By El Hanan Miller, Times of Israel

France’s most populous administrative zone, encompassing the capital Paris, has signed a cooperation agreement with the Palestinian district of Jerusalem, a move organizers say is designed to send a “political message” of solidarity with the Palestinians and their aspirations for a future capital in the city.

The French region described the agreement as the “first of its kind.”

The decision is a blow to Israel’s claim that the eastern sector is part of its united capital. A spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry said east Jerusalem “does not exist” as a separate entity and that the French council was “living in a make-believe world.” Read more…

Will report when I am back.

REAL CLEAR POLITICS WEDNESDAY

Romney, on Offense, Forces Obama to Defend Record – Jerry Markon, WP
Mitt Charges Out of Gate in First Debate – Scott Conroy, RealClearPolitics
Why Romney Succeeded – William Galston, Huffington Post
Obama Exposed in Debate – Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online
Not as One-Sided as Everybody Says – Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
It Wasn’t a TKO, It Was a Knockout – John Hinderaker, PowerLine
Where Was Obama Tonight? – Chris Matthews, MSNBC
A Historic Defeat for a Sitting President – Hugh Hewitt, Townhall
Mitt Did Little to Fix His Problems With Voters – Eleanor Clift, Daily Beast

Spengler, Asia Times Online

“No one cares about the Palestinians,” I wrote in this space two years ago [1], and since then the world has stopped funding them. As a result, the Palestine Authority is collapsing, comments Khalid Elgindy, a former PA adviser, on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, about “the wave of Palestinian protests that swept through the Israeli-occupied West Bank this month [and] … virtually paralyzed life in Palestinian cities, with scenes reminiscent of the first intifada”.

The PA can’t pay salaries because international donors, including the Gulf States, haven’t sent promised aid:
Read more…

By David Solway, FPM

I have long wondered what it is about the Jewish sensibility that is so internally divisive it will often jeopardize the very survival of the Jewish people in a perennially hostile world. What is the psychological factor that generates what often looks like a deeply harbored suicidal impulse, an irremediable tendency to set itself against itself, to consort with anti-Semites and even to collaborate with feral enemies who wish for nothing more than the suppression, ostracism or annihilation of every trace of Judaism in the world?
Read more…

by Raymond Ibrahim, FrontPageMagazine.com

As the Islamic world, in the guise of the 57-member state Organization of Islamic Cooperation, continues to push for the enforcement of “religious defamation” laws in the international arena—theoretically developed to protect all religions from insult, but in reality made for Islam—one great irony is lost, especially on Muslims: if such laws would ban movies and cartoons that defame Islam, they would also, by logical extension, have to ban the religion of Islam itself—the only religion whose core texts actively defame other religions.

To understand this, consider what “defamation” means. Typical dictionary-definitions include “to blacken another’s reputation” and “false or unjustified injury of the good reputation of another, as by slander or libel.” In Muslim usage, defamation simply means anything that insults or offends Islamic sensibilities. Read more…

by Joseph Puder, FPM

Reacting to the murderous rioting against the U.S. throughout the Arab and Muslim world and especially in Libya, where U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was murdered, and in Egypt, President Obama, who authorized millions in aid to Libya, said on September 12th: “Since our founding the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others…Already, many Libyan have joined us…and this attack will not break the bonds between the U.S. and Libya[.]”
Read more…

By Barry Rubin, PJ MEDIA

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has written an op-ed piece about what’s wrong with President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy and what he would do if he is elected president. There aren’t many surprises but it reminds us how far Romney has to go before he can be said to have articulated a clear foreign policy of his own.
Read more…

EZRA LEVANT:Out of Guantanamo and Into a Canadian Prison

Two years ago this month, a Guantanamo Bay military jury sentenced a Canadian-born al Qaeda terrorist to 40 years in prison. Omar Khadr was convicted of war crimes in Afghanistan, including the killing, during an ambush, of a 28-year-old U.S. Special Forces medic named Christopher Speer, the father of two young children.
Read more…

Get Over It!

By Ruth King, Mid East Output

Partisans of Israel from left and right keep evoking the so called America/Israel special relationship. The left worries that a muscular Israeli response to a mortal threat will threaten the relationship, and the right frets that it has seriously frayed under the Obama administration.

They are both wrong. The so called special relationship is a chimera.
Read more…

This was Obama’s position last year also. One must ask why is he doing this. Obviously he believes in Oslo and doesn’t want Oslo threatened. He must know that the GOI will not give the PA what it wants so nothing can be negotiated.. He may prefer the appearance of a peace process even if their is no progress, to the instability that will flow from the abrogation of Oslo. OR HE BELIEVES HE CAN FORCE ISRAEL TO MAKE CONCESSIONS. TED BELMAN

By Harriet Sherwood, guardian.co.uk,

The United States has warned European governments against supporting a Palestinian bid for enhanced status at the United Nations, saying such a move “would be extremely counter-productive” and threatening “significant negative consequences” for the Palestinian Authority, including financial sanctions.
Read more…

http://dotsub.com/media/b5ee5ada-5b37-4b0b-9916-e0896337ec4b/embed/heb

Libya was a failure of policy and worldview, not intelligence.
By Bret Stephens, WSJ

Why won’t the Libya story go away? Why can’t the memory of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staff be consigned to the same sad-and-sealed file of Americans killed abroad in dangerous line of duty? How has an episode that seemed at first to have been mishandled by the Romney camp become an emblem of a feckless and deluded foreign policy?

The story-switching and stonewalling haven’t helped. But let’s start a little earlier.
Read more…

By Randall Hoven, AMERICAN THINKER

Sweden, like Norway, is often held up as a country which is “socialist and successful.”  For example, Sweden has high taxes yet also has had healthy economic growth recently.  In this century so far, Sweden’s total tax bite amounted to 52% of GDP, while the U.S.’s was 32%.  Yet Sweden’s real GDP grew 2.3% per year from 2001 to 2011, and ours grew only 1.6% per year.  Prima facie evidence that high taxes don’t kill an economy, right?

In July I deconstructed the Norwegian “Miracle,” the other “socialist and successful” country.  It’s Sweden’s turn now.

Sweden, like Norway, consists of a small, not very diverse, mostly white and Christian people.  Its population is 9.1 million — a bit less than North Carolina’s.  (There are 13 cities in the world with bigger populations.)  Not only are native Swedes white, but so are most of Sweden’s immigrants.  The CIA World Factbook lists its immigrants as “Finns, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks.”  And 85% of that population is Lutheran; 85% live incities — 22% in the Stockholm area itself. Read more…

AJC’s survey of 1,040 American Jews was conducted by GfK, September 6 – 17, 2012. Margin of error is plus or minus five percent. AJC is a 501(c)(3) organization that neither supports nor opposes candidates for elected office. Conducted annually since 1990, AJC surveys often are cited as an authoritative barometer of American Jewish opinion on a range of issues. 

1. Where would you place yourself on this scale?

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By Gabriel Scheinmann, The National Interest

The world’s best-known secret has finally been revealed: the United States and Israel do not see eye-to-eye on Iran’s nuclear program.

In an unusually public ping-pong, the Obama administration rebuffed an Israeli effort to clarify America’s Iranian “red lines,” the point at which it would agree that its negotiations-cum-sanctions strategy has failed and it would take military action to stop the Iranian nuclear project.
Read more…

By Amil Imani, American Thinker

Nothing prompts the hundreds of ordinarily feuding and fighting sects of Islam to come together like the slightest disrespect shown to the founder of their religion or their religious sanctity. With the slightest hint from their vested-interest clergy and politicians, mobs of Muslims pour into the streets in a frenzy, burning things, destroying buildings, and killing people they consider, however remotely, complicit in defaming Islam.
Read more…