After fairly rapid negotiations, Israel has agreed with European nations to supply Europe with its future natural gas needs. The project will turn Israel into a significant fuel-exporting nation.
Construction will begin on the longest and deepest underwater fuel pipeline in the world. 1,305 miles in length and lying 1.86 miles under the Mediterranean Sea. The $7 Billion project will take five years to complete.
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting at Ukraine’s request on Monday to discuss Sunday’s maritime confrontation between vessels from Ukraine and Russia off the coast of the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. The meeting followed a procedural vote rejecting Russia’s attempt to ram through its own meeting agenda as the first item of business. Russia wanted to get out in front and blunt Ukraine’s complaint of Russian aggression by portraying itself as the victim of Ukraine’s alleged invasion of Russian territorial waters.
WIKI: National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsiɪzəm, ˈnæt-/), is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party—officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP)—in Nazi Germany…
Note the words Socialist and Workers in the NAZI party’s name.
Both words throughout history described parties of the political left, of communism, socialism, and fascism, NEVER of the political right.
You will never find socialist or workers appended to the names of any party on the right or the political center.
What they had in common was, they all imposed CHANGE on their citizens with the promise of HOPE.
The HOPE never materialized. The change always did.
What followed was poverty, misery, and millions of dead.
America avoided that bullet November 8th, 2016.
Forget about Australia moving its Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Indonesian threats to not sign a free trade agreement with Australia—coupled with veiled Malaysian suggestions of terrorist attacks on Australian targets if the Embassy is moved - will suffice to burst Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s thought-bubble.
French President Emmanuel Macron has apparently decided that with his approval ratings in the toilet, his best bet for a political resurgence is to attack the United States.
This isn’t a bad move, for a French president. Hatred for America has been a powerful mobilizing force in France since shortly after the American army liberated the French from Nazi German occupation in 1944.
Israel’s security cabinet’s decision Tuesday afternoon to walk away from the war Hamas initiated Monday and to accept a “ceasefire” is frustrating and infuriating. Hamas shot nearly 500 projectiles into Israel in under 24 hours. It blew up a bus with a Kornet anti-tank missile. Sixty Israelis were wounded, several critically. One civilian was killed. Numerous homes were destroyed.
Israel has never experienced any rocket onslaught from Gaza remotely as intense as what Hamas and Islamic Jihad shot off on Monday and Tuesday. And yet, rather than respond with equal – or better yet – far greater force and teach Hamas and Islamic Jihad a lesson they would long remember, the security cabinet sufficed with a couple hundred pinpoint air attacks, and then accepted the IDF’s advice and opted for the ceasefire. In so doing, they left the residents of southern Israel virtual hostages of Hamas and Islamic Jihad who have retained the capacity to attack them at will.
Revelations expose Labour Party members at all levels holding deeply felt and widespread anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist tendencies. The outing of this anti-Semitism has come about to a large extent by the actions and utterances of their leaders. The rank and file feel emboldened to express themselves by calling Israel a “racist endeavor” and anyone who supports the Zionist state as being complicit with an illegitimate regime.
Members of the first of several Central American migrant “caravans” have already arrived at the U.S. border with Mexico. Some of the migrants scaled or crawled through barrier fences, attempting to move onto U.S. soil illegally. So far, Border Patrol agents have been dealing with the situation, but they may have more difficulty as more migrants arrive en masse and try to enter the United States illegally. It was to deter such entry that President Trump issued a proclamation that would deny political asylum to migrants crossing illegally into the country. They are required to enter only at the official ports of entry and wait patiently to be processed for possible asylum hearings.
President Trump - having rejected a barrage of criticism since describing himself as a “nationalist” - faces a further torrent of invective should he choose to say “Judea and Samaria” rather than “West Bank” in his soon to-be-released peace proposals.
Arab propaganda has used “West Bank” since 1949 to obliterate any Jewish connection to one of the two remaining pieces of land under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine where sovereignty still remains undetermined between Jews and Arabs.
Eighty years ago, on the night of the 9th to the 10th of November, 1938, the Jewish People began a journey of exile from civilization that ultimately ended in Hell. The journey was not one taken of our own volition; rather, we were sent upon it by a nation reputed for its culture and enlightened, rational, scientific approach to the human condition, but which in reality became—for a period of twelve years—the earthly embodiment of absolute evil. Seventy-nine years ago, the sun disappeared from the sky and ceased to shine for the next seven years—eclipsed by hearts of darkness so thick that no light could penetrate their souls. Never before, and—we swear before Heaven and Earth—never again, such a wickedness that defies all attempts at redemption. Never before, such a ruthless, stone-hearted, systematic manifestation of total evil, and as long as we remember that seven-year eclipse of humanity, never again will we permit such a darkening of the moral climate on this planet. It may rain; it may snow, but never again will we permit such total darkness to engulf us. No, never again!
Oman has broken ranks with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) by endorsing President Trump’s efforts to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict.
The PLO has made it crystal-clear on many occasions that it wanted nothing to do with Trump’s upcoming proposals. The PLO Central Council also threatened on 30 October to suspend its recognition of the State of Israel and halt security coordination with Israel.
The United Nations General Assembly once again singled out the United States, by far the UN’s largest financial contributor, for condemnation. This time, the issue was the U.S. embargo against Cuba, an issue that the General Assembly considers and votes upon as an annual ritual that has been going on for 27 years. By a recorded vote of 189 in favor to 2 against (Israel, United States), with no abstentions, the General Assembly adopted on Thursday the resolution entitled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” The General Assembly also overwhelmingly rejected proposed U.S. amendments to the resolution that would have strongly criticized the Cuban regime’s abysmal human rights record.
This week we received a few reminders that in certain significant ways, the discourse in Israel and hence the policymaking is very much stuck in the 1990s.
The first reminder came on Sunday when Jordan’s King Abdullah abruptly announced that he is rescinding two annexes of the peace deal that then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed with his father the late King Hussein in 1994. Not only did he give Israel no prior warning of his plan to abrogate the annexes, but Abdullah made the announcement on the 23rd anniversary of Rabin’s assassination.
United States Secretary of Defense - James Mattis—remarkably failed to mention “the two-state solution”, or even the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” in his keynote address—“US Policy in a Changing Middle East”—delivered at the International Institute for Strategic Affairs 14th Regional Security Summit in Manama, Bahrein held between 26-28 October.
Mattis’ pointed omissions can only fuel speculation that a “one-state solution”—possibly involving the creation of a Jordan enclave in the West Bank - could now be uppermost in President Trump’s thinking.
This writer enjoyed a recent visit to the Southern Evangelical Seminary’s 25th Annual National Conference on Christian Apolegetics in Charlotte, North Carolina. The event was headed by my former pastor Dr. Richard Land who is now the President of SES. Besides being one of the most profound influences in my life, Dr. Land is a friend and a caring Christian brother.
Almost 70 of America’s best theologians and apolegetics spoke at the beautiful Calvary Church Campus in Charlotte. We heard only a few of them before taking a tour of the new campus of SES and the Billy Graham Library.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Let’s be clear: the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was a despicable act by a regime that, even after enacting modest reforms recently, still tolerates virtually no domestic dissent.
We should all be outraged, we should demand the truth, and we should look for ways to condemn such action in the clearest terms, such as by sanctioning the regime and the individuals involved.
In 2014, Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran Bureau Chief, was arrested and spent two years in prison. Iran kept him in one of its worst prisons, he slept on a damp concrete floor, was denied medical treatment, experienced hallucinations due to sleep deprivation and was abused by his captors. His wife was told that her legs would be cut off and her husband would be thrown off a cliff if she didn’t confess.
While Jamal Khashoggi has often been misidentified as a Washington Post journalist, all he did for the radical leftist paper owned by Amazon’s CEO is write editorials promoting the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. The Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Bin Laden pal was never a journalist. The closest he came to it was acting as a terrorist propagandist in Afghanistan, glamorizing Osama bin Laden, on behalf of a man listed by the Treasury Department as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers.”
Four major developments in the past week have heightened expectations that President Trump will have no option but to call on Jordan and Israel to negotiate the allocation of sovereignty between their two respective States in the West Bank and Gaza—5% of the territory comprised in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (Mandate) .
Jordan and Israel are the two successor States to the Mandate currently exercising sovereignty in the other 95% of the Mandate territory—Jordan 78%, Israel 17%.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL - The Trump administration announced it will merge the Jerusalem Consulate, responsible for relations with the Palestinian Authority, into its newly relocated U.S. Embassy.
For the past two weeks, Israel-bashers have had a brand-new poster child. Her name is Lara Alqasem.
Alqasem is an American citizen registered in a masters degree program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is also a key operative in the so-called BDS or “boycott, divestment and sanctions” campaign against Israel.
It appears that the Youth Sin-Nod 2018 has turned out to be another Nod to Sin. A pope wearing a rainbow cross? It’s no wonder that the LGBT community is doing somersaults.
Any lingering thought that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) would have any role to play in President Trump’s soon to-be-released peace plan has vanished - after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that $165 million had been deducted from funding to the PLO because of its continuing “pay for slay” policy in breach of the Taylor Force Act.
The United States Mission to the United Nations convened a meeting on October 16th at the UN headquarters’ Economic and Social Council chamber regarding the plight of political prisoners in Cuba and Cuba’s abysmal human rights record. More than a dozen representatives from Cuba’s Mission to the UN tried to disrupt the meeting by constantly shouting and pounding on the table in front of them. They chose to employ the typical mob-like tactics of the Left, mirroring the U.S. Left’s tactics during the Kavanaugh hearings. They tried to stamp out others’ right to freely tell their stories of Cuban government repression without fear of intimidation, failing utterly to rebut their claims with reasoned arguments and evidence of their own, which the Cuban government representatives were invited to do.
After the meeting, Cuba’s UN Ambassador Anayansi Rodriguez Camejo claimed that the U.S. had shown “contempt for human rights” and for the UN. She called the meeting “a political comedy staged on false arguments.” She even tried to turn the tables on the U.S. by referring to what she characterized as U.S. “imprisonment of immigrants, including children who are separated from their families.” While ignoring the overwhelming evidence of Cuba’s contempt for human rights in imprisoning its own people for their peaceful dissent, Cuba’s ambassador was completely oblivious to the irony of so many people wanting to come to the United States for its freedoms and opportunities while so many Cuban people have wanted to leave Cuba because of its atrocious human rights record.
Double standards may not be enough to describe what has become of the United Nations. In some ways, it has no standards at all. This was demonstrated very clearly by last week’s UN General Assembly vote for new members to join the inaptly named Human Rights Council.
On February 19, 2018, the Israeli-American consortium that owns natural gas concessions in Israel’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), including gas fields Tamar and Leviathan, announced an agreement with the Egyptian Delphinus company. According to the agreement, estimated at $15 billion, an annual 3.5 BCM will be sold from each field, beginning in 2019. As such, Tamar, which is already active, and Leviathan, are together to supply 64 BCM over the next decade.
Tom Bishop (Brad Pit)—Ah, Jesus Christ, you just… You don’t just trade these people like they’re baseball cards! It’s not a # game!
Nathan Muir (Robert Redford)—Oh, yes it is. It’s exactly what it is. And it’s no kid’s game either. This is a whole other game. And it’s serious and it’s dangerous. And it’s not one you want to lose.—Spy Game (2001)
“Although no one had written them down, they were the precepts we all understood… By the time they got to Moscow, everyone knew these rules. They were dead simple and full of common sense…”.—Tony Mendez—The Master of Disguise
“There was only one rule: to win.”—Oleg Kalugin—Former major general in the KGB
“We are drifting as a society into what can be fairly described as a post-truth world…where there is no longer a basic understanding of what objective facts are.”—General Michael Hayden—Former CIA and NSA Director
Russia’s sudden deployment of S-300 surface-to-air missiles in Syria last week raised the stakes in Syria significantly for the U.S. and Israel.
While it is easy to conclude things have become far more dangerous, the fact is that there are certain important aspects of the situation on the ground that we just don’t know.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Pastor Andrew Brunson, who was wrongfully imprisoned by the Turkish government since October 7, 2016, has been released from Turkish house arrest and is free to travel due to the efforts of President Trump, including his administration and Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback. Moreover, Sen. James Lankford visited Turkey in December 2017 to meet with their Ministry of Justice officials to advocate for the release of Pastor Brunson.
This is about the best news we could have ended the week with.
This has a January 20, 1980 sort of feel to it – we’ll believe it when the plane touches down on non-hostile territory – but it appears Pastor Andrew Brunson is finally about to come home from his unjust, political captivity in Turkey. A Turkish court has just decided that Brunson’s sentence for “terrorism” will be limited to time served, and that means he should be free to leave the country in short order.
The US administration blamed Iran for the September 2018 rocket attacks against the US consulate building in Basra, Iraq, claiming they were carried out by Shiite militia forces. The administration announced the transfer of its diplomatic staff to the embassy in Baghdad, and senior US officials have threatened that Iran will pay a heavy price if it strikes American targets. Although the US statements relate to Iran’s overall activity in the Middle East, they seem to place special emphasis on Iraq’s potential to become more of a conflict arena between the United States and Iran, a conflict already underway regarding the respective influence on the establishment of the new Iraqi government following the parliamentary elections of May 2018. Israeli threats to take action against Iranian targets in Iraq require that full coordination first be achieved between Israel and the United States, particularly in light of US concerns regarding Iranian intentions to strike at American targets and the administration’s sensitivity regarding continued stability within Iraq.