"The suspect has tentatively been identified as a man of Somali heritage," the Council of American Islamic Relations's press release said.
The so-called regularisation bill, which passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset, would allow for the ex-post legalisation of Israeli outposts in the occupied West Bank. It would enable essentially the confiscation of the private property rights of Palestinian land owners in the West Bank for the benefit of settlers. This would mean crossing a new threshold, even under Israeli law, for the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. It would also mean the exact opposite of what the Quartet has called for, namely preserving the two-state solution.
For products from the West Bank or the Golan Heights originating from settlements, a restriction to "product originating in the Golan Heights" or "product originating in the West Bank" is not acceptable. Although these expressions refer to the broad area or territory from which the product originates, the omission of additional geographical information to the effect that the product originates from Israeli settlements may mislead the consumer True origin of the product. In such cases it is necessary to add, in brackets, the expression "Israeli colony" or equivalent terms. Thus, expressions such as "product originating in the Golan Heights (Israeli colony)" or "products originating in the West Bank (Israeli colony)" may be used.
The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River at the Wadi Malih south-east of Beisan...
Palestinian minister: Israeli occupation seeks to demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque
Wednesday, 23 / November / 2016 - 20:10
Minister of Awqaf and Religious Affairs of the Palestinian Adeis Yusuf, said the situation in the holy city and the Aqsa Mosque has reached an extremely dangerous level, given the lapse of the Israeli occupation authorities in their practices against racism and the Judaization of the mosque and the city.
Adeis in an exclusive statement to the UAE site 24 said that the Israeli government is trying to undermine the Al-Aqsa Mosque and implement a spatial partitioning scheme and then destroy it, to establish on its ruins the alleged structure [i.e. the Third Temple], stressing that Israel is seeking to impose a fait accompli policy.
Adeis explained that the Israeli occupation of racist practices designed to blur the historical Arab and Islamic presence in Jerusalem, in preparation for implementation of all settlement plans and colonial against Jerusalem.
He pointed out that the Palestinian leadership took the file to the international community and the Security Council, and moving toward the cessation of Israeli practices and punish the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the holy city, noting that the Palestinian move alone is not enough to rein in Israel and stop the repeated crimes.
"Now is actually a good time to put forward a reasonable plan to resolve the settlement question and to indicate Israel’s intentions in negotiations with the Palestinians. And Lieberman has done just that, calling for a return to the terms of the Bush-Sharon letters of 2004. The Bush-Sharon letters called for a two-state solution and an end to settlement construction outside of the major settlements blocs. At the same time, they also called for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and suggested that the blocs could be incorporated into Israel as part of any final status agreement. As Lieberman noted, a reaffirmation of this correspondence could be negotiated in such a way that would give Israel freedom to expand settlements within agreed-upon borders of the blocs.
If the Bush-Sharon letters are adopted by Trump and Netanyahu, peace is hardly likely. In the current climate, it is hard to imagine the Palestinians embracing the 2004 formula.
“totally inappropriate” and “fucking outrageous.”
“I have to tell you, I am emotionally fucking pissed,”
“It was like a f–ing firing squad,”
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.
"I think we should all learn from the election that this doesn't fly with the voters," she [Kellyanne Conway] said, adding that CNN is "focusing on divisions" by calling out Trump's tweets.
"This network and other people will always be focused on divisions. How about accepting the election results,[CNN host] Chris [Cuomo], and letting him form a government?" Conway said. "He is a leader and takes the counsel of many people, and that's exactly what he's doing."
"And a leader should also have thick skin," Cuomo shot back.
If any native Americans are reading this, please note: between 1920 and 1948, almost 20,000 Jews who had been living in those areas which became known as the "West Bank" (a term that was created only in 1950 when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan illegally occupied the area that was to become the Arab State of Palestine as declared by the United Nations in 1947) but historically known for over 2500 years as Judea and Samaria, where subjected to an Arab-initiated and instigated ethnic cleansing campaign. It was carried out violently including riots, pogroms, rape, murder, banditry, destruction of property and terror. Jews who had been living in some locations, such as Hebron, Gaza and the Old City of Jerusalem, were attacked and those who survived forced to flee in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 and finally, in the war pf aggression Arabs launched after rejecting the UN Partition Plan. Until 1951, UNRWA cared for some 17,000 Jewish refugees from Jerusalem, kibbutzim in Gush Etzion, agricultural communities north of Jerusalem and other areas. Do not be fooled into believing Arab propaganda.
From our demand for just rights, the pursuit of sovereignty, and a long history of resistance, we walk a joint path to liberation.Their poster:
From the dominant diatribe of manifest destiny and the insidiousness of settler-colonialism to our extortion as Indigenous people, our beasts are of the same species — we face similar barriers in varied contexts: we live on land surrounded by settlements, we have plentiful water and resources around us but have no power over how we access them. From our demand for just rights, the pursuit of sovereignty, and a long history of resistance, we walk a joint path to liberation.
Islamists Join Environmentalists At Standing Rock To Delegitimize America
What unites these two seemingly antithetical movements is their shared desires to accumulate power and topple a common enemy.
Jews who read, quote, and believe anything written in Breitbart even after Bannon said it was the platform for the alt. right remind me of the kapos of many years ago. There really is no difference
The majority of the people who stood by and did nothing when my father and his family were in Hitler Germany were not good. They were pretty much like your friends who were Trump supporters,
Welcome to Trump's fourth Reich.
Trump has shown that he a racist and it is just plain silly to think he was saying and posting racist, xenophobic and anti-semitic words and symbols just to gt votes from the KKK and other white supremacy and American Nazi party supporters, he really is part of this himself. Any Jewish person who is attracted to this crap because they sympathize with the hate he spews or because they like his politics of greed is very misguided. My dad told me about Jews like this in Berlin who were looking to profit off of the misfortune of others.
“The new administration plans to force Muslims to register on some master list. As Jews we know what it means to be forced to register. I pledge to you that because I am committed to the fight against anti-Semitism that if one day Muslim Americans are forced to register their identities, that is the day that this proud Jew will register as Muslim.”
Jewish protesters march into D.C. building hosting Trump team against Bannon's appointment
U.S. Anti-Semitism Worst Since ‘30’s
"progressive economic degradation of...Jewry, the systematic stultification of its legal equality...and many recurrent and unchecked outbursts of brutal violence"
An Israeli committee on Sunday approved a bill that if adopted would legalize outposts built without government permission in the West Bank, territory Palestinians demand for their future state.
It still needs to pass several stages before it can be adopted.
A first reading is expected in parliament on Wednesday.
...a majority of the Jewish public (53.5%) are sure or think that the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians can keep going for a long time. Forty-one percent are sure or think the opposite. On the left only a minority (about a third) believes the situation can continue as it is, while on the right there is a majority of more than half.
In the Jewish public, among those who think the current situation cannot continue, 47% expect that the stalemate will end because international pressure will be exerted on Israel to end its control of the territories, 20% assess that a Palestinian uprising will erupt, and 10% think Israel will annex Judea and Samaria/the West Bank. A total of 7.5% chose other possibilities that would bring an end to the stalemate. A particularly high rate (15.5%) does not know what will happen.
...Another question that was asked in this context was: “In light of the situation, are you for or against annexing all of Judea and Samaria/the West Bank to the state of Israel?” In the Jewish public the highest rate (46%) favored annexation, compared to an only slightly lower rate (42%) who expressed opposition to it. Whereas on the left and in the center there was, as expected, only a minority of supporters of annexation, among those who defined themselves as right-wingers there was a majority of supporters for it in light of the existing situation...
In recent years, he spent many Shabbat mornings and Monday evenings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue on Venice Boulevard, talking about Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there, Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley, who says that he considers Cohen “a great liturgical writer,” read from the pulpit passages from “Book of Mercy,” a 1984 collection of Cohen’s that is steeped in the Psalms. “I participated in all these investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,” Cohen has said. “I even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas—no robe, I didn’t join them, but I was trying everything.”
To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts. In our conversations, he mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kabbalah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl Jung’s “Answer to Job,” and Gershom Scholem’s biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah of the seventeenth century. Cohen is also very much at home in the spiritual reaches of the Internet, and he listens to the lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain, a Kabbalist who has converted, serially, to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism, and lives in the San Bernardino mountains
Cohen showed up in Israel [during the Yom Kippur War], hoping to replace someone who had been drafted. “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people,” he told an interviewer at the time. He ended up performing, often many times a day, for the troops on the front.)
what is on Cohen’s mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. “I’ve had a family to support, so there’s no sense of virtue attached to it,” he said. “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now it’s a habit. And there’s the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I haven’t gotten near finishing up. I’ve finished up a few things. I don’t know how many other things I’ll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue. . . . There are times when I just have to lie down. I can’t play anymore, and my back goes fast also. Spiritual things, baruch Hashem”—thank God—“have fallen into place, for which I am deeply grateful.”and
Cohen has unpublished poems to arrange, unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish. He’s considering doing a book in which poems, like pages of the Talmud, are surrounded by passages of interpretation.
“The big change is the proximity to death,” he said. “I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.”
“I know there’s a spiritual aspect to everybody’s life, whether they want to cop to it or not,” Cohen said. “It’s there, you can feel it in people—there’s some recognition that there is a reality that they cannot penetrate but which influences their mood and activity. So that’s operating. That activity at certain points of your day or night insists on a certain kind of response. Sometimes it’s just like: ‘You are losing too much weight, Leonard. You’re dying, but you don’t have to coöperate enthusiastically with the process.’ Force yourself to have a sandwich.
“What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.” The divine voice. “You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’
In his letter contra David S. Galdi (May 27), Shai Ben-Tekoa asserts, mistakenly, that prior to 1967, "there was no 'West Bank'" and that "it was not yet in use". Of course there was and it was indeed in use.
The term "West Bank" was created in April 1950 when Jordan's King Abdallah I annexed, illegally, that portion of the former Mandate of Palestine that was to become an independent Arab state. Jordan was on the East Bank and so, Judea and Samaria, the terms actually used in the 1947 UN Partition recommendation, became the "West Bank".
President Barack Obama and the Jewish Communities across the Green Line
Yisrael Medad
The past eight years of the Obama Administration have undoubtedly been one of the most contentious and tension-filled periods since 1967 between the United States and Israel on the issue of Jewish communities across the Green Line. On the positive side, Mr. Obama never referred to our residency as "illegal" (it aren't) but as "illegitimate" beginning on his Cairo Speech, June 4, 2009: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements" (even though the Bush-Sharon 2004 Understanding did do just that) but in the same breath demanded that "it is time for these settlements to stop." To be fair to Obama and precise, he targeted always "continued" Jewish residency activity not the totality of the presence of Jews in areas of their historic homeland.
On the other hand, despite that the 2009-10 moratorium on construction proved that the Palestinian Authority was not interested in negotiations, not to mention its anti-Jewish incitement which resulted in more terror, Obama always placed the onus for a lack of agreement on Israel's government. America's Jerusalem Consulate General effectively cold-shoulders the Jews living in the communities and denies them equal cultural non-consular services Arabs receive which, unfortunately, allows the assumption that the total removal of communities would be tolerated even the new Jerusalem neighborhoods.
But Obama is leaving and a Netanyahu/Likud government continues.If the new administration will be Republican, a whole new panorama of possibilities exist taking into consideration the purposeful ignoring of a two-state solution by the Republican Platform. The Palestinian Authority, already being objects of critical Congressional moves together with the anti-BDS legislation in states' legislatures, will be more pressured. A Democratic win will be expected to further badger Israel while showing a lax attitude toward Palestinian Authority inadequacies.
The church of Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom") in Istanbul for centuries, was ground zero for Orthodox Christians. Here the Roman emperors were crowned, after Constantine moved his capital here in 324 AD.
Mohammed recognized the significance of the city, and the hadith report him saying, "Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will her leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be.”
Indeed it was day of rejoicing for Muslims when Constantinople fell to them in 1453 and was renamed Istanbul. Hagia Sophia was converted into the most important mosque of the Islamic caliphate...Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern, secular Turkey, turned Hagia Sophia into a museum. The ancient Christian frescoes were uncovered, and visitors today can see Mary, the "mother of God" right alongside the more recently added calligraphy reading "Allah" and "Mohammed."
This week come new reports of rising public pressure in Turkey to turn Hagia Sophia back into a functioning mosque:
Onder Soy, the new imam of the Hunkar Kasri, part of the Hagia Sophia complex, recently led the first friday Muslim prayers there in 80 years, sparking enormous joy and excitement among many Muslims...
"We see that Erdogan is after an imperial presidency. And what better place to finalize this than a prayer session at the Hagia Sophia and converting it back to a mosque? This will be just like how the sultans' inaugurations were done — and all Turkish soap opera audiences know that."
...several believers who were interviewed on television Oct. 21 after the first Friday prayers at the complex said this access was not enough. One commented, “We are calling upon the president: Please open the Hagia Sophia as a mosque again so we can pray freely.” Below are a few examples from hundreds of jubilant comments on social media.
Political commentator Savci Sayan, who is known for his adoration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, tweeted, “I am dreaming of the president leading the Friday prayer at Hagia Sophia. And I am praying for this dream to come true. #LetUsPray.”
Another citizen tweeted, "Now there is an imam for the Hunkar Kasri of Hagia Sophia. The next order of business should be to open Hagia Sophia for believers."
Division along a United Nations-monitored ceasefire line
invasion
negotiations...are expected to zero in on territorial disputes which have fuelled more than four decades of discord
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has made clear he wants to see a final, enduring deal reached before his term expires at the end of the year.
"Important ... security and territorial issues - which are decisive - have not yet been the object of any substantive dialogue."
The last peace efforts collapsed...when a proposal worked out...was accepted by most...but resoundingly rejected by...
"This is not something that we can keep discussing after 50 years for another 50 years. Everyone, including the UN, is aware of this,"
Division along a United Nations-monitored ceasefire line has prevailed since a Turkish invasion in 1974 triggered by a coup supported by the military junta ruling Greece, and is a source of friction between NATO allies Greece and Turkey.
But on Monday five days of negotiations open at a luxury resort outside Lausanne are expected to zero in on territorial disputes which have fuelled more than four decades of discord between the island's Greek and Turkish communities.
"The prospect of a solution in Cyprus is within their reach," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters as the negotiations got underway in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland.
The talks began 17 months ago between Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Mustafa Akinci. UN chief Ban Ki-moon has made clear he wants to see a final, enduring deal reached before his term expires at the end of the year. "Disagreements remain on issues which have been discussed," Anastasiades told reporters. "Important ... security and territorial issues - which are decisive - have not yet been the object of any substantive dialogue."
The last peace efforts collapsed in 2004 when a proposal worked out by then-UN chief Kofi Annan was accepted by most Turkish Cypriots, but resoundingly rejected by Greek Cypriots in twin referendums.
The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus - which is only recognized by Turkey - says talks cannot go on indefinitely. "This is not something that we can keep discussing after 50 years for another 50 years. Everyone, including the UN, is aware of this," Akinci said in a speech last week.
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