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July 2017

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

What Has Trump’s Policy Actually Been Toward Russia? So far the Trump administration has pursued a tough-on-Russia foreign policy. By Elliot Kaufman

By on July 12th, 2017

Anyone who knows anything about President Trump knows that there’s something up with him and Russia. Yesterday, Donald Trump Jr. basically admitted to at least attempted collusion. And there is the long list of often embarrassingly positive statements Trump Sr. has made about the Russian president. Frank Bruni compiled them in a recent column for the New York Times. Yet there is something missing from Bruni’s article, and often, from the larger narrative about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians: a single mention of policy.

That omission is telling. Trump’s comments might be suggestive, and his campaign team may well have sought and even used anti-Clinton information from Russian sources, but his policies have thus far been revealing—and not of any particular softness on Russia. Just the opposite: Where Obama was weak, the Trump administration has pursued a tough-on-Russia foreign policy.

Take Trump’s recent trip to Poland, a nation that has on occasion seen Russian troops and never wants to see them again. Look past the noise surrounding Trump’s excellent speech. Instead, focus on the air-defense memorandum signed on Thursday. “The U.S. government has agreed to sell Poland Patriot missiles in the most modern configuration,” Poland’s defense minister Antoni Macierewicz announced. This provides a real measure of Trump’s support for Poland, which is understandably nervous about the Russian Iskander missile system to be deployed in Kaliningrad.

This move also contrasts sharply with the Obama administration’s decision in 2009 to scrap missile-defense plans for Poland and the Czech Republic. Many Poles, including the heroic former president Lech Walesa, interpreted that as an abandonment.

Trump and Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland, also discussed American natural-gas shipments to Poland, the first of which arrived only last month. Trump is pushing American and Polish companies to sign a long-term liquefied natural gas (LNG) deal, though he won’t have to push very hard.

This is part of Trump’s strategy to achieve “energy dominance,” as he put it last week. “We will export American energy all around the world,” Trump said. Rick Perry, the U.S. secretary of energy, explained that the plan seeks to counter Russian influence. The goal is to provide vulnerable European nations with an “alternative to Russia” so they can no longer be “held hostage.” Trump echoed these comments in Poland.

This initial memorandum of understanding with Poland is only the plan’s first step. More is planned. As Investors Business Daily notes:

Poland has just built a massive Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) terminal on the Baltic as an entry point for gas from the U.S. and other energy suppliers. What’s more, that terminal is big enough, according to estimates, to replace as much as 80% of Russia’s gas supplies to Poland. All of the Baltic nations — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — are likewise building LNG facilities. Croatia plans to open its own LNG terminal in 2019.

Already, Trump has offered to export American coal to Ukraine, which Russia has long bullied with actual or threatened cuts in natural-gas exports. The other nations at the recent Three Seas Initiative attended by Trump (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria) would like U.S. energy too.

There is perhaps nothing the Russians fear more than American oil and gas production. It has the potential to supplant Russian gas exports, which are crucial to Russia’s coffers as well as its strategic ambitions. The absence of a strong “oil weapon” functioning as both carrot and stick would substantially reduce Russia’s ability to meddle in European affairs. Trump’s initiative, therefore, is poised to protect Europe and weaken Russia.

This is part of why Walter Russell Mead suggested in February that “Trump isn’t sounding like a Russian mole.” If Trump were under Putin’s influence, he would surely be doing everything he could to limit American natural-gas production, reject proposed pipelines, curtail fracking, and impose harsh emissions reduction targets. But Trump has done the opposite. He has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, approved the Keystone pipeline and set about repealing roadblocks to fracking on federal lands. In June, for instance, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would auction off 195,732 acres of federal land in Nevada for fossil-fuel development.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Have Consumers Decided Most News Is Fake News? Global investors seem nearly as skeptical as Trump partisans. By James Freeman

By on July 12th, 2017

Skepticism toward the media is most often associated with conservatives in Middle America, some of whom eat something other than artisanal sandwiches. But this week brings more evidence that investors worldwide have become very reluctant to buy what many established news organizations are selling. How else to explain the collective shrug of the shoulders in financial markets to the latest breathless media reports about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia?

Such reports have dominated this week’s news as much of the professional commentariat has pondered out loud whether treason has been committed in the President’s inner circle. Yet after an ever-so-slight hiccup on Tuesday following Donald Trump Jr.’s release of emails regarding a meeting he took last June with a Russian lawyer, stocks drifted higher. Since then, investors have spent much of their time parsing the remarks of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. Reassured by her questionable suggestion that interest rates won’t have to rise very fast or very far in the years ahead, they continue to keep market indexes near record levels.

Investors in the aggregate obviously don’t believe that the republic is coming to an end, nor do they seem to expect a wrenching change in U.S. leadership. There have been similar episodes over the last several months of sharp divergence between the collective analytical judgment of journalists and that of investors. This era of reported turmoil has been marked by a striking lack of volatility in the financial markets. Stocks aren’t cheap by historical standards and corrections do happen.

Yet the world’s investors still like U.S. equities, despite constant media reports that U.S. constitutional governance is hanging in the balance. Now let’s look at the general population in the U.S. A new report from the Pew Research Center also suggests that the news media’s credibility problem reaches well beyond the hard-core MAGA crowd. A full 85% of Republicans and those who lean Republican have a negative view of the national news media. And even among Democrats and those who lean Democratic, the press corps is underwater, with 46% holding a negative view compared to 44% holding a positive one.

Each respondent may distrust the media for a different reason. And perhaps investors are not so much ignoring the reported news as they are trying to strike a balance between conflicting reports. For example, let’s say that an investor has concluded that the New York Times and the Washington Times are equally trustworthy. A reader of this story from the New York paper is bound to take away a very pessimistic view of the current White House:

As Air Force One jetted back from Europe on Saturday, a small cadre of Mr. Trump’s advisers huddled in a cabin helping to craft a statement for the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to give to The New York Times explaining why he met last summer with a lawyer connected to the Russian government. Participants on the plane and back in the United States debated how transparent to be in the statement, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Ultimately, the people said, the president signed off on a statement from Donald Trump Jr. for The Times that was so incomplete that it required day after day of follow-up statements, each more revealing than the last. It culminated on Tuesday with a release of emails making clear that Mr. Trump’s son believed the Russian lawyer was seeking to meet with him to provide incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

The Russia story has become the brier patch from which the president seemingly cannot escape.

But an investor reading this Washington Times story published the same day may conclude that the real danger to the republic was narrowly avoided last November:

While the mainstream news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration.

The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series of unverified criminal charges against Mr. Trump’s campaign aides, such as coordinating Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party computers.

Some Democrats have widely circulated the discredited information. Mr. Steele was paid by the Democrat-funded opposition research firm Fusion GPS with money from a Hillary Clinton backer. Fusion GPS distributed the dossier among Democrats and journalists. The information fell into the hands of the FBI, which used it in part to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign aides.

Mr. Steele makes clear that his unproven charges came almost exclusively from sources linked to the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He identified his sources as “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” a former “top level Russian intelligence officer active inside the Kremlin,” a “senior Kremlin official” and a “senior Russian government official.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe Wary as U.S. Scrutinizes Iran Nuclear Deal Diplomats say drawn-out assessment of accord could crimp its effectiveness By Laurence Norman

By on July 12th, 2017

BRUSSELS—European diplomats say they are increasingly concerned the Trump administration will stretch out its review of the Iranian nuclear deal, undermining the agreement by curbing the economic benefits designed to ensure Iran’s compliance.

President Donald Trump has attacked the agreement, reached in 2015, as a “terrible deal” for the U.S.

European officials have remained publicly upbeat about the U.S. remaining a party to the deal, but diplomats privately voice serious concerns about where the U.S. review is headed. They say Washington is providing little feedback, has given no firm end-date for the review and hasn’t made clear who is shaping the process.

European officials still believe the Trump administration won’t abandon the nuclear deal, but many fear Washington will keep it under a rolling review. That, they say, would crimp economic benefits Iran expected from the agreement by persuading already cautious Western banks and investors to stay away—whereas President Barack Obama’s top officials urged engagement with Tehran. European diplomats also worry that if the U.S. commitment remains uncertain, Iran may respond by attempting limited violations.

Trump administration officials have raised concerns—echoed in some European capitals—that the deal doesn’t curtail Iran’s nuclear activities once its key commitments expire over the next 15 years. Washington has also repeatedly criticized the deal for not committing Iran to change its behavior in the region, where it has intervened to support the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and moved to increase its influence elsewhere through proxy forces such as Hezbollah.

While Obama administration officials toured Europe to encourage companies to take advantage of the lifting of most sanctions, the new administration has taken the opposite approach. White House Deputy Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Mr. Trump used last weekend’s Group of 20 leaders meeting in Germany to press his counterparts “to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.”

The limbo over the deal could strain U.S. ties with Europe, where the governments of France, Germany, and the U.K., as well as the European Union, helped negotiate the deal and strongly support it. They argue the deal averted a military conflict over Iran’s nuclear program and is now allowing the continent to start rebuilding investment ties with Tehran. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

EPA Moves to Roll Back Proposed Restrictions on Alaskan Mine Agency will seek public comment for 90 days on decision By Sara Schaefer Muñoz

By on July 12th, 2017

TORONTO—The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday it is moving to withdraw proposed restrictions on the development of the Pebble Mine in Alaska, owned by Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd.

The move is a reversal from the agency’s stance on the matter under the Obama administration, and the latest signal that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is following through on his promise to make his agency more friendly to business and roll back Obama-era restrictions.

“The current administration at EPA is closely focused on enforcing environmental standards and permitting requirements for major development projects like Pebble in a way that is both rigorous and robust, but also consistent to provide predictability and an even-playing field for all resource developers,” said Tom Collier, the chief executive of Pebble Limited Partnership, Northern Dynasty’s wholly-owned subsidiary.

The EPA in 2014 made a proposed determination to bar large-scale mining on the site, in Alaska’s Bristol Bay area, because of concerns about threats to an extensive salmon spawning area. A 2014 EPA report said the Pebble mine could have “significant” adverse effects on the fisheries and the Native Alaskan communities that depend on them.

The EPA said in a statement that it will seek public comments for 90 days on Tuesday’s decision.

The move follows a settlement agreement between the agency and Pebble Partnership, reached in May, that allows the mining project to proceed the “normal course” permitted under Clean Water Act rules and other environmental regulations, without being subject to what the company called “extraordinary development restrictions.”

Now, Northern Dynasty said, the EPA’s move clears the way for it to get going on an environmental impact study, which could take several years. Under the terms of the settlement, Northern Dynasty has agreed to hire the US Army Corps of Engineers to complete the study. CONTINUE T SITE

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

MARK LANGFAN’S MOVIE ON THE ALLON PLAN

By on July 12th, 2017

Please Watch my 9-minute movie on the Allon Plan:

https://youtu.be/awyM3DI-BAU

And read my article in English & Hebrew: ‘Rabin’s “Allon Plan”‘
www.marklangfan.com/rabinsallonplan.html
www.marklangfan.com/rabbinsallonplanhebrew.html

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ted Kennedy and the KGB A reflection on the late Democratic Senator’s outreach to the Kremlin to undermine President Reagan. Jamie Glazov

By on July 12th, 2017

Editors’ note: In light of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with the Russian government during the 2016 US presidential election, which now involves Trump Jr. daring to talk to a Russian woman, Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to a forgotten story of verifiable scheming with the Kremlin — by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy against President Ronald Reagan. We are reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s 2008 interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, who unearthed documentation detailing Kennedy’s outreach to the KGB and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the height of the Cold War, in which the Democratic Senator offered to collude with the Soviets to undermine President Reagan.

Ted Kennedy and the KGB.
Frontpage Magazine, May 15, 2008.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Kengor, the author of the New York Times extended-list bestseller God and Ronald Reagan as well as God and George W. Bush and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. He is also the author of the first spiritual biography of the former first lady, God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life. He is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.

FP: Paul Kengor, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

Kengor: Always great to be back, Jamie.

FP: We’re here today to revisit Ted Kennedy’s reaching out to the KGB during the Reagan period. Refresh our readers’ memories a bit.

Kengor: The episode is based on a document produced 25 years ago this week. I discussed it with you in our earlier interview back in November 2006. In my book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I presented a rather eye-opening May 14, 1983 KGB document on Ted Kennedy. The entire document, unedited, unabridged, is printed in the book, as well as all the documentation affirming its authenticity. Even with that, today, almost 25 years later, it seems to have largely remained a secret.

FP: Tell us about this document.

Kengor: It was a May 14, 1983 letter from the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to the head of the USSR, the odious Yuri Andropov, with the highest level of classification. Chebrikov relayed to Andropov an offer from Senator Ted Kennedy, presented by Kennedy’s old friend and law-school buddy, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California, to reach out to the Soviet leadership at the height of a very hot time in the Cold War. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he believed was bringing us perilously close to nuclear confrontation. Kennedy, according to Chebrikov, blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president—Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, “very impressed” with Andropov.

The thrust of the letter is that Reagan had to be stopped, meaning his alleged aggressive defense policies, which then ranged from the Pershing IIs to the MX to SDI, and even his re-election bid, needed to be stopped. It was Ronald Reagan who was the hindrance to peace. That view of Reagan is consistent with things that Kennedy said and wrote at the time, including articles in sources like Rolling Stone (March 1984) and in a speeches like his March 24, 1983 remarks on the Senate floor the day after Reagan’s SDI speech, which he lambasted as “misleading Red-Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”

Even more interesting than Kennedy’s diagnosis was the prescription: According to Chebrikov, Kennedy suggested a number of PR moves to help the Soviets in terms of their public image with the American public. He reportedly believed that the Soviet problem was a communication problem, resulting from an inability to counter Reagan’s (not the USSR’s) “propaganda.” If only Americans could get through Reagan’s smokescreen and hear the Soviets’ peaceful intentions.

So, there was a plan, or at least a suggested plan, to hook up Andropov and other senior apparatchiks with the American media, where they could better present their message and make their case. Specifically, the names of Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters are mentioned in the document. Also, Kennedy himself would travel to Moscow to meet with the dictator.

Time was of the essence, since Reagan, as the document privately acknowledged, was flying high en route to easy re-election in 1984.

FP: Did you have the document vetted?

Kengor: Of course. It comes from the Central Committee archives of the former USSR. Once Boris Yeltsin took over Russia in 1991, he immediately began opening the Soviet archives, which led to a rush on the archives by Western researchers. One of them, Tim Sebastian of the London Times and BBC, found the Kennedy document and reported it in the February 2, 1992 edition of the Times, in an article titled, “Teddy, the KGB and the top secret file.”

But this electrifying revelation stopped there; it went no further. Never made it across the Atlantic. Not a single American news organization, from what I can tell, picked up the story. Apparently, it just wasn’t interesting enough, nor newsworthy.

Western scholars, however, had more integrity, and responded: they went to the archives to procure their own copy. So, several copies have circulated for a decade and a half.

I got my copy when a reader of Frontpage Magazine, named Marko Suprun, whose father survived Stalin’s 1930s genocide in the Ukraine, alerted me to the document. He apparently had spent years trying to get the American media to take a look at the document, but, again, our journalists simply weren’t intrigued. He knew I was researching Reagan and the Cold War. He sent me a copy. I first authenticated it through Herb Romerstein, the Venona researcher and widely respected expert who knows more about the Communist Party and archival research beyond the former Iron Curtain than anyone. I also had a number of scholars read the original and the translation, including Harvard’s Richard Pipes.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Jr.’s Emails Undermine Collusion Conspiracy Theory The smoking gun that wasn’t. Matthew Vadum

By on July 12th, 2017

Donald Trump Jr. fought back yesterday against the increasingly desperate shrieking from the tinfoil-hat Left by publishing online the emails that led to his innocuous campaign-season meeting a year ago with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

By releasing the chain of emails leading to the much ballyhooed but brief get-together at the Trump Tower in Manhattan, Donald Jr. is hoping to dispel any notion that the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government to affect the outcome of the November 2016 election. (I wrote about the Trump Jr. meeting story yesterday here at FrontPage before the emails became available.)

The emails do not indicate any knowledge of Russian government wrongdoing, such as hacking, or Trump campaign involvement in such activities. Yet the mainstream media is going berserk, hyping the overheated ravings of leftist idiots like Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) whose disastrous performance in the vice presidential debate against Republican Mike Pence may have helped to sink the Democrat ticket last year.

Kaine accused Donald Trump Jr. of committing treason by agreeing to meet with Veselnitskaya. “We are now beyond obstruction of justice,” Kaine said Tuesday. “This is moving into perjury, false statements and even potentially treason.”

Of course, Kaine is no stranger to treason. He himself may have engaged in seditious activity in late January when he said Democrats would have to “fight in the streets” against the Trump administration.

And how quickly the Left forgets that the Ukrainian government took action to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign with nary a peep from left-wingers. As one media outlet reported:

The actions taken by government officials included disseminating “documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”

Meanwhile, the Left is trying to stigmatize and de-normalize everything Trump’s father does as president, pretending opposition research is something new and shady when it has been part of the electoral process ever since elections began. Nor is it illegal, immoral, or somehow unethical to “collude,” by which the Left means, communicate, with foreign nationals in conducting opposition research in connection with an election. The U.S. does have the First Amendment, after all. But all of this nonsense and misdirection is part of the Left’s campaign to delegitimize the Trump administration.

But honest left-wing law professor Jonathan Turley trashed an ethics lawyer for claiming that the Trump Jr.-Veselnitskaya meeting “borders on treason.”

“There is not a clear criminal act in such a meeting based on the information that we have,” Turley writes. “Moreover, it is not necessarily unprecedented.”

The president’s oldest son said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show yesterday that he didn’t bother his busy father with the particulars of what turned out to be a pointless meeting with Veselnitskaya.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

THIRTEEN MINUTES: A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

By on July 12th, 2017

When this movie opened, I postponed seeing it, thinking that I had seen so many other movies about World War II that this one could not surprise me. And was I wrong! Turns out that I knew just about nothing concerning this particular attempt to assassinate Hitler while he spoke in Munich in 1939. For most of you, this movie will be revelatory both in terms of history and the character of Georg Elser, the unsuccessful perpetrator whose home-made bomb exploded 13 minutes after Hitler left the lectern.

Told in the real time of Elser’s arrest and interrogation and the flashbacks to his life in the decade leading up to the event, this movie artfully details every aspect of the rise of Nazism and the national mood in Germany. The set designs of factories, steel-work installations, offices, beer-halls and rural houses are pitch-perfect as are the depictions of women working in the fields, children caught up in the frenzy of Hitler-Youth and ordinary people seduced by the peer pressure of an entire population hypnotized by the Fuhrer’s promises of power and glory for the Homeland. The character of Georg, a jack of all trades artisan, furniture-maker, skilled technician, musician and ladies’ man is singular and captivating. We see him playing the accordion, then singing, then capturing the heart of a young woman who attempts to teach him the tango only to be led by him with the grace and control of a seasoned dancer. Georg is a man who thinks for himself, avoids joining any political group and has the clarity and instincts of a true humanist. The contrast between his deepening awareness of the moral depravity around him with the mob euphoria of the crowds leads to his eventual decision that he must act alone.

Driven by his conviction, he must leave his family, the woman he loves and the town that has grown so foreign and abhorrent to him. Though we are familiar with re-enactments of life in concentration camps, there are scenes of torture in this film that make water-boarding seem like the pause that refreshes. But nothing is gratuitous here – these are records of one of the darkest periods in man’s history. The fact that one man had the strength and determination of an ancient prophet is a symbol, however small, of the redemptive power of character, rational thought and human values. The fact he failed was tragic but his heroic effort and resistance to the forces of evil was a startling triumph. Previously unknown to most of us, Georg Elser has been given his proper recognition in a remarkable performance by Christian Friedel and a well-crafted film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Wind and Solar Energy Are Dead Ends By Spencer P. Morrison

By on July 12th, 2017

Renewable energy is the way of the future, we are told. It is inevitable. Some renewable energy advocates boldly claim that the world could be powered by renewable energy as early as 2030 – with enough government subsidies, that is. And of course, the mainstream media play their part, hyping up the virtues of solar and wind energy as the solution to climate change.

In one regard, they are quite right: in terms of generational capacity, wind and solar have grown by leaps and bounds in the last three decades (wind by 24.3% per year since 1990, solar by 46.2% per year since 1990). However, there are two questions worth asking: (i) are renewable energies making a difference, and (ii) are they sustainable?

To answer the first question: No, wind and solar energy have not made a dent in global energy consumption, despite their rapid growth. In fact, after thirty years of beefy government subsidies, wind power still meets just 0.46% of earth’s total energy demands, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The data include not only electrical energy, but also energy consumed via liquid fuels for transportation, heating, cooking, etc. Solar generates even less energy. Even combined, the figures are minuscule: wind and solar energy together contribute less than 1% of Earth’s energy output.

Bottom line: Renewables are not making a difference. It would be far more cost-effective and reasonable to simply invest in more energy-efficient technology. But of course, doing so would not line the pockets of billionaires like Elon Musk.

To answer the second question: Is renewable energy sustainable? Is the future wind- and solar-powered?

No.

Looking first at wind energy: Between 2013 and 2014, again using IEA data, global energy demand grew by 2,000 terawatt-hours. In order to meet this demand, we would need to build 350,000 new 2-megawatt wind turbines – enough to entirely blanket the British Isles. For context, that is 50% more turbines than have been built globally since the year 2000. Wind power is not the future; there is simply not enough extraditable energy. Unfortunately, better technology cannot overcome this problem: turbines can become only so efficient due to the Betz limit, which specifies how much energy can be extracted from a moving fluid. Wind turbines are very close to that physical limit.

The state of solar energy is only slightly more promising. Recent findings suggest that humanity would need to cover an equatorial region the size of Spain with solar panels in order to generate enough electricity to meet global demand by 2030. Not only is this an enormous amount of land that could otherwise be used for agriculture, or left pristine, but it also underestimates the size of the ecological footprint, since only 20% of mankind’s energy consumption takes the form of electricity. Were we to switch to electric vehicles, the area needed would be five times as large.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UNESCO Supports Terrorism by Bassam Tawil

By on July 12th, 2017

This is the same Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership that purports to be working toward achieving peace and coexistence with Israel. In the upside-down world of Palestinian denial, such repudiation of the truth is par for the course: the “culture of peace” lie that Abbas fed to President Donald Trump several weeks ago has about as much truth value as this newest deadly fabrication.

As of now, Palestinians also have an international agency (UNESCO) to support their anti-Israel narrative and rhetoric. The UNESCO resolutions are being interpreted by many Palestinians as proof that Israel has no right to exist. For many Palestinians, the resolutions are a green light to pursue their “armed struggle” to “liberate Palestine, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river.”

The latest UNESCO resolutions are a catalyst for Palestinian terrorism against Israelis. Yet they are more than that: they also make the prospect of peace even more distant.

What do Hamas and UNESCO have in common?

Both believe that Jews have no historical, religious or emotional attachment to the Holy Land.

The recent UNESCO resolutions concerning Jerusalem and Hebron are precisely what terror groups that deny Israel’s right to exist, such as Hamas, have long been hoping to hear from the international community.

The first resolution denies that Israel is the sovereign power over Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, while the second one designates Hebron and the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs as an “Endangered Palestinian World Heritage Site.”

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