RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/11/07/brazil-we-wont-yield-to-arab-pressure-embassy-will-move-to-jerusalem/

After Egypt reportedly rescinds invitation of Brazilian foreign minister in protest of Brazil’s plan to relocate its embassy, President-elect Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, insists embassy will move • Jewish leader: Israel suffered but held its head high.

The new administration in Brazil has reiterated its position that despite mounting pressure from the Arab world, it will remain true to its word and relocate its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“We’re going to move the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem,” Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro, wrote on Tuesday to Jane Silva, president of a leading pro-Israel organization in Brazil.

Silva had approached Eduardo Bolsonaro in the wake of reports in the Brazilian press indicating that Egypt had called off the Brazilian foreign minister’s upcoming visit to Cairo in protest of the planned embassy transfer.

In her letter to Bolsonaro, Silva wrote: “Jerusalem was always the capital of Israel. … There was a partition plan; the Arabs rejected it and launched wars against Israel and persecuted Israel. Israel has suffered, but it held its head high. Israel has seized every opportunity and established a nice home for the sole and legitimate owners of the land of Israel – the Jewish people.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271855/mosul-and-true-face-islam-kenneth-r-timmerman

I have lived and worked in the Muslim Middle East for the past thirty-five years, and have many dear friends who are Muslims. Most recently, I prayed with a 38-year old Muslim man in the ruins of his house in the old city of Mosul, as he told me his story of surviving the ISIS occupation.

I stumbled upon Azam Nejim Abdallah by accident, while inspecting the devastation wrought upon the magnificent 4th and 5th century churches of West Mosul with an Iraqi police brigadier general and activists from the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, a local group dedicated to protecting Iraqi minorities.

Azam and an older neighbor, Abu Ibrahim Mohsen, were among the hardy few who had returned to the ruins and were attempting to rebuild. Their problem on this particular day was that they had no water, and no electricity. “People just three blocks down the street have water,” they complained to the brigadier general. Why not us?”

To us, the answer was obvious. The fact that Azam and his neighbors were alive was nothing short of miraculous. One neighbor’s house was just a pile of rubble. Bomb squads were still combing through the neighborhood, more than a year after the liberation, for ISIS booby-traps and unexploded ordinance. There was not a single house left standing in the neighborhood. Water? Electricity? Really?

When Azam saw me, he wanted to tell me the story of how his four-year son and father were killed in the final days of the ISIS occupation. He kept pointing to an alleyway, and in the end, I let him take me by the hand to his house a bit further away. He had already started to rebuild the walls, but that wasn’t what he wanted to show me: it was a picture of his four-year old son, Omar, and the jagged hole a coalition bomb had torn through a metal door. “I was crouching, right there,” he pointed. “Omar was crouching here, with my father. They were both killed,” he wept. All I could do as he showed me a photograph of his son was to pray with him.

I am reminded of this story by an encounter with a pastor in an Anglican church in Europe recently, who commented that ISIS and all their barbarity were “such a distortion of true Islam.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-european-digital-retreat-1541635377

As impressive as Emmanuel Macron’s reform successes have been, this week brings word of a failure by the French President that’s worth cheering. There are growing signs that the Europe-wide digital tax cherished by Paris is falling by the wayside.

Finance ministers from Ireland, Sweden and Denmark this week rebuffed the European Commission’s digital tax proposal, released earlier this year, and Berlin now appears to have reservations as well. All signs are that at least some of these governments will exercise their veto over the plan at the next finance ministers’ summit in December, or kick the plan into the long grass by delaying further action until 2021 or later.

Mr. Macron and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire have aggressively advocated such a tax, which the Commission would set as a 3% charge on revenues (not profits), to be paid to the EU state where the revenue is earned rather than where a European subsidiary is headquartered. This is an attack on U.S. tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, since few European companies would hit the thresholds of €750 million in annual global revenue and €50 million in EU revenue above which the tax kicks in.

The plan also is a policy assault on low-tax EU states such as Ireland, which has attracted the European headquarters of many global tech companies by imposing a 12.5% tax rate on corporate profits. Tax-happy EU members such as France and Germany have complained about this competition for decades, and Messrs. Macron and Le Maire may have thought that public irritation at American tech companies over privacy would provide political cover for another attack on Dublin.

But Dublin is stubbornly defending its fiscal sovereignty. Sweden is worried about the implications for its own tech economy, including music-streaming service Spotify. Other leaders are concerned about potential retaliation from President Trump. Berlin now says it would prefer to wait for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s plan for digital taxation—which may be a very long wait—despite Chancellor Angela Merkel signaling her support for the French plan earlier this year.