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Why Palestinian Leaders Fear Opinion Polls by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15334/palestinians-corruption-opinion-polls

The Palestinian Authority leadership was far from pleased about AMAN’s exposure of the Palestinians public’s discontent with corruption.

Palestinian leaders fear that reports about corruption could contribute to a drying up of international funding of the PA. If donor countries got whiff of the fact that their taxpayers’ money is being squandered and stolen by senior PA officials, the cash cow might just kick over the PA bucket.

The statement by Transparency International is a clear indication of the campaign of threats and intimidation its representatives have been facing since the release of the corruption survey. The statement implies that AMAN was forced to withdraw its public opinion poll after its staff received threats from the PA leadership.

Mahmoud Abbas also apparently wants to make sure that donor countries continue to channel funds to his government without noticing that a majority of Palestinians are complaining about corruption.

Palestinian Authority leaders are upset: a survey published on December 11 by Transparency International, a global organization that “gives voice to the victims and witnesses of corruption,” found that corruption is increasing in the PA and in five Arab countries.

Transparency International said that its survey, called “Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) – Middle East and North Africa,” revealed that “almost two-thirds of all people (65%) in six countries surveyed think that corruption is getting worse in their country, and that their governments are not doing enough to end corruption.”

The GCB report, one of the largest, most detailed surveys of citizens’ views on corruption and experiences of bribery, incorporates the views of more than 6,600 citizens from Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan and Tunisia, according to Transparency International.

“For the first time, the GCB also measures the prevalence of wasta, or the use of personal connections, to access public services, in three countries: Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine,” it said in a statement. “Despite the relatively low bribery rates in countries like Jordan and Palestine, citizens often resort to wasta in order to get public services they need.”

Frontpage Person of the Year: The Hong Kong Protestor Fighting for our freedom against a new global Communism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/frontpage-person-year-hong-kong-protestor-daniel-greenfield/

On Christmas Eve, democracy protesters in Hong Kong ignored police warnings and began the countdown to midnight. The courageous young men wearing antlers wished the uniformed Communist regime thugs, “Merry Christmas”, and continued the fight.

While Time’s Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, was yachting and traveling first class on trains, being feted at parties and getting giant murals painted of her, true activists were fighting against Communism

The protests over China’s brutal attempts to terrorize Hong Kong residents began in the spring and continued on into the summer, autumn and winter. Christmas is a traditionally cheerful time in this capitalist enclave of the People’s Republic which has a large Christian population who, unlike their mainlander cousins, are still free to worship, but it’s now marked by the brutality of the regime.

Christmas Eve saw clashes in shopping malls between protesters in Santa hats and gas masks, and Communist regime thugs, in and out of uniform, wielding guns, batons, and noxious sprays. While Greta’s environmentalist supporters claim that they’re opposed to consumerism, the protesters in Hong Kong were putting their bodies on the line in shopping malls to sabotage the shopping season.

Their message to Xi’s Communist regime, and to his puppets and allies in Hong Kong was that there would be no business as usual. The People’s Republic of China had avoided the catastrophic collapses that befell the Soviet Union and much of the Communist bloc by finding a balance between the economic prosperity of free market economies and the authoritarian control of Communism.

After Tiananmen Square, the Communist regime had bribed its populace with economic prosperity obtained through dirty trade tactics aimed at the United States of America and the entire world. The Hong Kong protesters are sending a message that they won’t trade shopping malls for freedom.

Protesters courageously fought so that Christmas in Hong Kong won’t be a Communist shopping mall.

  The ICC decision on Israel would make Himmler proud   The ICC chief prosecutor’s hand is now controlled by organizations linked to the 3rd Reich.  By Richard Kemp KEMP

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-ICC-decision-on-Israel-would-make-Himmler-proud-612211 

PROSECUTOR FATOU BENSOUDA waits for the start of the trial against former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo and former youth minister Charles Ble Goude at the International Criminal Court in The Hague last month.

SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, architect and director of the Holocaust, would be proud of the latest move by Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Intent on the total elimination of the Jewish race, Himmler supported Amin al-Huseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in his plans to eradicate the Jews in Palestine.
Now Bensouda and the ICC have joined the international campaign aimed at eliminating the Jewish state, led by al-Huseini’s successors. In a grotesque inversion, the ICC, heir to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, has become a propaganda weapon of anti-Semitic hate. This represents a shameful betrayal of its honourable anti-Nazi progenitor. Its path more closely resembles that of the Nazis’ notorious People’s Court, the Volksgerichthof, than the Nuremberg trials.

Nuremberg laid low many of the Nazi monsters that perpetrated the Holocaust. The ICC chief prosecutor’s hand is now controlled by organizations linked to the 3rd Reich. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq, Addameer and Al-Dameer,
Palestinian NGOs backed by EU and Swiss funds, have been lobbying the ICC to bring prosecutions against Israel for more than a decade according to the Israeli research institute NGO Monitor. All are connected to the Palestinian group PFLP whose founding leaders in the 1970s were trained in terrorism and political warfare by former SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny and Dr Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, once of Josef Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.

Israeli Intelligence Continues to Help Thwart Terrorist Attacks Abroad

https://www.investigativeproject.org/8228/israeli-intelligence-continues-to-help-thwart

Denmark’s security authorities foiled several jihadist terrorist attacksearlier this month after arresting 20 suspects in raids throughout the country. That same week, two brothers were sentenced to long prison terms in Australia after planning to down a commercial airplane on behalf of the Islamic State group in 2017. These developments point to a rising trend in thwarted jihadist terror plots.
But the two cases also share another commonality: Israel’s intelligence services reportedly played an integral role in stifling the mass-casualty plots. Denmark and Australia join a long list of countries that relied on Israeli intelligence to prevent serious violence around the world.
According to Israel’s Channel 12 news, information from Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service helped Danish authorities prevent attacks shortly before they were to be executed. Prosecutors allege that two of the suspects tried to purchase guns and ammunition “to be used in connection with one or several terror attacks in Denmark or abroad.” The Copenhagen City Court also ordered two other suspects remain imprisoned for allegedly attempting to build several explosive devices.
The relative threat posed by various terrorist actors can be skewed if analysts only look at realized attacks. Europol reports consistently show that European separatists conduct more attacks than jihadists on the continent. But these assessments misrepresent the fact that the jihadist threat is transnational, not inherently localized like separatist movements, and are more likely to generate more fatalities.

Headstones discovered vandalized at second Jewish cemetery in Slovakia

The aftermath of vandalism at the ancient Jewish cemetery of Námestovo, Slovakia in December 2019. (Courtesy of ZCN)

(JTA) — More than 20 headstones were vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in northern Slovakia in the second such incident in the country in a week.

The 22 gravestones vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in the country’s northern town of Rajec appear to have been damaged in mid-December, according to the World Jewish Congress. The vandalism is currently under investigation by police.

The 60 gravestones knocked down and set on fire in the Jewish cemetery of Námestovo, a town in northern Slovakia near the Polish border, were discovered on December 16.

It is not known yet whether the two incidents are connected.

Anti-Semitic incidents of this nature are extremely rare in Slovakia, according to the World Jewish Congress.

In Central and Eastern Europe, inactive Jewish cemeteries often attract vagrants because they are often located outside urban centers and out of sight of law enforcement. Some incidents of vandalism have been attributed to drunks and drug users and are not always deemed hate crimes.

German Parliament: Its Resolution to Ban Hezbollah is Just a Legal Charade – Part II by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15346/german-parliament-hezbollah-update

Gatestone Institute wholeheartedly supports U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to ban Hezbollah in Europe. The Bundestag resolution, however, calls for an incomplete ban, which appears aimed at providing the German government with political cover that would allow Berlin to claim that it has banned the group even if it has not.

It is utterly implausible that Germany, one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced countries in Europe, is unable to ascertain the organizational structure of Hezbollah within its own borders.

“Six months ago, the AfD presented a resolution in the Bundestag to ban Hezbollah, a resolution which you vehemently rejected and which since then you have blocked in caucus…. What is needed is the complete ban of Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s propaganda and terror financing in Germany must be stopped… This, by the way, is also demanded by the Bundestag’s Anti-Semitism Resolution, which expressly calls for the deportation of supporters of anti-Semitism. If this does not apply to supporters of Hezbollah, which wants to send Jews to the gas chambers, and wants to destroy Israel, then to whom could this apply?” — Beatrix von Storch MP, Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] party, to the Bundestag, December 19, 2019.

Von Storch noted that the Bundestag’s resolution, if implemented by the German government, would allow Hezbollah’s 30-plus German-based mosques and cultural centers — where the group raises funds and spreads anti-Israel propaganda — to continue to operate. Moreover, not one of the 1,050 known Hezbollah operatives now in Germany would be deported.

Gatestone Institute recently reported that a December 19 German parliamentary resolution, which claims to call for a complete ban in Germany of Hezbollah (Arabic for “The Party of Allah”), actually falls short of demanding a comprehensive ban of the terrorist organization. A senior US government official called the article “flat wrong”. It would have been nice if had been.

Gatestone Institute wholeheartedly supports U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to ban Hezbollah in Europe. The Bundestag resolution, however, calls for an incomplete ban, which appears aimed at providing the German government with political cover that would allow Berlin to claim that it has banned the group even if it has not.

The Bundestag itself has issued a statement which states that it is calling for an activity ban (Betätigungsverbot) of Hezbollah, but not an organizational ban (Organisationsverbot) — an important distinction because the activity ban is legally weaker than the organizational ban.

A New French Leader: Joachim Son-Forget by Grégoire Canlorbe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15319/joachim-son-forget

What shocks the elites of Paris or Brussels about President Trump is that he actually embodies real governance, which is totally inadequate in their mode of operation.

Clandestinely, North Korea is at the forefront of computing, which allows it to siphon significant funds through the blockchain [bitcoin].

Kim Jong-un has no interest in denuclearization. His program is total and irreversible, not to mention verifiable…. He has promised that its effect… will change the “strategic status” of North Korea… Why would his regime comply with adopting a position of weakness?

Joachim Marie Son-Forget, a French politician born in South Korea, since 2017 has been a member of the French National Assembly (lower house of the French Parliament) representing French residents overseas. Formerly active in the Socialist Party and later La République En Marche!, he resigned in late 2018 to start his own political party, Valeur Absolue.

Grégoire Canlorbe: How do you react to the EU’s attitude: hostile to Trump but friendly towards the mullahs of Iran?

Joachim Son-Forget: I do not think that the EU is particularly hostile to Trump, except that it denounces the trade war that has been declared. I fully understand the US President’s decision to increase tariffs on goods such as European wines or Airbus aircraft. Trump is defending America’s economic interests, and from his point of view, he is right to do so. As I am concerned with French and European interests, I am obliged to approve the tariff sanctions with which the EU has promised to respond. But Trump is a great President; I regret that he cannot find in [French President Emmanuel] Macron an interlocutor who answers him from a position him of strength — as a leader who skillfully and ferociously defends his own economic and geopolitical interests, like Kim Jong-un, who has been so skillful despite his age and his education in Switzerland.

Communist Cuba Enslaves Physicians Havana sends them abroad, steals their wages, and forces them to act as spies. By Marion Smith

https://www.wsj.com/articles/communist-cuba-enslaves-physicians-11577299061?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

What do you call a system that combines slavery with espionage? In Communist Cuba, you call it humanitarian aid. For decades Havana has sent tens of thousands of doctors abroad as a supposed sign of goodwill, only to steal their income and use some as unwilling spies. Fortunately, more nations are rejecting Cuba’s “help.”

After toppling socialist dictator Evo Morales in November, Bolivia expelled more than 700 Cuban doctors, accusing them of fomenting protests demanding Mr. Morales’s return to power. Ecuador moved to evict the 400 or so Cuban doctors within its borders a few days earlier. One doctor said she and her colleagues received only a third of their promised salaries, with Havana keeping the rest. She also said Cuban authorities forced them to “send messages of support to the revolution.”

In late 2018, incoming Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro demanded that Cuba allow the more than 8,500 doctors in his country to bring their families and collect their full salary, which was paid for by Brazilian taxpayers. Havana soon recalled the doctors. A year before, at least 150 Cuban doctors in Brazil filed lawsuits detailing their mistreatment. One said, “There comes a time when you get tired of being a slave.”

UN, UK Treating Persecuted Christians as “Enemies” by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15311/persecuted-christians-enemies

“You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been ‘genocided,’ they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in… and even threaten you…” — Paul Diamond, British Human Rights Lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019.

Lord George Carey is suing the UK Home Office for allegedly being “institutionally biased” against Christian refugees and therefore complicit in what he calls “the steady crucifixion of Middle East Christians.”

When it comes to offering asylum, the UK “appears to discriminate in favour of Muslims” instead of Christians. Statistics seemed to confirm this allegation: “out of 4,850 Syrian refugees accepted for resettlement by the Home Office in 2017, only eleven were Christian….” — Barnabas Fund, November 2, 2017.

A number of other Christian orderlies were also denied visas, including another nun with a PhD in biblical theology from Oxford; another nun denied for not having a personal bank account; and a Catholic priest denied for not being married.

Christian “infidels” need not apply, but radical Muslims are welcomed with open arms.

The United Nations Refugee Agency appears to be committed to blocking persecuted Christians from receiving any assistance. According to a recent CBN News report:

Christian Syrian refugees … have been blocked from getting help from the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, by Muslim UN officials in Jordan.

One of the refugees, Hasan, a Syrian convert to Christianity, told us in a phone call that Muslim UN camp officials “knew that we were Muslims and became Christians and they dealt with us with persecution and mockery. They didn’t let us into the office. They ignored our request.”

THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD

Yes, tiny Israel with 9 million people, the size of New Jersey is number 8!  The U.S. is 473 times the size of Israel. 
Happy Holidays from Janet Levy.

According to U.S. News and World Report, the most powerful countries in 2019 are:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/power-rankings
1.   United States
2.   Russia
3.   China
4.  Germany
5.  United Kingdom
6.  France
7.  Japan
8.  Israel
9.  Saudi Arabia
10. South Korea
11.  United Arab Emirates
12.  Canada
13.  Iran
14.  Switzerland
15.  Australia
16.  Turkey
17.    India
18.   Italy
19.   Iraq
20.  Singapore
21.   Sweden
22.  Pakistan
23.  Spain
24.  Qatar
25.  Belgium
26.  Netherlands
27.  Norway
28.  Denmark
29.  Egypt
30.  Brazil