German model and journalist Anabel Schunke says she is afraid to walk the streets thanks to Angela Merkel’s migrant influx.
Please share this video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poa5h6xAvR8
http://www.infowars.com/model-multiculturalism-is-killing-germany/
Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America’s commitment to Israel’s security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom, the president had the United States abstain from — and thereby effectively enact — a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlement activity.
At least, that’s what the resolution ostensibly does. The reality is much more than that. The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible.
It was a black day in modern American diplomatic history, a flurry of sinister wheeling and dealing while the nation — exhausted by the election, anticipating a weekend of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration — was looking the other way.
To his great credit, Donald Trump was not. The president-elect asserted himself on Israel’s behalf, backing up his campaign promise that “America First” meant restoration of America’s reputation as a dependable friend and an enemy not to be trifled with. Under the pressure he generated, Egypt backed down, withdrawing its sponsorship of the resolution.
But such is the disdain in which Israel is openly held after eight Obama years of empowering Islamists that four other countries — Malaysia, Venezuela, Senegal, and, of all places, New Zealand — revived the resolution, knowing they had the State Department’s backing. With the U.S. abstention, it was easily approved.
It is a disgraceful legacy of Barack Obama that his obsession over settlements and antipathy toward Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — traits he shares with his old radical comrade, Rashid Khalidi — have made the already dim prospects for peace far more remote. At the root of the settlements controversy is the fiction that the territory at issue is “occupied Palestinian” land. In point of stubborn fact, no matter how tirelessly the vaunted “international community” evokes the scurrilous image of occupation, the territory is righteously disputed.
The hunt for the suspect in the deadly attack on a Berlin Christmas market ended before dawn Friday in a shootout with Italian police near Milan, but the political fallout was just beginning to gather force.
Anis Amri, a Tunisian, lived in Germany for more than a year, despite having been previously jailed in Italy and denied asylum in both nations. Even as Europe’s most-wanted man, he traveled hundreds of miles this week, crossing at least two European Union borders on his way to Italy, where police stopped him to check his identity.
Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to mounting pressure Friday over her approach to migrants and national security as she readies for a re-election battle next year.
“The Amri case raises a series of questions, not just about the deed itself but also about the time since he came to Germany,” she said. “We will now examine with urgency to what degree state practices must be changed.”
Police in multiple countries were working Friday to figure out how Amri, who authorities said had train tickets from France, made his escape and whether he had help.
“I am very relieved that there is no more danger stemming from this perpetrator,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said, but he added that authorities would continue hunting for any accomplices. As of late Friday, police hadn’t disclosed any additional arrests.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. The terror group’s official Amaq news agency posted a video of a man it said was Amri urging followers to kill “crusaders.” The man strongly resembled photos of Amri released by German police.
On Friday U.S. President-elect Donald Trump tweeted: “Such hatred! When will the U.S., and all countries, fight back?”
For all eight years of the Obama administration, Democrats have made believe that Barack Obama is a firm and enthusiastic supporter and defender of the Jewish state. Arguments to the contrary were not only dismissed but angrily denounced as the products of nothing more than vicious partisanship. Obama’s defenders repeatedly used the trope that “Israel should not be a partisan issue,” as if Obama’s views and actions were beyond reproach. A whole corps of Jewish leaders, some at the major organizations and many from Chicago, showed far greater loyalty to Obama than to the tradition of true nonpartisanship when it came to Middle East policy.
All of those arguments have been ground into dust by Obama’s action Friday allowing a nasty and harmful anti-Israel resolution to pass the United Nations Security Council. Just weeks before leaving office, he could not resist the opportunity to take one more swipe at Israel—and to do real harm. So he will leave with his record on Israel in ruins, and he will leave Democrats even worse off.
It’s pretty clear that he does not care. Obama has gotten himself elected twice, the second time by a decreased margin (the only time a president has been reelected by fewer votes than in his first term), but he has laid waste to his party. In the House, the Senate, the state governorships, and the state legislatures, the Democrats have suffered loss after loss. Today’s anti-Israel action will further damage the Democratic party, by driving some Jews if not toward the Republicans then at least away from the Democrats and toward neutrality. Donald Trump’s clear statement on Thursday that he favored a veto, Netanyahu’s fervent pleas for one, and the Egyptian action in postponing the vote show where Obama stood: not with Israel, not even with Egypt, but with the Palestinians. Pleas for a veto from Democrats in Congress were ignored by the White House.
Does the resolution matter? It does. The text declares that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” This may turn both settlers—even those in major blocs like Maale Adumim, that everyone knows Israel will keep in any peace deal—and Israeli officials into criminals in some countries, subject to prosecution there or in the International Criminal Court. The text demands “that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” Now add this wording to the previous line and it means that even construction in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City is “a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution also “calls upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.” This is a call to boycott products of the Golan, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
For the past four decades, Samir Qumsieh, who hails from a large and well-respected Christian family in the town of Bet Sahour, near Bethlehem, has fought for the rights of the region’s miniscule Palestinian Christian minority. He has even dared to speak out against the subjugation of Christians living under the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
He regularly receives death threats, and he has been the target of a petrol bomb attack.
“The solution to extremism starts with the kindergarten, with elementary school. It begins with the churches, with the mosques and the school curricula. Curricula are very important – Jewish, Christian and Muslim ones. They should concentrate on accepting the ‘other.’ If this idea is adopted, the future generation will be liberal and open-minded.” — Samir Qumsieh.
“Every day we hear and see some radical Muslim clerics speaking strongly against Christians. Just recently, one of the sheiks was saying that Christian Copts should be slaughtered like sheep. Where is the Egyptian security? If I were in charge of Egyptian security, I would have this sheikh arrested immediately, and have him rot in a dark underground cell.” — Samir Qumsieh.
“To understand the severity of the situation is, let us recall that in the 1950s about 86% of the population of the Bethlehem area was Christian. Today, we are only 12%. In Israel, by contrast, we have 133,000 Christians and the figure is stable. Of course, I am worried about the future of Christians here.” — Samir Qumsieh.
“I fear the day will come when our churches will become museums. is my nightmare.” — Samir Qumsieh.
Without question, Samir Qumsieh is one of the most courageous Christian leaders in the Middle East. Qumsieh is one of the few willing to risk his life to speak out against Muslim persecution of Christians in the Palestinian territories and the Middle East, generally.
The decision by the United States to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel over its settlements on the West Bank is one of the most significant, defining moments of the Obama Presidency.
It defines this President’s extraordinary ability to transform matters of public policy into personal pique at adversaries. And it defines the reality of the international left’s implacable opposition to the Israeli state.
Earlier in the week, Egypt withdrew the Security Council resolution under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. President-elect Donald Trump also intervened, speaking with Egypt’s government and, via Twitter, urging Mr. Obama to block the resolution, as have past U.S. Administrations and Mr. Obama himself in 2011.
As was widely reported Friday after the U.N. vote, the White House decided to abstain—thereby allowing the pro-Palestinian resolution to pass—in retaliation against the intervention by Messrs. Netanyahu and Trump.
Mr. Obama’s animus toward Prime Minister Netanyahu is well known. Apparently Mr. Obama took it as an affront that the President-elect would express an opinion about this week’s U.N. resolution.
It is important, though, to see this U.S. abstention as more significant than merely Mr. Obama’s petulance. What it reveals clearly is the Obama Administration’s animus against the state of Israel itself. No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free, finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous President has done.
No effort to rescind the resolution, which calls the settlements a violation of “international law,” will succeed because of Russia’s and China’s vetoes.
Instead, the resolution will live on as Barack Obama’s cat’s paw, offering support in every European capital, international institution and U.S. university campus to bully Israel with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
UNITED NATIONS—The Obama administration broke from a longstanding tradition of U.S. defense of Israel at the U.N. and allowed the passage of a resolution harshly criticizing the country’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.
It was the first time in 36 years the Security Council was able to adopt a resolution addressing the issue of Israeli settlement construction, an outcome made possible by the abstention of the U.S., which had veto power.
Throughout his tenure, President Barack Obama had warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against expanding Israeli settlements in disputed lands, saying such construction poses an obstacle to peace in the Middle East. And throughout that time, he was rebuffed.
The measure on Friday was approved with 14 members voting in favor and the U.S. abstaining. That abstention, years in the making, marked what could be Mr. Obama’s final jab at an Israeli leader with whom he repeatedly clashed.
The vote followed days of extraordinary international political drama as Israel directly lobbied President-elect Donald Trump to intervene against the adoption of the resolution.
Mr. Trump and his transition team on Thursday held talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi and Israeli officials. Egyptian officials originally drafted the resolution, but after the conversation between Messrs. Trump and Sisi, Egypt pulled the resolution from consideration a few hours before it was scheduled for a vote.
The move infuriated U.S. and European diplomats who saw the decision as the result of interference by Mr. Trump.
It is sadly fitting that, for the first time since 1978, this year the lighting of the first Hanukkah candle coincides with Christmas Eve.
Though the two holidays have nothing in common, they are often lumped together. This is partly due to their proximity on the Gregorian calendar. It is also a period when Jewish and Christian students in the West are let out of school for what is now called “winter vacation,” with a lot of gift-giving and overeating taking place.
But this year, Jews and Christians would do well to embrace a deeper similarity, and say prayers for one another — even while some are drinking eggnog at the foot of lavishly decorated trees, while others are feasting on jelly donuts around lit candles.
Last year on Dec. 24, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi attended mass at St. Mark’s Orthodox Coptic Church in Cairo to show that things in his country were going to be different now that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was no longer at the helm. This gesture, like el-Sissi’s strengthening ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was particularly significant in a region ravaged by full-fledged genocidal war and horrific low-resolution conflicts. The message he was trying to convey was that Egypt under his rule would treat its Christian minority with respect. In the months since then, he has also made moves to embrace his country’s treaty with the Jewish state, with which he shares the goal of fending off terrorists in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. Perhaps mystically, the last time Hanukkah and Christmas Eve fell on the same night occurred three months after the signing of the Camp David Accords, the precursor to that treaty.
El-Sissi’s efforts have not paid off too well on either front. At the Rio Olympic Games in August, though his government warned judoka Islam El Shehaby that if he did not compete against Israeli contender Or Sasson he would be stripped of his Egyptian citizenship, fellow countrymen from all walks of life urged him not to “shame Islam” by fighting Sasson, and afterward denounced him for sharing the mat with a Jew.
Also in the year since el-Sissi went to church, Islamist terrorists have continued, as before, to commit heinous acts of violence against the Copts. This month, during Sunday prayers at the very cathedral that el-Sissi visited in 2015, two dozen worshippers were killed and many more wounded when a bomb went off in the packed premises. Though there is still some confusion as to whether the mass murder was carried out by suicide bomber or a terrorist who laid the explosives near a pew, the Islamic State organization took happy credit for the snuffing out of the lives of innocent Christians, mostly women and children, and vowed to continue its annihilation of “apostates” everywhere.
El-Sissi announced that the suspected perpetrator was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had established ties with a Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate.
This year Chanukah starts on December 24 in the evening and ends on the evening of January 1, 2017 . No one ever explains it better than retired ambassador Yoram Ettinger…rsk
1. Chanukah and Jewish immortality. In 1899, Mark Twain wrote: “Jews constitute but one percent of the human race…, [but] their contributions to literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are away out of proportion to the weakness of their numbers. They have made a marvelous fight in all the ages, and had done it with their hands tied behind them…. The Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians rose and then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed, made vast noise and they are gone…. The Jew saw them all, beat them all and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies…. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
2. The Chanukah Menorah (a nine-branched-candelabra) commemorates the legacy of the Maccabees, which has been a pillar of fire for the Jewish people, highlighting the prerequisites of spiritual and physical liberty, in defiance of formidable odds: faith, optimism, patriotism, memory and adherence to value and principle-driven culture. The Maccabees have become a universal role-model of national and religious liberation struggle against all odds, the victory of long-term, principle-driven faith over short-term, convenience-driven cynicism and opportunism; the victory of tenacious optimism over pessimism and political-correctness.
3. Israel’s Founding Father, David Ben Gurion: “The struggle of the Maccabees was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history…. The Maccabees overcame one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history due to the spirit of the people, rather than the failed spirit of the establishment ….” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22, Ben Gurion, IDF Publishing, 1953)
4. The US connection:
* On December 2, 1993, in Billings, Montana, white supremacists tossed a brick through a window of a Jewish home that displayed the Chanukah Menorah. On the following morning, the Billings Gazette – reflecting sentiments of local churches and civic leaders – printed a full-page Menorah, which was pasted on the windows of over 10,000 non-Jewish residents in a show of solidarity. Some Billings’ residents displayed their Not in Our Town spirit, displaying Chanukah Menorahs on Billings’ main street. The Billings’ Chanukah gesture has been commemorated annually. A Chanukah candle-lighting was recently held at the State Capitol in Helena, MT.
*A bust of Judah the Maccabee is displayed at West Point Military Academy, along with those of Joshua, David, Alexander the Great, Hector, Julius Caesar, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon – “the Nine Worthies.”
*John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Thomas Paine and the organizers of the Boston Tea Party were referred to as “the modern day Maccabees.”
* According to the Diary of Michael and Louisa Hart, George Washington was introduced to Chanukah in December 1777 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He was challenging the much superior British military. A Jewish solider lit a Chanukah candle, explaining its significance: a conviction-driven, tactical victory against immense odds. Washington replied: “I rejoice in the Maccabees’ success, though it is long past…It pleases me to think that miracles still happen.” On June 19, 1778, Washington implemented the battle tactics of Judah the Maccabee, defeating the British troops.
While the medieval Saudi system of justice was flogging the gentle blogger Raif Badawi 50 out of the stipulated 1000 lashes, a delegation of UN bureaucrats landed in Jeddah to promote an international conference on religious freedom.
The Saudis use these international seats to advance their oppressive agenda, and to press the Western democracies to punish criticism of Islam.
Through the shameful trial of Geert Wilders, Dutch authorities sent a message of surrender to the Saudis and other rogue Islamic regimes that punish dissent.
Did the Dutch prosecute Wilders on behalf of the Saudis, who threatened to impose sanctions on the Netherlands?
The UN and the Western democracies are putting the defense of human rights and freedom in the hands of one the world’s worst violators of religious and intellectual freedom.
Sharia courts are already fully operating in the Netherlands. They know something about “human rights”: stoning, flogging and chopping off heads.
Who will rescue our right to speak?
“My husband has been languishing in a Saudi prison since June 17th, 2012. Our children live with me in the city of Sherbrooke, Québec in Canada. They have not seen their father for five years now… On January 9, 2015, Raif received the first 50 lashes… Will members of the United Nations Human Rights Council join the European Parliament and ask for Raif’s release?”
Unfortunately, the UN members did not respond to this appeal by Ensaf Haidar, the fearless wife of the most famous blogger of the Arab world, the gentle Raif Badawi, imprisoned and flogged by the Saudis for his secular ideas. A few days after Ensaf’s appeal, the United Nations welcomed Badawi’s executioners, the Saudis, at the UN Human Rights Council. The Saudi representative, Abdulaziz Alwasil, will be decisive on three major issues at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva: women, religious freedom and the system of justice.
What a great achievement for Saudi Arabia: The country flogs poets and bloggers, and its sheikhs have no other concern than filling their sumptuous palaces with wives and concubines, and then stoning them to death if they become “adulterous”. Saudi Arabia is where a Shiite cleric was publicly beheaded and where a Christian cannot wear a tunic or a cross.
The British government supported the Saudi bid to be re-elected at the Human Rights Council (British Prime Minister Theresa May was urged in vain to oppose the Saudi election to the Geneva body). The Obama Administration did the same: Samantha Powers, the U.S. ambassador at the UN, called the Saudi bid at the UN a “procedural position”.
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