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Shimon Peres, 1923-1016 Essay: With Peres’ death, two very different men died. BY: David Isaac

With the passing of Shimon Peres at the age of 93, two very different men died. The first was young, pragmatic and tough-minded, skilled in negotiation and focused on building Israel’s military strength. The second was older, a dreamer, resolutely focused on a vision of peace that proved stubbornly impervious to reality.

The first Peres was tapped by Ben-Gurion to head Israel’s navy at the tender age of 24, and then became director general of the defense ministry at 29. He helped establish Israel’s arms industry and led the negotiations with France that made it Israel’s chief weapons supplier. He was deeply involved in the planning, with England and France, of the 1956 Sinai campaign and is credited with the construction of Israel’s nuclear deterrent at Dimona.

This Peres reacted to events like a security hawk. When in 1976 then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wavered between sending a rescue mission to Entebbe or giving in to terrorist demands, it was Peres, as defense minister, who pushed hard for the risky and unprecedented rescue effort. And it was Peres, within a divided government, who supported the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria.

But around 25 years ago, Peres was reborn. In 1993, as foreign minister he became the architect of the Oslo Accords. Until then, it had been illegal for an Israeli to speak to PLO representatives. In the blink of an eye, Yasser Arafat went from terror chieftain to world statesman. The new policy led to a Nobel Peace Prize for both Arafat and Peres, along with Prime Minister Rabin, whom Peres carried along with his vision. This is the Peres who promoted the idea of a New Middle East, in which cooperation would replace conflict.

The new Peres would become the most un-Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers. This is not in the sense of religious observance: Peres may have been less alienated from tradition than some of Israel’s other secular leaders. It is in the sense of departing from fundamental Jewish historical values and insights. One of the most central of these is the importance of remembrance. Zakhor—remember, according to former Columbia Professor of Jewish History Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, is invoked 169 times in the Bible. Indeed, Yerushalmi wrote a book entitled Zakhor in which he notes that only in Israel “is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.” Yet Peres repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in the past. Noting the contrast between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on memory in Judaism and Peres’s cavalier dismissal of history, the pro-Israel group Americans for a Safe Israel compiled a pamphlet of statements from Peres on subjects like history, Zionism, and Judaism over nearly a decade following the Oslo Accords. Below is a sampling:

UN Demands US Pay Reparations “Human rights” panel accuses American police of being modern-day lynchers. Joseph Klein

Just when you thought the United Nations could not sink any lower, a UN panel has issued a report recommending that the United States pay “reparations” to African-Americans for its “legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality.” The report accuses the United States of maintaining “institutional and structural racial discrimination and racism against people of African descent.”

The panel that issued this claptrap is the self-styled Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which reported on the visit of three of its members to the United States from January 19-29 2016. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent reports to the UN’s dysfunctional Human Rights Council, which the Obama administration decided to join and American taxpayers are thus helping to pay for.

The Working Group members met with representatives from various federal agencies, including the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency. They also met with officials of the White House working on African-American issues, staff of the congressional black caucus, a member of the United States Senate and various state and local government officials. Finally, they met with hundreds of unidentified “African Americans from communities with a large population of people of African descent living in the suburbs, as well as with lawyers, academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations.”

The Working Group’s report channeled the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the report’s authors went out of their way to praise Black Lives Matter.

The report charged that currently in the United States “a systemic ideology of racism ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to impact negatively on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today.” The fact that the country twice elected an African-American as president and that two African-Americans have served as the U.S. Attorney General during the last seven plus years seems to have eluded the report’s authors.

While acknowledging some progress since the long gone Jim Crow era, the Working Group chose to focus in its report on what it characterized as “alarming levels of police brutality and excessive use of lethal force by law enforcement officials, committed with impunity against people of African descent in the United States.”

The report’s authors shamelessly concluded that today’s “police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”

Never mind that thousands of innocent blacks have been murdered by black criminals, not by the police who are trying to protect innocent lives in high crime neighborhoods.

Never mind that in many instances of police shootings resulting in the deaths of African-Americans, independent investigations have concluded that the police were dealing with armed perpetrators whom the police had reason to believe posed an imminent lethal threat.

Ron Pike Runnymede on the Murrumbidgee?

King John prevented his subjects using the rivers, forests and the fauna for their sustenance. That particular despot is long gone, replaced with green bureaucrats restricting access to the tools of production and commerce that are the very foundation of prosperity. It is past time they, too, were brought to heel.
Citizens of Western democracies accept that the state, via its law-making and -enforcement processes, is charged with deterring and punishing criminal activity — a category in which theft and extortion most definitely figure. But who holds the state to account when it makes those crimes its stock in trade? Numerous recent events lead me to believe that, if justic is to be served, it should be possible to sue the state and its officers for the felony of “extortion”. Bear with me as I explain, first by detailing the essence of those particular crimes.

The noun “extortion” is defined as oppressive or illegal exaction — the obtaining of money or goods under colour of office being one manifestation. Bear that in mind as you look back to 2002, when the last big drought was dragging on and there was insufficient water for NSW irrigators to grow their crops. The state hounded those food producers, flinging charges of water wastage and environmental damage. Low river flows were said to be their fault even when they had no access to water from those same rivers. It wasn’t long before the state took 15% of entitlements from irrigators with general security licenses and 5% of entitlements from irrigators with high security licenses. No compensation has ever been paid, and promised reviews of those edicts have not eventuated. Those hardest hit, the folk who produce our food, had a basic input to their businesses exacted by the state without compensation. Surely that is extortion.

Not satisfied with this abuse of power, the NSW government next legislated to introduce water-delivery charges, regardless of the its ability to actually deliver that water as and when required. These charges apply not just to the remaining 85% of irrigators’ entitlements, but also to the 15% resumed by the state. Yes, the state is actually charging irrigators for water it has exacted and is now asininely flushing to the sea. Al Capone’s business plan and methods cannot hold a candle to such brazen theft! How long before we are paying for the air we breathe?

Not content with allowing NSW to humble regional communities by removing basic inputs to production and forcing higher costs on all producers and manufacturers, Malcom Turnbull — then the relevant minister under John Howard — introduced the Water Act. This legislation, later passed by the Rudd government, has led to further extortion in relation to water for productive use and clearly contravenes Section 100 of our Constitution:

The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of the rivers for conservation and irrigation.

This Commonwealth legislation spawned the Murray Darling Basin Plan, which gave Canberra bureaucrats the right to buy irrigation entitlements from license holders across the Murray-Darling Basin. At that time, many irrigators were in dire financial straits, with no crop income for several years because of the drought. Many had to borrow to pay water charges, as detailed above, while others, desperate to care for their families, sold their entitlements to the Commonwealth.

France: ‘The Jungle’ Migrant Camp “Plan will proliferate a multitude of mini-Calais throughout the country.” by Soeren Kern

In 2001 alone, 54,000 people “attacked” the Channel Tunnel terminal in Calais and 5,000 had gotten through.

Migrants evicted from Calais moved to Paris and established a massive squatter camp at the Jardins d’Eole, a public park near the Gare du Nord station, from where high-speed Eurostar trains travel to and arrive from London. The area has become a magnet for human traffickers who charge migrants thousands of euros for fake travel documents, for passage to London.

The President of the Alpes-Maritimes region, Eric Ciotti, criticized the government’s “irresponsible” plan to relocate migrants in Calais to other parts of France. He said the plan would “proliferate a multitude of small Calais, genuine areas of lawlessness that exacerbate lasting tensions throughout the country.”

A whistleblower reported that volunteer aid workers at “The Jungle” were forging sexual relationships with migrants, including children. “Female volunteers having sex enforces the view (that many have) that volunteers are here for sex,” he said.

French President François Hollande has vowed “definitively, entirely and rapidly” to dismantle “The Jungle,” a squalid migrant camp in the northern port town of Calais, by the end of this year.

Hollande made the announcement during a September 26 visit to Calais — but not to the camp itself — amid growing unease over France’s escalating migrant crisis, which has become a central issue in the country’s presidential campaign.

The French government plans to relocate the migrants at the camp to so-called reception centers in other parts of the country. But it remains unclear how the government will prevent migrants from returning to Calais.

Sceptics say the plan to demolish “The Jungle” is a publicity stunt that will temporarily displace the migrants but will not resolve the underlying problem — that French officials refuse either to deport illegal migrants or else to secure the country’s borders to prevent illegal migrants from entering France in the first place.

The decision to demolish the camp came just days after construction work began on a wall in Calais, a major transport hub on the edge of the English Channel, to prevent migrants at the camp from stowing away on cars, trucks, ferries and trains bound for Britain.

Tel Aviv: A Beach-to-Market Food Tour Israeli food is having its global moment, spurring ever more inventive cooking in trendsetting Tel Aviv. Here’s how to find the city’s most exciting restaurants, food stalls—and the king of all pita sandwiches By Raphael Kadushin

When I was 7 my family moved from the Midwest, in the dead of winter, to Israel and everything shifted. Our snow boots gave way to sandals, blizzards turned into salty sea breezes and food that used to arrive wrapped in plastic came alive, in very real ways. On Friday mornings the poultry vendor would chase our Sabbath chicken around the market yard, until we heard the last strangled squawk. The oranges from our neighbor’s tree would spray juice when we halved them, and hummus was always spilling out of pita and running down our bare arms.

We left Israel before I entered high school and returned for short visits in the years that followed. But I hadn’t gone back for an extended visit until last year, around the same time the rest of the world was busy discovering the tastes I remembered. Israeli cuisine is having a huge global moment, from Jerusalem-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s network of Middle-Eastern restaurants in London to Alon Shaya’s Shaya, currently one of the toughest reservations in New Orleans. And all that excitement isn’t just an Israeli export. The Tel Aviv I knew, a relatively quiet, provincial town, has morphed into Israel’s largely secular trendsetter; new restaurants are debuting weekly. “We’re open to the world now,” chef Eytan Vanunu later told me, “in fashion, art, music and, of course, food.”
On this return trip, the proof of that voracious appetite, and Tel Aviv’s ascendance as style maker, were obvious my first day in town. I passed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s glossy new contemporary wing, and the warren of boutiques and galleries crowding the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, before my cab deposited me in the hipsterized Florentin district at Halutzim 3, the restaurant Mr. Vanunu runs with his partner, Naama Szterenlicht. Housed in a small renovated warehouse, the bistro is anchored by a recycled wood counter and filled with flea-market-find tables. But if the dining room’s casual design doesn’t suggest the dynamism of Israeli food, the amped-up menu unequivocally does. The parents of Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht variously came to Israel from Argentina, Poland, Germany and Morocco. A decade ago northern European Jewish (Ashkenazi) and southern (Sephardic) recipes would have ended up in different pots. But Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht, representing a new generation of Israeli chefs, bring all those international accents to the freshest local produce and turn out a coherent tumble of flavors. At Halutzim 3, my bowl of black lentils, true to Israel’s abiding vegetarian palate, came tossed with coriander, cured lemon, tomatoes, roasted almonds and goat yogurt. Unabashedly non-kosher, the kitchen also serves a challah loaf stuffed with minced pork and a calamari salad brightened by lime and parsley.

‘When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over.’

“Israeli cuisine,” Mr. Vanunu told me, as he dished up the lentils, “is a dialogue that starts now. When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over. The flavors on your plate aren’t just Naama and my own personal heritage. They also blend in lots of other strands of Israeli culture—Palestinian, Lebanese, Russian, Tunisian, Turkish, Algerian, Romanian, Bulgarian.” Add the growing number of French and Iraqi immigrants and Tel Aviv’s border-hopping food, taking shape before our eyes, is driven by an exuberant flavor profile that won’t be confined by any rigid tradition.

The lesson got reinforced that night when I dined at Yaffo Tel Aviv, an industrial-cool restaurant sitting at the base of downtown’s sleek Electra Tower. The standout hybrid dishes included a puffy focaccia that read more like pita, and an Italo-Israeli gnocchi with shavings of local goat cheese, for a taste of Tel Aviv on the Tiber.

The next morning, though, the very idea of another restaurant seemed claustrophobic. In a city where the sun rarely dives behind clouds, nobody stays inside too long, and Tel Aviv’s dense network of markets and street vendors do a brisk business. The choices are legion. Determined to recover a nostalgic taste of my childhood, I started just down the block from Halutzim 3 at the Levinksy Market, where the fruit stalls displayed pyramids of pomegranates and the market’s long-running Yom Tov Deli was selling cream cheese-stuffed hibiscus flowers in a dollhouse-sized storefront. “What’s good?” I stupidly asked the sale clerk. “Everything,” he said, with a classic Tel Aviv shrug, as I popped a rice-filled grape leaf in mouth, “We’re a deli.

After Islamic State, Fears of a ‘Shiite Crescent’ in Mideast Sunni Arab countries could face a potentially more dangerous challenge if Iranian allies establish a land corridor from Tehran to Beirut By Yaroslav Trofimov

From the point of view of Sunni Arab regimes anxious about Iran’s regional ambitions, Islamic State—as repellent as it is—provides a silver lining. The extremist group’s firewall blocks territorial contiguity between Iran and its Arab proxies in Syria and Lebanon.

This means that now, as Islamic State is losing more and more land to Iranian allies, these Sunni countries—particularly Saudi Arabia—face a potentially more dangerous challenge: a land corridor from Tehran to Beirut that would reinforce a more capable and no less implacable enemy.

Pro-Iranian Shiite militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Badr and Asaib Ahl al-Haq are filling the void left by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and they are much better equipped and trained than the Sunni extremist group. They are also just as hostile to the Saudi regime, openly talking about dismantling the kingdom and freeing Islam’s holy places from the House of Saud.

That rhetoric only intensified after January’s breakup in diplomatic ties between Riyadh and Tehran.

Many Western officials see these Shiite militias—which currently refrain from attacking Western targets—as an undoubtedly preferable alternative to Islamic State’s murderous rule, and some of the groups operating in Iraq indirectly coordinate with U.S. air power. But that isn’t how those militias are viewed in Riyadh and other Gulf capitals.

Abuses committed by Iranian proxies in Sunni areas are just as bad as those of Islamic State, argued Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and a nephew of the current king.

“They are equally threatening, and one feeds off the other,” Prince Turki said in an interview. “Both of them are equally vicious, equally treacherous, and equally destructive.”

The West, he added, fundamentally misunderstood Iranian intentions in the region. “It’s wishful thinking that, if we try to embrace them, they may tango with us. That’s an illusion,” he said.

Fears over a “Shiite crescent” of Iranian influence in the Middle East aren’t new. They were first aired by Jordan’s King Abdullah a year after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq brought pro-Iranian politicians to power in Baghdad.

In the following years, the huge U.S. military presence in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency there kept Iranian power in check. Then, just as the U.S. withdrawal and the taming of the insurgency seemed to herald a new era of Iranian prominence in the region, the 2011 upheaval of the Arab Spring unleashed the Syrian civil war.

The dramatic rise of Islamic State that followed created a Britain-sized Sunni statelet in Syria and Iraq—and severed all land communications in the middle of that “Shiite crescent.”

“Prior to 2011, Iran already had overwhelming influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. So Iran has not significantly expanded its influence in the region, but rather it has been forced to provide military protection to pivotal allies it risked losing,” said Ali Vaez, Iran expert at the International Crisis Group. “If this has caused panic in Riyadh, it’s mainly because the Arab world is in a state of disarray.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Chess Players Forced to Compete in Hijabs At World Championship in Iran By Kieran Corcoran see note please

WILL THE BISHOPS ON THE BOARD BE CALLED MULLAHS? RSK
Female chess grandmasters will be forced to wear hijabs at the world chess championship in Iran next year.

http://heatst.com/world/chess-players-forced-to-compete-in-hijabs-at-world-championship-in-iran/?mod=hsnewsletter_dd

Women hoping to prove themselves the best player in the world have been told to respect “cultural differences” and cover up at the Islamic theocracy was named the host nation.
Players threatened to boycott the event in response and attacked the sport’s governing body for kowtowing to the demands of Iran’s religious police.Visitors to Iran face fines and even arrest if they appear in public with their hair on show.

France’s New Sharia Police by Yves Mamou

Are French institutions sacrificing one freedom for another? Is equality between men and women being sacrificed to freedom of religion (Islam) to impose its diktats on French society?

If someone still does not realize that the Islamic dress code is the Trojan horse of Islamist jihad, he will learn it fast.

For years, “big brothers” have been obliging their mothers and sisters to wear a veil when they go out. Now that this job is done, they have begun to fight non-Muslim women who wear shorts and skirts — no longer just in the sensitive Muslim “no-go zones” of the suburbs, where women no longer dare to wear skirts — but now also in the heart of big cities.

“The law guarantees women, in all fields, same equal rights as men.”

What people do not seem to know is that in the heart of Paris, a Muslim man can insult a woman for drinking a cola in the street and is served in stores first, before women.

Many people evidently still do not know that Islam is a religion and a political movement at war with the West — and openly intent on subjugating the West. It must be responded to as such. The problem is, every time it is responded to as such, Muslim extremists run for cover under the claim of freedom of religion.

It is crucial for Western societies to start making a distinction between freedom of speech and incitement to violence, and to begin seriously penalizing attacks on innocents, as well as calls to attack innocents.

The Council of State, the highest administrative court in France, decided that, to allow freedom of religion, the burkini must not be banned. At first the ruling looked sound: why should people not be able to wear what they wish when they wish? What is not visible, however, is that the harm comes later.

Clinton’s undebatable Iran message: Ruthie Blum

During the first U.S. presidential debate on Monday night, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton articulated her party’s positions clearly, while defending the Obama administration’s policies that she helped forge and implement.

One topic absent from the verbal boxing match between Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump was Israel. This may or may not have been intentional on the part of moderator Lester Holt, who asked a general question about American security. Whether the candidates purposely avoided the subject is also unclear.

But what Clinton said about the Islamic Republic of Iran was plain as day.

She claimed that when she was secretary of state, Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. To confront this threat, she boasted, she was instrumental in imposing the sanctions that “brought” the ayatollahs to the negotiating table. Finally, she asserted, America achieved a deal that “put the lid” on Iran’s nuclear program. Such, she crowed, is the stuff that “diplomacy” and “coalition-building” are made of.

This echoed what she is reported to have told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday in New York City, where the two met in the aftermath of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly. According to a statement released by her office after the tete-a-tete, Clinton said she would “enforce” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement signed in July 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 powers led by the United States.

She failed to mention that the JCPOA is not worth the paper on which it was written; that secret addenda provide loopholes for Iranian military operations; that billions of dollars in cash and gold were transferred clandestinely to Tehran in exchange for the release of American hostages, among other things; and that Iran has already violated several clauses that do appear in the document.

Which brings us to Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, the key negotiator of the disastrous deal.

Kerry, who kept his mouth shut while his counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, shouted at him during every summit, has no problem whatsoever berating the Jewish state.

As Haaretz reported on Sunday, at a meeting last week of nations that fund the Palestinian Authority, Kerry chastised Israel.

“How does increasing the number of settlers indicate an attempt to create a Palestinian state?” he was quoted as saying. “The status quo is not sustainable. So either we mean it and we act on it, or we should shut up. … The consequences of the current trends reverberate far beyond the immediate damage the destruction and displacement may cause. What’s happening today destroys hope. It empowers extremists.”

Lisa Daftari:ISIS-linked group promoting ‘lone jihadi’ tutorials on the dark web

A pro-Islamic State hacking group operating on the dark web has called on Muslims in the U.S. and Europe to launch attacks in their own countries.

The ‘cyber Kahilafah’ group issued a message addressing so-called ‘lone wolves’ operating in “Europe, America and Gulf States involved in the coalition fighting the Islamic State.”

“We invite you to train for combat and learn how to build and detonate improvised explosives” a chilling message on the front page of a new Zeronet portal observed by The Foreign Desk said.

“If you cannot migrate from the land of the infidels to the Caliphate, then carrying out jihad in your own country will also be a victory for the Islamic State and all Muslims,” the message read.

The website appeared on the ZeroNet network, a serverless peer-to-peer group of websites that rely on bitcoin cryptography and the BitTorrent network. These websites, though encrypted, making simple detection challenging for authorities, are accessible via a regular web browser.

According to analysts there is presently no way to take down a ZeroNet webpage that still has seeders.

Links on the ZeroNet page refer the user to an archive of PDF and video tutorials on bomb making, hacking tools and jihad guides hosted on the anonymous TOR network and a separate ZeroNet page provides a secure email address for further contact.

The message for attacks in the West echoes the sentiments of a speech given by Islamic State leader Muhammad Al Adnani in May in which he declared that “if the tyrants have shut the doors of hijra [immigration to ISIS territories] in your face, then open the gate of jihad in their faces and make them regret their action. The smallest bit of work that you can carry out in their countries is far better and beloved to us than any major work [i.e. operations] here.”