RUTHFULLY YOURS

Always good for a laugh, Australia’s high priests of the catastropharian faith have been peppering acolytes with missives about each other’s motives, competence and acumen. If someone hasn’t called a lawyer, they’re even sillier than the current contretemps suggests.
Emeritus Professor of Climate Catastrophism at the ANU Will Steffen and his Climate Council team appear to have belatedly realized that they are not immune from the law of libel. On September 6, Steffen sent out an urgent missive that re-wrote his email circular of September 5. “Please delete our previous email,” he begged.

The two emails were headed, “Breaking ranks”. From the email’s wording, I’d say a heading “Breaking banks” would be more appropriate as far as Steffen’s and the council’s finances are concerned.

Steffen’s two emails were despatched to a big contact list of “Friends”, including myself, from the Council’s computer and in Steffen’s capacity as a Councillor.

Steffen, famous for his ‘death threat’ panic in 2010 after an overheard conversation about kangaroo culling, blathers on in the email about an alleged dissenting report to the official Climate Authority’s report on how Australia should meet its obligations under the Paris climate agreement.[1]

Apart from the naughty bits of the email (which I’ll get to eventually), the “dissenting report” itself has been disowned by the Authority. In a website posting on September 5, headed, “Clarification—misleading report”, chair Wendy Craik AM says,

“The Climate Change Authority is aware that a report released on 5 September 2016 incorrectly purports to be a minority report to the Authority’s third and final report of its special review, Towards a Climate Policy Toolkit . The report released this morning was not released or endorsed by the Authority, and has no status as an Authority report.”

How odd that Steffen and the Council, set up to tout the alleged “facts” on climate change, can’t get even their own basic facts right.

Today the Authority’s chair, Craik, added further:

“Firstly, the suggestion that the Authority secretariat staff are inexpert or incompetent is manifestly false. The staff have a truly impressive depth of knowledge on all aspects of climate policy and have worked tirelessly, with a high degree of professionalism, to produce a high quality report under difficult circumstances. The Authority acknowledged this great effort by the secretariat staff in our report: Towards a Climate Policy Toolkit.

I also reject strongly any suggestion that the Authority has been politically influenced or motivated by political considerations in its work on the special review. In preparing Towards a Climate Policy Toolkit , the Authority exercised its independence in recommending a set of policies that we believe can chart a sustainable, durable and scalable course for Australia’s climate change response in the years and decades ahead. To suggest otherwise is both offensive and untrue.

With the move to Canberra, the Authority looks forward to taking its place amongst a number of other independent agencies, including the Productivity Commission and the Clean Energy Regulator.”

All the settlements created by Israel before the Oslo accords are legitimate, including the new Israeli housing estates created in the extended boundaries of Jerusalem. As long as the “interim period” envisaged in those accords remains in force, Israel is allowed to build within the originally defined pre-Oslo boundaries of the settlements, but is not allowed to change their pre-Oslo status. The Palestinians are not excluded from demanding a total Israeli withdrawal to the ceasefire lines of 1949, but Israel is likewise not excluded from demanding the retention not merely of the settlements but also of any other part of the Mandatory Palestine of 1947.

The Fourth Geneva Convention contains a Part I that applies to wars both within a Power and between Powers. Otherwise, the Convention applies primarily to wars between Powers alone. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians began as a civil war under the British Mandate for Palestine and continued as such until at least the late 1980s. Until then, consequently, Part I of the Convention applied to the conflict, including Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line, but Part III – which purportedly forbids the existence of such settlements – did not yet apply. Part III became relevant, if at all, only for events that postdated the Oslo accords of the 1990s.

If there is anything that perplexes good friends of Israel, it is the issue of settlements beyond the “Green Line” (a misleading term, as we shall see). In a familiar phenomenon, a foreign politician arrives in Jerusalem to make a speech that manifests genuine admiration of the State of Israel and its achievements, but proceeds to an equally genuine cry of distress over its settlement policies. Why? Because they are supposedly “illegal under international law.”

These friends, as we shall see, are making a widespread basic mistake. Because of the endless talk of a “two-state solution,” the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is viewed as if it had always been a war between two states. In fact, it began as a civil war under the British Mandate for Palestine and continued as such until at least the late 1980s. By that time, almost all the present settlements were already in existence. Consequently, the provisions of international law that should apply to them are those that pertain to civil wars, not to inter-state wars.
Preliminaries

To start with, let us set aside some questions whose answer is relatively simple. First, the present Israeli occupation of lands acquired during the Six Day War of 1967 is not illegal per se, because it resulted from aggression by the neighboring states concerned. Hostilities with Egypt started when Egypt blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat, an act of aggression that was followed by Egypt’s demand for the removal of United Nations peacekeepers from the border between the two states (obviously in preparation for further acts of aggression). Hostilities with Jordan began with a Jordanian bombardment of the Israeli part of Jerusalem. As for Syria, it had for years been engaged in constant aggression by way of encroachments into Israeli territory and bombardment of Israeli villages from the Golan Heights. Moreover, a recent expert report (2012) of the International Committee of the Red Cross emphasized that International Humanitarian Law “did not set any limits to the time span of an occupation” (see p. 72); rather, the longer the occupation lasted, the more the “occupying power” was required to upgrade the infrastructure, etc., for the benefit of the inhabitants.

Choudary’s supporters stood up in the gallery during sentencing and yelled “Allahu Akbar.”

A British court has sentenced radical cleric Anjem Choudary, former spokesman for the pro-Sharia Islam4UK movement, to five years behind bars for encouraging support for ISIS — prompting cheers of “Allahu Akbar” from supporters.

London-born Choudary, 49, and Islamic preacher Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, 33 and also a London native, were convicted at the end of July.

According to a release from Scotland Yard, the two “invited support for a proscribed terrorist organisation, namely ISIL, also known as ISIS or the Islamic State, contrary to section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000” between June 29, 2014, and March 6, 2015.

Both received sentences of five years and six months in prison, with 15-year notification orders.

During the four-week trial, evidence “established that Choudary broadcast speeches online providing his rationale to recognise Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the leader of the Islamic State,” Scotland Yard said. They said investigators combed through 20 years of material.

“Rahman uploaded a speech that claimed learned scholars would offer allegiance to Baghdadi and that they would support him so long as he complied with the Sharia Law, and another speech where he discussed Hijrah in which he encouraged people to take up jihad and migrate. Finally the court heard that Choudary and Rahman pledged their allegiance to ISIS using Mohammed Fachry, a convicted terrorist, to publish the oath that had been signed off by Choudary, on an Indonesian website.”

FROM THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF OUTPOST

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/the-self-destruction-of-the-jews-rael-jean-isaac.html

Much has been made of the alleged self-destructiveness of Donald Trump who for two weeks lurched from gaffe to gaffe, but who speaks of the far more lethal self-destructiveness of organized Jewry in America? In this case what is involved is not off-the-cuff remarks but thought-out (incredibly foolish) policy positions.

There is nothing more detrimental to the future of Jews in America than a large, ever-growing Moslem population. So why do the major Jewish organizations seek to expand it? In 2013 the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) founded the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees as a coalition of Jewish organizations. As a start, it agitated for increasing the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States to 100,000 in 2016, roughly four times the already much-expanded number proposed by Obama and significantly larger than the 65,000 requested by the UN Refugee Association. Although the Multifaith Alliance is still heavily weighted with Jewish organizations, others (scarcely noted for their friendship to Israel) have joined, among them Church World Service, the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

As far as Jewish organizations belonging to the Multifaith Alliance go, it’s a veritable who’s who of them, starting with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which includes the entire spectrum of Jewish outfits, ranging from Americans for Peace Now on the left to JINSA and American Friends of Likud on the right. Not content with their support through the President’s Conference, some of its members have underlined their support by also joining individually, among them the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York, the Union for Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, Ameinu and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. A substantial number of individual synagogues have also signed on. Perhaps the most egregious participant is the ADL, given that it raises over $50 million a year on the basis of its stated mission to fight anti-Semitism and it is 100% guaranteed that the more the Moslem population grows, the more anti-Semitism will gain strength.

It’s not as if the evidence is not overwhelming as to what can be expected. Terrorism, which the Multifaith Alliance cavalierly dismisses as an overblown threat (indeed it claims existing vetting is vastly overdone) is merely the tip of the iceberg. France provides the template. University of Paris professor Guy Milliere writes that there are over 570 no-go zones in France (the government calls them ”sensitive urban zones.”) Hundreds of thousands of young Muslims live there, many imbued with a deeply rooted hatred for France and the West. Recruiters for jihadist organizations tell them, directly or through social networks, that if they kill in the name of Allah they will attain the status of martyrs. Twenty thousand people are in the government’s “S-files”, an alert system meant to identify individuals linked to radical Islam and because the task of following so many is overwhelming, most on the list go unmonitored (including the Carlie Hebdo murderers and Mohamed Merah, the killer at the Jewish school in Toulouse).

French President Hollande has no credible answer. His party depends on the Muslim vote (polls show 93% of Muslims voted for Hollande in the last election). Milliere reports that the most important left-wing think tank in France, Terra Nova, has published several reports explaining that the only way for the left to win elections is to attract the votes of Muslim immigrants and to add more Muslims to the population. Already Muslims made up about 10% of the French population; even more worrying, 25% of teenagers in France are Muslims. Unsurprisingly, Jews have been the favored Muslim target with the result, by now well known, that thousands are fleeing, so that in some areas of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Netanya you are more likely to hear French than Hebrew.

Rear Admiral Shaul Chorev (Ret.), Mary Landrieu, Admiral Ami Ayalon (Ret.), Seth Cropsey, Charles D. Davidson, Douglas J. Feith, Arthur Herman, Ron Prosor, Admiral Gary Roughead (Ret.) & Eytan Sheshinski

Authoritarian politics, energy and computer technology and war are rapidly transforming the Eastern Mediterranean.

Political instability — triggered by the Arab Spring — has made the region extraordinarily violent. Syria is disintegrating; millions of refugees from the conflict have spread across the region. Civil war has decimated Libya and Yemen. Turkey, a NATO member, is fighting thePKK and Islamic State as its increasingly authoritarian president transforms the country’s domestic politics. Further complicating the situation, Russia and Iran are capitalizing on American disengagement from the region to expand their military presence on the land, air and sea.

Nevertheless, the region has a few bright spots. Among the brightest are the large offshore energy reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. Such reserves are already benefiting Israel and creating potential for cooperation between Israel and its neighbors.

Israel’s energy laws and policies were developed largely when the country was an energy importer. Israeli officials now have to develop a way to handle energy matters that can allow Israel to become not only a substantial energy producer, but an exporter. They must balance antitrust, security, environmental and other concerns while safeguarding Israel’s reputation as a fair and reliable home for foreign investment. They hope to take advantage of the resulting diplomatic openings and domestic job and business opportunities, use energy tax revenues for the public interest.

To address the range of energy and security questions relating to the Eastern Mediterranean, the University of Haifa and Hudson Institute sponsored a “blue-ribbon” commission of senior Israeli and American military officers, policy practitioners and scholars. The commissioners met in Israel and in Washington, D.C. in 2016 and drafted a comprehensive report that addresses Israel’s energy policy, security problems and opportunities in the region and the future of the US-Israel strategic partnership.

The case can be made that Israel and the United States continue to share strategic interests, but those with contrary views are increasingly vocal. It is sensible for Israelis and Americans to reexamine their assumptions about world affairs and how their ties might better serve their interests. This report delineates new avenues for bilateral cooperation while making the case that the United States has no realistic option to disengage or isolate itself from the Middle East.