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Israel Lawmakers Plan Bill to Annex West Bank Settlement Members of governing coalition say they will put forward the measure after Donald Trump takes office By Rory Jones

TEL AVIV—Members of Israel’s governing coalition said they would propose legislation after Donald Trump’s inauguration to annex a West Bank Jewish settlement for the first time, defying the United Nations and the international community.

If approved, such a law would mark a stark departure from decades of Israeli policy tolerating and even promoting settlements but not considering them part of the country proper.

Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, said Monday that after the new U.S. president takes office on Jan. 20, he would put to an initial vote in parliament a bill to make the settlement Ma’ale Adumim part of Israel. Mr. Trump has indicated he will ease U.S. pressure on Israel to curtail settlements when he is in the White House.

“The conclusion is to stop the march of folly toward a Palestinian state and to implement Israeli law in Ma’ale Adumim,” Mr. Bennett said in a statement issued from the settlement. Jewish settlers in the West Bank are subject to military law, but if the territory they occupy is annexed they come under civilian Israeli law.

Mr. Bennett has advocated for Israel to abandon its longstanding commitment to establishing a Palestinian state as part of a future peace deal—a position that in part spurred the U.S. decision last month to allow the U.N. to pass a rare censure of Israel that deemed settlements illegal.

His plan to push for annexation of a settlement appeared to be in response to that U.N. resolution and a subsequent speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that also criticized Israel over settlements.

Jewish Home holds enough seats in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile ruling coalition to force a collapse of the government if it wants to. In recent months, Mr. Netanyahu has acquiesced to many of the party’s demands to expand or maintain settlements on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

To become law, the bill would need the support of the vast majority of governing coalition members, who account for 67 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. It already has the support of some of the 30 lawmakers from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party and all of Jewish Home’s eight seats.

Members of the Likud party and Mr. Bennett’s Jewish Home initially drafted a bill last year to annex Ma’ale Adumim—one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank with 37,000 residents, and located just 5 miles east of Jerusalem—but ultimately decided not to push it while the Obama administration was still in office.

Lawmakers from all but one of the parties in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition signed off on support for the bill last year. Those from the ultraorthodox United Torah Judaism party, which has six seats, haven’t formally offered their support.

It would have to pass a number of votes in the parliament before becoming law, a process likely to take months.

“Right now, the prime minister asked us not to do anything active in the short term as he is going to consider the move with the President-elect Trump and will work to get support,” said Yoav Kish, a member of the Likud party who led the drafting of the bill. “From my side, I’m going to push it forward once we pass President Obama.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Shooting Down North Korea’s Missiles Kim wants the ability to make U.S. cities his nuclear hostages. See note please

Little Kim scion of an evil dynasty is the product and legacy of an unfinished war…..Instead of total surrender and reunification Eisenhower ended the war in 1953 . Please read:

The Legacy of an Unfinished War by Ruth King 2008 http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/exclusive-the-legacy-of-an-unfinished-war
Kim Jong Un announced Sunday that North Korea is about to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the U.S. mainland. If he proceeds with the test, the U.S. should shoot it down.

The test itself is not a shock. Four previous tests of the Taepodong-2 missile were disguised as satellite launches, and two of them succeeded in putting objects into orbit over the U.S. The news here is that the young dictator is so confident of becoming a full nuclear power that he has dispensed with the fig leaf of a space program.

This is one more sign that Kim is racing to the finish line of full nuclear-weapons capability. Thae Yong Ho, the No. 2 in the North Korean Embassy in London until he defected, warned last week that Kim wants to deploy nuclear-armed missiles by the end of 2017.

The North already has the technology to launch a nuclear weapon against South Korea and Japan. But hurdles remain to deploying an ICBM with a nuclear warhead. Chief among them is a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding extremes of temperature and vibration. A successful test could provide the North with valuable data to work the problem.

The U.S. has ship-based missile defenses in the region, and intercepting the test would have the dual purpose of slowing Kim’s nuclear progress and demonstrating an effective deterrent. Kim may figure the U.S. won’t take such action as it prepares to inaugurate a new President and South Korea is riven by an impeachment trial of President Park Geun-hye. But the U.S. right to self defense provides ample justification, and U.N. Security Council resolutions ban the North from pursuing its missile program.

Even the defensive use of force carries risks that Kim would retaliate, but the larger risk is letting a man as reckless as Kim gain the means to hold American cities hostage. Kim evidently believes that once the North has a credible ability to destroy Seattle or Chicago, the U.S. will have no choice other than to accept it as a normal nuclear state. The Obama Administration, in consultation with President-elect Donald Trump, can demonstrate its bipartisan resolve to thwart that plan.

Hamas’s Fatah and the No-State Solution by Khaled Abu Toameh

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared that 2017 will be the “year of international recognition of the State of Palestine.”

The melee in Gaza exposes as the lie that it is Abbas’s repeated claim of a unified Fatah able to lead the Palestinians towards statehood. Incredibly, Abbas seeks global recognition of a Palestinian state at a time when the flames in his own backyard are set to engulf him and his questionable regime.

More bad news from the poll: if presidential elections were to be held today, Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the terrorist group Hamas, would beat Abbas by 49% to 45%.

Palestinians are now openly talking about two different Fatah factions. After Abbas’s decision to strip the legislators of their parliamentary immunity, six Fatah PLC members participated in a Hamas-sponsored meeting of the PLC in the Gaza Strip. This was the first time since 2007 that such a move had been made.

Fatah leaders in the Gaza Strip, unlike their colleagues in the West Bank, are de facto recognizing the Hamas rule over the Gaza Strip. This is wonderful news for Hamas, whose leader, Ismail Haniyeh is likely to defeat Abbas in a presidential election.

The Fatah gunmen who marched in the Gaza Strip courtesy of Hamas are not supporters of Abbas. Instead, they represent the “other face” of Fatah — the one that does not believe in any peace process with Israel and shares Hamas’s ambition of destroying Israel.

During a celebration in Ramallah marking the 52nd anniversary of the founding of his Fatah faction, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas declared that 2017 will be the “year of international recognition of the State of Palestine.” Hailing the recent anti-settlement UN Security Council resolution 2334, Abbas said he was prepared to work with the new administration of Donald Trump “to achieve peace in the region.”

But while Abbas and his lieutenants were celebrating in Ramallah, at least 11 Palestinians were wounded in a scuffle that erupted between rival Fatah factions in the Gaza Strip. According to sources in the Gaza Strip, the fight broke out between Abbas loyalists and supporters of estranged Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan. The confrontation, which was the most violent between the two sides in many years, is yet another sign of increasing schism in Fatah. Moreover, it is an indication of how Abbas’s control over his own faction is slipping through his hands. Hamas policemen who were at the scene did not interfere to break up the fight between the warring Fatah activists.

Iran’s New Indigenous Air Defence System NATO Take Heed by Debalina Ghoshal

Clearly, if Iran continues to develop long range launch capabilities, it could choose destabilize the entire Middle East region, and directly threaten Israel and Europe.

The rapid development of an advanced system such as the Bavar-3 demonstrates that the Iranians are capable of developing not only defensive but also offensive weapons systems, even as Iran remains prohibited under the present UNSC Resolution 2231 (2015) from developing surface-to-surface nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

If Iran continues to develop offensive nuclear and long-range ballistic missile capabilities, the international community may be in for an unpleasant surprise — awakening to find a nuclear-armed Iran protected by sophisticated, hardened air defences. By then, the balance of power in the Middle East will be altered irreversibly.

While Western governments and NATO continue to congratulate themselves on the Iranian nuclear deal, in Tehran it is business as usual as the regime continues to plan for war.

In August 2016, on Iran’s National Defense Industry Day, the mullahs unveiled a sophisticated, domestically-built air-defence system — a surface-to-air long range missile system called the Bavar-373 [“Belief”]. Iran’s system was commissioned in 2010, when UN sanctions suspended a deal for Iran to purchase additional S-300 air defence systems from Russia.

As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani bragged with complete accuracy, “The Islamic Republic is one of the eight countries in the world who have mastered the technology to build these engines.” Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan claimed that Iran would begin mass production by the end of 2016. As the Bavar-373 is made entirely from domestic components, it can be manufactured and deployed even in the face of future sanctions.

Peter O’Brien: Trump’s Key Promise

Among his other campaign pledges, the president-elect vowed to scuttle US support for the Paris Climate Accord. Since then his comments have become somewhat milder, raising the suspicion that he might just be backing off his hard-line stance. If so, he should think again
In October, 2009, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, ostensibly for what he had done in his first few months as President. In effect, the sum of his achievements, such as they were, had been to deliver a couple of speeches that appealed to the chairman of the Nobel committee, a former Norwegian Labor Party Prime Minister. In awarding the prize, his TelePrompted orations were described as “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

This announcement was greeted by conservative commentators, I won’t say with disgust because the Nobel Peace Prize now has about as much status as the Australian of the Year, but, let’s say, with contempt. And events have proven the sceptics right. Obama the Impotent has been a monumental failure, particularly on the global stage. He bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, ‘lost’ Libya, watched the rise of ISIS while doing nothing and, only last week, capped that dismal record with a shameful-but-predictable betrayal of Israel.

What prompted this thought about the departing president has been the equally premature elevation, by certain commentators – including some on this site — of Donald Trump to near sainthood, on the strength of his campaign promises and because he relegated Hilary Clinton to the dustbin of history (a worthy achievement certainly). It seems that, like the law in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, he has no kind of fault or flaw. That would, indeed, make him unique.

Since his election Trump has been modifying his rhetoric on many fronts. That may be no more than a bid to project a more statesmanlike image. Let’s hope so, but there are worrying signs. He has already backtracked on his pre-election assertion that, had he been in charge of the Justice Department, Clinton would have been in jail by now. He has now said of the Clintons, “they’re good people” and claims to wish no ill upon them. He might be serious; then again, he might not, as the twin investigations of Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation‘s pay-to-play shenanigans are being independently investigated — twin probes over which the soon-to-be-president has no control whatsoever.

No president gets to implement his agenda in its entirety and we can certainly expect some backtracking and compromise. Even with Republicans in control of both houses, Trump will not get his own way on everything. The biggest mistake the Republicans made was to not embrace Trump with both arms once he baggedd the nomination. Now he owes them nothing. It will be an uneasy relationship between the White House and Congress.

New Year’s Terror in Turkey Will the latest terrorist attack bring Turkey and Russia even closer together? Joseph Klein

Turkey experienced another terrorist attack to start off 2017, following a very bloody 2016 during which multiple deadly terrorist attacks took place. A gunman targeted a popular upscale nightclub in Istanbul about 1 AM on Sunday, killing at least 39 New Year’s celebrants and wounding dozens of other people. In addition to the Turkish victims, foreign citizens from such countries as Israel, Belgium, France, Jordan, Tunisia, Lebanon and India were among the dead. The attack occurred despite stepped up security that was put into place after American intelligence officers had issued a warning to expect an attack in Turkey during the holiday season. ISIS, directly through its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and via supportive media, has threatened attacks specifically in Turkey

The gunman reportedly screamed “Allahu Akbar” as he carried out his massacre. Turkish intelligence officers believe that the prime suspect is a member of the East Turkestan branch of ISIS. Officials have released a picture of the suspect whom, as of the writing of this article, is on the run and has not yet been identified by name or nationality.

Turkey’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, vowed: “As a nation, we will fight to the end against not just the armed attacks of terror groups and the forces behind them, but also against their economic, political and social attacks.” Noting that the terrorists “aim to create chaos, demoralize our people, and destabilize our country with abominable attacks which target civilians,” President Erdogan added, “We will retain our cool-headedness as a nation, standing more closely together, and we will never give ground to such dirty games.”

World leaders were quick to condemn the attack and send their condolences. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, whom has worked with the Turkish and Iranian governments to negotiate a ceasefire in Syria, sent Turkey’s president a telegram message, stating, “It is hard to imagine a more cynical crime than killing innocent people during New Year celebrations. However, terrorists don’t share moral values. Our common duty is to combat terrorists’ aggression.”

President Putin sent this message against the backdrop of the murder of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, two weeks ago by a terrorist associated with al Qaeda’s Nusra Front (now known as the Fatah al-Sham Front).

Tony Thomas: Warmism’s Martial Plan

Obama declines to bomb an ISIS convoy because burning trucks will boost CO2 emissions … Australia’s defence wallahs fret about rising seas and drowning air bases … alarmist ratbaggery distorts strategy and budgets. Military effectiveness has a new enemy: the climate-scam crowd.
The US military is in flux as President-elect Trump prepares to rid it of Obama’s global-warming overlays. This switch is underway just as the Australian military is starting to adopt Obama-style environmentalism, after a decade’s passive resistance to climate politics.

The ADF has already capitulated to feminists and inclusiveness mavens, with top brass applauding then-Human Rights Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick for her 2014 report castigating the force’s “masculine norms” and “warrior culture”. The ADF was also told by Assistant Defence Minister Stuart Robert in the Abbott government in March, 2015, to recruit an imam for the benefit of the force’s 100 Muslim recruits. The coming capitulation is to the hyped climate “science” of the ANU Climate Institute and Tim Flannery’s crusading Climate Council.

This essay looks at the status quo with environmentalism in the US military, and the recent flow-ons to Australia.

What happens when the military gets climate-minded played out in Syria a year ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin was annoyed at Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-24 bomber. So he blew the whistle on America’s reluctance to attack Syrian ISIS road tankers carting oil into Turkey. Those black-market oil sales generate the main funding for ISIS.[1]

Showing Russian reconnaissance footage, Putin spoke of “vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon…a living oil pipe day and night.” US reporters wondered why the Obama administration hadn’t ordered US planes to blow up the “living oil pipe”. The public explanation from former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell was that Obama did not want “to create environmental damage” or wreck infrastructure that Syrians would need in peace-time.

In an Obama version of shock and awe, A-10s Warthog ground-attack planes and Spectre gunships did start attacking the tankers, but only after leaflet drops to give the ISIS tanker drivers a considerate 45 minutes to “get out of your trucks now and run away from them.”

Concern about CO2 emissions from exploding ISIS oil tankers is just one facet of Obama’s generalship. Since 2009 he has been issuing progressively-tougher Executive Orders to government agencies, including Defence, demanding that global warming issues be raised to top-priority status. Obama has several times publicly declared climate change to be an equal or greater threat than terrorism, and the Obama/Kerry team recently moved climate change talks from the Oval Office to the “Situation Room,” for military/security discussion of active threats to the US.

Dakota Wood, a retired Marine Corps officer and U.S. Central Command planner, says the Pentagon is introducing climate change, right down to military tactics, techniques and procedures level.

China’s military doctrine is less convoluted: “China’s armed forces uphold combat effectiveness as the sole and fundamental standard and work to build themselves into a people’s military that can fight and win.” Putin, like his Chinese counterparts, has not afflicted the Russian military with climate provisos.

Another serious “threat to national security” posited by Obama is from politicians who deny that various extreme weather events are demonstrations of climate change. Whatever dissent existed among the top US brass about the Obama campaign went mainly unspoken, while more ambitious officers competed publicly to burnish their climate credentials. But in mid-2015, General Martin Dempsey, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his disgust clear by issuing a 14-page policy statement on military doctrine that contains not one mention of climate change.

Trump’s eagerness to drain Obama’s military swamp is evident from his 74 questions to the Department of Energy. He wants to identify all programs tainted by Obama’s junk science, along with the programs’ bureaucratic champions. The specificity of the questions is impressive, and designed to trump any civil-service obfuscation and passive resistance. The Brits take a perverse pride in Yes, Minister bureaucrats who run rings around their politicians. Trump and his realpolitik appointees intend to (and know how to) beat the bureaucrats.

The US Navy’s so-called “Great Green Fleet” reflects Obama’s priorities, and has some direct Australian flow-ons. The background is the Navy target to run 50% on planet-friendly alternative fuels by 2020, along with many conventional energy-saving measures. In practice, if a fuel stock contains as little as 10% biofuel, it can be fudged into the ‘green’ category.

The Islamization of Germany in 2016 “Germany is no longer safe.” by Soeren Kern *****

Mass migration from the Muslim world is fast-tracking the Islamization of Germany, as evidenced by the proliferation of no-go zones, Sharia courts, polygamy and child marriages. Mass migration has also been responsible for a host of social disruptions, including jihadist attacks, a migrant rape epidemic, a public health crisis, rising crime and a rush by German citizens to purchase weapons for self-defense — and even to abandon Germany altogether.

Development Minister Gerd Müller warned that the biggest refugee movements to Europe are still to come. He said that only 10% of the migrants from the chaos in Iraq and Syria have reached Europe so far: “Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.”

“There are written instructions … today we are not allowed to say anything negative about the refugees. This is government journalism, and this leads to a situation in which the public loses their trust in us. This is scandalous.” — Wolfgang Herles, Deutschlandfunk public radio.

The Turkish government has sent 970 clerics — most of whom do not speak German — to lead 900 mosques in Germany that are controlled by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), a branch of the Turkish government’s Directorate for Religious Affairs, known in Turkish as Diyanet. Critics accuse Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of using DITIB mosques to prevent Turkish migrants from integrating into German society.

A Cologne police superintendent revealed that he was ordered to remove the term “rape” from an internal police report about the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. He said that an official at the North-Rhine Westphalia Interior Ministry told him in an angry tone: “This is not rape. Remove this term from your report. Submit a new report.”

The German branch of Open Doors, a non-governmental organization supporting persecuted Christians, reported that thousands of Christians in German refugee shelters are being persecuted by Muslims, sometimes even by their security guards.

A 23-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker wearing a T-shirt with the words “I’m Muslim Don’t Panic” was assaulted by fellow refugees for offending Islam. He was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized.

Half of the three million ethnic Turks living in Germany believe it is more important to follow Islamic Sharia law than German law if the two are in conflict, according to a survey.

A document leaked to Der Spiegel revealed that more than 33,000 migrants who are supposed to be deported are still in Germany, being cared for by German taxpayers. Many of the migrants destroyed their passports and are believed to have lied about their countries of origin to make it impossible for them to be deported.

Migrants committed 142,500 crimes during the first six months of 2016, according to a report by the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 32.5 crimes each hour, an increase of nearly 40% over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a migrant suspect has been caught.

Bild, the largest-circulation newspaper in Germany, warned that the country was “capitulating to Islamic law.”

Germany’s Muslim population surpassed six million in 2016 for the first time ever. Germany now vies with France for the highest Muslim population in Western Europe.

“Tolerance” in Tunisia by Tharwa Boulifi

Tharwa Boulifi, aged 15, lives in Tunisia.

The thing that struck me most is that they had no beards. Terrorism seems to be changing tactics. It no longer shows up as beards, revolvers, religious clothing… But it has started to take over our daily lives: in buses, subways, streets, supermarkets, maybe mostly in the slums. Every day, there, terrorists are being snapped up by ISIS.

“Religion” for me now just means “violence” and “kill.”

The thing is, Muslims generally do not have great arguments, so they just insult us. The subject of religion seems taboo for them: seeing other people — especially those who do not share their same beliefs — criticizing or asking questions about it is considered a humiliation. Discussing Islam means questioning its credibility, and so humiliating it.

Discussing Islam also seems a threat to their psychological safety: having the same beliefs and the same God is a sort of a reassurance and protection. To cast doubt on their religion means breaking into their “comfort zone” — and possibly even raising doubts.

For many, religious tolerance has become a business currency — a way to promote tourism, improve relations with other countries, elevate Tunisia’s image and benefit from the aid of rich countries. But that only makes tolerance a mask worn for personal gain.

The subway is something I do not go on a lot anymore, said the boy. On the subway, said the boy, people still gave me the evil eye; probably the long hair. Last time, a friend phoned; I spoke to him in Arabic. Soon after, a group of young men came up.

One said, “Are you Tunisian?”

“Yes,” I said.

Then, one of them saw the cross.

“Are you a Muslim?” he said.

“The cross is a gift,” I said. Then I told them the truth. “I am atheist,” I said.

I tried to ignore them, but one of them grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Oh really?” he said. “Then where do you think you are going after your death? Who created the universe if it was not Allah? If you do not revere Allah, you must revere Satan.”

New Year Speech to the Muslim World by Nonie Darwish

By Western standards, military rule is shunned as an oppressive form of government, but in the Islamic world it is the only buffer of protection from the tyranny of total sharia law that must be enforced by Islamic theocracies, such as those of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The days of sacrificing the safety and security of citizens of the West for the sake of multiculturalism, are over. In order for multiculturalism to work, it must be a two-way street between people that share common values of respect of each other’s culture. Unfortunately, the West did not get that from Islam.

It really does not matter what is “true Islam”. That is something the Muslim world needs to deal with internally; it does not serve us in the West to try to evaluate what is “true Islam” and what is not.

Your religious leaders, whose salaries are paid by Islamic governments, stand before your media cameras and call on Muslims to stab, slam trucks, kill, rape and humiliate the kafir [non-Muslim] Jews, Christians and Pagans.

Islamic governments and terror groups are two peas in a pod, working together for the same goal: enforcing Allah’s law, sharia, on the world. It is no secret that a Muslim head of state must rule by sharia and must conduct jihad against non-Muslims. Sharia law commands Muslim citizens to remove, by rebellion or assassination, any Muslim leader who does not abide by sharia and support jihadists.

As of today, the West must hold Islamic governments responsible for jihadist actions of their own terrorist citizens. Nothing happens in Muslim countries without the knowledge of their governments. If a Muslim government has no control of its citizens, it should be considered a rogue nation.

Bringing in unvetted refugees from Syria and Iraq is not an act of compassion, but gross negligence. Western governments have failed their citizens for too long in that respect and that will end today.

After all, why should cultures that loathe the West seek to live in the West? As President-elect Trump said, why should America — or any country — not allow in only immigrants who love us and who respect our laws and way of life?