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The Secret War of Agence France Presse against Israel by Yves Mamou

Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse.

It is so thoroughly a “pro-Palestinian news agency” that this French institution does not see anything unethical about hiring Palestinian activists as reporters: “Nasser Abu Baker, the chairman of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, the leading force for the boycott of Israeli journalists and media, also writes for the influential French news agency.”

The same bias appears in the media and news agencies all over the developed world, including Reuters, the BBC and the AP. Why, when it comes to Israel, is such a misinterpretation of reality so generalized in the press? The only answer is that a war is in progress: a war of delegitimization.

On July 15, 2016, after the truck ramming that killed 84 people in Nice, France, Agence France Presse (AFP) released a report entitled, “When Vehicles Become Weapons”. It is the duty of a large news agency such as AFP to list, for its customers, examples of countries that are suffering from vehicular terrorism.

Concerning Israel, we can read in the third paragraph: “In Israel and the Palestinian territories, car-ramming attacks have featured heavily in a wave of violence that has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese since October last year”.

A naïve reader might understand that in Israel and Palestinian territories, Jews and Muslims — or Israelis and Palestinians — find it amusing to use their vehicles to kill innocent passersby. He might think also that Jews are far better players of this gamer than are Muslims, because they killed “215 Palestinians” against only “34 Israelis.”

As the website Honest Reporting noticed:

“In fact, the total number of Israelis who have committed car ramming attacks against Palestinians is exactly zero, but a reader would have no way of knowing that. To the contrary, the AFP’s language gives the incorrect appearance that more Palestinians are targeted by car ramming attacks than Israelis.”

Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse.

AFP — like Reuters, Associated Press or Bloomberg — is a news agency with offices all over the world (150 countries and 200 bureaus). But it is not a private company; it is supposed to be a cooperative owned by customers (newspapers, radios and TV channels), but it is actually a state-owned company, heavily subsidized due to the large number of subscriptions from different French government ministries — especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The managing director of AFP is appointed by the government. AFP is a tool of French diplomacy and is considered an arm of France’s cultural international influence.

AFP has a large “bureau” in Jerusalem and its journalists have an enormous influence on the European and Middle Eastern press. This influence is enormous because its reports are literally copied-and-pasted by newspapers and countless websites in France and Europe.

Trump could put the US economy back on track David Goldman

ww.atimes.com/trump-put-us-economy-back-track/

The surge in industrial and raw materials stock prices and the collapse of bond markets since Donald Trump’s election victory portend a very different kind of world economy. Rather than persisting in a world of quantitative easing, with extremely low interest rates and 1%-2% growth, the United States has the potential to get back onto a normal recovery track.

How much can it grow? The US economy is 10% smaller than it would have been under a “normal” economic recovery since 2008, and if it can regain half the lost ground, that’s an additional 5% of GDP. The global rally in capital equipment stocks reflects America’s need for capital goods imports to gear up.

Beijing does not expect a trade war with the United States; Trump is viewed by China as a pragmatic businessman, perhaps a tough negotiator, but a man whose object is to get a deal rather than to make ideological points.

Stopping The Global Jihad: Why Is The U.S. Failing? The hope that a President Trump represents. Jeff Ludwig

This writer is one of the numbed masses of people who have spent their entire adult lives witnessing mass atrocity after mass atrocity committed against Americans around the world and on U.S. soil by evil persons acting in the name of Allah. Actually, attacks by militant Islamists on Americans go all the way back to the administrations of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Those attacks on American ships and sailors off the coast of what is today Libya were finally stopped by the Marines led by Stephen Decatur. Fast forward to World War I. At that time, the U.S. joined with Britain and France to fight against, and defeat, the aggression of the Central Powers of Europe that were allied with the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Only after that victory was this last caliphate dismantled into the various Islamic nation-states we now find in the Middle East.

The post-World War I decades have seen the expansion of Arab oil wealth and continued internecine quarrels within the divided Arab world. Further, Islamist aggression internally and against the West – nay, against the entire world — has not only continued but grown exponentially with each passing decade since 1918.

During October 1983, 241 U.S. troops were massacred in Lebanon by Hezbollah (as well as 58 French troops at a different location). President Reagan, for many citizens the very incarnation of the warrior spirit, nonetheless, by Feb. 1984 withdrew all remaining U.S. troops from Lebanon. Thirty years later, relatives of the soldiers killed in that attack were awarded $2.65 billion in reparations in a lawsuit against Iran, but have yet to see any of that money. At the same time, President Obama has negotiated a deal with Iran releasing $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets to Iran from various financial institutions as part of a new so-called detente with that malignant terrorist nation. And, by the way, Iran is still on our State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Fast forward to 1996, thirteen years later, part of a housing complex where Americans lived in Khobar, Saudi Arabia was bombed by a truck carrying the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. On that occasion “only” 19 Americans were killed. After intense investigation, again Hezbollah and Iran were blamed for the bombing by a U.S. court; however, payments were not made to the affected U.S. citizens. It took 20 years before the mastermind of this attack was arrested, raising many suspicions about whether or not there has been a partial or total cover-up.

Israel Watches Ominous Developments in Syria with Weary Eye Rising enemies in a volatile region. Ari Lieberman

Last Friday, a senior Iranian general confirmed that the Islamic Republic was manufacturing weapons including rockets in Aleppo and that some of those rockets were transferred to Hezbollah, bolstering the terror group’s already formidable stockpiles. The revelation of Iranian military production facilities in a foreign country was the first such acknowledgement by a senior Iranian official.

Chief of Staff of the Iranian Army, Major General Mohammad Bagheri noted that Iran’s production of missiles in Syria began in 2002 and that rockets manufactured at the Aleppo facility were transferred to Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon War also known as the Second Lebanon War. During that 33-day conflict, Hezbollah fired in excess of 4,000 rockets at Israel. Since the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah, primarily with Iranian assistance, has increased its rocket and missile arsenal tenfold, from 12,000 to an estimated 120,000.

The general’s acknowledgement provides us with some sense of how entrenched the Iranians are in Syria and how they’re utilizing Syrian resources to supply their proxies. It is believed that the Iranians are employing between 7,000 to 10,000 Hezbollah operatives in Syria. Hezbollah represents one of four foreign pillars propping up the Assad regime and his flagging army. Iran maintains a military force of between 13,000 to 16,000 soldiers and, aside from Hezbollah, is believed to have recruited some 40,000 foreign fighters from Middle Eastern and Central Asian states. Russia maintains a sizable air and naval presence in Syria, supplemented by Special Forces and electronic warfare specialists.

Israel is watching these developments with keen interest. The Israelis are cooperating closely with the Russians to ensure that that their respective military forces, particularly their air forces don’t mistakenly tangle over the skies of Syria. The last time Israel dueled with the Russians was in July 1970 over the skies of the Suez Canal, during the height of the Cold War. Five Soviet MiG-21 fighters were shot down by Israeli F-4 Phantoms and Mirage jets. But so far, the Israelis and the Russians have managed to avoid hostile encounters with each other due to unprecedented cooperation between their respective military and political leaders.

Al-Qaeda Slams Obama for ‘Astonishing and Deceptive’ Inaction on Climate Change By Bridget Johnson (???!!!)See note please

The color green is mentioned in the Koran and it is prominent in the symbols and flags of Hamas , Hezbollah
Image result for flag of hezbollah
Image result for hamas flag

and other assorted vermin……rsk

Al-Qaeda slammed the Obama administration for being all talk and no action on climate change and protecting the environment in a new issue of their English-language how-to magazine for lone jihadists.

The new special issue of Inspire, published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Al-Malahem Media, is titled “The 9/17 Operations” — the Sept. 17 attacks on a race in New Jersey, a street in Manhattan and a shopping mall in Minnesota. ISIS claimed responsibility for the third attack, in which nine people were stabbed.

But Inspire editor Yahya Ibrahim said of the pressure-cooker attacks on the East Coast: “This time Al-Qaida did not come out to declare responsibility for the operations, this is because America is witnessing a new form of operations and new form of tactics … They are indeed the heroes of Lone Jihad.”

Inspire said the timing of the attacks “has both a political and security dimension, this is because carrying out an operation during the same days of the 9/11 anniversary increases the sense of fear, insecurity and brings back the past memories in details; especially when the operation targeted the same place – Manhattan.”

They theorized that “because preparing a single pressure cooker bomb may take at least a week, it is likely that preparations for the operation took more time than anticipated” and may have been planned closer to the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Qaeda praised all of the operations as an “exceptional success” for achieving a goal of “reviving fear and terror at a time when successive American administrations lie to their people, convincing them that they have crushed ‘terrorist’ groups and disrupted their capabilities and therefore the American citizens live in a peace, safe and stable life.”

They panned, though, the use of a timer for the New Jersey bomb; runners were not injured in the explosion as the race had been delayed. “In this case, we prefer the use of a remote control detonator as used by the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston Marathon.”

They suggested that a restaurant in Chelsea would have been a better target than a Dumpster, and cautioned jihadists who don’t plan on committing suicide to be careful about leaving fingerprints. “It was better to put the bomb in a place where people are gathering and standing around it, such as a shopping center,” said the review of the attack. “This is because people pass by quickly besides garbage containers and they don’t normally stand beside them. This explain[s] the result of the injured in the operation.” Thirty-one people were injured in the blast.

The issue reviews pressure-cooker bomb construction, locations and camouflage in order to cause the most harm.

The magazine also notes that U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaeda leaders doesn’t degrade the group but makes the terrorists “more committed to their principles.”

As al-Qaeda has previously done in the pages of Inspire, this issue tried to appeal to African-Americans by highlighting police shootings of black men.

Donald Trump was not specifically mentioned in the new issue. President Obama’s final address to the United Nations General Assembly in September was slammed as rehashing U.S. policies such as support for Israel that carry over regardless of the administration. “Some of them say that they will wait for the next president who might give them hope and best handle their issues… Undoubtedly, the kitchen that draw most of the American foreign and internal policy is the same one, the parties rotate to play the same roles and the president executes the outcomes. Therefore, the role that the president is playing is just an executive role.”

“We admit to say that America has ruled the world for the past two decades, and is still considered the most powerful nation in the world,” states the review of Obama’s speech. “And America has to admit to us that we have insulted and subjugated its arrogance.”

Al-Qaeda makes clear that they don’t care about party affiliation. They do, however, make a pitch against climate change.

“The environment has suffered from America’s policies. In latest official statistics of International [sic] Health Organization, it mentions that 92% of the world population are breathing polluted air. Moreover, 6.5 million people are dying annually because of air pollution,” the magazine says. “One of the main cause of pollution results from American factories, which produce 36.1% of greenhouse gases. Despite that, up to this day America hasn’t taken any tangible steps to reduce these harmful gases.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Tony Thomas Finally, Warmists Find a Real Threat

Whatever else he does, President-elect Donald Trump can be counted on to shoo those green snouts out of the climate-scare trough — first by repealing Obama’s executive orders, then by re-directing from the UN to domestic environmental concerns. It’s a beautiful thing.
“I’m feeling very flat today,” snuffled Amanda McKenzie, CEO of Tim Flannery’s crowd-funded Climate Council. As she should, given that President-elect Trump will end the trillion-dollar renewable-energy scam so beloved by the council.

McKenzie continues, “Progress on climate change can feel hopeless and it’s tempting to give up and turn away.” But instead, she rattles the tin for donations of $10 a month “to allow us to undertake some massive projects next year that will power communities and everyday Australians to spearhead our renewable energy transition.” Good luck with that, Amanda.

Throughout the Western world, green lobbies are likewise oscillating between despair and self-delusion over the Trump election.

Trump’s agenda – as per his election website – includes

Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.
Declare American energy dominance a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the United States.
Become, and stay, totally independent of any need to import energy from the OPEC cartel or any nations hostile to our interests.
Rescind all job-destroying Obama executive actions.
Reduce and eliminate all barriers to responsible energy production, creating at least a half million jobs a year, $30 billion in higher wages, and cheaper energy.

Trump says Obama’s onslaught of regulations has been a massive self-inflicted economic wound denying Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under their feet: “This is the American People’s treasure, and they are entitled to share in the riches.” ore than that, the president-elect’s common-sense policies make the 20,000 climate careerists and activists in Marrakech, led by Vice-President John Kerry, seem comically irrelevant. They were supposed to be implementing the feeble Paris climate accord – notwithstanding that China has just announced a 19% expansion of coal capacity over the next five years.

Ending Aid to Terrorists Palestinian law rewards those who kill Jews, including Americans.

In his eulogy recently for Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, President Obama spoke of the “unfinished business” of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Now he or Donald Trump have an opportunity to advance the cause—by backing legislation to stop the flow of U.S. tax dollars to Palestinian terrorists.

Since the 1990s, as the U.S. and other countries have sent billions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians, Palestinian leaders have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in rewards to those who carry out bombings, stabbings and other attacks in Israel. These payments, codified in Palestinian law, are an official incentive program for murder that in any other context would be recognized as state sponsorship of terror. But the U.S. and other Western states have looked the other way while continuing to send aid, giving Palestinian leaders no incentive to stop.

Senators Lindsey Graham,Dan Coats and Roy Blunt have introduced a bill to end U.S. economic aid unless Palestinian leaders stop rewarding terrorists. It’s called the Taylor Force Act, after the 28-year-old U.S. Army veteran stabbed to death in March by a Palestinian in the Israeli city of Jaffa. Other American victims of recent Palestinian terrorism include 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel and 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz.

“They will never achieve peace when you pay one of your young men to kill someone like Taylor Force. That’s inconsistent and it needs to stop,” Mr. Graham (R., S.C.) says. “We’re not going to invest in a group of people that have laws like this. It’s just not a good investment.” The same Palestinian laws guarantee civil-service employment to terrorists upon their release from prison—the bloodier their crime, the cushier their post.“If you’re in jail for five to six years, you come out with the civilian rank of department head or lieutenant in their security forces, you get to choose. If you’re in jail 25 to 30 years, you become a deputy minister or a major general,” Mr. Graham adds.

Courageous Iranian professor deliberately avoids stepping on US/Israel flags by Lisa Daftari

Courageous Iranian professor deliberately avoids stepping on US/Israel flags Defying Iranian convention, Sadegh Zibakalam, 68, a professor at University of Tehran, enters a university building, painstakingly avoiding stomping on American and Israeli flags. SEE VIDEO

Boris Johnson Tells EU Leaders to Stop Whining About Trump Win By Rick Moran

The British foreign secretary will not attend an “emergency meeting” of the EU to discuss Trump victory.
I really wish someone in the U.S. would just stand up and tell liberals and all the snowflakes who are weeping over Trump’s victory to get a life and move on.

That’s what British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told European leaders as the EU prepares for an “emergency meeting” to discuss the Trump win.

CNN:

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told European leaders Friday to stop whining about the US election results following a slew of anxious statements in response to Donald Trump’s shocking victory.

“I would respectfully say to my beloved European friends and colleagues that it’s time that we snapped out of the general doom and gloom about the result of this election, and collective ‘whinge-o-rama’ that seems to be going on in some places,” Johnson said at a press conference in Belgrade, Serbia, using British slang for complaining.

The comments from the colorful British politician — who was widely tipped to become prime minister after successfully spearheading the campaign to leave the European Union — may have surprised some since he had earlier been outspoken about his disdain for the President-elect.

Johnson once said he was “genuinely worried that (Trump) could become president.”

And after Trump claimed areas of London were dangerous due to radicalized Muslims, Johnson said: “The only reason I wouldn’t visit some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

But he appears to have found a silver lining in Trump’s win, saying the election was a “great opportunity for the UK” following Britain’s seismic vote in June to leave the EU.

Johnson’s optimism contrasts with the lukewarm response from many EU politicians to Trump — a candidate who lobbed insults at Europe and European leaders during his campaign, and was heavily criticized in turn.

Trump Must Change US Defense Policy for Taiwan By Stephen Bryen

United States defense policy toward Taiwan must change. Now there is a rare opportunity to make that happen with the election of Donald Trump. But everyone knows he lacks experience in foreign affairs, although he is a man with great instincts. If he can prevail over the established litany, there is a chance that Taiwan can stay independent. But if he follows the “party line” from the State Department and their supporting chorus in parts of the Pentagon, Taiwan is a goner. It is only a question of time.

Taiwan is an island that lives next to a behemoth in the form of China. It is a democracy and, with its new government with a very strong domestic mandate, intent on maintaining its independence and democratic system. For China, democracy is the enemy as they have just demonstrated again in Hong Kong where they blocked two elected officials from taking office. Democracy threatens the Communist party dictatorship, and China is yearning for it. That is what happened before at Tiananmen, where democratic dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. And across China that is happening every day, and China’s government knows it. For them, the big thumb in their eye is Taiwan. They would take any opportunity to knock it off, and China has been building up forces to make it hard for the United States to come to Taiwan’s defense. When China’s forces reach a tipping point, and when they think America might back off, they will strike.

The question is not whether but when. America should be following a defense policy that pushes the “when” back to “whether” and puts a price on the “whether” decision that would make it hard for China’s leaders to act, if they were unsure of the outcome.

Unfortunately, America’s support of Taiwan has played directly into China’s hands and put Taiwan at considerable risk.

Consider for example that Taiwan has been allowed to have only half an air force and half a navy.

What is meant by “half”?