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ISRAEL

Trump Embraces The PLO Fantasy The new president is gearing up to make the same mistake as his predecessor. Caroline Glick

US President Donald Trump is losing his focus. If he doesn’t get it back soon, he will fail to make America great again or safe again in the Middle East.

After holding out for a month, last week Trump indicated he is adopting his predecessors’ obsession with empowering the PLO.

This is a strategic error.

There are many actors and conflicts in the Middle East that challenge and threaten US national interests and US national security. Iran’s rise as a nuclear power and regional hegemon; the war in Syria; Turkey’s abandonment of the West; and Russia’s regional power play all pose major threats to US power, security and interests. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, Hamas and other Sunni jihadist movements all threaten the US, Europe and the US’s Sunni allies in the region in a manner that is strategically significant to America.

None of these issues, none of these actors and none of these threats are in any way related to or caused by the PLO and its interminable, European-supported hybrid terror and political war against Israel. None of these pressing concerns will be advanced by a US embrace of the PLO or a renewed obsession with empowering the PLO and its mafia-terrorist bosses.

To the contrary, all of these pressing concerns will be sidelined – and so made more pressing and dangerous – by a US reengagement with the PLO .

And yet, over the past week, Trump has indicated that the PLO is now his focus.

Last Friday, Trump spoke on the telephone with Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is head of the PLO and the unelected dictator of the corrupt, terrorism-sponsoring, PLO -controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

According to media reports, Trump told Abbas – whose legal term in office ended eight years ago – that he views him as a legitimate leader. According to the official White House report of the conversation, Trump also reportedly told Abbas that he supports reaching a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Such a deal, to the extent it is ever reached, involves expanding PLO control over Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem at Israel’s expense.

Trump also invited Abbas for an official visit to Washington. And the day after they spoke, the Trump administration moved $250 million in US taxpayer dollars to Abbas’s police state where for the past 25 years, Abbas and his cronies have enriched themselves while feeding a steady diet of antisemitic, anti-American jihadist bile to their impoverished subjects.

To build up his credibility with the PLO , Trump put his electoral pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem on ice. The real estate mogul ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deny Jews the right to their property and their legal right to use state lands in Judea and Samaria.

And swift on the heels of that conversation with Abbas, Trump’s chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was dispatched to Jerusalem to begin empowering the PLO at Israel’s expense.

The Real Hamas: Sorry, Folks! by Bassam Tawil

What Hamas says, day and night, in Arabic, tells the real story. In fact, Hamas officials are very clear and straightforward when they address their people in Arabic. Yet some Western and Israeli analysts do not want to be bothered by the facts.

Some reports have suggested that Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are the ones pushing for the changes in the movement’s charter. However, even if Mashaal and Haniyeh succeed in their mission, there is no guarantee that Hamas’s military wing would comply.

Hamas has also denied its intention to cut off its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. “The reports are aimed at tarnishing the image of Hamas in the eyes of the world,” explained a top Hamas official. He also denied that Hamas was planning to abandon the armed struggle against Israel in favor of a peaceful popular “resistance.”

What does Hamas mean when it says that it “accepts” an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem without recognizing Israel’s right to exist?

Is this a sign of moderation and pragmatism on the part of the extremist Islamic terror movement? Or is it just another ploy intended to deceive everyone, especially gullible Westerners, into believing that Hamas has abandoned its strategy of destroying Israel in favor of a two-state solution?

Recent reports have suggested that Hamas is moving towards “declaring a Palestinian state over the 1967 borders.”

According to the reports, Hamas is also contemplating changing its charter so that it would no longer include anti-Semitic references. The charter, which was drafted in August 1988, contains anti-Semitic passages and characterizations of Israeli society as Nazi-like in its cruelty. The same reports also claimed that Hamas’s revised charter will also state that the terror movement is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some analysts in Israel and the West have interpreted these reports as a sign that Hamas is finally endorsing a policy of pragmatism toward Israel and Jews. They are particularly excited about Hamas’s purported intention to declare (in its revised charter) that its conflict is “only with Zionism and the occupation, and not with Jews around the world.”

Judging from the analyses published by some commentators and Palestinian affairs “experts” in the past few days, one might conclude that Hamas is on its way to making a dramatic change in its vicious ideology. Unfortunately, however, the facts suggest otherwise.

RICHARD BAEHR: TRUMP THE PEACE PROCESSOR

At the end of last week came news that U.S. President Donald Trump had phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and invited him to visit the White House. This followed a meeting in Ramallah between Abbas and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as well as other lower level communications between administration officials and the PA, including with Palestinian business leaders.

When Barack Obama was inaugurated president in 2009, his first call to any foreign leader was made that same day to Abbas. It took seven weeks for Trump to match Obama’s outreach. The difference undoubtedly reflects an overall shift in orientation and emphasis, but also a reflection of how a president can communicate a level of interest and support in a cause or a country even if little of substance has changed.

For eight years, Israelis fretted with good reason that their ties with the United States were threatened by the hostility of the Obama administration, particularly on the issue of settlement construction. Pretty much every Israeli announcement of any phase of a settlement construction project was met with a nasty public rebuke, even if the construction involved work in settlements that have always been assumed by all the American peace processors, Democrat or Republican, to be in communities that would remain part of Israel in a final status deal with the Palestinians. This understanding had been put in writing by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, but Obama never paid it any heed. The final rebuke was the American acquiescence through its abstention on the noxious Security Council resolution passed just after the 2016 election, which labeled all Israeli activity beyond the Green Line as that of an occupier.

The cold shoulder carried over into American pressure during the last Gaza war in 2014, when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert about the safety of Ben-Gurion Airport, when a rocket fired by Hamas landed a mile away, thereby shutting down U.S. air traffic to Israel for 36 hours. There were also repeated criticisms of Israeli actions that caused any Gazan civilian casualties, though Hamas seemed to be acting to ensure these would occur by storing and then firing rockets from the grounds of hospitals, mosques, schools and densely populated civilian areas.

And of course there was the American obsession with concluding a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, which effectively traded a short-term reduction in the level of Iranian centrifuge activity for a windfall of $100 billion in cash, sanctions relief, and America looking away as Iran violated other Security Council resolutions on missile development and arms sales, and as Iran stepped up its aggressive activities in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other countries.

FAITH GOLDY IN ISRAEL

http://www.therebel.media/faithgoldy

Faith Goldy is a fearless journalist and devout Catholic who stands up for family values, freedom, and firearms.

http://www.therebel.media/it_s_crusade_o_clock_in_bethlehem March 11, 2917

BETHLEHEM

Gavin McInnes and I are in Bethlehem as part of the Rebel mission to Israel. We were shocked to see the town in which Jesus was born is now a Muslim majority city, where Islam is the official religion. Why aren’t Christians abroad told the sad state of affairs at one of their holiest sites?

http://www.therebel.media/from_the_west_bank_a_message_for_ignorant_leftists March 10, 2017
From the West Bank: A message for ignorant leftists

Don’t believe your liberal arts profs or the mainstream media when they discuss “Israeli Apartheid”. I’m at the front lines of the West Bank and can’t believe my eyes! See Video

Intel’s Mobileye Acquisition Casts Spotlight on Pioneer in Self-Driving Technology Mobileye makes advanced driver assistance systems for dozens of manufacturers and is part of Israel’s emergence as a hub for automotive innovation By Rory Jones in Tel Aviv and John D. Stoll in Detroit

In the nearly two decades since its founding, Jerusalem-based Mobileye NV has helped revolutionize two sectors: automotive safety and Israeli tech.

The firm was created by Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram when most cars counted seat belts, anti lock brakes and air bags as central safety components. They set out to create vision-based systems that helped cars see the road and communicate with critical systems—including steering and braking—to respond to situations that could lead to a crash.

Mobileye is now known for its chip-based camera systems that power automated driving features. A flood of auto makers are relying on the company’s army of engineers to help accelerate the move to self-driving cars by creating algorithms and affordable modules that can operate as the eyes, ears and brains of a car that can pilot itself.

As a result, Mobileye has grown into one of the hottest names in the autosupply industry and secured a significant portion of the industry’s contracts for technology known as advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS. Its ascent helped spur dozens of other smaller upstart Israeli tech firms to enter a market traditionally dominated by automotive giants. CONTINUE AT SITE

Intel Joins Silicon Valley’s Race to Make Best ‘Server on Wheels’ With Mobileye Deal Acquisition marks latest investment by a technology company in the future of autonomous cars By Ted Greenwald

Intel Corp. agreed to buy Israeli car-camera pioneer Mobileye NV for $15.3 billion, one of the chip maker’s biggest acquisitions ever and the latest bet on Silicon Valley’s vision of cars as turbocharged computers on wheels.

The deal, which amounts to a 34% premium over Mobileye’s closing share price Friday, would give Intel ownership of a widely used technology in the rapidly emerging business of computer-assisted driving. It also would give Intel a long list of customer relationships Mobileye has with auto makers, including General Motors Co., Volkswagen AG and Honda Motor Co.

Intel is joining a race to create autonomous vehicles that has accelerated recently as unconventional auto companies have jumped in, sparking bidding wars for companies that specialize in self-driving gear or software. Besides Intel, Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Uber Technologies Inc. also have made big bets on car technology. Their entry has created a complex web of relationships between Silicon Valley, Detroit and other automotive hubs that has shifted the center of gravity in the global car business.

The deal for Mobileye is the second largest in Intel’s 48-year history, after its $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera Corp. in 2015, and its size signals Intel’s strong desire to stake out a significant position in the market after the chip maker largely missed out on the smartphone boom.

Soft boycott: How the news of a revolutionary new cancer treatment was spun to hide its Israeli origins The news of an amazing new treatment for prostate cancer shot around the world this week – but it was missing one important detail…

Medical laser iStock

The past 24 hours have seen wall-to-wall coverage of an amazing breakthrough on prostate cancer. Newspapers, TV, radio and social media have all carried reports of the research.

According to the BBC report:

“Surgeons have described a new treatment for early stage prostate cancer as ‘truly transformative’. The approach, tested across Europe, uses lasers and a drug made from deep sea bacteria to eliminate tumours, but without causing severe side effects. Trials on 413 men – published in The Lancet Oncology – showed nearly half of them had no remaining trace of cancer.”

And when I heard the report on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, I thought it does indeed sound amazing.

But let’s leave the science aside and look at another aspect of the story.

Guess where the breakthrough happened.

I say that not as a figure of speech but as an instruction – because from almost all the coverage, you would indeed have to guess where the research was carried out: the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel.

Not once in the Today programme report was it mentioned.

And in this BBC report there is a throwaway line right at the end detailing the originators of the science.

I wish I could believe this is just an honest mistake – that, purely by chance, the Israeli origins of a medical breakthrough had been left out. But I’m afraid I don’t think that – and I don’t think you will, either. It happens too often and too regularly for it to be pure chance. It’s what I call the soft-boycott strategy.

The campaign for BDS is so obviously racist and antisemitic, singling out the Jewish homeland alone in the world for boycott, that some of those who would rather Israel doesn’t exist choose an alternative approach – ignoring anything remotely positive about Israel and focusing only on bad news that fits their anti-Israel agenda.

Another Hollywood Ignoramus Richard Gere ” Israeli settlements are ‘absurd provocation,’ ‘completely illegal’ by Alex Ritman

Richard Gere has voiced his opposition to Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the ongoing construction of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

“Obviously this occupation is destroying everyone,” the actor told Israeli newspaper Haaretz during a two-day visit to the country for the local premiere ofNorman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. “There’s no defense of this occupation.”

But his strongest criticism was of the Israeli settlement program, a major source of debate between Israeli and other countries and a matter regularly used as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

“Settlements are such an absurd provocation and, certainly in the international sense, completely illegal — and they are certainly not part of the program of someone who wants a genuine peace process,” Gere said. “Just to be clear about this: I denounce violence on all sides of this. And, of course, Israelis should feel secure. But Palestinians should not feel desperate.”

More than 600,000 Jews live in around 140 settlements built since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. Having been increasingly criticized by the Obama administration as a barrier to peace, the inauguration of Donald Trump saw an immediate escalation of settlement activity. In February, a controversial law was passed in the Israeli parliament that retroactively legalized almost 4,000 settler homes built on privately owned Palestinian land.

Speaking of his visit to Israel, Gere said that, despite having been before, it was “more complex” to visit now than at any previous time.

“I had people on all sides — those who have been close friends and people I barely knew — telling me not to come,” he said. “I had people living here who told me, ‘Look, no good will come of this. The bad guys will use you’ — ‘bad guys’ meaning the policy-makers of this government. It was a complex month of going back and forth: ‘I’m coming….; I’m not coming.'”

President Trump to Invite Palestinian Leader Mahmoud Abbas to White House Eli E. Hertz

I suggest President Trump review the text below before the meeting.

The PLO Charter, also known as “the Palestinian National Charter” or “the Palestinian Covenant,” was adopted by the Palestine National Council (PNC) on July 17, 1968. It reads:

“Article 2 : Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.

“Article 9 : Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.

“Article 19 : The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time.

“Article 20 : The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history.”

The FATAH Constitution calls under Article 12 for the:

“Complete liberation of Palestine, and obliteration of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”

As for how it will achieve its goal to wipe Israel off the map, Fateh’s constitution, Article 19, minces no words:

“Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People’s armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.”

The Hamas Charter (acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” and at times referred to as the Hamas Covenant) states in its second paragraph:

“Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors. The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, May Allah Pity his Soul.”

The Dirty Little Secret of Palestinian Journalism – with Agence France-Presse Collusion by Bassam Tawil

Nasser Abu Baker, Chairman of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), who also works as a correspondent for Agence France-Press (AFP), also lashed out at Al-Quds for publishing the Israeli advertisement. “We are determined to combat normalization and those who promote it,” he vowed.

Abu Baker, who recently ran in the election for the Fatah Revolutionary Council, is the architect of the PJS campaign to boycott Israeli journalists and media outlets. His political activism constitutes a flagrant violation of the regulations and principles of AFP, and a conflict of interest. However, this does not seem to bother his employers at the French news agency, who apparently do not see a problem with one of their employees running in the election for Fatah’s Revolutionary Council.

Abu Baker and his colleagues have one mission: to “combat normalization” with Israel. For them, this task far exceeds in importance exposing financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority (PA) or reporting about assaults on freedom of expression. It is also evidently more important than protesting the arbitrary arrest and torture of their colleagues at the hands of the PA and Hamas.

One can only imagine the response of the Western mainstream media if the chairman of the Israeli Journalists Union or the Government Press Office called for a boycott of Palestinian journalists.

Palestinian journalists are up in arms. The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are arresting and torturing them, and imposing severe restrictions on their work and freedom of expression. But that is not what is upsetting them.

No, the journalists are angry because a Palestinian daily newspaper dared to publish a paid advertisement by the Israeli authorities. The journalists are now demanding that the newspaper, Al-Quds, apologize for running the advertisement by the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank.