Palestinians Destroy Important Israeli Archaeological Site in Jericho

King Herod

Israel entrusted one of its great archaeological treasures to the Palestinians. They destroyed it.

The Palestinians are systematically destroying King Herod’s grand Third Palace in Jericho by stripping its stone and building homes around it, thereby erasing a testament to the Jews’ deep roots to the Land of Israel.

Israel Hayom reported Tuesday that a team from the Kfar Etzion Field School visited the site recently and was appalled to find that the Palestinians, who received the important site as part of the Oslo Accords, had built housing around it. Some homes were constructed on the grounds of the palace itself. The remains of the palace are being systematically demolished to construct a road. The historic edifice is being stripped of its stone, and the supporting pillars and arches have been defaced.

Most of Herod’s Third Palace, lies within Area A, under full Palestinian control.

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Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote Wednesday evening that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is purging pro-Israel staff from the National Security Council (NSC), turning the administration against President Donald Trump’s policies.

In a Facebook post, Glick noted that “all of these people” whom McMaster has fired this week — Rich Higgins, Derek Harvey, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick — “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds.”

She noted that the firings were the latest evidence that NSA McMaster is “deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump”:

According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews.
Many of you will remember that a few days before Trump’s visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו and his advisers were blindsided when the Americans suddenly told them that no Israeli official was allowed to accompany Trump to the Western Wall.

 What hasn’t been reported is that it was McMaster who pressured Trump to agree not to let Netanyahu accompany him to the Western Wall. At the time, I and other reporters were led to believe that this was the decision of rogue anti-Israel officers at the US consulate in Jerusalem. But it wasn’t. It was McMaster.

And even that, it works out wasn’t sufficient for McMaster. He pressured Trump to cancel his visit to the Wall and only visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — ala the Islamists who insist that the only reason Israel exists is European guilt over the Holocaust.

Glick noted that the three latest firings were not McMaster’s first attack on pro-Israel officials, or those critical of radical Islam. Two others had already been assigned to other jobs outside the National Security Council, she said.

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'We Call Them Palestinians Because…'

During the joint White House press conference on February 15 featuring President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the latter said, “The Chinese are called Chinese because they are from China. The Japanese are called Japanese. And the Jews are called Jews because they came from Judea.”

Not surprisingly, a columnist in Israel’s hard-left newspaper Haaretz, Carolina Landsmann, sarcastically fired back in print, “Maybe at the next press conference Netanyahu will be so kind as to explain why the Palestinians are called Palestinians.”

Since that is not likely to happen, I will answer her for him. We call the Palestinians “Palestinians” because it is basic to this generation’s politically correct way, post-Holocaust, of hating Jews, and here’s why:

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Israel is Not an “Occupier”

The following column by former Israeli Ambassador to Canada Alan Baker highlights basic facts regarding the legal status of Judea and Samaria that, although critical, are not widely known.

International law defines “occupation” as one power occupying the lands of a foreign sovereign. In Israel’s case, Israel is not occupying any foreign sovereign’s land; Israel entered the area known as the West Bank in 1967 and took over the authority to administer the land from Jordan, which was never considered to be a sovereign in the area.
 
In actual fact, Israel and the Jewish people have got claims to the area that go far back into history. Anybody who reads the Bible can appreciate the fact that there is a very solid historic legal basis to the claim of Israel with respect to the territories and therefore Israel considers the territories not to be occupied, not to be Palestinian, but as in dispute.

We appreciate that the Palestinians also have claims with respect to the territory. Israel considers that its claims are far better based and better documented than any other claims, but Israel is committed to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians in order to find a permanent settlement to the issue.

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Palestinians Cheer Tel Aviv Slaughter

How Israel's "peace partners" react when women and children are ruthlessly murdered.

The calm of the Tel Aviv morning was shattered yesterday when two Arab gunmen in their 20s from the Palestinian Authority-controlled village of Yatta drew automatic weapons and began to systematically gun down every civilian in sight. When the carnage was over, four people – two men and two women – were dead and about a dozen others were wounded, three of them critically. Both terrorists were caught alive, though one sustained serious wounds during his apprehension. Israeli doctors performed life-saving emergency surgery on him while his victims were either dead or dying.

The blood on the pavement hadn’t even dried before “Palestinians,” as is their custom, celebrated the “heroic Tel Aviv operation.”  In Palestinian lexicon, terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians – men, women and children – are routinely referred to as “heroic” or “martyrdom operations.”

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Israel Rises in the East

The significance of Netanyahu's meeting with Putin in Moscow.

There was something poetic about the events that bookended the past week of diplomacy. This week began with French President François Hollande’s “peace” conference and ended with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit to Moscow.

From the perspective of both substance and style, the contrast between the two events couldn’t have been more striking.

France hosted yet another anti-Israel diplomatic pile-on. Hollande had hoped to show that France was stepping into the void left by the US’s abandonment of its position as world leader. But all the confab served to do was show how irrational and self-destructive France – and Western Europe – has become.

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The Cheesemaker Occupation Must End

(As Daniel Greenfield was otherwise occupied today, we instead present this editorial from 'The Independent" by renowned English poet and human rights activist Tim Paulin)

I have seen many news reports about the murder of a settler family by an unknown intruder, but none of these reports have made note of the real tragedy in this case. That of the knife. Jewish children are a dime a dozen. One can hardly walk through Jerusalem without being able to throw a stone in the direction of half a dozen of them. But knives are a vital part of Palestinian culture. A good throat slitting knife may be handed down through the generations.

When I visited Gaza in July, I met a brave fighter who showed me a knife which his grandfather used to slit the throat of a Jew in Hebron in 1933, and his father used in a raid on a farmhouse in 1962 and which he hopes to use one day as well.

There is both romance and practical necessity in this. The criminal Israeli siege of Gaza allows through food and clothing, but not knives.

Many Gazans must make do with a single knife for the entire family. Only one of them is able to use the knife at a time. If the grandmother of a large family wants to slice bread while her grandson breaks into a settlement to slit a baby's throat-- she has no choice but to starve.

That is the real tragedy here

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Memri TV #5098

Rafah Cleric Brandishes Knife in Friday Sermon, Calls upon Palestinians to Stab Jews

The Marshall Islands’ cautionary tale

On Tuesday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forcibly commandeered the Maersk Tigris as navigated its way through the Straits of Hormuz. Iran controls the strategic waterway through which 40 percent of seaborne oil and a quarter of seaborne gas transits to global markets.

The Maersk Tigris is flagged to the Marshall Islands. The South Pacific archipelago gained its independence from the US in 1986 after signing a treaty conceding its right to self-defense in exchange for US protection. According to the treaty, the US has “full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands.”

Given the US’s formal, binding obligation to the Marshall Islands, the Iranian seizure of the ship was in effect an act of war against America.

In comments to Bloomberg hours after the ship was seized, Junior Aini, chargé d’affairs at the Marshall Islands Embassy in Washington, indicated that his government’s only recourse is to rely on the US to free its ship.

Read more at: Caroline Glick

NBC’s Engel: US allies fear Obama admin leaking information to Iran

Just how badly has Barack Obama and his administration damaged relations with our allies in the Middle East? NBC’s Richard Engel reports that the Sunni nations in the region have begun to fear that the Obama administration leaks intel to Iran as part of its efforts at rapprochement with the mullahs, which is why the US got blindsided by the Saudi-led coalition’s operations in Yemen. The White House’s “incoherence” in policy, Engel reports, has most of them losing confidence in American leadership, according to Engel’s contacts (via Free Beacon):

Read more at: HotAir

To Cross the Rubicon

By Victor Sharpe

There is a time in a nation’s history when a decision of immense and fundamental importance must be made.  Such a decision means embarking on a new direction that alters everything that has gone before.  It is a veritable crossing of the Rubicon.  That decision now confronts embattled Israel.

A great alliance exists between two peoples who share principles of democracy, the rule of law, freedom of religion and speech, and human rights.  That alliance and friendship between the American and Israeli people largely remains, exemplified by the support of Congress, despite the policies of the current administration.

Like the United States, Israel respects the rights of minorities.  It has an independent judicial system, which protects the rights of individuals and operates under the principle of “innocent until proven guilty."  Israel, like America, features regularly scheduled elections that are free and fair and open to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or sex.  What a contrast exists between it and the grim horrors and butchery endemic among the failed Islamic states that surround it.

Read more at: American Thinker

Joan Rivers -- GOES OFF on Epic Israel/Palestine Rant

Thank you, Joan Rivers!

Obama's bread and circuses

Over the past week, President Barack Obama and his senior advisers have told us that the US is poised to go to war against Syria. In the next few days, the US intends to use its air power and guided missiles to attack Syria in response to the regime's use of chemical weapons in the outskirts of Damascus last week.

The questions that ought to have been answered before any statements were made by the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel have barely been raised in the public arena. The most important of those questions are: What US interests are at stake in Syria? How should the US go about advancing them? What does Syria's use of chemical weapons means for the US's position in the region? How would the planned US military action in Syria impact US deterrent strength, national interests and credibility regionally and worldwide? Syria is not an easy case. Thirty months into the war there, it is clear that the good guys, such as they are, are not in a position to win.

Syria is controlled by Iran and its war is being directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and by Hezbollah. And arrayed against them are rebel forces dominated by al-Qaida.

 

Read more at: Caroline Glick.com

Russia to ship missiles to Syria after EU ends arms embargo on rebels

by Ed Morrissey

Escalations continued on all sides in Syria’s civil war except, curiously, among the Syrians. The EU decided not to renew the embargo on arms sales to Syrian rebels, which prompted the Russians to pledge delivery of anti-aircraft missiles, which prompted Israel to implicitly warn that they would make great targets for their air force. In the middle of all this, John McCain got a photo op with a Syrian opposition that’s being dominated by radical Islamist militias, including an al-Qaeda affiliate that forms the core of their military operations.

In other words, it’s a mess, but let’s start with the embargo’s end, announced last night:

The European Union plans to end its embargo on arming the Syrian opposition, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Monday.
The Associated Press reports: “Hague insisted that Britain had ‘no immediate plans to send arms to Syria. It gives us flexibility to respond in the future if the situation continues to deteriorate.’ ”
The EU will continue its sanctions against Bashar Assad’s government, which had been set to expire on June 1, Hague said.

Russia answered almost immediately, explaining that they want to keep “hotheads” from interfering in the Syrian civil war:

Read more at: HotAir

Obama, Oy Vey! American Jews Finally Have Had Enough

By Stella Paul

"Two Jews, three opinions" goes the famous joke. And every day, more of those opinions turn pro-Romney, as American Jews increasingly reject the collapsing presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Romney's surging poll numbers in the crucial state of Florida reflect his growing success with Bubbie Molly and her unemployed grandson Adam, who both thought their right hand would wither if it ever pulled the lever for a Republican.

The signs and portents are everywhere, beginning with the special election of a Republican in Anthony Weiner's heavily Jewish, New York congressional district one year ago. Now a startling new poll even has Romney performing the ultimate miracle: the parting of the blue states, winning the Jewish vote by a healthy 44% to 40%!

Read more at: American Thinker

Mike Huckabee on Israel/Iran Conflict 9-22-12

Newt speaks plainly about Israel and regional geopolitics

Secretary of Defense Panetta shows how the Obama Administration is Selling Out Israel…and US Interests

by Barry Rubin

Charlie: “You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.”

Terry: “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, `Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’….I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit….”

–Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront.


In a major address on U S. Middle East policy to the Brookings Institution U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave us a clear picture of the Obama Administration’s view of the region. When taken along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on the same subject, we now know the following regarding Obama’s policy:

It is dangerously and absurdly wrong. This administration totally and completely, dangerously and disastrously for U.S. interests misunderstand the Middle East. They are 180 degrees off course, that is heading in the opposite direction of safety.

Despite the satisfactory state of relations on a purely military level, the Obama Administration is not a friend of Israel, even to the extent that it was arguably so in the first two years of this presidency.

It is now an enemy; it is on the other side. Again, the issue is not mainly bilateral relations but the administration’s help and encouragement to those forces that are Israel’s biggest enemies, that want to rekindle war, and that are 100 percent against a two-state solution. And I don’t mean the Palestinian Authority, I mean the Islamists.

And the Obama Administration is also a strategic enemy of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan. It is also a strategic enemy to the democratic opposition forces in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Having analyzed and studied the Middle East for almost four decades I say none of this lightly. And these conclusions arise simply from watching what the administration says and does.

Read more at: PJMedia

The great 'Palestinian' lie

Anti-Semitism the real issue that dare not speak its name

Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor From: The Australian September 24, 2011 12:00AM

A YEAR or two ago, I took a taxi from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a brilliant sunny day and all around me the hills were green, as we passed a prosperous Arab village, a beautiful kibbutz, a bit of jangled traffic.

The taxi driver was English, an English Jew who had found a better life in Israel - better pay, less anti-Semitism, safer streets, an easy air commute to his daughter in England, but close to other relatives in Israel, and lots and lots of sunshine.

That day, a Roger Whittaker song was playing on the taxi radio. This Israel, I thought, there's something beautiful here.

Let me offer you a couple of other images.

On the BBC website, a British journalist, neither Jewish nor Israeli, recounts this experience in Cairo: "While walking in the street, someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around,

I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan.

"Relieved that the assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants: 'Sorry,' he said contritely, 'we thought you were a Jew'."

Read more at: The Australian