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WEEK OF MARCH 27 THROUGH APRIL 2
 
UN Names Democratic Israel as World’s Worst Human Rights Violator
March 30….(Anne Bayefsky) According to the United Nations, the most evil country in the world today is Israel. On March 24, 2016, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) wrapped up its annual meeting in New York by condemning only one country for violating women’s rights anywhere on the planet, Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women. On the same day, the UN Human Rights Council concluded its month-long session in Geneva by condemning Israel five times more than any other of the 192 UN member states. There were five Council resolutions on Israel.  One each on the likes of hellish countries like Syria, North Korea and Iran.  Libya got an offer of “technical assistance.”  And countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and China were among the 95 percent of states that were never mentioned. 
    No slander is deemed too vile for the UN human rights bodies that routinely listen to highly orchestrated Palestinian versions of the ancient blood libel against the Jews. In Geneva, Palestinian representative Ibrahim Khraishi told the Council on March 24, 2016:  “Israeli soldiers and settlers kill Palestinian children. They shoot them dead. They will leave them to bleed to death.”  And in New York, Palestinian representative Haifa Al-Agha told CSW on March 16, 2016:  “Israel is directing its military machinery against women and girls. They are killing them, injuring them, and leaving them bleeding to death.”
    Operating hand-in-glove with governments and the UN secretariat are the unelected, sanctimonious NGOs, to which the UN offers free facilities and daily advertisement of “side-events.”  In theory “materials containing abusive or offensive language or images are not permitted on United Nations premises.” In practice, in Geneva the UN permitted handouts that claimed Israel “saw ethnic cleansing as a necessary precondition for its existence.”  A film accused Israel of sexual violence against children and “trying to exterminate an entire Palestinian generation.”  Speeches focused on the 1948 “catastrophe” in which a “settler colonial state” was established on Palestinian land. The New York CSW-NGO scene included a film set in in the context of Israeli “oppression” and the “tear gas of my childhood,” and statements analogizing the experiences of Palestinians to today’s Syrian refugees.
    In Geneva’s grand UN “Human Rights” Council chamber, 750 people assembled, pounced on the Jewish state, broadcast the spectacle online, and produced hundreds of articles and interviews in dozens of languages championing the results. On the ground, Israelis are being hacked to death on the streets, stabbed in buses, slaughtered in synagogues, mowed down with automobiles, and shot in front of their children.
    At the New York’s UN headquarters, 8,100 NGO representatives gathered from all corners of the globe, in addition to government delegates, and watched the weight of the entire world of women’s rights descended on only one country. On the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honor, Saudi women can’t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so-called “adultery,” Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being Christian.
    Isn’t it about time that people stopped calling the UN a harmless international salon or a bad joke? The poison isn’t simply rhetorical.  One of the Council resolutions adopted last week launches a worldwide witch-hunt for companies that do business with Israel, as part of an effort to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield.  The resolution casts a wide net encompassing all companies engaged in whatever the UN thinks are business “practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises.” And the toxicity is self-perpetuating. Acting at the beck and call of Islamic states and their conduit, French Ambassador Elizabeth Laurin and Council President Choi Kyonglim selected Canadian law professor Michael Lynk as the newest UN “independent” human rights investigator on Israel. Lynk’s qualifications?  He has likened Israelis to Nazis, and challenged the legitimacy of the state of Israel starting in 1948 as rooted in “ethnic cleansing.” 
    All of this played out in the same week that Europe was reeling from the Belgian terror attacks.  Petrified or already vanquished, no European state voted against this onslaught of UN resolutions against Israel.  Germany and the United Kingdom occasionally abstained, while France voted with Arab and Islamic states on all but one Council resolution. 
    Here we are just 70 years after World War II and Europeans believe that they can license this vitriol against the Jewish state, the only democracy on the front lines of an Islamist war against human decency, and the consequences can be contained to the Jews.
Even as the converse stares them in the face.  Two days after the Brussels attacks, Islamic states rammed through a Council resolution slyly labeled “Effects of terrorism on the enjoyment of all human rights” that was actually so anti-human rights even Belgium was forced to vote against it.
    As for the United States, the Obama administration has been the Human Rights Council’s most important supporter.  Though the US is currently in a mandatory one-year hiatus, after serving two consecutive terms, President Obama plans to bind his successor by running again in the fall for another three-year term that starts January 1, 2017. Memo to Americans who are mad as hell: It's time to elicit a promise from our would-be leaders to refuse to sit on the UN Human Rights Council or to legitimize the United Nations. 

 

Sisi Begs Obama for Military Intervention to Save Egypt from ISIS
March 28….(DEBKA) Egyptian President Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi has sent a secret missive to President Barack Obama asking for urgent US military intervention in support of Egypt’s war on the Islamist State in Sinai, before the jihadis pose a real threat to Cairo. debkafile’s exclusive intelligence and counterterrorism sources report that El-Sisi has come to the conclusion that Egyptian army lacks the ability to eradicate the terrorist peril without direct US military support.
    In his note, he asks Washington to replicate in Sinai the format of US intervention in the war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria, namely, to send in special operations forces to establish bases and operate drones against jihadist targets. Unless stopped, he warns, the Islamic State is on the point of transforming the Sinai Peninsula into its primary forward base in the Middle East, bolstered by its branches of terror across North Africa, especially in Libya. US intervention is necessary to avert this. So far, Sisi has received no answer from the White House and no sign of one in the pipeline.
     Our military sources note that, given his record as former defense minister and a much-decorated general in the Egyptian army, an appeal to a foreign power for military assistance is out of character and would normally be found unacceptable in his own milieu. It must therefore be seen as a sign of extreme distress over Cairo’s failure to vanquish, or even contain ISIS, which now poses a strategic threat to Egypt proper.
In this situation, the generals in Cairo were dismayed to read a 
New York Times leader on March 25 captioned “Time to Rethink US relationship with Egypt,” which faults the Egyptian regime’s human rights record and suggests that the relationship does Washington more harm than good. The NYT concludes by saying, “Over the next few months, the president should start planning the possibility of a break in the alliance with Egypt. That scenario appears increasingly necessary.”
    Since this article appeared out of the blue, it is feared in Cairo that it is President Obama’s way of spurring the Egyptian president’s SOS. Some high-ranking military figures in Cairo have started talking about alternatives: If Washington refuses to come up with military assistance for fighting the Islamic State, perhaps the time has time to go elsewhere. An Egyptian appeal to Moscow cannot be ruled out.

 

 

WEEK OF MARCH 20 THROUGH MARCH 26
 
66 Percent of Syrian Christians Gone
March 22….(Christian Post) A Chaldean Catholic bishop in Syria has warned that two-thirds of all Christians in the war-torn country have left since the conflict began in March 2011, which means close to a million believers have fled the country. Antoine Audo told reporters that there were close to 1.5 million Christians in Syria in 2011, but five years later there are now only around 500,000 left.
    Christians and millions of other Syrian civilians have left the country to escape the ongoing civil war, which is being waged between the government of President Bashar al-Assad, various Islamic rebel groups trying to take out his regime, and the Islamic State terror organization, which joined the battle for control in 2014. Audo revealed that only around 40,000 of the once 160,000-plus Christian community in the city of Aleppo remain, and they have had to deal with mass bombings and a variety of other hardships over the years. "You cannot imagine the dangers that we face every day," Audo said, according to AFP. He revealed that while wealthier Christians have been able to flee, "the middle classes have become poor and the poor have become miserable."
    While the administration of Assad has been blamed by the international community for carrying out human right abuses in the conflict, along with all other parties involved, the bishop insisted that the Syrian government is not persecuting Christians. He said that Christians are being targeted by IS, which has beheaded or threatened with death countless believers, and is seeking to "destabilize the Syrian society and transform the war into a confessional war." Audo further said that Muslim and Christian communities lived side-by-side in peace in Syria before the civil war. "I think this war is not coming from inside Syria. I think all is organized from outside to destroy Syria," he added. Audo said back in May 2015 that Christians are living"under bombs" every day in Aleppo, and are among the most defenseless people because they have no weapons to fight back. "We are under bombs every day. I think many Christians will flee from Aleppo and seek shelter in the coastal area, but they will do it when schools and universities close, after the exams. In the disaster in which we live, even this year schools and universities remained open in the central districts of Aleppo," Audo shared at the time. "Many still believe that studying is important for the future although one lives in a city that seems to have no future," he added.
    A newly agreed upon ceasefire in March is still reportedly holding up in Syria, though Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised world leaders earlier this week when he revealed he would begin pulling troops out of the country.

 

 

WEEK OF MARCH 13 THROUGH MARCH 19
 
Can the UN Legally Impose a 2-State Solution on Israel?
(The EU and the UN want to substitute corporate imperialism for national imperialism) 
March 14….(Arutz) A movement is afoot to get the UN to predetermine borders between Israel and the future 23rd Arab state and to recognize “East Jerusalem” as its capital. Such predetermination would be in violation of the Roadmap which calls for a negotiated solution where “negotiated” implies freedom to say “no”. And such predetermination would prejudge the outcome which the world never tires of telling Israel, no one can do.
    I began doing research on the powers of the UN and on whether such UN predetermination would be ultra-vires its Charter. In other words, would it be legal by international law for the UN to dictate a solution. I wanted to know what the consequences might be for Israel. I have not yet gotten a good enough fix on these questions to give an opinion. Regardless of the true meaning of the Charter, I fear that the UN would give the same answer that the Queen gave to Alice in Wonderland, “It means what I say it means”.
    David Solway in The United Nations: Public Enemy Number One recommended that the US withdraw from the UN. He recites in a detailed way what is wrong with the UN and why it is the enemy of the US and freedom. But his polemic left out a reference to the overriding purpose of the UN. And in 2001, John F McManus, the then president of the John Birch Society, gave a speech entitled The Plan to Have the UN Rule. He quotes from a State Department official in 1945
“ there is no provision in the Charter itself that contemplates ending war. It is true the Charter provides for force to bring peace, but such use of force is itself war. The Charter is built to prepare for war, not to promote peace. The Charter is a war document, not a peace document.
"Not only does the Charter organization not prevent future wars, it makes it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose on which side we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting.”
   While the Charter pays lip service to national sovereignty by pledging to maintain “the sovereign equality of all its Members,” for no one would have joined otherwise, it is all about limiting such sovereignty. Thus joining negates sovereignty.
“No one can understand the reasoning behind self-defeating policies of the United States government without an awareness of the enormously harmful influence of the Council on Foreign Relations. This organization has worked to destroy America’s national sovereignty and create a tyrannical world government ever since its inception in 1921. It members are the leaders in government, the mass media, the wealthy foundations, the military, religion, education, the corporate world, and other important segments of our nation’s life. They are betrayers from within, and their influence has spread to numerous other parts of the world.”
That is also what the UN intends achieving.
“The Charter’s main authors were Americans Alger Hiss and Leo Pasvolsky and the Soviet Union’s Vyacheslav Molotov. Hiss was a secret communist and a member of the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations. Pasvolsky was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And Molotov was an official of the murderous Soviet Union whose criminal leaders expected the United Nations to bring about a communist-controlled world. These men surely did not want the nations of the world to remain independent. Instead, they wanted all to become subject to the authority of the United Nations, an organization they expected to control. And they wrote the UN Charter to accomplish that goal.”
    A subsequent step along the way was the creation of the EU which overrides the sovereignty of its members. In fact it may have the illusion of itself being a democratic body with electorates all electing their representatives, in reality it is run by a permanent bureaucracy. In effect the Europeans have been disenfranchised by joining. The supporters of world government need world problems, real or imagined, to justify world solutions. While the planet may or may not be warming, and if warming, may or may not be man made, what is important is that a world solution is needed. Never mind whether the suggested solutions would work, they would certainly involve the enlargement and power of world government and that is the point. What is envisaged is a stateless world. The nineteenth century was the “age of nationalism”. Nationalism is blamed for most the wars which ensued. It is no longer a good thing. Political Zionism was born in that century. As nationalism went into disfavour in the twentieth century so did Zionism.
     Imperialism is usually associated with nation states and is also decried. In fact in many ways nationalism resisted the imperialism of others. The powers that be see the doing away with nationalism as doing away with the resistance.
    Islam and World Government are comfortable bedmates and fellow travellers.
In effect they want to substitute corporate imperialism for national imperialism. Islam has no trouble with a stateless world. In fact it seeks a world caliphate in which Islam is supreme. The Caliphate is important, not the state. When noticing how Islamification is aided and abetted by the US and EU governments against the wishes of their citizens, I am reminded of the alliance between the Rome and the Catholic Church in the fourth century CE. The Catholic Church, as an agent of Rome, used to suppress the people in the name of God thereby removing popular resistance to Rome. With the fall of Rome, the Church went on to align itself with the ruling aristocracies and monarchies. During the age of colonialism, the Church was an active partner. Similarly Islam is a tool to harass and intimidate the people in the service of the rulers. “Allah” gave Mohammed the rallying cry and justification for conquering the world. Islam maintains itself by a brutal suppression of freedoms. The people are entirely disenfranchised. Thus Islam and World Government are comfortable bedmates and fellow travelers. Pres. Obama is totally supportive of the Caliphate and of the UN. He is working to empower them both. His policies include
1.      World nuclear disarmament
2.      Reduction of the US military and role as the world’s policeman to be replaced by an international force.
3.      Embracing the UN and even UNHRC.
4.      Whitewashing Islam
    Will the American people take Solway’s advice and "get the hell out?" Remains to be seen. So what does all this mean for little Israel? With few exceptions Israel has no friends among the nations. The US so far has been willing to stand by Israel by using its veto in the Security Council or supporting her right to self defense in the Lebanon War and Gaza War. But that support comes with a price, namely that Israel capitulates to the Arabs and accepts their terms for peace.
   The last three Israel Prime Ministers, Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu all came up through the ranks of Likud. All have accepted the inevitability of succumbing to American pressure and each tried to salvage what they could for Israel. It is inconceivable that the world will give up its efforts to get Israel to withdraw to the green line and share Jerusalem. 
   Obama has conceded the “Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements”. But these borders have been predetermined by Obama to be “based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps”. Slim pickings, indeed. Should Israel refuse such a deal, whether by the current government or by a revolt by the people, she will of course be saying, give us your best shot. This will include sanctions and expulsion from the UN. There is also the possibility of military intervention by the UN. McManas comments on this.
Chapter VII of the Charter begins with Article 39 by proclaiming that, “..the Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of peace, or act of aggression” and shall decide what measures shall be taken”. ”So the UN shall make the decision as to whether and when it shall act militarily. Then, in Article 42, the UN Security Council is authorized to –
“.. take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and operations by land, sea, or air forces of Members of the United Nations.” That’s no guarantee of peace, it’s a blueprint for war. Clearly, a nation that balks at being controlled by the UN will be deemed to be a threat to the UN’s definition of peace. And the UN has authority under this section of its Charter to wage war to accomplish its idea of peace.
    Serbia learned that lesson. But before it comes to that, Israel would respond by talking the battle to the American people and to the US Congress, their extension. It is a battle that Obama prefers not to fight
 

WEEK OF MARCH 7 THROUGH MARCH 13

 
Obama Administration May Force Diplomatic Resolution on Israel
March 8….(WSJ) As the Palestinians continue to refuse to negotiate with Israel and despite eight years of a failed foreign policy in the Middle East, President Obama will attempt to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in his last months in office by forcing Israel to accept Palestinian demands, the Wall Street Journal reported.
    The White House is working on plans to force Israel, against its national interests, to accept a diplomatic resolution with the Palestinians before President Barack Obama leaves office, including a possible United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution that would outline a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians and which includes the partition of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital.
    According to senior US officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal in a Monday report, the White House’s plans are aimed at offering a blueprint for future Israeli-Palestinian talks in a bid to advance a critical foreign-policy initiative that has made little progress during Obama’s two terms in the White House.
    The strongest element on the list of options under consideration is US support for a UNSC resolution calling on both sides to compromise on key issues, something Israel had opposed and Washington has repeatedly vetoed in the past, because it would force Israel to accept terms which would damage its national security and other interests.
    Other initiatives could include pressure on Israel by and through other international entities and venues. One scenario has the US pushing Israel to recognize east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians would in turn be asked to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and end claims on a right of return for the so-called Palestinian refugees, a fundamental step they have refused to take through decades of negotiations. Under that scenario, the administration also would recommend the establishment of two states based on the 1949 armistice line, leaving Israel with slim and indefensible borders.
An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the White House plans.
    Palestinian officials said they would welcome an intervention from Obama before he leaves office, as they welcome any international pressure on Israel over direct negotiations. Mounting a push for a Security Council resolution would be a significant shift in US policy. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations have vetoed dozens of Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. The Obama administration vetoed a Security Council resolution in 2011 that declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal.
    The White House discussions come as Vice President Joe Biden begins a visit to Israel on Tuesday. This report was published amid claims made by the White House that it offered Netanyahu a meeting with Obama later this month, but Netanyahu declined. Netanyahu’s office rebuffed the claims. The WSJ points out that for Obama, the effort would represent an uphill climb, and prospects for success in this realm are slim, especially in wake of six months of Palestinian terrorist attacks, which have been incited by the Palestinian leadership. Obama and his staff are skeptical of the move as well.

 

 


 

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