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WEEK OF SEPTEMBER
25 THROUGH OCTOBER 1
US, Russia on Brink of Military Showdown in Syria
Sept. 30….(DEBKAfile Exclusive Report) There
is a sense in Washington and Moscow alike that a military showdown between
the US and Russia is inevitable – direct this time, not through proxies,
like the downing of a Russian warplane by Turkish jets last year. When the
big powers are in direct confrontation, minor players step aside and run for
cover. When President Barack Obama Friday, Sept. 30 attended the funeral in
Jerusalem of the Israeli leader Shimon Peres, he must have realized he was
only 514km as the crow flies from Aleppo, the raging crux of the escalating
big-power conflict.
The
moment after the ceremonies ended the president and his party, including
Secretary of State John Kerry and his security adviser Susan Rice, made
haste to head back to Washington to navigate the crisis. The first step
toward a direct showdown was taken by the United States. By now, it is no
secret in Moscow, or indeed in any Middle East capital, that the American
A-10 air strike of Sept. 17 against a Syrian military position at Jebel
Tudar in the Deir ez-Zour region of eastern Syria was intentional, not
accidental, as originally claimed. Scores of Syrian soldiers died in the
attack.
The Russian-Syrian reprisal came two days after the A-10 strike. On Sept. 19, an emergency aid convoy was obliterated on its way to the desperate population of Aleppo. Moscow and Damascus denied responsibility for the deadly bombardment, but no other air force was present in the sky over the embattled city. On the ground, meanwhile, an unbridled onslaught on rebel-held eastern Aleppo was launchedWednesday by the Russians, Syria, Hizballah and pro-Iranian Shiite militias under the command of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers.
The
fall of Aleppo, Syria’s second city after Damascus, would give Bashar Assad
his most resounding victory in the nearly six-year civil war against his
regime. On Sept. 29, Kerry threatened Moscow that “the United States would
suspend plans to coordinate anti-Islamic State counter-terrorism efforts if
Moscow does not stop attacking Aleppo.”
Russia’s
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov answered with a sneering: “Once again
there was a certain emotional breakdown yesterday against the backdrop of
the Obama administration’s unwillingness to fulfill its part of the
agreements.”
This was a strong hint of the knowledge in the Kremlin that someone in the US administration was holding out against the implementation in full of the cooperation deal agreed upon and was therefore responsible for its breakdown.
The United States is left with two options: Either stand idly by in the face
of the Russian-Syrian-Iranian onslaught on Aleppo, or shelve the
coordination arrangements for US and Russian air operations in Syria, with
the inevitable risk of a clash in the air space of Syria or over the eastern
Mediterranean.
Trump: I Will Recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s Undivided Capital
Sept. 26….(Jerusalem Post) Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu privately in his
gilded Trump Tower apartment for nearly an hour and a half on Sunday
morning. Under
a Trump presidency, the United States will "finally accept the longstanding
congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the
State of Israel," his campaign said in a description of the meeting, which
was closed to the press.
The
two figures also discussed "at length Israel's successful experience with a
security fence," which Trump has cited as a model for his proposed US border
wall with Mexico, the campaign said, as well as "the nuclear deal with Iran,
the battle against ISIS and many other regional security concerns."
Trump described US military assistance to Israel as an
"excellent investment" for the United States and agreed with Netanyahu that
Middle East peace can only be achieved when "the Palestinians renounce
hatred and violence and accept Israel as a Jewish State."
Netanyahu
was expected to ask both candidates to come out publicly against any attempt
by the UN or any other international organization to impose a settlement on
Israel. This comes in light of concern that Barack Obama, in the twilight of
his presidency, may either support or even initiate a new UN Security
Council resolution on the conflict.
FOJ Note: For the first time in FOJ history, this
ministry will now endorse a candidate for President. The tipping point
reason for endorsing Donald Trump is his position as stated in this article.
Mr. Trump is the first ever candidate to fully support Israel's right to
Jerusalem.
Syria says Israeli ‘terrorism’ threatens entire region
Sept.
26….(Times of Israel) Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem on
Saturday condemned
Israel’s strikes in southern Syria, saying the IDF’s “aggressive policies do
not only threaten Syria but the whole region.” Speaking before the United
Nations General Assembly, Muallem said the
Syrian state was dealing not only with “mercenary terrorists on its
territory” in its five-year civil war, but also “has long confronted a
different kind of terrorism; the terrorism of Israel that has occupied a
precious part of our land in the Syrian Golan since 4 June 1967.”
Israel’s
“oppressive and aggressive practices,” he said, “are no longer confined to
the Occupied Golan, and are currently affecting the security and life of
Syrians in the southern part of the country.” Israel captured the Golan
Heights in the 1967 Six Day War, and annexed the territory in 1981.
Israeli
attacks in Syria, which the IDF routinely carries out in response to mortar
or rocket fire landing in the Israeli-held Golan Heights, serve to “assist
in every way the terrorist organizations operating in that area,” Muallem
charged. “Syria reaffirms that Israel’s aggressive policies do not only
threaten Syria but the whole region, especially given Israel’s nuclear
arsenal,” he told the assembly.
WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 21 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 27
Accept Palestine or Face ‘Sea of Hatred,’ Jordanian
King Warns Israel
(Jordan’s King Abdullah warned Israel would find itself in
“a sea of hatred” if it did not accept a Palestinian state, while also
condemning Muslim terrorists from the United Nations rostrum Tuesday).
Sept. 21….(Times of Israel) Speaking at the UN General
Assembly in New York, Abdullah spoke of the importance of peace between
Israel and Palestinians, blaming the ongoing conflict for continued unrest
in the region. “No injustice has spread more bitter
fruit than the denial of a Palestinian state. I
say: Peace is a conscious decision,” the king said. “Israel has to embrace
peace or eventually be engulfed in a sea of hatred in a region of turmoil.”
Mentioning only the Christian and Muslim connection to
Jerusalem holy sites, Abdullah accused Israel of attempting to alter the
identity of the city. “As the Custodian of Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem,
I will continue my efforts to protect these places, and stand up against all
violations of their sanctity, including attempts for temporal and spatial
division of Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al Haram Al Sharif,” he said.
Israeli officials have repeatedly rejected accusations by
Palestinian and Jordanian officials that it intends to allow Jewish prayer
on the Temple Mount or alter the status quo governing the holy site.
Tensions over the compound, considered the holiest place in Judaism and the
third holiest in Islam, have often led to flare-ups of violence.
Abdullah began his speech with a long and impassioned
plea for the world to differentiate between Islam and terrorism, which he
claimed had no connection to the religion. He decried Islamic terrorists who
“want to wipe out our achievements and those of our ancestors; to erase
human civilization, and drag us back to the dark ages.”
WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 4 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 10
Where Did the Bible Go?
(Author finds ‘alternative version of
Christianity’ in mega-type churches)
Sept. 9….(Religion News Service)
Kenneth A. Briggs has been on the “Godbeat” for years, as a religion
reporter for Newsday, as religion editor at The New York Times and now as a
contributor to the National Catholic Reporter.
In that time, the lifelong Methodist has
seen the Bible “become a museum exhibit, hallowed as a treasure but
enigmatic and untouched,” he writes in his book “The Invisible Bestseller:
Searching for the Bible in America.” And so Briggs set out on a two-year,
cross-country journey to investigate the Bible’s disappearance from public
life and see where he could find it still. He’s documented that journey in
“The Invisible Bestseller,” released this month by Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co.
Along the way, he met a homiletics
professor who encouraged her students to explore the text by exchanging
roles with the characters in biblical accounts, and he came across
professors at evangelical colleges surprised by how little their incoming
students knew about the Bible. He attended a meeting of Bible promoters in
Orlando, Fla., worried nobody was reading their tomes; the academic Society
of Biblical Literature convention in Chicago; and a traditional Presbyterian
church in Pennsylvania. He was deeply moved by his visit to a federal prison
in upstate New York, where, he said, the inmates knew the Bible better than
he did. Briggs spoke with RNS about what he learned. The interview has been
edited for length and clarity.
Q: When you say
the Bible is disappearing from public life, what do you mean?
A: Well, people aren’t
reading it very much, and it just doesn’t show up in, as they love to say,
public discourse. It doesn’t really make many appearances, and it is not in
the public consciousness. The Bible is kind of off the public grid in a way
I’ve never experienced before.
Q: In all your
travels and all the the different places you went looking for the Bible, was
there any place where you were expecting to see the Bible where it wasn’t?
A: In the mega-type
churches, the churches that were really heavily loaded with the visual and
the audio and the rest of the electronic stuff, the music, I was really
stunned by what I saw as that alternative version of Christianity being
delivered through those means. I didn’t consider it biblical in the fullest
sense. I thought it was highly stylized, the versions of Jesus, who Jesus
was, being filtered through these videos, and, in some way, I found almost
shocking in how they seemed to vary from the much fuller picture that exists
in the New Testament. So I was surprised by that.
Q: Where were you
most surprised to find the Bible?
A: I don’t know if
there were any major surprises, but I would find within the groups of people
that I would be with that there were some people who took an approach to it
that was quite – I hate to use the word “serious,” but they were quite
engaged with it. They really wanted to know what it was. That was the more
surprising thing. A lot of Bible study is just kind of either rote learning
or what they used to call the “banking system of education,” where the
banker hands out stuff and everybody takes it and leaves.
One of the people I
spent a little bit of time with was Anna Carter Florence, who teaches
homiletics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. She’s a rather
interesting person who got her inspiration by being in repertory theater at
Yale, and she has brought that to the preaching thing. That’s what Bible
study can be: where people actually exchange roles and say, “You be Sarah,”
to loosen up the process enough to really allow the questioning if it’s
going to become personal.
Q: What does it
say about us, that despite the diminished role of the Bible, it’s still
listed in Guinness World Records as the world’s best-selling book?
A: We still love it to
some extent as an artifact, as a keepsake, as a gift to people we think do
read the Bible even though we may not, so it remains very popular that way
and something almost like – I don’t want to say quite “rabbit’s foot,” but
it’s sort of like that. Every home should have at least one, and the average
is between four and five.
Q: What would you
say is the Bible’s current position in American public life, and how have
you seen that change? What was it before?
A: It’s largely
unknown. By that same token, it’s discoverable, and it’s not assumed anymore
that people know about it.
It used to be something
people thought they ought to know something about, and they did largely know
the do’s and don’ts when the Bible was regarded, at the very least, as a
rule book that gave you the moral guidelines to get into heaven or to lead a
decent life, not to be cynical about it.
Q: How do you
think this has impacted us as a culture and the way we engage in religion
and politics and public life?
A: One thing we miss in
this is the potential to enlarge our minds and hearts and spirits. I think
the Bible is the springboard to opening all kinds of ideas, thoughts,
beliefs about what our life is about. And I think without it, it narrows our
perspective and gives us a much more truncated view of what the
possibilities are. I don’t think we’re getting as much of the larger picture
by avoiding the source that has been that pathway to all kinds of discovery.
(It’s been the pathway to) entertaining most profound thoughts about what
possibly we might belong to beyond ourselves or our immediate communities.
Q: You write in
the book about the emergence of “Bible-less Christianity.” Can you talk
about how you see that play out in American culture?
A: The background, of
course, is that the Reformation gave at least a segment of Christians access
to the Bible in a way that hadn’t happened before. Most of our history has
been a rather Bible-less Christianity that was dictated or defined mostly by
the hierarchical church, not by people who read the Bible. … We gained the
freedom to approach it, and then in the current age, we have ceded that
exploration to media, to entertainment forms, to prepackaged interpretations
that are delivered in video, audio and pulpit forms so that there’s a
substitute Bible that isn’t the Bible, per se, at the same time that people
aren’t reading.
Hizballah Units Grouping on Israel’s
Golan Border
Sept. 7….(DEBKA)
A large Hizballah force, backed by the Syrian army and pro-Iranian Shiite
militias, is building up outside Quneitra, just 2km from Israel’s Golan
border. The Lebanese Shiite fighters, under the command of Iranian
Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) officers, are streaming into southern Syria,
armed with tanks and artillery. Monday night,
Sept. 5, Iranian state-controlled media shed light on this movement,
reporting that the combined force had “completed preparations necessary for
an extensive operation in southern Syria,” adding, “Hizballah aims to put an
end to the presence of armed men in the area close to the border.”
The nature of the
“armed men” was not specified, but the goal of the new operation was clear:
after evicting the assorted anti-Assad groups, including the Islamic State,
holding territory “close to the border,” Hizballah and its backers planned
to regroup on the Syrian-Israeli boundary.
This would position
Iran and its Hizballah surrogate ready to realize their six-year old design,
which is to open a second warfront against Israel. Western and Mid East
sources have told debkafile that
the triple army is in high spirits after last week’s successful operation in
Aleppo. By snatching back parts of the city they lost in mid-August, the
Syrian army and its allies managed to cut off the rebels’ supply lines from
Turkey. It was then that some Hizballah units were detached from the Aleppo
arena and redirected to the Quneitra front in southern Syria to face the
Israeli border.
Those sources report that the incoming troops
were sighted this week when they arrived at Madinat al-Baath and Khan Amabeh,
the main Syrian army bases on the Syrian Golan. They came with tanks and
heavy artillery. Seen for the first time in the Quentra sector were heavy,
self-propelled KS-19 artillery batteries, which are Russian anti-air guns
adapted to ground warfare. They have a range of 21km and a firing capacity
of 15 shells per minute.
The newly-arrived Hizballah force appears
to have set the capture of Syrian rebel-held al-Hamdiniyah 2km from the
Israeli border, as its first objective. Debkafile’s
military sources note that the Iranian media attached photos of Israel’s
security force opposite Quneitra to their reporting on the new move, thereby
framing the target of the Syrian-Iranian-Backed Hizballah build-up. This
fast-approaching development poses two tough questions:
1. Will Israel lie down for the avowedly
hostile Hizballah and Iran to occupy territory along its eastern
border?Israel officials have repeatedly emphasized that these forces would
not be allowed to take up positions on the Golan border, a message Russia
most certainly passed on to Damascus. If Hizballah and its allies go through
with their planned offensive, Israel will have to consider serious military
action to prevent them from reaching the border fence, i.e., an operation on
a scale quite different from the small-shot IDF reprisals for rockets or
shells straying across into the Golan from fighting on the other side.
2. Will the advancing Iranian-led force have
Syrian air cover? If it does, the Israeli Air Force will also be involved in
aerial combat over the Golan.
Colorful Floor of Jerusalem's Temple Reconstructed
Sept. 7….(ISRAEL TODAY)
After 12 years of painstaking work, Israeli
archeologists were able to reconstruct seven complete tiles from the 600
pieces of tile found in the debris resulting from the Palestinians'
reckless and illegal diggings on
the Temple Mount. The Muslims are clearing out Jewish history in order to
build a third mosque, the largest in Israel. The tiles in question were
found as part of the special Temple
Mount Sifting Project supervised
by Gabriel Barkai and Yitzhak Dvira.
Prof. Barkai has told Israel's Ynet news
portal that the seven reconstructed tiles "are of exceptional beauty, and
were probably used for the Temple Mount porticos … The Jewish historian
Josephus Flavius has described the floors of the Temple Mount as colorful …
and here for the first time we have a glimpse of one aspect of the beauty of
the Temple Mount."
Originally imported from Rome, Asia Minor, Tunisia and
Egypt, the tiles were cut to different geometrical shapes and most likely
were laid by foreign craftsmen sent by Emperor Augustus to his friend Herod
the Great.
Franky Schneider, a specialist in decorative ancient
floors who works with the sifting project and who reconstructed the tiles,
said that the floor style, called Opus sectile, was the most exclusive type
of tiling of the era.
Schneider and Dvira will present their findings in the
annual conference of Megalim (City
of David Studies of Ancient Jerusalem) on
Thursday. Scheduled to speak at this conference is
Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Dore Gold, who will
address UNESCO’s treatment of the subject and its consequences on
archaeological research in the State of Israel.
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