Trump Walks A Tightrope with Mideast Peace Plan

Authored by Tom Luongo,

For months I’ve been telling you that the framework for a Middle East Peace Plan is in process.

Donald Trump dropped a nuclear bomb on the world the other day by announcing the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, ending more than 50 years of virtue-signaling over what is, in fact, fact.

And right after that announcement Trump told the Saudi Arabians to end the blockade against Yemen.  And in less then a day Israelis went from cheering Trump’s name to being confused.

I spent a long time on the phone with a Jewish friend of mine who couldn’t understand what this was about.  Saying he couldn’t understand why Trump did this when the Saudis had already done so much.

And he should have known better.

What have the Saudis done to this point that should absolve them of having to do more to right their wrongs.  Mohammed bin Salman’s purge and gangster-esque shakedown of his rivals withing the royal family are a good start.

But, he has a lot of work to do to right his wrongs in Yemen… and Syria… and Qatar.  Because in all of these operations the Saudis were the aggressor, certainly in Yemen and Qatar and they’ve dragged us into these conflicts against our will because he misinterpreted Trump’s pledge to Saudi Arabia during his initial visit this summer.

This call to end the blockade in Yemen was a simple give and take with Iran and the Shia.  It doesn’t balance out the move to recognize Jerusalem but it does move the U.S. in the right direction in  defining the limits to which it will back both Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Follow that up with the report from Reuters this morning that in his phone call to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that this recognition is only the first step.

Trump told Abbas, a Western-backed moderate, that the final peace blueprint would offer the Palestinians an important settlement that they would be pleased with, but did not provide specifics, the sources said.

 

Abbas told Trump in response that any peace process must result in the Palestinians having their capital in East Jerusalem, a Palestinian official said. Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and later annexed it in a move not recognized internationally.

Trump’s no dummy.  He knows that concessions will have to be made to get any kind of deal done.  But, Jerusalem was never on the table in any practical sense and it existed as an excuse to continue the conflict indefinitely and eventually grind Israel off the map.

Trump just ended that open wound and took it off the table.  And with that one move he calls everyone’s bluff about what their real intentions are.

“Do you want peace?” “Great.  Let’s make a deal.  But you aren’t going to get everything you want.”

By the way, neither is Israel.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his merry band of neocons are going to be just as disappointed as bin Salman was when he was dressed down by both Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over his blockade of Qatar in June.

For anyone who thinks that Trump just gave Israel the green light to go to war with the Arabs is not thinking this through.  We ultimately guarantee both Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s security.  And if Trump demonstrates his ability to keep them both on a short leash, the Arabs will come to the table and talk.

The official said the plan, which he described as comprehensive and going beyond frameworks put forth by previous U.S. administrations, would likely be unveiled before the middle of next year.

 

A key test of keeping the peace efforts on track will be whether Abbas goes ahead with a scheduled meeting with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence when he visits the region in mid-December.

He will.  And Israel will stop striking out in every direction, as my friend Halsey English put it the other night, “bombing every truck over the size of an SUV that’s headed from Iran to Lebanon.”

And the U.S., thanks to Trump the U.S. is now publicly committed to Israel in a healthy way for the region, not just the big banks, big oil and AIPAC.

And as Halsey also pointed out, the entire region is scared enough of the Russians that they will have no problem getting the Iranians and Hezbollah to behave.  That’s why Russia isn’t leaving Syria.  And it’s why the Iranian Republican Guard will.

And Trump isn’t leading us into war but rather a rather sophisticated peace deal that will confound every conventional analyst on the subject.

Watch the first 20 minutes of this show to get the whole thing laid out in full.

Trump Reportedly Tells Abbas He Intends To Move Embassy To Jerusalem

After warning that he could officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel"s capital by the end of the week - an announcement that drew vociferous objections from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who both warned that such a declaration would irreparably damage US ties with the Muslim world - Palestinian sources are reporting that President Donald Trump told Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas that the US intends to eventually move its embassy to Jerusalem - a contested city that is claimed as a capital by both Israel and the Palestinian territories.

As we noted earlier, the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel"s capital would infuriate Palestinians.

Majdi Khaldi, a diplomatic adviser of President Mahmoud Abbas, said the Palestinian leadership would "stop contacts" with the US if Trump recognized Jerusalem – making Jared Kushner’s job of solving the Israel-Palestine conflict even more difficult than it already is. Khaldi said the US would lose credibility as a mediator in the Middle East if the US President went ahead with the move. Kushner had earlier said Trump hadn"t made a final decision.

On the call with Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other regional leaders, Abbas warned Trump that moving the embassy could have "dangerous consequences."

Readouts of the calls are expected later Tuesday.

Trump was expected to announce as soon as Wednesday that the US would recognize Jerusalem as Israel"s capital and move its embassy there (though some expected that he would delay the embassy move, but stress that he would eventually like to do so, according to local Israeli media.)

Israel considers Jerusalem its true capital, and the western part of the city is host to many of the Israeli state"s administrative functions.

If Trump follows through with what he told Abbas, his actions this week would be considerably more dramatic than anticipated.

 

 

 

Israel and Palestinian Authority Plunge Gaza into Darkness

(AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra) (The Associated Press)

(The Real Agenda News) Even in four-star hotels in Gaza, generators are blocked during prolonged power outages.

Since last April, the only power plant in the Gaza Strip has been shut down for lack of fuel, so the two million inhabitants of the Palestinian Mediterranean enclave have been provide only four hours of energy per day.

If the decision taken by the Israeli Government on Sunday at the behest of the Palestinian Authority is confirmed, the Gazans will remain in the dark.

When it comes to ten years of the seizure of power in Gaza by the Islamist Hamas movement – in which three wars have been waged against Israel – the Palestinian territory has been plunged into darkness.

The escalation of tension threatens to blow up the fuses of a new armed conflict.

The Palestinian Authority presiding over Mahmoud Abbas seems to have grown tired of waiting for the promised formation of a unity government with Hamas and has begun to exert intense economic pressure on the Gaza Strip.

After refusing to pay gas taxes for the Gaza power plant, which was affected by the Israeli bombing in the summer war of 2014, the Ramallah Government has cut the salaries of its officials by 30%.

In May it announced that it would only pay Israel 75% of the energy supplied to the territory controlled by the Islamists.

Israeli Minister of Construction and Housing, Yohav Galant, was 10 years ago the commanding general of the Army’s Southern Command, deployed to Gaza.

“For Israel, Hamas is the equivalent of ISIS in Western countries,” he said in Jerusalem before a group of foreign journalists, hours after the Cabinet had agreed to cut power supply to Gaza.

The Islamists won the 2006 legislative elections, the year after Israel withdrew completely from the Strip.

“In 2007 they surrounded the positions of Fatah (the nationalist party of President Abbas), evicted their political rivals and seized power,” Galant recounts. “Between 30,000 and 40,000 Hamas militiamen continue to hold Gaza’s two million inhabitants hostage.”

Like the rest of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Galant argues that the growing climate of tension has been due to the Palestinian fracture between Fatah, in power in the West Bank and Hamas, which rules over Gaza.

The minister declines to reveal when the works of the so-called underground wall, a barrier excavated in the subsoil around the border of the Strip to prevent the tunnels built by Hamas from penetrating the nearby kibbutz, are about to begin.

“The tunnels are their great strategic asset to attack Israel by surprise. If Hamas believes that it is going to lose it, it can trigger a new conflict “, says the former general.

The United Nations has warned Wednesday that the Strip faces an “absolute collapse” of its vital services to the population if the electricity supply is cut by 40%, as announced by the Government of Israel after the reduction of payments from the Palestinian Authority.

The UN humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian territories, Robert Piper, told France Presse that “increasing the duration of power outages can have a devastating effect on health facilities, water supply and sanitation”.

With the civilian population in Gaza trapped by fighting between Palestinian factions, political analyst Talal Okal, one of the few who still maintains independence of opinion in the Strip, believes that “the situation is so bad that it can hardly get worse.”

It is not foreseeable to have a popular outburst, in spite of the protests of the past winter, when the blackouts began to become a common thing, he explained.

“People are not going to stand up to the Hamas militias with their bare chest. Everyone knows that Gaza is subject to a military regime, but they are aware that, directly (in the West Bank) or indirectly (in the Strip), the central problem is the Israeli occupation. Or there is an agreement between the Palestinian parties,” he warns “or the risk of a new conflict with Israel can skyrocket.”

The population also suffers the refusal of Egypt to increase its electrical connections with the Strip.

The embargo imposed on Qatar – one of the main donors of energy to Gaza – by the Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia’s break with Hamas, which until just a few weeks ago claimed its loyalty to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood enemies of Riyadh, have further aggravated the humanitarian situation.

The Israeli NGO Doctors for Human Rights has found that hospitals in the Gaza Strip lack one-third of the medicines considered basic.

No energy, with the water from the wells and beaches contaminated; in a territory subjected to a strict blockade by Israel, with the Egyptian border half-frozen, and frozen Gulf financial support, Hamas spokesmen predict a “catastrophe” and an “explosion” in the Strip.

The UN warned long ago that Gaza will cease to be habitable by 2020.

European Parliament Censors Its Own Free Speech

Authored by Judith Bergmann via The Gatestone Institute,

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  The rule strikes at the very center of free speech, namely that of elected politicians, which the European Court of Human Rights has deemed in its practice to be specially protected. Members of the European Parliament are people who have been elected to make the voices of their constituents heard inside the institutions of the European Union.

  
  


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  The rule can only have a chilling effect on free speech in the European Parliament, and will likely prove a convenient tool in trying to shut up those parliamentarians who do not follow the politically correct narrative of the EU.

  
  


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  By lifting Le Pen"s immunity while she is running for president of France, the European Parliament is sending the clear signal that publicizing the graphic and horrifying truth of the crimes of ISIS, rather than being received as a warning about what might soon be coming to Europe, instead ought to be punished.

  
  


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  Where does this clearly totalitarian impulse stop and who will stop it?

  
  

The European Parliament has introduced a new procedural rule, which allows for the chair of a debate to interrupt the live broadcasting of a speaking MEP "in the case of defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior by a Member". Furthermore, the President of the European Parliament may even "decide to delete from the audiovisual record of the proceedings those parts of a speech by a Member that contain defamatory, racist or xenophobic language".

No one, however, has bothered to define what constitutes "defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior". This omission means that the chair of any debate in the European Parliament is free to decide, without any guidelines or objective criteria, whether the statements of MEPs are "defamatory, racist or xenophobic". The penalty for offenders can apparently reach up to around 9,000 euros.

"There have been a growing number of cases of politicians saying things that are beyond the pale of normal parliamentary discussion and debate," said British EU parliamentarian Richard Corbett, who has defended the new rule. Mr. Corbett, however, does not specify what he considers "beyond the pale".

In June 2016, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, addressed the European Parliament in a speech, which drew on old anti-Semitic blood libels, such as falsely accusing Israeli rabbis of calling on the Israeli government to poison the water used by Palestinian Arabs. Such a clearly incendiary and anti-Semitic speech was not only allowed in parliament by the sensitive and "anti-racist" parliamentarians; it received a standing ovation. Evidently, wild anti-Semitic blood libels pronounced by Arabs do not constitute "things that are beyond the pale of normal parliamentary discussion and debate".

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas receives a standing ovation at the European Parliament in Brussels on June 23, 2016, after falsely claiming in his speech that Israeli rabbis were calling to poison Palestinian water. Abbas later recanted and admitted that his claim had been false. (Image source: European Parliament)

The European Parliament apparently did not even bother to publicize their new procedural rule; it was only made public by Spain"s La Vanguardia newspaper. Voters were, it appears, not supposed to know that they may be cut off from listening to the live broadcasts of the parliamentarians they elected to represent them in the EU, if some chairman of a debate subjectively happened to decide that what was being said was "racist, defamatory or xenophobic".

The European Parliament is the only popularly elected institution in the EU. Helmut Scholz, from Germany"s left-wing Die Linke party, said that EU lawmakers must be able to express their views about how Europe should work: "You can"t limit or deny this right". Well, they can express it (but for how long?), except that now no one outside of parliament will hear it.

The rule strikes at the very center of free speech, namely that of elected politicians, which the European Court of Human Rights has deemed in its practice to be specially protected. Members of the European Parliament are people who have been elected to make the voices of their constituents heard inside the institutions of the European Union. Limiting their freedom of speech is undemocratic, worrisome and spookily Orwellian.

The rule can only have a chilling effect on freedom of speech in the European Parliament and will likely prove a convenient tool in trying to shut up those parliamentarians who do not follow the politically correct narrative of the EU.

The European Parliament lately seems to be waging war against free speech. At the beginning of March, the body lifted the parliamentary immunity of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. Her crime? Tweeting three images of ISIS executions in 2015. In France, "publishing violent images" constitutes a criminal offense, which can carry a penalty of three years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros. By lifting her immunity at the same time that she is running for president of France, the European Parliament is sending the clear signal that publicizing the graphic and horrifying truth of the crimes of ISIS, rather than being received as a warning about what might soon be coming to Europe, instead ought to be punished.

This is a bizarre signal to be sending, especially to the Christian and Yazidi victims of ISIS, who are still largely ignored by the European Union. European parliamentarians, evidently, are too sensitive to deal with the graphic murders of defenseless people in the Middle East, and are more concerned with ensuring the prosecution of the messengers, such as Marine Le Pen.

So, political correctness, now effectively the "religious police" of political discourse, has not only taken over the media and academia; elected MEPs are now also supposed to toe the politically correct line, or literally be cut off. No one stopped the European Parliament from passing this undemocratic anti-free speech rule. Why did no parliamentarian out of the 751 MEPs raise red flags about the issue before it became an actual rule? Even more importantly: Where does this clearly totalitarian impulse stop and who will stop it?