OBAMA’S MALICE, MAY’S SHAME. DRAIN THE UN SWAMP

Video Of The Week - Danny Dannon condemns the Anti-Israel UN Resolution-http://tinyurl.com/gvzn7rd

 24-12-2016 Melanie Philips

For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/jffamf7

President Obama’s refusal to veto the sickening UN Security Council resolution against Israel yesterday was an act of pure malice.

The resolution, demanding an immediate halt to all Israeli “settlement” construction, was proposed by New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal after its original sponsor, Egypt, had withdrawn. No-one can be in any doubt, though, that the resolution’s real sponsor was Obama, acting behind the backs of the US Congress and the American people.

Clearly it makes a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians very much harder, since the Palestinians will now have no incentive to negotiate the boundaries of a future Palestine state.

Worse than that, it seeks to draw the border of Israel along the ceasefire lines established in 1949, when Israel fought off the Arab attempt to exterminate it at its rebirth. These ceasefire lines have been called the “Auschwitz borders” because they leave Israel militarily indefensible against its enemies. These include the Palestinians who remain committed to destroy Israel – and whose infernal cause the UN, manipulated by Obama, has now backed.

Worse even than that, the resolution is legally illiterate and perpetrates the Big Lie about Israel: that the “settlements” violate international law and that they are the major obstacle to peace.

They do not violate international law and no UN resolution can make them unlawful. Israel is legally entitled to build on this territory. This is principally because 1) it was never sovereign land belonging to any other state and 2) because it was land where the UN’s precursor body pledged that the Jews should be settled on account of their unique right to do so.

The idea that the settlements are the greatest obstacle to peace is ludicrous. There were no settlements before 1967, yet the Arab war of extermination against Israel had already gone on for decades.

There are two actual reasons for the Middle East impasse: first, that the Palestinians continuously incite their people to hatred of the Jews and mass murder of Israelis on the back of a narrative of lies which writes the Jews out of their own history in the land; and second, that America, Britain and Europe fund, sanitise and incentivise that genocidal Palestinian agenda.

What this vote so clearly demonstrates is what has been clear for years: that the UN is no longer fit for purpose. Dominated by states implacably hostile to Israel and the Jewish people, the UN has long demonstrated through its egregious application of double standards against Israel alone that it has become nothing less than an instrument of extermination against a member state. Only the US restrained it; now Obama has allied America to this agenda of infamy.

The US Congress and new American president must now finally hold the UN to account. It is insupportable that the American people should be financing this rogue body which is not just motivated by ideological and religious malevolence against the Jewish people but actively damages world peace.

There is another country, however, whose behaviour over this resolution must be noted with grim dismay (we can forget New Zealand, a stupid country of no other significance). As one of the five permanent Security Council members, Britain could have vetoed the resolution. Instead it actually supported it.

Since she came to power last July the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, has gone out off her way to express her warm affection for the Jewish people and her strong support for the State of Israel.

Her words now stick in the throat. If Obama has committed a foul and final act of malice towards Israel, Mrs May has done something just as bad, if not worse: presented herself as the friend upon whom the Jewish people can rely while her government stuck the knife not into Israel’s back, as did Obama, but its front.

Two weeks ago, Mrs May told the Conservative Friends of Israel that the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government committed itself to the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, was “one of the most important letters in history” and that next year’s anniversary of the Declaration was one that Britain would be “marking with pride”.

There is no reason to doubt that she is personally warmly disposed towards the Jews and Israel. But her understanding seems terribly limited. The reality, of which she seems to be genuinely unaware, is that for three decades after the Balfour Declaration the British did everything they could to undo it.

They turned a blind eye to Arab pogroms against the Jews of Palestine. They tore up Britain’s internationally binding obligation to settle the Jews throughout that land, making Britain an accessory to the Holocaust by refusing Jewish refugees entry to Palestine during the Nazi period. And they offered the Arabs, as a response to their murderous violence against both the Jews and the British, part of the Jews’ own entitlement to the land.

Britain’s wholesale disregard of international law, its craven appeasement of the Arabs’ violence and its further punishment of their Jewish victims cemented permanent Arab aggression and rejectionism towards Israel. Yesterday at the UN, making common cause with ideologues, appeasers and tyrants, perfidious Albion continued its betrayal of the Jewish people.

The scene is now set for the US to tackle the reservoir of evil that the UN has become. Not before time. This is one swamp that most urgently needs to be drained.

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Left’s hatred of Israel is racism in disguise

Video of the week:Arson terrorists destroy vineyard in Dolev, Israel- http://tinyurl.com/z3kp9tv

 MICHAEL GOVE  The Times 16-12- 2016

·        For the full article go to: https://cfoi.co.uk/michael-gove-lefts-hatred-of-israel-is-racism-in-disguise/

·         

 How do you know if someone’s an antisemite? They don’t all perform stiff-arm salutes for the camera and offer interesting 140-character thoughts about race theory on Twitter. Although those are helpful clues, as the American alt-right, Hezbollah and Iran’s leadership prove.

But antisemitism isn’t a prejudice restricted to the likes of Richard Spencer, Hassan Nasrallah and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As befits the world’s oldest and most durable hatred, it has many more adherents and has taken many different forms.

In medieval times, when individuals made sense of their world through the prism of faith, antisemitism was a religious prejudice. In the 19th and early 20th centuries — the age of Darwinism — antisemitism clothed itself in the white coat of the scientist. Biological metaphors were deployed to modernise hate. The Jews were carriers of “racial contamination” who had to be eliminated as a pathological threat to humanity’s future.

That belief led to history’s greatest crime. The extermination of six million powered by hatred of one thing — Jewish identity. It should have been the case that antisemitism died in the furnaces of the Holocaust. But the hatred survived. And, like a virus, mutated.

Antisemitism has moved from hatred of Jews on religious or racial grounds to hostility towards the proudest expression of Jewish identity we now have — the Jewish state.

No other democracy is on the receiving end of a campaign calling for its people to be shunned and their labour to be blacklisted. The Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement is a growing force on our streets and campuses. Its campaigners argue that we should ignore ideas from Jewish thinkers if those thinkers come from Israel and treat Jewish commerce as a criminal enterprise if that business is carried on in Israel.

This is antisemitism, impure and simple. It is the latest recrudescence of the age-old demand that the Jew can only live on terms set by others. Once Jews had to live in the ghetto, now they cannot live in their historic home.

It is to Britain’s eternal credit that we rejected centuries of prejudice one hundred years ago and pledged to extend to the Jewish people the rights enjoyed by Germans and Italians, Japanese and Mexicans — the right to a land they could call their own. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 was followed in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel. Since then, that state’s success has been near-miraculous.

Surrounded by enemies who sought to strangle it at birth, continually threatened by war and constantly under terrorist attack, a nation scarcely the size of Wales with no natural resources, half of whose territory is desert, has become a flourishing democracy, a centre of scientific innovation, one of the world’s major providers of international humanitarian relief and the only state from Casablanca to Kabul with a free press, free judiciary, a flourishing free enterprise economy and freedom for people of every sexual orientation to live and love as they wish.

And that is the reason it attracts such hostility. Not because of what Israel does. But because of what it is.

For those on the left addicted to guilt-tripping and grievance-mongering, who believe that poverty is a consequence of western exploitation and that bourgeois ethics lead to oppression, the existence of a political entity that is a runaway success precisely because it is a bourgeois-minded, capitalist-fuelled, western-oriented nation state is just too much to bear. Their ideological prejudices have collided with a stubborn, undeniable, fact.

So what do they do? Keep the prejudices, of course, and try to get rid of the fact. Try to undermine, delegitimise and reduce support for Israel. Make it the only country in the world whose right to exist is called continually into question. Make the belief in that state’s survival, Zionism, a dirty word. Denounce, as the NUS president has, a British university for being a “Zionist outpost”. And instead call organisations pledged to eliminate Israel such as Hezbollah and Hamas “friends”, as Jeremy Corbyn has.

Antizionism is not a brave anti-colonial and anti-racist stance, it is simply antisemitism minding its manners so it can sit in a seminar room. And as such it deserves to be called out, confronted and opposed.

Because the fate of the Jewish people, and the survival of the Jewish state, are critical tests for all of us. The darkest forces of our time — Islamic State, the Iranian leaders masterminding mass murder in Aleppo — are united by one thing above all: their hatred of the Jewish people and their home. Faced with such implacable hatred, and knowing where it has always led, we should not allow antisemitism any space to advance, or incubate.

Instead we should show we’re not going to be intimidated by those who want to treat Israel as a second-class state, we’re not going to indulge the antisemitic impulse to apply the double standard. Israel is the only state where we don’t locate our embassy in the nation’s capital and the only ally the Foreign Office has refused to let the Queen visit. So let’s celebrate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration by moving our embassy to Jerusalem next year and inviting Her Majesty to open it. What are we afraid of? Earning the enmity of those who hate Israel? To my mind, there could be no greater compliment.

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UK prime minister delivers staunchly pro-Israel speech

Video of the week - Wounded Syrians treated in an Israeli hospital - http://tinyurl.com/jqtf6hn

 Ynetnews by  Yaniv Halily:  13.12.16

For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/jd8b7hs

LONDON - British Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a staunchly pro-Israel speech Monday during which she declared her government’s unwavering support for Israel, proclaimed her unequivocal opposition to boycotts and reiterated her commitment to expunging anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial from British society.

Speaking at the annual Conservative Friends of Israel lunch, May announced her intention to make her country one of the first in the world to adopt an international definition of anti-Semitism and to clamp down on hate crime after an increase in the number of reported incidents targeting Jews.

Speaking to more than 800 guests, May described the 1917 Balfour Declaration—Britain’s pledge to create a Jewish state in Palestine—as “one of the most important letters in history" before stating her believe that the two-state solution, for two peoples brought about by direct negotiations, “without preconditions” offered the only plausible blueprint for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.

May lauded Israel as “a thriving democracy, a beacon of tolerance, an engine of enterprise and an example to the rest of the world for overcoming adversity and defying disadvantages.”

Recalling her experiences during a 2014 visit to Israel, the prime minister added that “it is only when you walk through Jerusalem or Tel Aviv that you see a country where people of all religions and sexualities are free and equal in the eyes of the law.”

May also acknowledged Israel’s disproportionate impact on the world: “It is only when you travel across the country that you realise it is only the size of Wales—and appreciate even more the impact it has on the world.”

Citing the kidnapping and murder of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah in 2014, she said “it is only when you witness Israel’s vulnerability that you see the constant danger Israelis face, as I did during my visit.”

After heaping praise on Israel’s life-saving work around the world, from Nepal to Haiti, and paying homage to Israel’s late former President Shimon Peres, May assured her listeners that “no British taxpayers’ money will be used to make payments to terrorists or their families.” 

May then addressed anti-Semitism in British society and announced her much anticipated promise to adopt an international definition.

 “That means there will be one definition of anti-Semitism – in essence, language or behaviour that displays hatred towards Jews because they are Jews – and anyone guilty of that will be called out on it.”

 In a similar vein, she also pledged to continue her predecessor’s (David Cameron) vision to build a National Memorial to the Holocaust next to Parliament.

 May then turned her focus to British Labour Party, expressing her disgust with anti-Semitic elements within it and what she described as its hard-left allies. Furthermore, she ridiculed the UK Labour Party's deputy leader, Tom Watson who broke out singing Am Yisrael Chai ("The people of Israel live") at a recent annual Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) lunch.

  “No amount of karaoke can make up for turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism, May insisted. “No matter what Labour say—or sing—they cannot ignore what has been happening in their party.”

 May’s government already began backing up her stated commitment to countering anti-Semitism with the announcement on the same day that a British neo-Nazi group would become the first of its kind to be banned under the country's new anti-terror laws, with Interior Minister Amber Rudd branding it Monday as "racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic."

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The Real Illegal Settlements

  

Gatestone Institute - by Bassam Tawil, December 5, 2016

For the full article go to - http://tinyurl.com/zctqunt

           

        While construction in Jewish settlements of the West Bank and neighborhoods of Jerusalem has long been carried out within the frame of the law and in accordance with proper licenses issued by the relevant authorities, the Palestinian construction is illegal in every respect.

        The Palestinian goal is to create irreversible facts on the ground. The sheer enormity of the project raises the question: Who has been funding these massive cities-within-cities? And why? There is good reason to believe that the PLO and some Arabs and Muslims, and especially the European Union, are behind the Palestinian initiative.

        The Jewish outpost of Amona, home to 42 families, is currently the subject of fiery controversy both in Israel and in the international arena. Apparently, settlements are only a "major obstacle to peace" when they are constructed by Jews.

        The EU and some Islamic governments and organizations are paying for the construction of illegal Palestinian settlements, while demanding that Israel halt building new homes for Jewish families in Jerusalem neighborhoods or existing settlements in the West Bank.

        The hypocrisy and raw malice of the EU and the rest of the international community toward the issue of Israeli settlements is blindingly transparent. Yet we are also witnessing the hypocrisy of many in the Western mainstream media, who see with their own eyes the Palestinian settlements rising on every side of Jerusalem, but choose to report only about Jewish building.

As the international community continues to slam Israel for construction in Jewish settlement communities, Palestinians are quietly engaging in massive construction of entire neighborhoods in many parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition to overlooking the Palestinian building project, the West has clearly been neglecting a crucial difference between the two efforts: while the construction in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank and neighborhoods of Jerusalem has long been carried out within the frame of the law and in accordance with proper licenses issued by the relevant authorities, the Palestinian construction is illegal in every respect.

In this behind-the-scenes endeavor, which does not meet even the most minimum standards required by engineers, architects and housing planners, the Palestinian goal is to create irreversible facts on the ground.

A quick tour of the areas surrounding Jerusalem from the north, east and south easily exposes the colossal construction that is taking place there. In most cases, these high-rise buildings are slapped together without licenses or any adequate planning or safety concerns.

 An example of massive illegal Palestinian construction near Shufat and Anata, 

on the northeastern outskirts of Jerusalem.

 An example of massive illegal Palestinian construction near Shufat and Anata, on the northeastern outskirts of Jerusalem.

The Jewish outpost of Amona in the central West Bank, home to 42 families, is currently the subject of fiery controversy both in Israel and in the international arena. In 2006, the High Court of Israel ruled that the outpost is illegal under Israeli law because it lies on private Palestinian land. In 2014, the High Court ordered the government to evacuate and demolish the entire outpost within two years.

In Israel, as Amona demonstrates, no one is above the law. Israel boasts an independent judiciary system that is second to none.

Yet as the debate in Israel intensifies over the fate of Amona, the Palestinians are making a mockery of laws and building regulations by embarking on massive construction of illegal neighborhoods and buildings. Apparently, settlements are only a "major obstacle to peace" when they are constructed by Jews.

 Video of the week: Israeli women in the IDF - http://tinyurl.com/hnh4h4l

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2 Israeli Arabs confess to starting wildfires

For the full article go to “Times Of Israel” http://tinyurl.com/z3jrx9r

Police chief Roni Alsheich says arson attacks are nothing new; cops prepared to treat cases as terrorism.

Two Israeli Arabs arrested on suspicion of deliberately starting brush fires have confessed to the crimes, police reportedly told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.

The suspects were said to from the Israeli Arab towns of Umm al-Fahm and Deir Hanna in northern Israel, the Hebrew-language Ynet news website reported. The report did not specify which fires the two admitted to igniting or offer details on the suspects.

While many of the fires that ravaged towns and cities nationwide since Tuesday have been caused by negligence, officials say at least some of the blazes were started by nationalistically motivated Arab arsonists and have vowed to crack down on the perpetrators.

On Sunday, officials offered assurances that the wave of wildfires that swept across the country over the past six days had mostly come to an end, at least for the time being, but fresh blazes were later reported in northern Israel.

At least 35 people have been arrested since Thursday on suspicion of setting fires or inciting others to do so. More than 15 were Palestinians arrested by the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet security service, an army spokesperson said. At least 10 of those held are Israeli Arabs, according to Hebrew media reports. Police did not offer a detailed breakdown of how many were being detained for incitement and how many for arson.

Police chief Roni Alsheich said Sunday that there had been similar arson attacks in the past and that they should be considered acts of terror, Army Radio reported.

“If setting the fire was deliberate it is definitely terror,” Alsheich said during a visit to the West Bank settlement of Halamish, where a fire destroyed 18 homes on Friday night. “By the way, that is nothing new, there have been arson incidents in the past. The concentration of a relatively large number of days, and the number of incidents and the weather conditions, brought about these results but there is nothing new and there were incidents like this in the past.”

Alsheich said the security services are equipped to deal with terror and hinted that Israel was prepared to employ more stringent measures if necessary.

“We have good tools for dealing with terror — we haven’t yet taken advantage of them; we will review things and if we think that the measures are lacking we will demand them… There are sufficient measures in the Israeli book of laws.”

Earlier Sunday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said there was “proof” that 17 of 110 recorded wildfires were caused by arsonists, and authorities “were still investigating the other incidents.”

Authorities estimate that since Tuesday, some 130,000 dunams (32,124 acres) have been destroyed, approximately 30 percent more than a major blaze in the forests around Haifa six years ago.

Haifa city officials said Saturday that this week’s fires torched some 28,000 dunams (6,900 acres) of land in the city since Thursday.

At least 60,000 of the city’s residents were evacuated Thursday while firefighters battled to contain a blaze that had entered a dozen of the city’s neighborhoods from the nearby Carmel Forest.

Most had returned home by Sunday morning, but an estimated 1,600 residents remained without homes. Between 400 and 530 apartments were said to be completely destroyed by the flames. Dozens of homes in other locales have also been damaged by separate wildfires during the wave.

It was not immediately clear that the motive of all the arsonists was terrorism. Israeli security officials on Saturday night gave preliminary indications that weather conditions were the prime cause of the initial wave of fires. From Wednesday and into the weekend, security officials and politicians indicated that arson was being investigated in some cases.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday there was “no doubt” some of the fires were started deliberately. “There is a price to pay for the crimes committed, there is a price to pay for arson terrorism,” he said.

The Magen David Adom rescue service reported Saturday that among the 133 people treated by the organization for fire-related injuries, one was seriously hurt and three others were moderately injured.

Throughout the week, firefighting equipment from the US, Russia, Turkey, Greece, France, Spain, Canada and the Palestinian Authority joined Israeli crews in dumping tons of water and retardants on the fires around Israel and the West Bank.

Video of the week: Wild fires rage in Israel http://tinyurl.com/nco4cfx 

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Save a Child's Heart (SACH)

Save a Child's Heart (SACH) is an Israeli-based international, non-profit organization.We are known worldwide for our commitment to saving lives by improving the quality of cardiac care for children from developing countries and creating centers of medical competence in these countries.

Save a Child’s Heart provides life-saving cardiac surgery and other lifesaving procedures at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, Israel. Our doctors and nurses also hold preoperative and follow up cardiology clinics in Israel and abroad on a weekly basis. Save a Child’s Heart offers a comprehensive training program within Israel for doctors and nurses from developing countries, and leads surgical and teaching missions to our partner countries. To date, we have saved the lives of 4,000 children from Africa, South America, Europe, Asia, and throughout the Middle East.

By mending hearts, regardless of race, religion, gender, nationality, or financial status, we contribute to a more peaceful and productive world; a happier, healthier world, and a better world for all children, and their families.

Since 1995, SACH has treated more than 4,000 children suffering from congenital and rheumatic heart disease, from infancy to 18 years of age. The annual number of children we treat has grown dramatically from 48 cases in 1996 to over 260 in 2015.

The children we help are treated at the Wolfson Medical Center and housed at the Legacy Heritage Children’s Home of Save a Child’s Heart, both located in Holon. They come from around the globe, from 50 countries where adequate medical care is simply unavailable.

Approximately 50% of the children are from the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Iraq and Morocco, more than 30% are from Africa, and the remainder are from Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.

Incredibly, in today’s modern age, at any given moment there are thousands of children suffering from heart disease around the world who require our assistance.

If you know a child who needs our help, please use this Guidance and Referral Form form to send us their information. 

Download a breakdown of children treated by Save a Child’s Heart according to country, June 2015.

Video of the week: Save a Child's Heart (SACH) -  http://tinyurl.com/hqty4lp  

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TRUMP’S ISRAEL ADVISORS LIKELY TO USHER IN ERA OF IMPROVED US-ISRAEL TIES

by Tom Gross

During the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, there have been complaints about a strain of anti-Semitism among some of Trump’s supporters and in some of the campaign advertising, as well as the hounding of certain Jewish journalists. That Trump has insufficiently condemned this is, of course, a matter of great concern.

This dispatch, however, only focuses on Trump’s likely Israel policy.

Israel is unlikely to feature prominently in Donald Trump’s presidency (compared to under other recent presidents). But to the extent that it does, it seems Trump will restore close ties between the US and Israel after some shaky relations during Barack Obama’s two terms in office over the Iran nuclear program and other issues.

Three main persons seem to have emerged as Donald Trump’s advisors on Israel.

JARED KUSHNER

Jared Kushner, the president elect’s son-in-law, could play a major role in the Trump administration. There are even rumors that he may be chief of staff.

As Trump met privately with President Obama at the White House this morning, Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough walked with Jared Kushner around the South Lawn.

Kushner served as Trump’s shadow campaign manager throughout the presidential race. Kushner kept a relatively low profile on the campaign trail, sometimes standing silently to the side of the stage, during big primary nights and at rallies.

Kushner is a pro-Israel orthodox Jew, married to Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism and is bringing up Trump’s grandchildren in a kosher home.

As I have reported previously in these dispatches, Kushner along with the editor of the New York Observer (which Kushner owns) co-wrote Trump’s keynote address to AIPAC earlier this year.

DAVID FRIEDMAN

David Friedman, 57, is Trump’s longtime lawyer and friend. There are rumors that Friedman may be appointed as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Friedman works at the New York law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman LLP, where several subscribers to this email dispatch list also work, including former U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate, Senator Joe Lieberman.

Trump and Friedman are quite close and Trump paid a condolence call to the family Shiva at Friedman’s parents’ home in Long Island after his father died.

Unlike some of President Obama’s advisors, Friedman has said that it is unwise for the United States to try and impose any solutions on Israel and that it is up to Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate directly to reach an agreement.

Just as the present American ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, is a friend of Barack Obama, and is close to the Israeli opposition and to leftist American Jewish groups such as J-Street, so Friedman is closer to American pro-Israel conservative groups.

He grew up in Woodmere, in Long Island, New York. His father, the late Morris Friedman, was rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in North Woodmere, and president of the New York Board of Rabbis.

Friedman is a graduate of New York University Law School, and his family are longtime Republicans.

During the 1984 presidential race, Ronald Reagan became the first sitting American president to visit to a synagogue since George Washington in 1791, when he went to Friedman’s father synagogue and afterwards to the Friedman house for Shabbat lunch.

Friedman has, on various occasions, attacked the New York Times for its coverage of Trump. During the election campaign, he wrote in the Jerusalem Post that in some of its coverage of Trump, the New York Times “has the journalistic integrity of the worst gossip rag.”

“If only the Times had reported on the Nazi death camps with the same fervor as its failed last-minute attempt to conjure up alleged victims of Donald Trump, imagine how many lives could have been saved,” said Friedman

JASON GREENBLATT

The third main Trump advisor on Israel is Jason Greenblatt, who serves with Friedman as co-chairman of Trump’s Israel Advisory Committee.

Greenblatt, 49, is the chief legal officer and executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

Greenblatt, an observant, yarmulke-wearing real estate lawyer, was educated at Yeshiva University and New York University School of Law, and lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.

He is friends with several subscribers to this email list, who tell me he is “a mild-mannered, soft-spoken family man, more liberal than Trump”.

Greenblatt also runs a parenting blog with his wife, Naomi, a psychiatrist who focuses on women’s mental health issues. They often write about “teaching their six children ethics and integrity”.

During the presidential campaign, Trump came under fire for tweeting and then deleting an image that many found anti-Semitic (a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, overlaying images of money). In response, Greenblatt wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing that Trump has always been respectful of his many Jewish friends and employees, and had encouraged Greenblatt to take time off work to observe the Sabbath. He said that the star was a sheriff’s star, not a star of David.

Unlike Trump, who during the campaign took a very hard-line on immigrants and refugees, Greenblatt, the son of Jewish refugees from Europe, has written positively about his immigrant heritage, saying that America had given “refuge” to his family members, who “benefited tremendously by being able to raise the next generation in freedom.”

TRUMP’S TOP 3 CONTENDERS FOR SECRETARY OF STATE ARE ALL FIRMLY PRO-ISRAEL

It will likely be some time before Trump appoints members of his cabinet. But the three persons who are believed to be top of Trump’s short-list for secretary of state all have strong pro-Israel records.

They are: John Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005-2006 in the George W. Bush administration. As long ago as 1991, Bolton played a key role in the successful U.S. effort to revoke the notorious U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution while assistant secretary for international organization affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Another possibility for secretary of state is Newt Gingrich, who served as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999. Gingrich is a staunch supporter of Israel and has repeatedly criticized the Palestinian Authority for refusing to compromise and negotiate with Israel in recent years.

A third name in the running is Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Corker has said that the Obama administration “got fleeced” on the Iran deal. Corker criticized Obama for giving up on “anytime, anywhere” inspections of Iranian nuclear sites, and for effectively allowing Iran, “to move from having its nuclear program dismantled to having its nuclear proliferation managed.”

Tom Gross adds: I think Hillary Clinton, had she become president, would also, on the whole, have been pro-Israel, and more so than Barack Obama. But Israel was not (and nor should it have been) a major issue in this campaign.

Video of the week: Mike Pence gives direct message to Israel- http://tinyurl.com/jhpw6wo

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