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Ruth King

Troubles of a Two-State Solution Why a Palestinian state would be a disaster for Israel and the region. Joseph Puder

Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) CEO created a bit of an uproar among certain Jewish organizations when he stated at the AIPAC conference earlier this month that, “We must work toward that future: two states for two people. One Jewish with secure and defensible borders, and one Palestinian with its own flag and its own future.” It was a reiteration of last year’s call on the U.S. administration to undertake steps that “Could create a climate that encourages the Palestinians to negotiate in pursuit of the goal we desire: a Jewish state of Israel living side by side in peace and security with a demilitarized Palestinian state.”

There is no question that Howard Kohr’s motives are pure and honorable in seeking a secure Israel alongside a peaceful and demilitarized Palestinian state. Unfortunately reality dictates otherwise. At the moment we actually have a need to solve more than a two-state question. We have a third state question and that is the Hamas ruled Gaza Strip. Hamas has vowed to fight until the liberation of all of Palestine and the destruction of Israel. The Los Angeles Times reported (March 1, 2017), “In a shift, the new document (as it relates to the Hamas Covenant-JP), formally endorses the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with Jerusalem as its capital, as part of a ‘national consensus’ among Palestinians (this was during the reconciliation process with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority-JP). While that may be a tacit acknowledgment of Israel’s existence, the revision stops well short of recognizing Israel, and reasserts calls for armed resistance toward a ‘complete liberation of Palestine’ from the river to the sea.”

The attempted assassination of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah earlier this month in Gaza, put a stop to the reconciliation efforts between Hamas and the PA, which is dominated by Fatah. Fatah spokesperson and Revolutionary Council member, Osama al-Qawasmi said, “Hamas is fully responsible for this cowardly operation that targeted the homeland, reconciliation, and unity. This cowardly act is outside of our values and national relations, and has repercussions.” It is clear that even if PA President Mahmoud Abbas should return to the negotiating table, and that is doubtful, Hamas will continue its campaign of terror against Israel. Hamas is unwilling to give up control of its arms, its rockets, or its mortars, to the PA.

SOUTH AFRICA: MALEMA EXPLAINS THE LEGAL MEANS TO EXPEL ALL BUT “ESSENTIAL” WHITE FARMERS…SEE VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8yES9IOp1Y
Julius Sello Malema is a Member of Parliament and the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a radical leftist and racial nationalist South African political party, which he founded in July 2013.

South African firebrand Julius Malema explains to a TV interviewer how white farmers might be stripped of their land via legal means, with those considered “essential” perhaps allowed to remain on long-term leases — or not, as the case may be. As an endorsement of caprice as the rule of law’s guiding principle it is nasty stuff, although not quite so toxic as this clip in which Mr Malena enjoys a gloating moment of tribal triumphalism while assuring the crowd that it is white South Africans’ turn to suffer.

Another Steele Report Sheds Light on the Death of Russian Media Tycoon By Rick Moran

Christopher Steele, the author of the Steele Dossier that alleges Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, also penned a report for the FBI that supposedly sheds light on one of the most puzzling incidents in recent history.

Mikhail Lesin was a former Russian media tycoon who was minister of the press early in Vladimir Putin’s tenure as president. Later, he played a role in stifling Russian independent media and used thuggish tactics to acquire huge holdings in Russian media companies.

Lesin was found dead in his DC Dupont Circle Hotel room in 2015. He died as a result of head and body trauma — an “accident,” the coroner said. Authorities say that Lesin died as a result of multiple falls after going on a two-day drinking binge.

But nobody ever bought that explanation. It was 11 months before a severely redacted autopsy report was released and to this day, even with many FOIA requests and digging by reporters, the mystery surrounding Lesin’s death persists.

Steele gave the FBI a report gleaned from several Russian sources that states that Lesin was murdered unintentionally — that he had a falling out with an oligarch close to Putin who wanted to send a message to Lesin but killed him by accident. The bureau got the report from Steele as it was helping D.C. police investigate the case.

BuzzFeed has the story:

Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.

The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.

Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.
The Steele report is not the FBI’s only source for this account of Lesin’s death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele.

Even more surprising, federal prosecutors called witnesses before a sitting grand jury in 2016. It is not known what those witnesses testified to, but 150 pages of information were amassed and are being sought by numerous news outlets. CONTINUE AT SITE

Haley to UNSC: ‘We Should All be Ashamed’ for Russia, Assad Bombardment of Civilians During Ceasefire By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley lashed out at the UN Security Council during a Tuesday briefing on the humanitarian crisis in Syria for not being “responsible” and acting against the Assad regime and his allies Russia and Iran as they ignored a UN ceasefire.

“Siege. Starve. And surrender. This is the awful, unceasing rhythm of the Syrian war. As we meet here today, the third step – surrender – is taking place in eastern Ghouta. After years of enduring siege and starvation, residents are surrendering eastern Ghouta. The terrible irony of this moment must be stated and acknowledged: in the 30 days since the Security Council demanded a ceasefire, the bombardment of the people of eastern Ghouta has only increased. And now, at the end of the so-called ceasefire, eastern Ghouta has nearly fallen,” Haley said.

“History will not be kind when it judges the effectiveness of this Council in relieving the suffering of the Syrian people. Seventeen hundred Syrian civilians were killed in just the last month alone. Hospitals and ambulances are deliberately targeted with bombs and artillery. Schools are hit, like the school in eastern Ghouta that was bombed just last week, killing 15 children. Siege. Starve. And surrender,” she added.

About 1,700 civilians have been killed in the city over the past month; about 500 of the dead were women and children.

“I would ask my Security Council colleagues to consider whether we are wrong when we point to Russian and Iranian forces working alongside Assad as being responsible for this slaughter,” Haley said. “Russia voted for the so-called ‘ceasefire’ in Syria last month. More than that, Russia took its time painstakingly negotiating the resolution demanding the ceasefire.”

Haley noted that during those negotiations “we could see our Russian friends constantly leaving the room to confer with their Syrian counterparts.”

“The possibilities for what was going on are only two – either Russia was informing their Syrian colleagues about the content of the negotiations, or Russia was taking directions from the Syrian colleagues about the content of the negotiations. Either way, Russia cynically negotiated a ceasefire it instantly defied,” she said.

Saying they’re bombing “terrorists” as they target civilian neighborhoods is a “transparent excuse for the Russians and Assad to maintain their assault,” the ambassador added.

“…Their blatantly false narratives will not keep us from telling the world about Russia’s central role in bombing the Syrian people into submission.”

Haley told the council “we should all be ashamed” for the fact that, with the ceasefire ignored, Assad and his allies now control 80 percent of Ghouta. CONTINUE AT SITE

One Swallow Does Not Make A Summer By Marilyn Penn

Aristotle said it first but no one cared to remind Anderson Cooper or Sixty Minutes of that saying when they headlined Stormy Daniels’ appearance on the show as Porn Star’s Affair With Trump. Turns out to have been Brief Encounter more than Affair to Remember, specifically a one time experience. For many $130,000 would have seemed more than generous remuneration, even for a woman with a sense of self as inflated as her chest, but Stormy has been fortunate in receiving even bigger offers for her ability to add to the media’s hate campaign against the truculent tweeter. The serious journalists who have occupied seats on Sixty Minutes must be chagrined at having Stormy earn the show its highest ratings in years. As for Anderson, he seems to have become the reporter with a specialty niche of asking former Playboy centerfolds and current porn-hackers whether they or their johns used protection during sex. One wonders whether he would ask a gay compatriot a similarly salacious question and whether his concern was for the spread of venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy or just to experience the frisson of rudeness.

Stormy claims that she went public because she feared for her child’s life after receiving a threat from an unknown man on the street; this might explain why she would notify the police but makes us wonder why a woman who occupies one’s entire field of vision would want to amplify that target for additional unhinged people who would see her up close on t.v. Is it possible that someone who has been in a dubious business, known for using underage performers, might have fibbed about her motivation?

The Teenage Demagogues By Rich Lowry

Stoneman Douglas students’ passion is not wisdom.

All you needed to know about student activist David Hogg’s speech at the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., over the weekend was that he affixed a price tag on the microphone to symbolize how much National Rifle Association money Senator Marco Rubio took for the lives of students in Florida.

The stunt wasn’t out of place. Indeed, it perfectly encapsulated the braying spirit of the student gun-control advocacy in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting.

These young activists are making our public debate even more poisonous and less civil, and are doing it as teenagers. They are precocious that way.

The Stoneman Douglas students experienced a horrific trauma. No one can deny their grief or blame them for being impassioned. And allowance has to be made for the fact that they are teenagers, who universally believe that they know better than their hapless elders (Hogg says the problem is that their parents don’t know how to use a democracy).

Yet none of that excuses their scurrilous smears of the other side in the gun debate. The student activists presume that there is a ready solution to mass shootings that everyone knows, and the only reason why someone might not act on this universally accepted policy is malice or corruption. This makes the other side the equivalent of murderers.

A RALLY IN LONDON, A RALLY IN PARIS FROM TOM GROSS

The 85-year-old child Holocaust survivor murdered in her Paris apartment who I wrote about yesterday morning, has now been named as Mireille Knoll. Besides being repeatedly stabbed and burned, police sources say she had her throat slit, and that anti-Semitism was the prime motive for her murder. Two suspects have been arrested.

As a nine-year-old girl, she was one of the survivors of the notorious Vel d’hiv round-up of Paris’s Jews by French police acting for the Nazis in 1942 — events depicted in the 2010 film Sarah’s Key, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, which I recommended in this dispatch.

Knoll is the 11th person murdered in an act of anti-Semitism in France in the past 12 years, and many others, including children, have been badly injured.

A “silent march” outside her home in Paris, initiated by a French friend of mine and subscriber to this email list, is planned for tomorrow in her memory. It is expected to draw thousands of people. Unlike the march yesterday in London, in which only a handful of non-Jews joined British Jews in protesting anti-Semitism, significant numbers of French non-Jews are expected to join tomorrow’s vigil.

FRONT PAGE NEWS

Below are a selection of today’s British newspaper covers. Only the Guardian, in denial about the ugly nature of the British far left as ever, talks of ‘perceived’ anti-Semitism.

“MORE REMARKABLE IS THAT IT IS HAPPENING IN BRITAIN”

As the left-wing Israeli paper Haaretz writes:

The rally by Jews outside parliament in London was “unprecedented. The Jewish community in a modern Western democracy is accusing one of the country’s largest mainstream political parties and its leader, who may well be the country’s next prime minister, of tolerating and enabling anti-Semitism. More remarkable is that it is happening in Britain, where the leaders of the Jewish establishment are notoriously timid and routinely shy away from any hint of controversy. And to the Labour Party, which historically fought against any racism or discrimination against minorities…”

“There will be no happy end to this sorry saga. At 68, and after nearly half a century of political activism, Corbyn is too old and dogmatic to change. His attitudes can’t shift. In the some way he is incapable of acknowledging that Russia was almost certainly behind last month’s poisoning of a former double agent in Salisbury, even though his beloved Soviet Union was long ago replaced in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy, he is incapable of grasping that many of his fellow-travelers on the radical left are judeophobic. And many of those who now cling to Corbyn as their savior are equally incapable of hearing any ill spoken of him.”

Surviving Boko Haram A survivor shares her story. Jack Kerwick

Unsurprisingly, Michelle Obama’s “hashtag” campaign from four years back failed abysmally to prevail upon the violent jihadist group Boko Haram to return the hundreds of Nigerian school girls who it abducted.

And while the American media gave audiences the impression that this attack by militant Muslims against young Christian girls was a one-off, the truth is that Boko Haram has been conducting a reign of terror upon Nigeria’s Christian inhabitants for years. When men are included, the total number of victims of Boko Haram is estimated to be at 20,000.

Some, like 17 year-old Esther, have managed to return home.

On a day that started like any other in October of 2015, Esther’s life would forever change. Esther’s mother had already passed away. She lived with her sick father, for whom she cared when she wasn’t in school. But the day that Boko Haram besieged her town would be the last day that she would ever see him alive.

Esther and her father heard the first gunshots. They tried to escape, but the terrorists already had their home surrounded. Open Doors shares what happened next:

“The rebel militants struck down her [Esther’s] father and left him in a heap on the ground. Esther became a Boko Haram captive. As rebel fighters carried off her and several other young women in their town to their hideout in the Sambisa Forest (where Boko Haram drove thousands of those they kidnapped), she continued to look back, her eyes fixed on her father.”

Millionaire Poverty Pimps Fight ‘Income Inequality’ There’s a reason Washington D.C. is the most unequal city in the country. Daniel Greenfield

Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren, three lefty millionaires, got together to solve “income inequality” in a town hall broadcast live from the Capitol visitors center.

Washington D.C., where two out of the three parasites do business, has the worst income inequality in the country. The bottom fifth of Washington D.C. account for just 2% of the city’s income. It has one of the highest poverty rates in the country and the highest food stamp use. And under Obama, the Imperial City of the politicians and the poor was surrounded by some of the wealthiest districts in the country.

“Income Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class,” the Sanders, Warren and Moore town hall, comes to progs from the most unequal and oligarchic city in America

If Bernie, Liz and Michael really want to see income inequality, they can take a walk away from the marble and glass edifices of big government to see what big government had wrought. It isn’t any of their usual villains, the corporations and banks, who made Washington D.C. so miserable.

It’s the triumph of socialism.

Washington D.C. and its bedroom communities are what the entire country would look like if the left got its way. A socialist apartheid state divided between the business of government and the poor.

But the three socialist stooges aren’t just in the business of politics. They’re millionaire poverty pimps.

Bernie Sanders made over $1 million pushing conspiracy theories about income inequality. Denouncing big business let him rent a private Delta 767 with a menu of herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache and fine cheeses. The Sanders clan is up to 3 homes now and Bernie is using his clout to get two of his kids elected to political offices. Who better to lecture us on the “Rise of Oligarchy” than an oligarch?

A ‘Duty to Hate Britain’ by Douglas Murray

At Brooklands College in July 2017, Ahmed Hassan was awarded a prize as “student of the year”. He used the £20 Amazon voucher he received to purchase the first of the ingredients he needed to build his bomb.

Mr Justice Haddon-Cave seems almost to suggest that “violating” the law of the Quran and Islam is an offense in itself — one worth noting alongside the crime of putting a bomb on a packed commuter train.

That the judge’s pronouncement was superfluous is obvious. That it is incorrect is at least equally so. But worst is that it will further erode the belief of the citizenry in their lawmakers.

Last week, Ahmed Hassan was sentenced to a minimum term of 34 years in prison. The previous September, he had stepped onto the District line of the London Underground and left a homemade bomb on the train. At Parson’s Green tube station, the device detonated. Fortunately for the commuters, which included many children on their way to school, only the detonator of the bomb went off. On its own, it created a fireball which ran along the roof of the carriage, singeing the hair of many passengers and causing an immediate stampede away from the blast and a number of injuries. The main explosive material the of bomb, however, which was packed with shrapnel, including bolts, nails and knives, failed to detonate. Had it done so, the United Kingdom would have seen — for the fourth time in a few months — dozens more dead victims, including school children, carried out in body bags.

All this happened because of a young man of Iraqi origin, who should never have been in the UK in the first place. Hassan moved into Europe among the migrant flows of 2015. He ended up at the “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais — a place to which celebrities in the UK consistently go in order to implore the British people to take in the people who are living there. A particular cry of these celebrities (figures such as the actress Juliet Stevenson) is that the “child migrants” in particular should be taken in by the UK. The call is flawed, not least, in that it suggests that anybody who breaks the existing asylum procedures of the European Union and simply pushes their way to the front of the queue is somebody who will be rewarded for this act.