RUTHFULLY YOURS

LAME DUCK EFFORT TO WEAKEN ISRAEL RSK
The White House is working on plans for reviving long-stalled Middle East negotiations before President Barack Obama leaves office, including a possible United Nations Security Council resolution that would outline steps toward a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, according to senior U.S. officials.

The internal discussions 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 Mr. Obama’s two terms in the White House, the officials said.

The strongest element on the list of options under consideration would be U.S. support for a Security Council resolution calling on both sides to compromise on key issues, something Israel had opposed and Washington has repeatedly vetoed in the past.

Other initiatives could include a presidential speech and a joint statement from the Middle East Quartet, an international group comprising the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

A senior administration official said no final decisions have been made and that Mr. Obama is considering a range of possibilities. The timing of any new White House move hasn’t been determined, but officials said it would be later this year.

The White House offered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a meeting with Mr. Obama later this month, but Mr. Netanyahu declined, administration officials said Monday.

By wading into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the final months of his presidency, Mr. Obama would be following a path some of his predecessors have taken. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both pushed for an agreement late in their second terms, but neither was able to bridge longtime divisions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

The largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel.

Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last? One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand.

Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.

From the Stanford Review editorial board’s “The Case for a Western Civilization Requirement at Stanford,” Feb. 21:

National debates erupted over Stanford’s decision to remove Western Culture requirements during the 1980s. We believe the University must reignite a national debate and reinstate a Western Civilization requirement. Therefore, the Stanford Review is petitioning to place an initiative on the undergraduate spring ballot urging the Faculty Senate to instate a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement, replacing Thinking Matters. The initiative text reads:
“In accordance with Stanford’s commitment to educating its students, and in recognition of the unique role Western culture has had in shaping our political, economic, and social institutions, Stanford University should mandate that freshmen complete a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” . . .

Western civilization, more so than any other, unleashes disruptive technology on the world; and Western history brims with examples of technological revolutions and their effects on warfare, politics, culture, economics, and poverty. Technologists and policymakers working on driverless cars, for example, would surely benefit from knowledge of how transportation innovations impacted urbanization patterns, employment, and culture.

But these future business and government leaders will not have this insight. 59% of Stanford’s Class of 2019 intends to major in engineering. These students will not know the history that society needs them to grasp. Stanford must equip these students with the knowledge necessary to attain “direct usefulness in life,” as our Founding Grant requires.

– Nurit Greenger, Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) Founder & President introduced the Program to the Tennessee Legislators in Nashville, Tennessee, causing a wave of great interest and much support.C.H.I.P‘s entire vision began with Whitwell [Tennessee] Middle School Paper Clips Project and the Whitwell Children Holocaust Memorial. This is a project about the discrimination of others, about the Holocaust, the result of the Nazis discrimination of Jews. Whitwell Middle School Paper Clips Project has set the case in point that a change could be made, one young student at the time.
For the past two years C.H.I.P, that has set itself up to the task to take middle school students to Israel and thus start building a generation with the emphasize on the teaching of basic western values of tolerance and indiscriminating behavior, along the values that are captured in the Ten Commandments, has been gathering growing support.
“C.H.I.P, means chipping away at ignorance” stated Mrs. Linda Hooper, the visionary of the Paper Clips Project, who is leading the way for 22 Whitwell Middle School students and 10 chaperones to partake in the C.H.I.P Project this coming May, 2016.
Assisted by Lydia Taylor of Hayovel who initiated the Tennessee legislators’ introduction to C.H.I.P, this past week in February, Ms. Greenger was invited to meet with the several Tennessee legislators: Tennessee General Assembly Senator Janice Bowling, David Alexander-Tennessee State Representative and Randy Boyd Commissioner, Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. The visit has captured the endorsement of C.H.I.P by the legislators.

Who supports the Islamic State (ISIS) and why do Sunni nations seem to tolerate it?

Patrick Sookhdeo, a Muslim convert to Christianity and scholar of Islamic faith and politics, “suggests a pessimistic prospect; Islamic State is likely to remain a persistent threat, even if it suffers overwhelming defeats.” So reads his recent book Unmasking Islamic State: Revealing Their Motivation, Theology, and End Time Predictions, an insightful primer into the Islamic State (IS) jihadist polity currently ravaging Mesopotamia and beyond.

Islamic State “is the most well organized Sunni jihadi organization in the Middle East and may well have the most sophisticated structure of any terrorist organization currently active,” Sookhdeo writes. Islamic State presents an alliance of convenience between high ranking military officers and officials from Saddam Hussein’s deposed Baathist dictatorship and jihadist organizations that originally fought Iraq’s American-led regime change. The result is a “powerful fusion of Salafi/Jihadi ideology with professional military and counterintelligence strategies and urban warfare tactics, as well as bureaucratic know how needed to run state.”

“With the declaration of the caliphate Islamic State has become the leading jihadi group worldwide, supplanting Al-Qaeda [AQ] as perceived leader of the radical Islamist movements,” assesses Sookhdeo. Kidnapping for extortion, looting of bank gold deposits and other valuables like antiquities, and black market oil sales mean that “Islamic State has become the richest jihadi organization in the world,” worth over $2 billion in some estimates. Having “constructed a viable territorial state,” Islamic State “is constantly opening up new, unexpected fronts and bringing other jihadi groups under its umbrella” globally. The “information strategy now employed by Patrick Sookhdeo, Andrew Harrod, Islamic State, Saudi, ISIS, ISIL makes most of Al-Qaeda’s efforts seem old-fashioned.”