JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER.
1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
LUKE 21:28-29
28 And when these things begin to come to pass,(ALL THE PROPHECY SIGNS FROM THE BIBLE) then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption (RAPTURE) draweth nigh.
29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree,(ISRAEL) and all the trees;(ALL INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES)
30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.(ISRAEL LITERALLY BECAME AND INDEPENDENT COUNTRY JUST BEFORE SUMMER IN MAY 14,1948.)
JOEL 2:3,30
3 A fire devoureth (ATOMIC BOMB) before them;(RUSSIAN-ARAB-MUSLIM ARMIES AGAINST ISRAEL) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(ATOMIC BOMB AFFECT)
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB)(BECAUSE NUKES HAVE BEEN USED ON ISRAELS ENEMIES)(GOD PROTECTS ISRAEL AND ALWAYS WILL)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)(THIS IS AN ATOMIC BOMB EFFECT)
EZEKIEL 20:47
47 And say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.
ZEPHANIAH 1:18
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD'S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
MALACHI 4:1
1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven;(FROM ATOMIC BOMBS) and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE
Czech president: Netanyahu offered his Jerusalem home to be our embassy-Apparently joking, Milos Zeman says he hopes gesture 'still valid, because it could greatly reduce the cost of this relocation'-TOI-JUN 18,18-BY JTA
Czech President Milos Zeman said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to give up his own home in Jerusalem if the Czech Republic opens an embassy there.Zeman said this, possibly as a joke, during a speech last week at a gala of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.Zeman, a staunch supporter of Israel who supports moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, praised US President Donald Trump for initiating in December the move of the US embassy to the Israeli capital. Zeman said he had supported moving the Czech embassy years ago, according to a transcription of his speech that was posted this week on the official website of the Czech presidency.“That’s not all, Bibi Netanyahu told me: ‘If you do [the same] I will give you my own house for your embassy,’” Zeman said, adding: “I strongly hope that the offer is still valid because it could greatly reduce the cost of this relocation.”The European Union, of which the Czech Republic is a member, opposes the US embassy’s move to Jerusalem, which Brussels says should occur only after the conclusion of a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority. It also claims Jerusalem as the capital for a future Palestinian state. Netanyahu has called on other nations to follow the example of the United States. So far, only Guatemala and Paraguay have followed suit.The Czech foreign ministry, which is under the authority of the Czech prime minister, not the president, has said the embassy will stay put for now.Zeman has called this “cowardice.”Unfortunately, he added during his speech at the AIPAC gala dinner in Prague, “I’m afraid that only 10 percent of the total population is brave, maybe less. That’s why I like Israel. Let me end with one sentence from an old Jewish prayer: Next year in Jerusalem!”The Czech acting prime minister, Andrej Babis, in April said his country will open an honorary consulate in Jerusalem but Zeman later said that consulate’s opening is part of an open-ended effort that will end with the relocation of the Czech embassy to Jerusalem.Also during the AIPAC gala, Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, presented Zeman with a piece of a monument that was inaugurated earlier this month at Terezin, the site of a former Nazi concentration camp. The new monument features a massive rock suspended over the ground by a circular brace.“The nature of the stone is meant to capture the eternity of grief, and its immensity the magnitude of the burden of the Jewish people,” Kantor said at the inauguration ceremony on June 4. He also said the monument is to serve as a “reminder of the lessons of the Holocaust” amid rising levels of anti-Semitic violence in Europe.
Palestinians throw cold water on ‘meaningless’ US peace push-Abbas spokesman says next week's Kushner and Greenblatt Middle East trip 'won't achieve anything' since the Trump administration is trying to circumvent PA leadership-By TOI staff-JUN 18,18
Ahead of a visit to the region next week by the Trump administration’s Middle East peace team, the Palestinian Authority on Saturday dismissed the expected US peace plan as “meaningless” and said the series of meetings being held were “a waste of time” because they did not have the support of the Palestinians.“The round of meetings that began in New York, whose purpose is to bring a meaningless plan, won’t achieve anything,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman, was quoted as saying by the Ynet news site.Abu Rudeineh was referring to Friday’s meeting in New York between United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, peace envoy Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s special adviser and son-in-law. The White House said they discussed US peace efforts and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.Kushner and Greenblatt are set to discuss the two issues during their trip to the Middle East for talks with regional leaders. They are scheduled to visit Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar.The US officials will be in Israel Friday, June 22 through Saturday, June 23. They have no meetings scheduled with Palestinian Authority leaders.Their tour of the region comes amid a nadir in relations between the United States and the Palestinians. The PA has refused to speak to administration officials since the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last December and subsequently relocated the US embassy to the city last month. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.“Without the agreement of the Palestinian people, the fate of the series of meetings will be a total failure,” said Abu Rudeineh.“It is a waste of time and destined to fail, as long as the attempt to circumvent the legitimate Palestinian institutions continues,” he added, according to Channel 10.Abu Rudeineh said Wednesday any plan that does not include a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem or address Palestinian refugees will be unsuccessful, according to the official Wafa news agency.Israel has long insisted that the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, as defined by the Palestinians, is a nonstarter in peace negotiations. The UN categorizes as refugees not just those Palestinians who were displaced or expelled from their homes in 1947 and 1948, but also all of their descendants. As a consequence, accepting the “right of return” would mean millions of Palestinians being allowed to enter Israel, ending Israel’s majority Jewish status.Kushner and Greenblatt’s latest visit also comes after weeks of deadly violence along the Gaza border, with tens of thousands of Palestinians taking part in the ongoing Hamas-backed “March of Return” protests at the border.Gaza faces shortages of electricity and drinkable water. Israel and Egypt maintain a blockade on the Strip that they say is designed to prevent Hamas from importing weapons and other goods that could be used to build military equipment or cross-border tunnels.The deteriorating living conditions have been cited by security officials as a major factor fueling the violent clashes on Israel’s border, as well as a debilitating sense of desperation.A US official told Channel 10 this week that the White House has no clear plan for resolving the humanitarian situation in the coastal enclave and was seeking solutions from Israeli officials and others in the region.Israel has said the humanitarian situation will not improve until Hamas returns the bodies of two IDF soldiers and the two civilian captives it holds. It blames Hamas for the dire reality, charging the terror group with diverting millions in aid to purchase weapons, dig tunnels, manufacture rockets and train its military wing, instead of using it for the welfare of the people.Gaza’s woes have been exacerbated by an ongoing dispute between Hamas and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has cut the salaries it pays to workers in Gaza and imposed various sanctions, including cutting payments for electricity supplies to the enclave.
Incendiary kites, balloons hit Gaza periphery, sparking fires-Firefighters battle blazes near Sderot, Kisufim; one fire raging near a military post-By TOI staff-JUN 18,18
Fires erupted in at least seven locations in the Gaza periphery on Saturday, caused by incendiary kites and balloons flown into Israel from the Strip.Firefighters were battling flames near the town of Sderot. According to the Ynet news website, one fire was raging near a military post on the border. Firefighters were at the scene and there was no danger to the soldiers.Earlier, firefighters put out blazes in the Kisufim area of the western Negev. The fires came amid an intense heat wave, with temperatures in the area hitting 40°C (104°F.) On Friday incendiary balloons and kites set 11 fires inside Israel, which were extinguished by the fire services and local volunteers. A booby-trapped balloon was also flown into Israeli territory, landing on a highway in the Sha’ar Hanegev region. Police sappers were called to the scene and destroyed the balloon and the explosive device attached to it in a controlled explosion, police said.Hamas threats to send 5,000 flaming kites and balloons into Israel failed to materialize, with many Palestinians busy with the three-day Eid al-Fitr holiday that caps the fasting month of Ramadan. Eid is traditionally a time of family visits and festive meals, with children getting new clothes, haircuts and gifts.Attention may also have focused on the World Cup in Russia. Two matches featuring Arab teams took place Friday afternoon as Egypt — without the iconic Mohammad Salah — took on Uruguay, and Iran played Morocco.At Kibbutz Nir Am Friday, children and residents launched balloons carrying candy towards the Palestinian enclave, Hadashot TV news reported.Nir Am has suffered a number of fires sparked by burning kites flown from Gaza.Hadashot news reported that Israel for the first time used a new radar to find kites and balloons, which were then intercepted by drones. The radar, initially designed to detect gliders, was calibrated to pick up the kites.Also Friday Israeli military aircraft fired warning shots at a group of Palestinians in Gaza involved in the launching of burning balloons.The method of firing warning shots appeared to be a new tactic that the military was looking to adopt in order to counter the threat posed by these kites and balloons, which have burned thousands of acres of farmland, forests and nature reserves in the regions around the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials.Since March 30, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have launched hundreds of kites and helium balloons bearing flammable materials, and occasionally explosives, into Israeli territory, sparking near-daily fires.The military has sought to counter these kites and balloons with teams of soldiers operating drones. Israeli officials have deemed the drone program a success, but it has not provided a perfect solution.
National security expert leads the charge to keep US Jews voting Democratic-Halie Soifer, newly elected head of Jewish Democratic Council of America, must deal with Republican challenges and a divided party in the lead-up to the November midterms-By Ron Kampeas-TOI-JUN 18,18
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Halie Soifer says her transition from national security expert to political operative started with a crisis of violence: the deadly neo-Nazi march last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.Soifer says the march, which culminated in a car-ramming attack on counter-protesters that killed one and injured at least 20, spurred the establishment of the organization she now leads as executive director, the Jewish Democratic Council of America.The JDCA accelerated its launch by three months, to August, because of President Donald Trump’s equivocal response to the violence, when he said both sides — neo-Nazis and counter-protesters — were at fault and include “very fine people.”“President Trump’s outrageous handling of the tragic events in Charlottesville compelled us to speak out now,” the group’s founders said at the time. It also offered a political opportunity for Democrats.Soifer says that moment also launched a reexamination of her priorities, leading her to become the JDCA’s first executive director last month.“At that moment it was very clear, unlike even past Republican administrations, this administration had no qualms about affiliating itself and even sympathizing with anti-Semites,” she said.Soifer was at the top of her national security game: Having advised Obama administration UN Ambassador Samantha Power, she was then in the same role on the staff of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., one of the most talked-about politicians likely to seek the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination.“I wanted to do something political,” she said in an interview with JTA last week in the offices of Bluelight Strategies, a PR firm that does work for Jewish groups and Democrats. “I wanted to help shape the composition of Congress as opposed to working for one member.”There are other likely factors in the establishment of the JDCA, a successor to the National Jewish Democratic Council, which withered and all but disappeared after the 2014 midterm elections. Democrats traditionally garner the vast majority of the Jewish vote, but Republicans have been making inroads in recent years.Trump, with his plainly stated biases about minorities and women, was expected drive away Jewish voters. Instead he persuaded 24 percent of Jews to vote for him, according to exit polls — commensurate with George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008, politicians regarded with affection by Jewish organizational leaders, even those with political differences.In 2012, the NJDC played a role in keeping Florida Democratic with a door-knocking drive in the final days of the campaign; Obama edged Mitt Romney by just under 1 percent. In 2016, Florida went for Trump, winning the state by 1.2 percent.The party and the Hillary Clinton campaign also had Jewish outreach teams in Florida and other states in 2016. It’s unlikely that a separate Jewish outreach effort would have changed much, but its absence was notable.Soifer won’t venture a guess as to whether she thinks the NJDC absence made a difference in 2016, but acknowledges that JDCA was created “to fill a vacuum and in response to this administration.”Soifer, not having been associated with the NJDC, said she doesn’t know why it disappeared. A number of the JDCA board members were involved with NJDC, many others were not. According to a former NJDC official, establishing a new organization was a way of attracting new blood. Another former official said a defamation lawsuit against the organization filed by Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who is also a major funder of the GOP and pro-Israel causes, was too much of a distraction to sustain other activities. NJDC won the lawsuit.Soifer says Trump’s presidency is propelling Jewish interest in the midterms.“What I’ve seen is younger people, and especially women, want to get involved, many for the first time,” she said, anticipating door-knocking campaigns in swing districts with big Jewish communities as the November vote approaches.Soifer, 39, exudes energy, speaking forcefully, in paragraphs. She headed Jewish outreach for the Obama campaign in Florida in 2008 when she was barely 30. In 2006 she was a star of sorts to Washington wonks: Her then-boss, Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., agreed to let the Sundance Channel track him and his staff for a reality show, “The Hill.”Soifer was a much-watched presence on the show. She ditched a Republican boyfriend for a Democrat, then spent the series debating whether they should move in together. (They eventually married.) The Hill newspaper called her “ridiculously idealistic.” Soon after, she left Wexler’s office to obtain a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Middle East Studies and international economics.She is now coupling her ideology with her organizing skills, but envisions a big tent: The JDCA announced its first eight endorsements this week and last, all moderates in the Hillary Clinton mold, but she won’t turn away the Bernie Sanders wing of the party as she seeks out more candidates to endorse.Soifer inherits a challenge that grew in part from the 2016 campaign — and it was via Sanders, not Trump. Sanders, who is Jewish, ran an unexpectedly strong challenge against Clinton in the primaries. He was and remains more willing to criticize Israel than Democratic politicians of the past, and insists on America’s role as an “honest broker” in the region.In January, the Pew Research Center reported that the share of Republicans who sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians is growing, while Democratic sympathy for Israel is slipping. The political action committee affiliated with J Street, the liberal Middle East policy group that is consistently critical of the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced last week that more than half of the Democratic caucuses in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate accepted its endorsements.Republicans this season are not hesitating to use Israel against Democrats they find questionable. In Virginia, Leslie Cockburn is a congressional candidate in a district that Democrats hope to pick up and a former journalist who co-authored a book in 1991 lambasting the US-Israel alliance. The state’s GOP describes her as “anti-Semitic.”Matt Brooks, who directs the Republican counterpart to the JDCA, the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA that J Street figures large in the challenges facing Soifer.“Currently J Street is raising millions of dollars for Democrats and is seen as the dominant presence in the Democratic Party,” Brooks told JTA. “It’s going to be hard for [JDCA] to compete against them and have the kind of impact J Street is. I think one area where JDCA can make an impact and differentiate themselves is to come up with a plan and take a leadership role in working to address the troubling trend of weakening support for Israel amongst Dems as we’ve been seeing lately in all the recent polling.”JDCA is pro-Israel, Soifer says, but she turns around questions about Democrats and Israel to focus instead on the other party.Instead she describes a divisive president and Republican Party, citing the firestorm around David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel. Democrats have accused Friedman of not inviting them to the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem last month, and he said recently that Republicans are more pro-Israel than Democrats.“I don’t think it’s Bernie Sanders who is politicizing Israel. I have never seen a US diplomat at any embassy speak in such political terms or treat an event like the opening of the embassy in such a politicized manner,” Soifer said, referencing her years of working at the State Department.On Twitter, Brooks welcomed her aboard.“Congrats!!!” he wrote. “Look forward to working with you.”Grinning, Soifer says “I don’t envision us working closely together. I hope we have a cordial relationship.”
As Denmark considers a ban on circumcision, some Jews consider leaving-With parliament weighing new non-binding proposal, many in Jewish community feel caught between Islamist extremism and the xenophobia it triggers in their secularist society-By Cnaan Liphshiz-TOI-JUN 18,18
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (JTA) — In 2015, a jihadist killed a Jewish guard outside this capital city’s main synagogue, where Hannah Bentow was having her bat mitzvah party.Her sense of security as a Jew in Denmark was shattered, she told JTA last week. Bentow and dozens of teenagers stayed inside for hours as police pursued and later killed the man who gunned down the volunteer guard, Dan Uzan.But Bentow said her decision to leave for Israel as soon as she finishes high school was sealed and reaffirmed by the precedent-setting steps undertaken this year in this Scandinavian country toward banning nonmedical circumcision of boys. The Danish parliament is set to become the first in the European Union to vote on a nonbinding motion calling to prohibit the practice.The ruling parties said they would oppose a ban or a call for one, but the debate about it “makes me feel like I don’t belong, and like Denmark doesn’t want me to belong, either,” Bentow said.Her words echo a sentiment shared by many Danish Jews, who are questioning their future in a nation where they increasingly feel caught between Islamist extremism and the xenophobia it triggers in their secularist society.When Denmark’s Jewish minority of 9,000 people is “so pressed already, with armed police at our school and armed troops at shul, this [debate on circumcision] is sucking the marrow out of wanting to be Jewish,” said Mette Bentow, the mother of Hannah and two sons. Mette Bentow said her boys are the first in three generations of her Jewish family who were circumcised.The language of the draft motion on circumcision that is pending a vote in parliament cites only child welfare concerns.“The introduction of an 18-year minimum age for circumcision puts children’s interests and rights at the forefront,” the text states. It calls for a jail term of up to six years for anyone who performs a circumcision, and holds parents and guardians responsible whether the act happened in Denmark or not.More than 50,000 people signed a petition on the Danish parliament’s website endorsing the text, which equates nonmedical circumcision of boys with female genital mutilation.In Denmark and other European countries, campaigns to ban nonmedical circumcision of boys — a religious initiation rite that Muslims call khitan and Jews call milah – have been brewing for years.But Danish promoters of the ban made a breakthrough following an amendment this year saying that petitions that receive 50,000 signatures within six months of their posting on the parliament’s website are expected to be brought to a vote as a nonbinding draft motion in parliament. The circumcision proposal cleared the signature hurdle within four months.To many Danish Jews, the arguments about child welfare hide the real motivation behind the ban: xenophobia.In addition to children’s welfare activists, “many others use the situation to show that they are against Jews, Muslims, and they can express anti-Semitism and xenophobia without admitting to it,” Finn Rudaizky, a former leader of the Jewish community of Denmark, told JTA.Anecdotal evidence seems to support his view.Over the past decade, Denmark has developed some of Europe’s strictest immigration policies, which The Washington Post last year called “a Muslim ban [that] was just called something else.”And in the 2015 elections, the Danish People’s Party, which The New York Times has labeled “far right,” emerged as the second largest in parliament. It now supports the policies of the center-right party in power — including the ban passed this month on wearing face-covering garments like the ones favored by some Muslim women.Denmark has already outlawed the slaughter of animals without stunning them first, as required by Jewish and Muslim religious laws; that was in 2014.The following year, a Muslim cemetery was desecrated in Copenhagen. In a separate incident in 2015, a Danish man tried to burn down a mosque in the Danish capital while dozens of worshipers were inside.Against this backdrop, “the debate about circumcision in Denmark is definitely part of a bigger picture where xenophobia plays a role,” said Hagai Ben-Avraham, an Israel-born academic who is married to a Christian Danish woman and has lived in Copenhagen for the past six years.Whatever the forces driving the case against circumcision, the pending vote in parliament is causing Ruchama Elisabeth Munch — a 24-year-old Israel-born mother living with her Christian husband in the city of Aarhus — to question her future in Denmark.At the circumcision last year of their first born, Yoav, Munch said she and her husband invited only close family partly because they “didn’t feel comfortable” inviting non-Jews to a ceremony that is often characterized in the media as child abuse.“But when we have more children, of course it will affect our decision whether to live here, if we get branded as criminals” over milah, she said.Munch also said that she has been “welcomed into Danish society” and has experienced no negative attitudes over her being an immigrant or an observant Jew.“This is a tolerant country despite everything,” she said, “which is why I really don’t understand why so many people here want to ban milah.”In a survey conducted in 2016 among 1,027 adult Danes, 87 percent of respondents said they support a ban on nonmedical circumcision of boys.Amid the discomfort that this sentiment is causing Danish Jews, they are adjusting to the new reality that followed the 2015 synagogue attack.At the Chabad synagogue, machine gun-toting troops wearing bulletproof vests over camouflage fatigues gently tap their feet to the melody produced by some 30 Jews singing inside the building during a recent Friday night service. They smile and joke with Rochel Loewenthal, the wife of Yitzi, the local Chabad rabbi, who offers them a plate of kosher chicken and hummus dip.Security was at its peak earlier this month during the annual Jewish Culture Festival, where eight police and soldiers were on hand at a Saturday night event for young Jews attended by about 15 teenagers outside the city’s main synagogue. It has two doors, and anyone seeking to enter is questioned in the middle section when they are unable to enter or leave.But Hannah Bentow, whose bat mitzvah was the target of the 2015 attack, doesn’t feel these measures are excessive. Weeks after the attack, someone smashed the window of Denmark’s only kosher shop and sprayed it with swastikas. Then it was attacked again in 2016. And last year a 17-year-old Muslim girl was convicted of plotting to blow up the Jewish school from which Bentow recently graduated.For Bentow and her younger brother, 11-year-old Elias, the 2015 attack “introduced fear into their lives,” Mette Bentow said. Elias has asked that his father, Klaus, a security consultant who has worked for El Al, no longer wear his kippah in public.Enjoying the last rays of sunlight in the backyard of her family’s riverview apartment building near the Chabad synagogue, Mette Bentow said that she and her husband often tell Elias not to be afraid of Muslims he sees on the street — so far with partial success.Mette Bentow said she is deeply thankful for how Danish society “embraced” its Jews following the 2015 attack.“I love Denmark, I love our royal house, I get goosebumps on national holidays,” she said as she sat with her family around a table laden with fresh cherries, sourdough Danish pastries and a pitcher of elderberry juice.“But lately,” she added, “the more I live here, the more I get the feeling this might be the wrong place to raise a Jewish family.”
Fight over the oldest synagogue in the US heads to the Supreme Court-Congregation Jeshuat Israel files appeal after court rules that Shearith Israel of NY is rightful owner of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island-By JTA-TOI-JUN 18,18
BOSTON — The legal fight over ownership of the country’s oldest synagogue is headed to the US Supreme Court.The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals last week denied a petition filed by Congregation Jeshuat Israel, which worships in the historic synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, for a rehearing of a ruling from August that said it was a tenant of the building.That ruling by a three-judge panel found that New York’s Shearith Israel, which was founded in 1654, is the rightful owner of the Touro Synagogue, which was built in 1763. Jeshuat Israel will appeal, according to its lawyer, Gary Naftalis.It is the latest development in a years-long property dispute between Jeshuat Israel and Shearith Israel, the nation’s oldest congregation.The appeals court ruling by Justice David Souter, a former US Supreme Court justice, also grants the Manhattan congregation ownership of some of Touro’s possessions.“We will seek review by the United States Supreme Court to continue our fight to preserve the Touro Synagogue,” Naftalis wrote in an email to JTA. He said that Jeshuat Israel is the only congregation that has prayed at Touro for over a century.But Louis Solomon, the board chairman of Shearith Israel and its lawyer in the case against Jeshuat Israel, said the “Court’s decision reaffirms the need, for the good of American Jewry and people of faith everywhere, to put this divisive matter behind us.”The two congregations have had a close, centuries-old intertwined relationship. During the Revolutionary War, when Newport’s Jews fled the city, Shearith Israel became the trustee of Touro and for a time held its possessions. Later, with a wave of new Jewish immigrants, the congregation rechartered.The current legal dispute dates back to 2012, when Jeshuat Israel, seeking to secure its financial footing and maintain a rabbi, planned to sell artifacts worth millions of dollars. Shearith Israel moved to block the sale, arguing in part that it is the rightful owner of the Touro Synagogue and its possessions.Two years ago, a US District Court judge in Providence ruled in favor of Jeshuat Israel and removed Shearith Israel as a trustee. Shearith Israel appealed and won the decision in August, with Souter finding that Jeshuat Israel was a tenant.The intended sale that sparked the conflict was of a pair of Colonial-era silver Torah scroll finials handcrafted by prominent silversmith Myer Myers valued at more than $7 million.The ruling last week featured a dissent by Judge Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson in which she expressed concern that the decision did not consider long-standing Rhode Island law on charitable trusts that “could lead to different legal conclusions.”Designated a national historic site in 1946, the Touro Synagogue attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year, including for its annual summertime reading of a historic letter from George Washington, who visited the synagogue in 1790. The nation’s first president wrote that the government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
In Holland, a former jihadist reaches out to Jews for forgiveness-Ex-member of the Hofstad terror group which killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh gives first interview to Jewish newspaper, says Israelis 'need their own homeland'-By Cnaan Liphshiz-TOI-JUN 18,18
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Jews were never far from the mind of Jason Walters when he was still a key member of the Netherlands’ deadliest network of jihadist terrorists.Even after Dutch security forces arrested Walters in 2004 for throwing a hand grenade at police during a counterterrorist raid on his hiding place, he believed that “the outcome of the trial will be determined in Tel Aviv.”That belief was the result of an “extreme susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” said Walters in a recent interview.It was that susceptibility that led Walters, still a teenager, to join the deadly Hofstad Group that in 2004 killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.Now Walters is 33 and a recent university graduate. He says he became de-radicalized in prison, where he served eight years before his release in 2013.“As a salafi jihadist, anti-Semitism is wrapped up in your entire worldview,” he said.Which is why Walters chose to speak out for the first time to Esther Voet, the editor-in-chief of Holland’s NIW Jewish weekly, in an unusual interview that also featured an apology to Dutch Jews and other victims, and his advocacy of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.Ahead of the 15th anniversary of the Hofstad group’s exposure, Walters is one of two individuals with ties to that network who are giving others hope in the fight against radical Islam by reaching out to Jewish audiences and warning other Muslims against radicalization.Soumaya Sahla, a Muslim woman who spent nine months in jail in connection with the Hofstad Group, broke her silence last year. Sahla, 34, had traveled with the CIDI pro-Israel lobby group to Jerusalem for a seminar on the Holocaust.“When a Jewish man can’t wear a kippah on the street” but Muslims can wear traditional garb, “then something’s wrong,” she said last year during a Hanukkah party in Utrecht.Walters’s interview made waves in the Netherlands because, unlike Sahla, he was convicted of carrying out an armed attack and planning to assassinate high-profile anti-Islam politicians, including Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Major Dutch newspapers such as Elsevier and Algemeen Dagblad covered the NIW interview, as well as Belgian media.Part of the interview’s significance is attached to the “national trauma” that the Netherlands experienced following Theo van Gogh’s murder by another member of the Hofstad Group in 2004. Van Gogh, who angered Dutch Muslims with his film criticizing the treatment of women in Islam, was shot and stabbed as he cycled to work in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004. Bart Olmer, a former intelligence services correspondent for the Telegraaf daily, told JTA that the Hofstad group “changed the reality in this country.”In addition to Walters, Sahla and Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo Van Gogh’s killer, another 21 people were arrested in connection with the group, whose name refers to The Hague, its main area of operations. It was the first, largest and deadliest jihadist cell in Dutch history. Its discovery prompted an unprecedented tightening of security and counterterrorism efforts in a country whose leaders for decades had bicycled to work without bodyguards. It also triggered an explosion of anti-Muslim sentiment that has defined much of the country’s politics until today.Jason Walters’s involvement in the cell was particularly shocking to many in Holland because, unlike many others in the cell, he did not come from a radical Muslim environment. Born to a Dutch-born woman and an American soldier serving in the Netherlands, he was converted to Islam at the age of 13 with his brother, Jermaine — who in 2015 died in Syria while fighting with other jihadists.The brothers became interested in Islam following the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, Walters said. Moroccan extremists took the two brothers under their wings and radicalized them, according to the prosecution in Walters’s trial. By 2003, when the brothers were both older than 18, they were part of the Hofstad group, a local network of terrorists with weapons and hit-lists and extensive connections to international Sunni terrorist groups.“It began by studying the Koran day and night. As an extremist, that worldview is everything. You’re not even a person anymore, you become dazed,” Walters told Voet, during the interview at her home in Amsterdam. “You believe you experience miracles. Religion defines you: You’re no longer entitled to your own opinion and feelings. If they contradict religion, you need to adjust.”Hating Jews was an important part of Walters’s identity, he said.“The dogma is: The Jews refused Mohammad’s message, they’re intrinsically bad, cursed,” Walters added. Islamic verses describe how “Jews are messengers of the devil.” Israel’s existence served as proof of the nearing of the day of reckoning because “they had assembled in one place in the Middle East to be annihilated,” he said.“You demonize everything Jewish as the source of everything evil,” Walters said.With time on his hands, Walters, who spent much of his prison term in isolation, began studying Western sciences with the intention of proving they were all rooted in the Koran, he said. But exposure to empirical thinking caused Walters’s religious conviction to “crumble,” he said.Walters told Voet that he suddenly noticed how he believed simultaneously in three contradictory theories about the Holocaust: That it was a hoax to justify Israel’s creation; that it was real but justified, and that it was real and unjustified, exemplifying the evilness of Christian societies.Walters recently completed his master’s degree on Islamist radicalization with the prestigious Leiden University.Amid rising levels of anti-Semitic violence in the Netherlands, “I began feeling increasingly guilty,” Walters said.“I had been very unfair and I want to set it right,” he said of his decision to reach out to Voet for his first interview. “I need to make up for being on the absolutely wrong side. It became a major issue to me, in relation to Jews and Israelis.”He also apologized to the four officers who were wounded in the explosion he caused by throwing a hand grenade at them in 2004.“It’s something I have to live with,” he told NIW.The “pitfall of anti-Semitism, where I once fell, is becoming mainstream,” he added. “The same stereotypes are back. There’s no more balance in the debate about Jews or Israel.”In the NIW interview, Walters went on to defend Israel.“When the religious source for my anti-Semitism fell away, I began a reorientation,” he said. Looking at the map of Israel, “I began to think what would I do if I were an Israeli.” Walters attributes Israel’s control of disputed land to the Middle East’s instability. And he called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “restrained” in comparison to Arab rulers who butchered them en masse.Israel “does make mistakes,” he said. But “of course it chooses to have power” in view of how “history has proven that Jews need their own homeland, because no one else will protect them.”Walters declined to have his picture appear in the NIW paper, explaining he wanted his exposure to “be a gradual thing.” But as Islamist extremism continues to claim victims across Western Europe, Walters also said that he feels increasingly compelled to oppose it publicly.“I hoped to have a boring job, perhaps as a professor of philosophy,” he said. “But I’m realizing that we have a problem of Muslim extremism.” At his age, “I’m thinking about starting a family and what kind of society I want my children to live in.”Although he has become a poster child for de-radicalization, Walters says he has little faith in its likelihood for most followers of the hateful ideologies to which he used to subscribe. De-radicalization is no clinical procedure, he said.“It’s about an existential choice,” he said.Getting radicalized Muslims to abandon their doctrines is about as likely as getting hardened left-wing voters to support the far-right, he explained.“There is no painless solution,” Walters opined. “We may be nearing very inconvenient choices, like redefining freedom of religion and reconsidering how equipped the constitution leaves us to tackle this problem.”While Walters says he has “no answers” to these sobering questions, he added that he does feel compelled to act to fix the issue. “I have a responsibility, I’ve seen both sides of the problem,” he said.
EARTH DESTROYED WITH THE EARTH IN NOAHS DAY(BECAUSE OF SIN,VIOLENCE AND GODLESS PEOPLE)
GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)(HAMAS IN HEBREW IS VIOLENCE)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM)(HAMAS) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
HOSEA 4:1-3
1 Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
2 By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.
3 Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.
DEUTORONOMY 28:22-24
22 The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.
23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.
24 The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.
Rains from Tropical Storm Carlotta pound Mexico's coast-[Associated Press]-CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN-YAHOONEWS-June 18, 2018
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Heavy rains from Tropical Storm Carlotta pounded Mexico's Pacific coast east of Acapulco ahead of its expected landfall late Saturday or early Sunday.Carlotta, the third named storm of the Pacific hurricane season, was meandering just off Mexico's coast, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.It said that Carlotta had maximum sustained winds near 50 mph (60 kph), and its center was located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south-southeast of Acapulco. The storm was nearly stationary, but a northward motion was forecast to begin later Saturday.The hurricane center says the storm threatens torrential rains for the coastline of the southern states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, with up to 10 inches possible in some areas.On Friday, the Mexican Interior Department reported that there were no deaths in the resort cities of Los Cabos from Tropical Storm Bud, which left the Baja California Peninsula and re-emerged over the Gulf of California.The hurricane center said Bud was expected to dissipate on Saturday over the high terrain of the Mexican state of Sonora. Its remnants were expected to bring heavy rain to northwest Mexico and the southwest United States.
Flooding possible in U.S. Southwest where wildfires scorch earth-[Reuters]-By Keith Coffman-YAHOONEWS-June 16, 2018
DENVER (Reuters) - Heavy thunderstorms and widespread rains expected on Saturday in the U.S. Southwest could help douse the numerous unrelenting wildfires crews are battling in the parched region.But they could also bring the potential for dangerous flash flooding as 1 to 3 inches (3 to 9 cm) of rain is forecast to fall in parts of the five-state region where more than 20 wildfires have left behind areas of barren earth, the National Weather Service said."Water can rise quickly downstream of heavy rain, even when thunderstorms and heavy rain are miles away," the service said in an advisory. "Rock and mud slides, and high water flowing across roads, are also possible which could impact travel."One of the areas of particular concern is in southwestern Colorado where the largest and most threatening blaze is the 416 Fire, which has scorched nearly 33,000 acres (13,000 hectares)near the town of Durango. The fire was 20 percent contained as of Friday night, fire officials said."When an area has burned, soil become hydrophobic, or water resistant, which causes water to rush over soil instead of soak in," The Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team said in an advisory, noting that crews are in place to perform water rescues.Some 143 residences and businesses remain under evacuation orders and another 2,513 are under a pre-evacuation notice, La Plata County officials said.The 416 Fire and a separate, smaller blaze burning nearby, the Burro Fire, prompted state parks officials to close several wildlife areas to the public. The U.S. Forest Service has closed all 1.8 million acres of the San Juan National Forest to visitors.No one has been injured and no structures have been lost in the Colorado fires, but nine homes were destroyed in a small wildfire in Utah.In southern Wyoming near the Colorado border, the Badger Creek Fire in the Medicine Bow National Forest is nearly 15,000 acres, according to the Inciweb online U.S. fire information service.The Wyoming fire containment was listed as zero percent by fire officials. About 400 homes in Albany County have been ordered to evacuate, and one home and two outbuildings have been destroyed by the flames, a fire incident spokesman said.The fire also has prompted the closure of about 50,000 acres of the 2.9 million-acre national forest, and 16,000 acres of the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and Pawnee National Grasslands in neighboring Colorado, the spokesman said.(Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Adrian Croft)
WORLD POWERS IN THE LAST DAYS (END OF AGE OF GRACE NOT THE WORLD)
EUROPEAN UNION-KING OF WEST-DAN 9:26-27,DAN 7:23-24,DAN 11:40,REV 13:1-10
EGYPT-KING OF THE SOUTH-DAN 11:40
RUSSIA-KING OF THE NORTH-EZEK 38:1-2,EZEK 39:1-3
CHINA-KING OF THE EAST-DAN 11:44,REV 9:16,18
VATICAN-RELIGIOUS LEADER-REV 13:11-18,REV 17:4-5,9,18
WORLD TERRORISM
OH BY THE WAY WHEN THE MEDIA SAYS ALLU-AK-BAR MEANS GOD IS GREAT LIE. IN ISLAM ALLU-AK-BAR MEANS OUR GOD IS GREATER OR GREATEST. THIS IS HOW THE MEDIA SUCK HOLES UP TO ISLAMIC-QURANIC-MUSLIMS. BY WATERING DOWN THE REAL MEANING OF THE SEX FOR MURDER DEATH CULT ISLAM. TO MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A PEACEFUL RELIGION (CULT OF DEATH AND WORLD DOMINATION).
GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)(HAMAS IN HEBREW IS VIOLENCE)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM)(HAMAS) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
GENESIS 16:11-12
11 And the angel of the LORD said unto her,(HAGAR) Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael;(FATHER OF THE ARAB/MUSLIMS) because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12 And he (ISHMAEL-FATHER OF THE ARAB-MUSLIMS) will be a wild (DONKEY-JACKASS) man;(ISLAM IS A FAKE AND DANGEROUS SEX FOR MURDER CULT) his hand will be against every man,(ISLAM HATES EVERYONE) and every man's hand against him;(PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM BEING BEHEADED) and he (ISHMAEL ARAB/MUSLIM) shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.(LITERAL-THE ARABS LIVE WITH THEIR BRETHERN JEWS)
ISAIAH 14:12-14
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,(SATAN) son of the morning!(HEBREW-CRECENT MOON-ISLAM) how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14 I (SATAN HAS EYE TROUBLES) will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.(AND 1/3RD OF THE ANGELS OF HEAVEN FELL WITH SATAN AND BECAME DEMONS)
JOHN 16:2
2 They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.(ISLAM MURDERS IN THE NAME OF MOON GOD ALLAH OF ISLAM)
Fighting rages around airport in Yemen port city of Hodeida-Iran-backed Houthi rebels chant 'death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews' as they battle Saudi-led forces-By Ahmed al-Haj-TOI-JUN 18,18
SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Saudi-led forces fought to retake the international airport of Yemen’s rebel-held port city of Hodeida from the Shiite Houthi rebels, Yemeni officials and witnesses said on Saturday, as combat intensified for the starving nation’s main gateway for food shipments.With battles raging at the southern side of al-Hodeida International Airport, the military of Yemen’s exiled government said it had entirely seized the facility, and that engineers were working to clear mines from nearby areas just south of the city of some 600,000 people on the Red Sea.“The armed forces which are supported by the Arab coalition have freed the al-Hodeida International Airport from the Houthi militias and the engineering teams have started to clean the airport and its surroundings from mines and bombs,” the military said on its official Twitter account.Other government officials and witnesses later said coalition forces had not yet fully taken control of the airport. They said fighting was heavy just outside the airport gates.Sadek Dawad, spokesman of the Republican Guards force loyal to the Saudis, said government forces had battled onto the airport grounds.Dawad also said the southern gate of Hodeida city was captured by pro-coalition forces.“The military operations to liberate the city of Hodeida will not be stopped until we secure the city and its strategic port and that won’t last too long,” he told The Associated Press.Yemen’s Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who hold the country’s capital of Sanaa, did not immediately acknowledge losing the airport.The Houthi-run Al Masirah satellite news channel aired footage it described as being from near Hodeida showing a burned-out truck, corpses of irregular fighters and a damaged Emirati armored vehicle. The Iranian-aligned fighters rifled through a military ledger from the vehicle before chanting their slogan: “Death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, victory to Islam!”Yemeni officials and witnesses said forces from the United Arab Emirates-backed Amaleqa brigades, backed by air cover from the Saudi-led coalition, were heading to eastern Hodeida province to attempt to cut off the main road that links it with the capital, Sanaa.The officials said if government forces capture the Kilo 16 Road they will trap the rebels in Hodeida and the western coast and prevent them from receiving supplies from the capital. The rebels are then expected to have no choice but to head to the northern province of Hajjah.The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media and the witnesses for fear of reprisals.The Norwegian Refugee Council said humanitarian agencies cannot reach the southern part of Hodeida as fighting escalated. It said in a statement that heavy airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition have moved confrontation lines deeper to the south.United Nations special envoy Martin Griffiths, meanwhile arrived in Sanaa in an effort to broker a cease-fire.The Saudi-led coalition began its assault Wednesday on Hodeida, the main entry for food into a country already on the brink of famine. Emirati forces are leading ground forces mixed with their own troops, irregular militiamen and soldiers backing Yemen’s exiled government. Saudi Arabia has provided air support, with targeting guidance and refueling coming from the US.International aid groups and the UN cautioned the Saudi-led coalition from launching the assault. Their fear is that a protracted fight could force a shutdown of Hodeida’s port at a time when a halt in aid risks tipping millions into starvation. Some 70 percent of Yemen’s food enters via the port, as well as the bulk of humanitarian aid and fuel supplies. Around two-thirds of the country’s population of 27 million relies on aid and 8.4 million are already at risk of starving.For its part, the Saudi-led coalition says it had no choice but to launch the assault as the port provided millions of dollars for the Houthis through customs controls. They also accuse the Houthis of using the port to smuggle weapons through, something a UN panels of experts described in January as “unlikely” as incoming ships require UN permission and are subject to random searches.The UN and Western nations say Iran has supplied the Houthis with weapons, from assault rifles to the ballistic missiles they have fired deep into Saudi Arabia, including at the capital, Riyadh.The coalition has blocked most ports, letting supplies into Hodeida in coordination with the UN The air campaign and fighting have disrupted other supply lines, causing an economic crisis that makes food too expensive for many to afford.Aid agencies and the UN evacuated international staff from the city ahead of the offensive. Some of the wounded able to flee are driving on to Aden, some 315 kilometers (195 miles) away, after being stabilized at a hospital in Mocha on the way, the aid group Doctors Without Borders said. The local hospital in Hodeida already is struggling to help the wounded, the group said.Thousands remain besieged in the city and around the airport due to the fighting.“Families are trapped inside and it is difficult leaving as they are coming under airstrikes and bombardment by both parties of the war,” relief worker Saber Wasel told The Associated Press. “It was a hard night for citizens because of the intensity of the strikes and gunfire.”The Houthis seized control of Sanaa in September 2014, later pushing south toward the port city of Aden. The Saudi-led coalition entered the conflict in March 2015 and has faced criticism for a campaign of airstrikes killing civilians and destroying hospitals and markets.The Houthis meanwhile have laid land mines killing and wounding civilians, targeted religious minorities and imprisoned opponents.
Ahead of Macron meeting, Merkel insists migration needs ‘European answer’-German leader facing insurrection from her interior minister amid broad public support for a harder line on immigration-By Agencies-TOI-JUN 18,18
BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted Saturday that migration is “a European challenge that needs a European answer” amid a dispute over the issue inside her government and ahead of a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.Merkel is locked in a standoff with her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, over his demand for some asylum-seekers to be turned back at the border. Merkel opposes unilateral action, arguing that it would weaken the European Union.In her weekly video message Saturday, Merkel named migration as one of four major challenges to be addressed by German and French leaders when she meets Macron in Germany on Tuesday along with ministers from both governments.Other issues included foreign and defense policy and the future of the euro currency zone.Her comments come after an opinion poll Friday showed most Germans support the tougher line of her rebel interior minister.The survey found that 62 percent of respondents were in favor of turning back undocumented migrants at the border, in line with the stance of Seehofer who is openly challenging Merkel.And 86 percent want faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers, a process now often held up by bureaucratic hurdles and legal challenges, according to the Infratest dimap poll.The survey turns up the pressure on Merkel, who has faced a backlash for allowing into Germany more than one million people fleeing war and misery in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere since 2015.The mass influx sparked the rise of the far-right and anti-Islam AfD party, which entered parliament last September.Merkel’s welcome to refugees also infuriated Seehofer and his CSU, the sister party of her Christian Democrats in the southern state of Bavaria, which became the main entry point for most migrants.In an unprecedented split between the CDU and CSU, Seehofer has openly defied Merkel with a demand to allow border police to turn back migrants who lack valid identity papers or are already registered in another EU country.Seehofer also sacked Jutta Cordt, the head of the Office for Migrants and Refugees (BAMF), an interior ministry spokesman said late Friday.The BAMF has been at the heart of a scandal around the right of asylum for several weeks, with one of its branches in Bremen, northern Germany, under investigation for allegedly favouring more than 1,200 asylum applications.The CSU’s Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder said that the ongoing “asylum tourism” meant that, as a government, “we’re nearing the endgame when it comes to our credibility”.“The people are running out of patience,” he told Bild daily.Merkel argues that Germany must not take the sudden and unilateral step of rejecting asylum seekers at the border, which would add to the burden faced by frontline countries like Italy and Greece.She has pledged instead to seek bilateral agreements with arrival and transit countries and a wider solution by the EU, which holds its next summit on June 28-29, while admitting that this plan is “ambitious”.The CSU — which faces an election threat from the AfD in October state polls — has refused to budge and set Merkel an effective ultimatum of next Monday.Seehofer will on that day seek CSU party backing to use his ministerial authority to order border police to turn back the asylum seekers, in open defiance of Merkel.For Merkel, in power for over 12 years, the stakes could not be higher as she leads an uneasy coalition government with a narrow majority that took half a year to cobble together.If Seehofer decides to go it alone, Merkel would have to fire him, sparking an unprecedented CDU-CSU split, political scientist Heinrich Oberreuter told business daily Handelsblatt.In that scenario, Merkel could lead a minority government with the third party in the coalition, the Social Democrats (SPD), or call fresh elections that would likely benefit only the AfD, he said.Macron offered his backing to Merkel, telling reporters: “Countries are committed to the paths taken by their heads of state or government.”“Germany also has a head of government,” he said of Merkel, saying it was she who was “responsible before her people and her parliament”.In a sign of the frayed nerves, Germany’s political and media world lurched into a brief panic Friday as several media outlets fell for a hoax tweet claiming Seehofer’s CSU was quitting the coalition.The fake news was quickly debunked as originating from satirical magazine Titanic, but not before it had been picked up by some major media, causing immediate dips in the euro and stock market.
Pope: Abortion is 'white glove' equivalent to Nazi crimes-[Associated Press]-NICOLE WINFIELD-YAHOONEWS-June 18, 2018
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis denounced abortion on Saturday as the "white glove" equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families to accept the children that God gives them.Francis spoke off-the-cuff to a meeting of an Italian family association. The Vatican didn't immediately provide a transcript of his remarks, but the ANSA news agency and the SIR agency of the Italian bishops' conference quoted him as denouncing the pre-natal tests that can result in parents choosing to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus is malformed or suffering other problems."Last century, the whole world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves," the agencies quoted Francis as saying.The pope urged families to accept children "as God gives them to us."Francis has repeated the strict anti-abortion stance of his predecessors and integrated it into his broader condemnation of what he calls today's "throw-away culture." He has frequently lamented how the sick, the poor, the elderly and the unborn are considered unworthy of protection and dignity by a society that prizes instead individual prowess.He has also decried how women are often considered part of this "throw-away culture," sometimes forced to prostitute themselves."How many of you pray for these women who are thrown away, for these women who are used, for these girls who have to sell their own dignity to have a job?" Francis asked during his morning homily Friday.Francis has dedicated much of his pontificate to preaching about families, marriage and the problems that families today encounter. He is expected to highlight these issues during his August trip to Ireland where he'll close out the Catholic Church's big family rally.
28 And when these things begin to come to pass,(ALL THE PROPHECY SIGNS FROM THE BIBLE) then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption (RAPTURE) draweth nigh.
29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree,(ISRAEL) and all the trees;(ALL INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES)
30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.(ISRAEL LITERALLY BECAME AND INDEPENDENT COUNTRY JUST BEFORE SUMMER IN MAY 14,1948.)
JOEL 2:3,30
3 A fire devoureth (ATOMIC BOMB) before them;(RUSSIAN-ARAB-MUSLIM ARMIES AGAINST ISRAEL) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(ATOMIC BOMB AFFECT)
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB)(BECAUSE NUKES HAVE BEEN USED ON ISRAELS ENEMIES)(GOD PROTECTS ISRAEL AND ALWAYS WILL)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)(THIS IS AN ATOMIC BOMB EFFECT)
EZEKIEL 20:47
47 And say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.
ZEPHANIAH 1:18
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD'S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
MALACHI 4:1
1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven;(FROM ATOMIC BOMBS) and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE
Czech president: Netanyahu offered his Jerusalem home to be our embassy-Apparently joking, Milos Zeman says he hopes gesture 'still valid, because it could greatly reduce the cost of this relocation'-TOI-JUN 18,18-BY JTA
Czech President Milos Zeman said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to give up his own home in Jerusalem if the Czech Republic opens an embassy there.Zeman said this, possibly as a joke, during a speech last week at a gala of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.Zeman, a staunch supporter of Israel who supports moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, praised US President Donald Trump for initiating in December the move of the US embassy to the Israeli capital. Zeman said he had supported moving the Czech embassy years ago, according to a transcription of his speech that was posted this week on the official website of the Czech presidency.“That’s not all, Bibi Netanyahu told me: ‘If you do [the same] I will give you my own house for your embassy,’” Zeman said, adding: “I strongly hope that the offer is still valid because it could greatly reduce the cost of this relocation.”The European Union, of which the Czech Republic is a member, opposes the US embassy’s move to Jerusalem, which Brussels says should occur only after the conclusion of a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority. It also claims Jerusalem as the capital for a future Palestinian state. Netanyahu has called on other nations to follow the example of the United States. So far, only Guatemala and Paraguay have followed suit.The Czech foreign ministry, which is under the authority of the Czech prime minister, not the president, has said the embassy will stay put for now.Zeman has called this “cowardice.”Unfortunately, he added during his speech at the AIPAC gala dinner in Prague, “I’m afraid that only 10 percent of the total population is brave, maybe less. That’s why I like Israel. Let me end with one sentence from an old Jewish prayer: Next year in Jerusalem!”The Czech acting prime minister, Andrej Babis, in April said his country will open an honorary consulate in Jerusalem but Zeman later said that consulate’s opening is part of an open-ended effort that will end with the relocation of the Czech embassy to Jerusalem.Also during the AIPAC gala, Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, presented Zeman with a piece of a monument that was inaugurated earlier this month at Terezin, the site of a former Nazi concentration camp. The new monument features a massive rock suspended over the ground by a circular brace.“The nature of the stone is meant to capture the eternity of grief, and its immensity the magnitude of the burden of the Jewish people,” Kantor said at the inauguration ceremony on June 4. He also said the monument is to serve as a “reminder of the lessons of the Holocaust” amid rising levels of anti-Semitic violence in Europe.
Palestinians throw cold water on ‘meaningless’ US peace push-Abbas spokesman says next week's Kushner and Greenblatt Middle East trip 'won't achieve anything' since the Trump administration is trying to circumvent PA leadership-By TOI staff-JUN 18,18
Ahead of a visit to the region next week by the Trump administration’s Middle East peace team, the Palestinian Authority on Saturday dismissed the expected US peace plan as “meaningless” and said the series of meetings being held were “a waste of time” because they did not have the support of the Palestinians.“The round of meetings that began in New York, whose purpose is to bring a meaningless plan, won’t achieve anything,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman, was quoted as saying by the Ynet news site.Abu Rudeineh was referring to Friday’s meeting in New York between United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, peace envoy Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s special adviser and son-in-law. The White House said they discussed US peace efforts and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.Kushner and Greenblatt are set to discuss the two issues during their trip to the Middle East for talks with regional leaders. They are scheduled to visit Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar.The US officials will be in Israel Friday, June 22 through Saturday, June 23. They have no meetings scheduled with Palestinian Authority leaders.Their tour of the region comes amid a nadir in relations between the United States and the Palestinians. The PA has refused to speak to administration officials since the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last December and subsequently relocated the US embassy to the city last month. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.“Without the agreement of the Palestinian people, the fate of the series of meetings will be a total failure,” said Abu Rudeineh.“It is a waste of time and destined to fail, as long as the attempt to circumvent the legitimate Palestinian institutions continues,” he added, according to Channel 10.Abu Rudeineh said Wednesday any plan that does not include a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem or address Palestinian refugees will be unsuccessful, according to the official Wafa news agency.Israel has long insisted that the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, as defined by the Palestinians, is a nonstarter in peace negotiations. The UN categorizes as refugees not just those Palestinians who were displaced or expelled from their homes in 1947 and 1948, but also all of their descendants. As a consequence, accepting the “right of return” would mean millions of Palestinians being allowed to enter Israel, ending Israel’s majority Jewish status.Kushner and Greenblatt’s latest visit also comes after weeks of deadly violence along the Gaza border, with tens of thousands of Palestinians taking part in the ongoing Hamas-backed “March of Return” protests at the border.Gaza faces shortages of electricity and drinkable water. Israel and Egypt maintain a blockade on the Strip that they say is designed to prevent Hamas from importing weapons and other goods that could be used to build military equipment or cross-border tunnels.The deteriorating living conditions have been cited by security officials as a major factor fueling the violent clashes on Israel’s border, as well as a debilitating sense of desperation.A US official told Channel 10 this week that the White House has no clear plan for resolving the humanitarian situation in the coastal enclave and was seeking solutions from Israeli officials and others in the region.Israel has said the humanitarian situation will not improve until Hamas returns the bodies of two IDF soldiers and the two civilian captives it holds. It blames Hamas for the dire reality, charging the terror group with diverting millions in aid to purchase weapons, dig tunnels, manufacture rockets and train its military wing, instead of using it for the welfare of the people.Gaza’s woes have been exacerbated by an ongoing dispute between Hamas and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has cut the salaries it pays to workers in Gaza and imposed various sanctions, including cutting payments for electricity supplies to the enclave.
Incendiary kites, balloons hit Gaza periphery, sparking fires-Firefighters battle blazes near Sderot, Kisufim; one fire raging near a military post-By TOI staff-JUN 18,18
Fires erupted in at least seven locations in the Gaza periphery on Saturday, caused by incendiary kites and balloons flown into Israel from the Strip.Firefighters were battling flames near the town of Sderot. According to the Ynet news website, one fire was raging near a military post on the border. Firefighters were at the scene and there was no danger to the soldiers.Earlier, firefighters put out blazes in the Kisufim area of the western Negev. The fires came amid an intense heat wave, with temperatures in the area hitting 40°C (104°F.) On Friday incendiary balloons and kites set 11 fires inside Israel, which were extinguished by the fire services and local volunteers. A booby-trapped balloon was also flown into Israeli territory, landing on a highway in the Sha’ar Hanegev region. Police sappers were called to the scene and destroyed the balloon and the explosive device attached to it in a controlled explosion, police said.Hamas threats to send 5,000 flaming kites and balloons into Israel failed to materialize, with many Palestinians busy with the three-day Eid al-Fitr holiday that caps the fasting month of Ramadan. Eid is traditionally a time of family visits and festive meals, with children getting new clothes, haircuts and gifts.Attention may also have focused on the World Cup in Russia. Two matches featuring Arab teams took place Friday afternoon as Egypt — without the iconic Mohammad Salah — took on Uruguay, and Iran played Morocco.At Kibbutz Nir Am Friday, children and residents launched balloons carrying candy towards the Palestinian enclave, Hadashot TV news reported.Nir Am has suffered a number of fires sparked by burning kites flown from Gaza.Hadashot news reported that Israel for the first time used a new radar to find kites and balloons, which were then intercepted by drones. The radar, initially designed to detect gliders, was calibrated to pick up the kites.Also Friday Israeli military aircraft fired warning shots at a group of Palestinians in Gaza involved in the launching of burning balloons.The method of firing warning shots appeared to be a new tactic that the military was looking to adopt in order to counter the threat posed by these kites and balloons, which have burned thousands of acres of farmland, forests and nature reserves in the regions around the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials.Since March 30, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have launched hundreds of kites and helium balloons bearing flammable materials, and occasionally explosives, into Israeli territory, sparking near-daily fires.The military has sought to counter these kites and balloons with teams of soldiers operating drones. Israeli officials have deemed the drone program a success, but it has not provided a perfect solution.
National security expert leads the charge to keep US Jews voting Democratic-Halie Soifer, newly elected head of Jewish Democratic Council of America, must deal with Republican challenges and a divided party in the lead-up to the November midterms-By Ron Kampeas-TOI-JUN 18,18
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Halie Soifer says her transition from national security expert to political operative started with a crisis of violence: the deadly neo-Nazi march last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.Soifer says the march, which culminated in a car-ramming attack on counter-protesters that killed one and injured at least 20, spurred the establishment of the organization she now leads as executive director, the Jewish Democratic Council of America.The JDCA accelerated its launch by three months, to August, because of President Donald Trump’s equivocal response to the violence, when he said both sides — neo-Nazis and counter-protesters — were at fault and include “very fine people.”“President Trump’s outrageous handling of the tragic events in Charlottesville compelled us to speak out now,” the group’s founders said at the time. It also offered a political opportunity for Democrats.Soifer says that moment also launched a reexamination of her priorities, leading her to become the JDCA’s first executive director last month.“At that moment it was very clear, unlike even past Republican administrations, this administration had no qualms about affiliating itself and even sympathizing with anti-Semites,” she said.Soifer was at the top of her national security game: Having advised Obama administration UN Ambassador Samantha Power, she was then in the same role on the staff of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., one of the most talked-about politicians likely to seek the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination.“I wanted to do something political,” she said in an interview with JTA last week in the offices of Bluelight Strategies, a PR firm that does work for Jewish groups and Democrats. “I wanted to help shape the composition of Congress as opposed to working for one member.”There are other likely factors in the establishment of the JDCA, a successor to the National Jewish Democratic Council, which withered and all but disappeared after the 2014 midterm elections. Democrats traditionally garner the vast majority of the Jewish vote, but Republicans have been making inroads in recent years.Trump, with his plainly stated biases about minorities and women, was expected drive away Jewish voters. Instead he persuaded 24 percent of Jews to vote for him, according to exit polls — commensurate with George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008, politicians regarded with affection by Jewish organizational leaders, even those with political differences.In 2012, the NJDC played a role in keeping Florida Democratic with a door-knocking drive in the final days of the campaign; Obama edged Mitt Romney by just under 1 percent. In 2016, Florida went for Trump, winning the state by 1.2 percent.The party and the Hillary Clinton campaign also had Jewish outreach teams in Florida and other states in 2016. It’s unlikely that a separate Jewish outreach effort would have changed much, but its absence was notable.Soifer won’t venture a guess as to whether she thinks the NJDC absence made a difference in 2016, but acknowledges that JDCA was created “to fill a vacuum and in response to this administration.”Soifer, not having been associated with the NJDC, said she doesn’t know why it disappeared. A number of the JDCA board members were involved with NJDC, many others were not. According to a former NJDC official, establishing a new organization was a way of attracting new blood. Another former official said a defamation lawsuit against the organization filed by Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who is also a major funder of the GOP and pro-Israel causes, was too much of a distraction to sustain other activities. NJDC won the lawsuit.Soifer says Trump’s presidency is propelling Jewish interest in the midterms.“What I’ve seen is younger people, and especially women, want to get involved, many for the first time,” she said, anticipating door-knocking campaigns in swing districts with big Jewish communities as the November vote approaches.Soifer, 39, exudes energy, speaking forcefully, in paragraphs. She headed Jewish outreach for the Obama campaign in Florida in 2008 when she was barely 30. In 2006 she was a star of sorts to Washington wonks: Her then-boss, Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., agreed to let the Sundance Channel track him and his staff for a reality show, “The Hill.”Soifer was a much-watched presence on the show. She ditched a Republican boyfriend for a Democrat, then spent the series debating whether they should move in together. (They eventually married.) The Hill newspaper called her “ridiculously idealistic.” Soon after, she left Wexler’s office to obtain a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Middle East Studies and international economics.She is now coupling her ideology with her organizing skills, but envisions a big tent: The JDCA announced its first eight endorsements this week and last, all moderates in the Hillary Clinton mold, but she won’t turn away the Bernie Sanders wing of the party as she seeks out more candidates to endorse.Soifer inherits a challenge that grew in part from the 2016 campaign — and it was via Sanders, not Trump. Sanders, who is Jewish, ran an unexpectedly strong challenge against Clinton in the primaries. He was and remains more willing to criticize Israel than Democratic politicians of the past, and insists on America’s role as an “honest broker” in the region.In January, the Pew Research Center reported that the share of Republicans who sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians is growing, while Democratic sympathy for Israel is slipping. The political action committee affiliated with J Street, the liberal Middle East policy group that is consistently critical of the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced last week that more than half of the Democratic caucuses in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate accepted its endorsements.Republicans this season are not hesitating to use Israel against Democrats they find questionable. In Virginia, Leslie Cockburn is a congressional candidate in a district that Democrats hope to pick up and a former journalist who co-authored a book in 1991 lambasting the US-Israel alliance. The state’s GOP describes her as “anti-Semitic.”Matt Brooks, who directs the Republican counterpart to the JDCA, the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA that J Street figures large in the challenges facing Soifer.“Currently J Street is raising millions of dollars for Democrats and is seen as the dominant presence in the Democratic Party,” Brooks told JTA. “It’s going to be hard for [JDCA] to compete against them and have the kind of impact J Street is. I think one area where JDCA can make an impact and differentiate themselves is to come up with a plan and take a leadership role in working to address the troubling trend of weakening support for Israel amongst Dems as we’ve been seeing lately in all the recent polling.”JDCA is pro-Israel, Soifer says, but she turns around questions about Democrats and Israel to focus instead on the other party.Instead she describes a divisive president and Republican Party, citing the firestorm around David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel. Democrats have accused Friedman of not inviting them to the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem last month, and he said recently that Republicans are more pro-Israel than Democrats.“I don’t think it’s Bernie Sanders who is politicizing Israel. I have never seen a US diplomat at any embassy speak in such political terms or treat an event like the opening of the embassy in such a politicized manner,” Soifer said, referencing her years of working at the State Department.On Twitter, Brooks welcomed her aboard.“Congrats!!!” he wrote. “Look forward to working with you.”Grinning, Soifer says “I don’t envision us working closely together. I hope we have a cordial relationship.”
As Denmark considers a ban on circumcision, some Jews consider leaving-With parliament weighing new non-binding proposal, many in Jewish community feel caught between Islamist extremism and the xenophobia it triggers in their secularist society-By Cnaan Liphshiz-TOI-JUN 18,18
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (JTA) — In 2015, a jihadist killed a Jewish guard outside this capital city’s main synagogue, where Hannah Bentow was having her bat mitzvah party.Her sense of security as a Jew in Denmark was shattered, she told JTA last week. Bentow and dozens of teenagers stayed inside for hours as police pursued and later killed the man who gunned down the volunteer guard, Dan Uzan.But Bentow said her decision to leave for Israel as soon as she finishes high school was sealed and reaffirmed by the precedent-setting steps undertaken this year in this Scandinavian country toward banning nonmedical circumcision of boys. The Danish parliament is set to become the first in the European Union to vote on a nonbinding motion calling to prohibit the practice.The ruling parties said they would oppose a ban or a call for one, but the debate about it “makes me feel like I don’t belong, and like Denmark doesn’t want me to belong, either,” Bentow said.Her words echo a sentiment shared by many Danish Jews, who are questioning their future in a nation where they increasingly feel caught between Islamist extremism and the xenophobia it triggers in their secularist society.When Denmark’s Jewish minority of 9,000 people is “so pressed already, with armed police at our school and armed troops at shul, this [debate on circumcision] is sucking the marrow out of wanting to be Jewish,” said Mette Bentow, the mother of Hannah and two sons. Mette Bentow said her boys are the first in three generations of her Jewish family who were circumcised.The language of the draft motion on circumcision that is pending a vote in parliament cites only child welfare concerns.“The introduction of an 18-year minimum age for circumcision puts children’s interests and rights at the forefront,” the text states. It calls for a jail term of up to six years for anyone who performs a circumcision, and holds parents and guardians responsible whether the act happened in Denmark or not.More than 50,000 people signed a petition on the Danish parliament’s website endorsing the text, which equates nonmedical circumcision of boys with female genital mutilation.In Denmark and other European countries, campaigns to ban nonmedical circumcision of boys — a religious initiation rite that Muslims call khitan and Jews call milah – have been brewing for years.But Danish promoters of the ban made a breakthrough following an amendment this year saying that petitions that receive 50,000 signatures within six months of their posting on the parliament’s website are expected to be brought to a vote as a nonbinding draft motion in parliament. The circumcision proposal cleared the signature hurdle within four months.To many Danish Jews, the arguments about child welfare hide the real motivation behind the ban: xenophobia.In addition to children’s welfare activists, “many others use the situation to show that they are against Jews, Muslims, and they can express anti-Semitism and xenophobia without admitting to it,” Finn Rudaizky, a former leader of the Jewish community of Denmark, told JTA.Anecdotal evidence seems to support his view.Over the past decade, Denmark has developed some of Europe’s strictest immigration policies, which The Washington Post last year called “a Muslim ban [that] was just called something else.”And in the 2015 elections, the Danish People’s Party, which The New York Times has labeled “far right,” emerged as the second largest in parliament. It now supports the policies of the center-right party in power — including the ban passed this month on wearing face-covering garments like the ones favored by some Muslim women.Denmark has already outlawed the slaughter of animals without stunning them first, as required by Jewish and Muslim religious laws; that was in 2014.The following year, a Muslim cemetery was desecrated in Copenhagen. In a separate incident in 2015, a Danish man tried to burn down a mosque in the Danish capital while dozens of worshipers were inside.Against this backdrop, “the debate about circumcision in Denmark is definitely part of a bigger picture where xenophobia plays a role,” said Hagai Ben-Avraham, an Israel-born academic who is married to a Christian Danish woman and has lived in Copenhagen for the past six years.Whatever the forces driving the case against circumcision, the pending vote in parliament is causing Ruchama Elisabeth Munch — a 24-year-old Israel-born mother living with her Christian husband in the city of Aarhus — to question her future in Denmark.At the circumcision last year of their first born, Yoav, Munch said she and her husband invited only close family partly because they “didn’t feel comfortable” inviting non-Jews to a ceremony that is often characterized in the media as child abuse.“But when we have more children, of course it will affect our decision whether to live here, if we get branded as criminals” over milah, she said.Munch also said that she has been “welcomed into Danish society” and has experienced no negative attitudes over her being an immigrant or an observant Jew.“This is a tolerant country despite everything,” she said, “which is why I really don’t understand why so many people here want to ban milah.”In a survey conducted in 2016 among 1,027 adult Danes, 87 percent of respondents said they support a ban on nonmedical circumcision of boys.Amid the discomfort that this sentiment is causing Danish Jews, they are adjusting to the new reality that followed the 2015 synagogue attack.At the Chabad synagogue, machine gun-toting troops wearing bulletproof vests over camouflage fatigues gently tap their feet to the melody produced by some 30 Jews singing inside the building during a recent Friday night service. They smile and joke with Rochel Loewenthal, the wife of Yitzi, the local Chabad rabbi, who offers them a plate of kosher chicken and hummus dip.Security was at its peak earlier this month during the annual Jewish Culture Festival, where eight police and soldiers were on hand at a Saturday night event for young Jews attended by about 15 teenagers outside the city’s main synagogue. It has two doors, and anyone seeking to enter is questioned in the middle section when they are unable to enter or leave.But Hannah Bentow, whose bat mitzvah was the target of the 2015 attack, doesn’t feel these measures are excessive. Weeks after the attack, someone smashed the window of Denmark’s only kosher shop and sprayed it with swastikas. Then it was attacked again in 2016. And last year a 17-year-old Muslim girl was convicted of plotting to blow up the Jewish school from which Bentow recently graduated.For Bentow and her younger brother, 11-year-old Elias, the 2015 attack “introduced fear into their lives,” Mette Bentow said. Elias has asked that his father, Klaus, a security consultant who has worked for El Al, no longer wear his kippah in public.Enjoying the last rays of sunlight in the backyard of her family’s riverview apartment building near the Chabad synagogue, Mette Bentow said that she and her husband often tell Elias not to be afraid of Muslims he sees on the street — so far with partial success.Mette Bentow said she is deeply thankful for how Danish society “embraced” its Jews following the 2015 attack.“I love Denmark, I love our royal house, I get goosebumps on national holidays,” she said as she sat with her family around a table laden with fresh cherries, sourdough Danish pastries and a pitcher of elderberry juice.“But lately,” she added, “the more I live here, the more I get the feeling this might be the wrong place to raise a Jewish family.”
Fight over the oldest synagogue in the US heads to the Supreme Court-Congregation Jeshuat Israel files appeal after court rules that Shearith Israel of NY is rightful owner of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island-By JTA-TOI-JUN 18,18
BOSTON — The legal fight over ownership of the country’s oldest synagogue is headed to the US Supreme Court.The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals last week denied a petition filed by Congregation Jeshuat Israel, which worships in the historic synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, for a rehearing of a ruling from August that said it was a tenant of the building.That ruling by a three-judge panel found that New York’s Shearith Israel, which was founded in 1654, is the rightful owner of the Touro Synagogue, which was built in 1763. Jeshuat Israel will appeal, according to its lawyer, Gary Naftalis.It is the latest development in a years-long property dispute between Jeshuat Israel and Shearith Israel, the nation’s oldest congregation.The appeals court ruling by Justice David Souter, a former US Supreme Court justice, also grants the Manhattan congregation ownership of some of Touro’s possessions.“We will seek review by the United States Supreme Court to continue our fight to preserve the Touro Synagogue,” Naftalis wrote in an email to JTA. He said that Jeshuat Israel is the only congregation that has prayed at Touro for over a century.But Louis Solomon, the board chairman of Shearith Israel and its lawyer in the case against Jeshuat Israel, said the “Court’s decision reaffirms the need, for the good of American Jewry and people of faith everywhere, to put this divisive matter behind us.”The two congregations have had a close, centuries-old intertwined relationship. During the Revolutionary War, when Newport’s Jews fled the city, Shearith Israel became the trustee of Touro and for a time held its possessions. Later, with a wave of new Jewish immigrants, the congregation rechartered.The current legal dispute dates back to 2012, when Jeshuat Israel, seeking to secure its financial footing and maintain a rabbi, planned to sell artifacts worth millions of dollars. Shearith Israel moved to block the sale, arguing in part that it is the rightful owner of the Touro Synagogue and its possessions.Two years ago, a US District Court judge in Providence ruled in favor of Jeshuat Israel and removed Shearith Israel as a trustee. Shearith Israel appealed and won the decision in August, with Souter finding that Jeshuat Israel was a tenant.The intended sale that sparked the conflict was of a pair of Colonial-era silver Torah scroll finials handcrafted by prominent silversmith Myer Myers valued at more than $7 million.The ruling last week featured a dissent by Judge Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson in which she expressed concern that the decision did not consider long-standing Rhode Island law on charitable trusts that “could lead to different legal conclusions.”Designated a national historic site in 1946, the Touro Synagogue attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year, including for its annual summertime reading of a historic letter from George Washington, who visited the synagogue in 1790. The nation’s first president wrote that the government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
In Holland, a former jihadist reaches out to Jews for forgiveness-Ex-member of the Hofstad terror group which killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh gives first interview to Jewish newspaper, says Israelis 'need their own homeland'-By Cnaan Liphshiz-TOI-JUN 18,18
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Jews were never far from the mind of Jason Walters when he was still a key member of the Netherlands’ deadliest network of jihadist terrorists.Even after Dutch security forces arrested Walters in 2004 for throwing a hand grenade at police during a counterterrorist raid on his hiding place, he believed that “the outcome of the trial will be determined in Tel Aviv.”That belief was the result of an “extreme susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” said Walters in a recent interview.It was that susceptibility that led Walters, still a teenager, to join the deadly Hofstad Group that in 2004 killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.Now Walters is 33 and a recent university graduate. He says he became de-radicalized in prison, where he served eight years before his release in 2013.“As a salafi jihadist, anti-Semitism is wrapped up in your entire worldview,” he said.Which is why Walters chose to speak out for the first time to Esther Voet, the editor-in-chief of Holland’s NIW Jewish weekly, in an unusual interview that also featured an apology to Dutch Jews and other victims, and his advocacy of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.Ahead of the 15th anniversary of the Hofstad group’s exposure, Walters is one of two individuals with ties to that network who are giving others hope in the fight against radical Islam by reaching out to Jewish audiences and warning other Muslims against radicalization.Soumaya Sahla, a Muslim woman who spent nine months in jail in connection with the Hofstad Group, broke her silence last year. Sahla, 34, had traveled with the CIDI pro-Israel lobby group to Jerusalem for a seminar on the Holocaust.“When a Jewish man can’t wear a kippah on the street” but Muslims can wear traditional garb, “then something’s wrong,” she said last year during a Hanukkah party in Utrecht.Walters’s interview made waves in the Netherlands because, unlike Sahla, he was convicted of carrying out an armed attack and planning to assassinate high-profile anti-Islam politicians, including Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Major Dutch newspapers such as Elsevier and Algemeen Dagblad covered the NIW interview, as well as Belgian media.Part of the interview’s significance is attached to the “national trauma” that the Netherlands experienced following Theo van Gogh’s murder by another member of the Hofstad Group in 2004. Van Gogh, who angered Dutch Muslims with his film criticizing the treatment of women in Islam, was shot and stabbed as he cycled to work in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004. Bart Olmer, a former intelligence services correspondent for the Telegraaf daily, told JTA that the Hofstad group “changed the reality in this country.”In addition to Walters, Sahla and Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo Van Gogh’s killer, another 21 people were arrested in connection with the group, whose name refers to The Hague, its main area of operations. It was the first, largest and deadliest jihadist cell in Dutch history. Its discovery prompted an unprecedented tightening of security and counterterrorism efforts in a country whose leaders for decades had bicycled to work without bodyguards. It also triggered an explosion of anti-Muslim sentiment that has defined much of the country’s politics until today.Jason Walters’s involvement in the cell was particularly shocking to many in Holland because, unlike many others in the cell, he did not come from a radical Muslim environment. Born to a Dutch-born woman and an American soldier serving in the Netherlands, he was converted to Islam at the age of 13 with his brother, Jermaine — who in 2015 died in Syria while fighting with other jihadists.The brothers became interested in Islam following the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, Walters said. Moroccan extremists took the two brothers under their wings and radicalized them, according to the prosecution in Walters’s trial. By 2003, when the brothers were both older than 18, they were part of the Hofstad group, a local network of terrorists with weapons and hit-lists and extensive connections to international Sunni terrorist groups.“It began by studying the Koran day and night. As an extremist, that worldview is everything. You’re not even a person anymore, you become dazed,” Walters told Voet, during the interview at her home in Amsterdam. “You believe you experience miracles. Religion defines you: You’re no longer entitled to your own opinion and feelings. If they contradict religion, you need to adjust.”Hating Jews was an important part of Walters’s identity, he said.“The dogma is: The Jews refused Mohammad’s message, they’re intrinsically bad, cursed,” Walters added. Islamic verses describe how “Jews are messengers of the devil.” Israel’s existence served as proof of the nearing of the day of reckoning because “they had assembled in one place in the Middle East to be annihilated,” he said.“You demonize everything Jewish as the source of everything evil,” Walters said.With time on his hands, Walters, who spent much of his prison term in isolation, began studying Western sciences with the intention of proving they were all rooted in the Koran, he said. But exposure to empirical thinking caused Walters’s religious conviction to “crumble,” he said.Walters told Voet that he suddenly noticed how he believed simultaneously in three contradictory theories about the Holocaust: That it was a hoax to justify Israel’s creation; that it was real but justified, and that it was real and unjustified, exemplifying the evilness of Christian societies.Walters recently completed his master’s degree on Islamist radicalization with the prestigious Leiden University.Amid rising levels of anti-Semitic violence in the Netherlands, “I began feeling increasingly guilty,” Walters said.“I had been very unfair and I want to set it right,” he said of his decision to reach out to Voet for his first interview. “I need to make up for being on the absolutely wrong side. It became a major issue to me, in relation to Jews and Israelis.”He also apologized to the four officers who were wounded in the explosion he caused by throwing a hand grenade at them in 2004.“It’s something I have to live with,” he told NIW.The “pitfall of anti-Semitism, where I once fell, is becoming mainstream,” he added. “The same stereotypes are back. There’s no more balance in the debate about Jews or Israel.”In the NIW interview, Walters went on to defend Israel.“When the religious source for my anti-Semitism fell away, I began a reorientation,” he said. Looking at the map of Israel, “I began to think what would I do if I were an Israeli.” Walters attributes Israel’s control of disputed land to the Middle East’s instability. And he called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “restrained” in comparison to Arab rulers who butchered them en masse.Israel “does make mistakes,” he said. But “of course it chooses to have power” in view of how “history has proven that Jews need their own homeland, because no one else will protect them.”Walters declined to have his picture appear in the NIW paper, explaining he wanted his exposure to “be a gradual thing.” But as Islamist extremism continues to claim victims across Western Europe, Walters also said that he feels increasingly compelled to oppose it publicly.“I hoped to have a boring job, perhaps as a professor of philosophy,” he said. “But I’m realizing that we have a problem of Muslim extremism.” At his age, “I’m thinking about starting a family and what kind of society I want my children to live in.”Although he has become a poster child for de-radicalization, Walters says he has little faith in its likelihood for most followers of the hateful ideologies to which he used to subscribe. De-radicalization is no clinical procedure, he said.“It’s about an existential choice,” he said.Getting radicalized Muslims to abandon their doctrines is about as likely as getting hardened left-wing voters to support the far-right, he explained.“There is no painless solution,” Walters opined. “We may be nearing very inconvenient choices, like redefining freedom of religion and reconsidering how equipped the constitution leaves us to tackle this problem.”While Walters says he has “no answers” to these sobering questions, he added that he does feel compelled to act to fix the issue. “I have a responsibility, I’ve seen both sides of the problem,” he said.
EARTH DESTROYED WITH THE EARTH IN NOAHS DAY(BECAUSE OF SIN,VIOLENCE AND GODLESS PEOPLE)
GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)(HAMAS IN HEBREW IS VIOLENCE)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM)(HAMAS) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
HOSEA 4:1-3
1 Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
2 By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.
3 Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.
DEUTORONOMY 28:22-24
22 The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.
23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.
24 The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.
Rains from Tropical Storm Carlotta pound Mexico's coast-[Associated Press]-CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN-YAHOONEWS-June 18, 2018
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Heavy rains from Tropical Storm Carlotta pounded Mexico's Pacific coast east of Acapulco ahead of its expected landfall late Saturday or early Sunday.Carlotta, the third named storm of the Pacific hurricane season, was meandering just off Mexico's coast, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.It said that Carlotta had maximum sustained winds near 50 mph (60 kph), and its center was located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south-southeast of Acapulco. The storm was nearly stationary, but a northward motion was forecast to begin later Saturday.The hurricane center says the storm threatens torrential rains for the coastline of the southern states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, with up to 10 inches possible in some areas.On Friday, the Mexican Interior Department reported that there were no deaths in the resort cities of Los Cabos from Tropical Storm Bud, which left the Baja California Peninsula and re-emerged over the Gulf of California.The hurricane center said Bud was expected to dissipate on Saturday over the high terrain of the Mexican state of Sonora. Its remnants were expected to bring heavy rain to northwest Mexico and the southwest United States.
Flooding possible in U.S. Southwest where wildfires scorch earth-[Reuters]-By Keith Coffman-YAHOONEWS-June 16, 2018
DENVER (Reuters) - Heavy thunderstorms and widespread rains expected on Saturday in the U.S. Southwest could help douse the numerous unrelenting wildfires crews are battling in the parched region.But they could also bring the potential for dangerous flash flooding as 1 to 3 inches (3 to 9 cm) of rain is forecast to fall in parts of the five-state region where more than 20 wildfires have left behind areas of barren earth, the National Weather Service said."Water can rise quickly downstream of heavy rain, even when thunderstorms and heavy rain are miles away," the service said in an advisory. "Rock and mud slides, and high water flowing across roads, are also possible which could impact travel."One of the areas of particular concern is in southwestern Colorado where the largest and most threatening blaze is the 416 Fire, which has scorched nearly 33,000 acres (13,000 hectares)near the town of Durango. The fire was 20 percent contained as of Friday night, fire officials said."When an area has burned, soil become hydrophobic, or water resistant, which causes water to rush over soil instead of soak in," The Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team said in an advisory, noting that crews are in place to perform water rescues.Some 143 residences and businesses remain under evacuation orders and another 2,513 are under a pre-evacuation notice, La Plata County officials said.The 416 Fire and a separate, smaller blaze burning nearby, the Burro Fire, prompted state parks officials to close several wildlife areas to the public. The U.S. Forest Service has closed all 1.8 million acres of the San Juan National Forest to visitors.No one has been injured and no structures have been lost in the Colorado fires, but nine homes were destroyed in a small wildfire in Utah.In southern Wyoming near the Colorado border, the Badger Creek Fire in the Medicine Bow National Forest is nearly 15,000 acres, according to the Inciweb online U.S. fire information service.The Wyoming fire containment was listed as zero percent by fire officials. About 400 homes in Albany County have been ordered to evacuate, and one home and two outbuildings have been destroyed by the flames, a fire incident spokesman said.The fire also has prompted the closure of about 50,000 acres of the 2.9 million-acre national forest, and 16,000 acres of the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and Pawnee National Grasslands in neighboring Colorado, the spokesman said.(Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Adrian Croft)
WORLD POWERS IN THE LAST DAYS (END OF AGE OF GRACE NOT THE WORLD)
EUROPEAN UNION-KING OF WEST-DAN 9:26-27,DAN 7:23-24,DAN 11:40,REV 13:1-10
EGYPT-KING OF THE SOUTH-DAN 11:40
RUSSIA-KING OF THE NORTH-EZEK 38:1-2,EZEK 39:1-3
CHINA-KING OF THE EAST-DAN 11:44,REV 9:16,18
VATICAN-RELIGIOUS LEADER-REV 13:11-18,REV 17:4-5,9,18
WORLD TERRORISM
OH BY THE WAY WHEN THE MEDIA SAYS ALLU-AK-BAR MEANS GOD IS GREAT LIE. IN ISLAM ALLU-AK-BAR MEANS OUR GOD IS GREATER OR GREATEST. THIS IS HOW THE MEDIA SUCK HOLES UP TO ISLAMIC-QURANIC-MUSLIMS. BY WATERING DOWN THE REAL MEANING OF THE SEX FOR MURDER DEATH CULT ISLAM. TO MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A PEACEFUL RELIGION (CULT OF DEATH AND WORLD DOMINATION).
GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)(HAMAS IN HEBREW IS VIOLENCE)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM)(HAMAS) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
GENESIS 16:11-12
11 And the angel of the LORD said unto her,(HAGAR) Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael;(FATHER OF THE ARAB/MUSLIMS) because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12 And he (ISHMAEL-FATHER OF THE ARAB-MUSLIMS) will be a wild (DONKEY-JACKASS) man;(ISLAM IS A FAKE AND DANGEROUS SEX FOR MURDER CULT) his hand will be against every man,(ISLAM HATES EVERYONE) and every man's hand against him;(PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM BEING BEHEADED) and he (ISHMAEL ARAB/MUSLIM) shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.(LITERAL-THE ARABS LIVE WITH THEIR BRETHERN JEWS)
ISAIAH 14:12-14
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,(SATAN) son of the morning!(HEBREW-CRECENT MOON-ISLAM) how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14 I (SATAN HAS EYE TROUBLES) will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.(AND 1/3RD OF THE ANGELS OF HEAVEN FELL WITH SATAN AND BECAME DEMONS)
JOHN 16:2
2 They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.(ISLAM MURDERS IN THE NAME OF MOON GOD ALLAH OF ISLAM)
Fighting rages around airport in Yemen port city of Hodeida-Iran-backed Houthi rebels chant 'death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews' as they battle Saudi-led forces-By Ahmed al-Haj-TOI-JUN 18,18
SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Saudi-led forces fought to retake the international airport of Yemen’s rebel-held port city of Hodeida from the Shiite Houthi rebels, Yemeni officials and witnesses said on Saturday, as combat intensified for the starving nation’s main gateway for food shipments.With battles raging at the southern side of al-Hodeida International Airport, the military of Yemen’s exiled government said it had entirely seized the facility, and that engineers were working to clear mines from nearby areas just south of the city of some 600,000 people on the Red Sea.“The armed forces which are supported by the Arab coalition have freed the al-Hodeida International Airport from the Houthi militias and the engineering teams have started to clean the airport and its surroundings from mines and bombs,” the military said on its official Twitter account.Other government officials and witnesses later said coalition forces had not yet fully taken control of the airport. They said fighting was heavy just outside the airport gates.Sadek Dawad, spokesman of the Republican Guards force loyal to the Saudis, said government forces had battled onto the airport grounds.Dawad also said the southern gate of Hodeida city was captured by pro-coalition forces.“The military operations to liberate the city of Hodeida will not be stopped until we secure the city and its strategic port and that won’t last too long,” he told The Associated Press.Yemen’s Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who hold the country’s capital of Sanaa, did not immediately acknowledge losing the airport.The Houthi-run Al Masirah satellite news channel aired footage it described as being from near Hodeida showing a burned-out truck, corpses of irregular fighters and a damaged Emirati armored vehicle. The Iranian-aligned fighters rifled through a military ledger from the vehicle before chanting their slogan: “Death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, victory to Islam!”Yemeni officials and witnesses said forces from the United Arab Emirates-backed Amaleqa brigades, backed by air cover from the Saudi-led coalition, were heading to eastern Hodeida province to attempt to cut off the main road that links it with the capital, Sanaa.The officials said if government forces capture the Kilo 16 Road they will trap the rebels in Hodeida and the western coast and prevent them from receiving supplies from the capital. The rebels are then expected to have no choice but to head to the northern province of Hajjah.The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media and the witnesses for fear of reprisals.The Norwegian Refugee Council said humanitarian agencies cannot reach the southern part of Hodeida as fighting escalated. It said in a statement that heavy airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition have moved confrontation lines deeper to the south.United Nations special envoy Martin Griffiths, meanwhile arrived in Sanaa in an effort to broker a cease-fire.The Saudi-led coalition began its assault Wednesday on Hodeida, the main entry for food into a country already on the brink of famine. Emirati forces are leading ground forces mixed with their own troops, irregular militiamen and soldiers backing Yemen’s exiled government. Saudi Arabia has provided air support, with targeting guidance and refueling coming from the US.International aid groups and the UN cautioned the Saudi-led coalition from launching the assault. Their fear is that a protracted fight could force a shutdown of Hodeida’s port at a time when a halt in aid risks tipping millions into starvation. Some 70 percent of Yemen’s food enters via the port, as well as the bulk of humanitarian aid and fuel supplies. Around two-thirds of the country’s population of 27 million relies on aid and 8.4 million are already at risk of starving.For its part, the Saudi-led coalition says it had no choice but to launch the assault as the port provided millions of dollars for the Houthis through customs controls. They also accuse the Houthis of using the port to smuggle weapons through, something a UN panels of experts described in January as “unlikely” as incoming ships require UN permission and are subject to random searches.The UN and Western nations say Iran has supplied the Houthis with weapons, from assault rifles to the ballistic missiles they have fired deep into Saudi Arabia, including at the capital, Riyadh.The coalition has blocked most ports, letting supplies into Hodeida in coordination with the UN The air campaign and fighting have disrupted other supply lines, causing an economic crisis that makes food too expensive for many to afford.Aid agencies and the UN evacuated international staff from the city ahead of the offensive. Some of the wounded able to flee are driving on to Aden, some 315 kilometers (195 miles) away, after being stabilized at a hospital in Mocha on the way, the aid group Doctors Without Borders said. The local hospital in Hodeida already is struggling to help the wounded, the group said.Thousands remain besieged in the city and around the airport due to the fighting.“Families are trapped inside and it is difficult leaving as they are coming under airstrikes and bombardment by both parties of the war,” relief worker Saber Wasel told The Associated Press. “It was a hard night for citizens because of the intensity of the strikes and gunfire.”The Houthis seized control of Sanaa in September 2014, later pushing south toward the port city of Aden. The Saudi-led coalition entered the conflict in March 2015 and has faced criticism for a campaign of airstrikes killing civilians and destroying hospitals and markets.The Houthis meanwhile have laid land mines killing and wounding civilians, targeted religious minorities and imprisoned opponents.
Ahead of Macron meeting, Merkel insists migration needs ‘European answer’-German leader facing insurrection from her interior minister amid broad public support for a harder line on immigration-By Agencies-TOI-JUN 18,18
BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted Saturday that migration is “a European challenge that needs a European answer” amid a dispute over the issue inside her government and ahead of a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.Merkel is locked in a standoff with her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, over his demand for some asylum-seekers to be turned back at the border. Merkel opposes unilateral action, arguing that it would weaken the European Union.In her weekly video message Saturday, Merkel named migration as one of four major challenges to be addressed by German and French leaders when she meets Macron in Germany on Tuesday along with ministers from both governments.Other issues included foreign and defense policy and the future of the euro currency zone.Her comments come after an opinion poll Friday showed most Germans support the tougher line of her rebel interior minister.The survey found that 62 percent of respondents were in favor of turning back undocumented migrants at the border, in line with the stance of Seehofer who is openly challenging Merkel.And 86 percent want faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers, a process now often held up by bureaucratic hurdles and legal challenges, according to the Infratest dimap poll.The survey turns up the pressure on Merkel, who has faced a backlash for allowing into Germany more than one million people fleeing war and misery in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere since 2015.The mass influx sparked the rise of the far-right and anti-Islam AfD party, which entered parliament last September.Merkel’s welcome to refugees also infuriated Seehofer and his CSU, the sister party of her Christian Democrats in the southern state of Bavaria, which became the main entry point for most migrants.In an unprecedented split between the CDU and CSU, Seehofer has openly defied Merkel with a demand to allow border police to turn back migrants who lack valid identity papers or are already registered in another EU country.Seehofer also sacked Jutta Cordt, the head of the Office for Migrants and Refugees (BAMF), an interior ministry spokesman said late Friday.The BAMF has been at the heart of a scandal around the right of asylum for several weeks, with one of its branches in Bremen, northern Germany, under investigation for allegedly favouring more than 1,200 asylum applications.The CSU’s Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder said that the ongoing “asylum tourism” meant that, as a government, “we’re nearing the endgame when it comes to our credibility”.“The people are running out of patience,” he told Bild daily.Merkel argues that Germany must not take the sudden and unilateral step of rejecting asylum seekers at the border, which would add to the burden faced by frontline countries like Italy and Greece.She has pledged instead to seek bilateral agreements with arrival and transit countries and a wider solution by the EU, which holds its next summit on June 28-29, while admitting that this plan is “ambitious”.The CSU — which faces an election threat from the AfD in October state polls — has refused to budge and set Merkel an effective ultimatum of next Monday.Seehofer will on that day seek CSU party backing to use his ministerial authority to order border police to turn back the asylum seekers, in open defiance of Merkel.For Merkel, in power for over 12 years, the stakes could not be higher as she leads an uneasy coalition government with a narrow majority that took half a year to cobble together.If Seehofer decides to go it alone, Merkel would have to fire him, sparking an unprecedented CDU-CSU split, political scientist Heinrich Oberreuter told business daily Handelsblatt.In that scenario, Merkel could lead a minority government with the third party in the coalition, the Social Democrats (SPD), or call fresh elections that would likely benefit only the AfD, he said.Macron offered his backing to Merkel, telling reporters: “Countries are committed to the paths taken by their heads of state or government.”“Germany also has a head of government,” he said of Merkel, saying it was she who was “responsible before her people and her parliament”.In a sign of the frayed nerves, Germany’s political and media world lurched into a brief panic Friday as several media outlets fell for a hoax tweet claiming Seehofer’s CSU was quitting the coalition.The fake news was quickly debunked as originating from satirical magazine Titanic, but not before it had been picked up by some major media, causing immediate dips in the euro and stock market.
Pope: Abortion is 'white glove' equivalent to Nazi crimes-[Associated Press]-NICOLE WINFIELD-YAHOONEWS-June 18, 2018
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis denounced abortion on Saturday as the "white glove" equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families to accept the children that God gives them.Francis spoke off-the-cuff to a meeting of an Italian family association. The Vatican didn't immediately provide a transcript of his remarks, but the ANSA news agency and the SIR agency of the Italian bishops' conference quoted him as denouncing the pre-natal tests that can result in parents choosing to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus is malformed or suffering other problems."Last century, the whole world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves," the agencies quoted Francis as saying.The pope urged families to accept children "as God gives them to us."Francis has repeated the strict anti-abortion stance of his predecessors and integrated it into his broader condemnation of what he calls today's "throw-away culture." He has frequently lamented how the sick, the poor, the elderly and the unborn are considered unworthy of protection and dignity by a society that prizes instead individual prowess.He has also decried how women are often considered part of this "throw-away culture," sometimes forced to prostitute themselves."How many of you pray for these women who are thrown away, for these women who are used, for these girls who have to sell their own dignity to have a job?" Francis asked during his morning homily Friday.Francis has dedicated much of his pontificate to preaching about families, marriage and the problems that families today encounter. He is expected to highlight these issues during his August trip to Ireland where he'll close out the Catholic Church's big family rally.
