TRUMP’S BAN

Letters to the Editor,  Jerusalem Post ,  January 31, 2017

Isi Leibler’s sane “Pseudo-liberal Jews are causing unspeakable damage” (Candidly Speaking, January 29) serves as an antidote to the madness I’ve been hearing since US President Donald Trump’s executive order on refugees.

However, the crux of the matter is not being addressed: The ban should be on ideological, not religious grounds.

During the Cold War, communists could get into the US only through a waiver. Since Islam is not only a religion, but a political ideology, Trump is applying similar rules to Muslims, and we should view this as targeting the ideology.

If there were a way to easily differentiate between what Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls the “Mecca Muslims” (i.e., “Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly, but are not inclined to practice violence”) and the “Medina Muslims” (who “see the forcible imposition of Shari’a as their religious duty”), there would be less of a problem.

But this test is not easy to come up with, so it makes sense that until then, there should be a ban.

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC Beersheba

PM Netanyahu’s message to the Iranian people

Iran is back on the agenda! 

Donald Trump returns Winston Churchill's bust to the Oval Office

The Telegraph

Churchill bust with George W Bush

•  By David Millward, us correspondent 

Within hours of moving into the White House, Donald Trump has honoured his pledge to return the bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office.

The Jacob Epstein sculpture was given to President George W Bush by Tony Blair.

It was displayed in the Oval Office but was removed by President Barack Obama and replaced by a bust of Martin Luther King in 2009.

The former president's decision to send the bust back to the British embassy in Washington was greeted with outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Mr Obama sought to deflect the criticism by saying he had a second bust of Churchill which he kept in his private quarters.

“My private office is called the Treaty Room. Right outside the door of the Treaty Room so that I see it every day, including on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill,” he said.

But critics were unconvinced. Boris Johnson, who was London mayor at the time, said the move was a "snub to Britain". He suggested that the decision had been fuelled by what he described as Mr Obama's "ancestral dislike of the British Empire".

Mr Trump, who has a Scottish mother and is regarded as an Anglophile, had hinted that he was ready to return the bust to its pride of place in the Oval Office in a New York Times interview.

The case for returning the Epstein bust to the White House was pressed by Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, who forged a close relationship with Mr Trump.

***

 To me this was one of the first markers that indicated how dangerous the Obama presidency would be. As one who had read most of Churchill’s books and several Churchill biographies, I was appalled when I learned the Obama had removed the bust from the White House. If Obama had so little respect for Churchill who in 1940 stood alone facing Hitler and saved western civilization, then it was obvious that Obama did not care for our civilization. 

Thank you, President Trump for returning Churchill's  bust to the Oval Office.        

Trump's inaugural speech on uniting the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism

  

“We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate from the face of the Earth.”

I hope he will not be neutral to Palestinian radical Islamic terrorism as he proclaimed he would be when he was a candidate.  Perhaps Rudy Giuliani explained the inconsistency to him after I asked Giuliani about Trump’s stance during Giuliani's visit to Beer Sheva last March. 

Good riddance! Obama to leave office today.

In final act as president, Obama commutes 330 drug sentences

Well, if anybody had any remaining doubts what he stood for, this final act clarifies it. But what Obama has done on the world stage is just horrific.  To paraphrase Churchill, never in modern history have the lives of so many people put in jeopardy by so few.  

The sunset clause of the Iran Deal enables Iran to become a nuclear power in 13 years even if it sticks to the terms of the agreement. How under Obama’s leadership could the P5+1 powers    sign such a dangerous deal will be up to historians to clarify. I would say it is a combination of ignorance about Islam, especially Shi’a eschatology,  on the one hand and political correctness as euphemism for political cowardice on the other.  The political elites know that something is not right, but in contrast to Churchill they do not know what their enemy believes in.  Those who do, skip over the truth like Boris Johnson did in his book The Churchill Factor – a perfect example of political cowardice.  But in the end it all boils down to ignorance.

Reversing the Iran Deal must be priority number one for the new President and Congress.  Of all the disasters Obama foreign policy has created, and there are so many, from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood  in Egypt to not enforcing his red line in Syria,  the Iran Deal stands out as the most significant and dangerous error the west has committed in modern history. Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 have we put ourselves in such peril. 

In 2009 I wrote an article in the American Thinker How will Israel survive Obama's naïveté on Iran?

In two hours we will have made it.  The Obama nightmare is finally ending 

Phew!  We did it. Israel survived Obama! 

Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat welcomes Trump

The Obama nightmare will end on January 20, 2017, 12:00 NOON EST (GMT-5) i.e. 07:00 p.m. Israel Time (GMT +02:00).

Time  left before Obama leaves office

U.S. ambassadors appointed by Obama must quit by Inauguration Day

REUTERS

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's transition team has issued a blanket mandate for politically appointed ambassadors installed by President Barack Obama to leave their posts by Inauguration Day, the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand said on Friday.

"I will be departing on January 20th," Ambassador Mark Gilbert said in a Twitter message to Reuters.

The mandate was issued "without exceptions" through an order sent in a State Department cable on Dec. 23, Gilbert said.

He was confirming a report in the New York Times, which quoted diplomatic sources as saying previous U.S. administrations, from both major political parties, have traditionally granted extensions to allow a few such ambassadors, particularly those with school-age children, to remain in place for weeks or months.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said it was "common" procedure for all politically-appointed ambassadors to step down as a new U.S. administration comes in on Jan. 20.

"All political appointees for the Obama administration were directed to submit their resignation and the due date was Dec. 7, and the resignations are to take effect on Jan. 20," Kirby told reporters. "That is common, typical practise ... that's the way it works."

Kirby said, as expected, no career diplomats serving as ambassadors had been asked to resign by the transition team.

He acknowledged, however, that in the past there had been exceptions made for a small number of political appointees to stay on for a short time for personal reasons. "But that is totally in the prerogative of the incoming administration," he added.

The order could leave the United States without Senate-confirmed envoys for months in critical nations like Germany, Canada and Britain, the New York Times reported.

A senior Trump transition official told the newspaper there was no ill will in the move, describing it as a simple matter of ensuring Obama's overseas envoys leave the government on schedule, just as thousands of political aides at the White House and in federal agencies must do.

Trump has taken a strict stance against leaving any of Obama's political appointees in place as he prepares to take office on Jan. 20, aiming to break up many of his predecessor's signature foreign and domestic policy achievements, the newspaper said.

Diplomats told the New York Times that the order has thrown their personal lives into a tailspin, leaving them scrambling to secure living arrangements and acquire visas allowing them to stay in their countries so their children can remain in school.