Says Palestinians can rename city 'whatever they want'
By Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM – A top member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government today announced Israel "must" give up sections of Jerusalem for a future Palestinian state, even conceding the Palestinians can rename Jerusalem "to whatever they want."
"We must come today and say, friends, the Jewish neighborhoods, including Har Homa, will remain under Israeli sovereignty, and the Arab neighborhoods will be the Palestinian capital, which they will call Jerusalem or whatever they want," said Israeli Vice Premier Haim Ramon.
Positions held by Ramon, a ranking member of Olmert's Kadima party, are largely considered to be reflective of Israeli government policy.  
Ramon's statements follow last month's U.S.-sponsored Annapolis summit at which Olmert committed to aim at completing negotiations by next year to create a Palestinian state, with Israel expected to evacuate swaths of Jerusalem and the strategic West Bank.
Ramon said due to the city's demographics, Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem "should not be under Israeli sovereignty, because they pose a threat to Jerusalem being the capital of a Jewish Israel."
About 231,000 Arabs live in Jerusalem, mostly in eastern neighborhoods. The city has an estimated total population of 724,000.
Ramon ...   more »

A leading Israeli rabbi said last week that if the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert moves ahead with the surrender of Judea and Samaria (the so-called 'West Bank') for the creation of a Palestinian Arab state, the Jews living there in fulfillment of their biblical mandate will declare a new Jewish state independent of Israel.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe, founder of the grassroots right-wing umbrella group SOS Israel, said that in light of the 2005 uprooting of more than 8,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip, the time had clearly come for the Jews of Judea and Samaria to prepare to secede from Israel and establish their own autonomous state.
Earlier in the week, SOS Israel launched a contest to choose a flag and national anthem for the new state.
Original Source
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Herb Keinon ,
Israel and the US are heading for a showdown over construction in Jerusalem's Har Homa neighborhood, as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that building there does not help create confidence in peace negotiations, and Construction and Housing Minister Ze'ev Boim responded that the construction will continue.
Rice, in comments to reporters after her meeting with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in Brussels on Friday, said she brought up the issue of a recent tender to build some 307 units in Har Homa with Livni.
"I've made [it] very clear, about seeking clarification on precisely what this means," Rice said. "I've made clear that we're in a time when the goal is to build maximum confidence between the parties and this doesn't help to build confidence."
Rice said that "there just shouldn't be anything that might try and judge final status, the outcomes of final status negotiations. It's even more important now that we are really on the eve of the beginning of those negotiations."
Boim, however, was quoted by Army Radio on Saturday as saying that nothing could prevent the new construction in Har Homa since it was within the capital's municipal borders.
"Rice must ...   more »

The newspapers here in Israel made for sobering reading this weekend.
In the words of a visiting compatriot in the cause of Christian Zionism, it is as if, after years of moving towards a cliff in Israel-US relations, we have suddenly arrived, and tipped over the edge.
The United States has betrayed the trust of its once “faithful friend” in the Middle East, and things are spiraling at an alarming speed - seemingly out of control.
Israelis today believe that Washington successfully worked to lure them to Annapolis by promising to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Jewish state against Iran’s fevered efforts to obtain, deploy and possibly use nuclear weapons.
Largely as a result of this “guaranteed” alliance, the Olmert government went to Annapolis despite the refusal of the Palestinian Arabs to, among other things, recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Once there, believing that America truly has Israel’s best interests at heart, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to work towards the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of the Bush presidency, and gave the US the right to judge whether or not Jerusalem is complying with its commitments under the Road Map.
And then, with this Israeli commitment ...   more »

By Mladen Andrijasevic 
On August 8, 2006 Professor Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Islam studies in the West, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers." And "In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead -- hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement."
I did a quick search of the National Intelligence Estimate document "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" for the words "imam" or "12th" or "Mehdi". No hits. So I can judge with "high confidence" that NIE conclusions have not much to do with why Iran wants to do what it wants to do. As long as that has not changed, nothing has changed.
In other words, it is irrelevant whether this is disinformation by Iran ...   more »

It must be clear that if Iran does not cooperate with the West on the nuclear issue, military confrontation will be unavoidable, incoming Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, was quoted as saying Sunday.  
Israeli ambassador to Britain Ron Prosor.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
Prosor, who served as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's senior adviser on Iran, told the Sunday Telegraph that Teheran could enrich enough uranium to make an atomic bomb by 2009.
"At the current rate of progress Iran will reach the technical threshold for producing fissile material by 2009," he told the British newspaper. "This is a global threat and it requires a global response. It should be made clear that if Iran does not co-operate then military confrontation is inevitable. It is either co-operation or confrontation."
Prosor went on to say that the Iranians would soon be able to fully control all the elements of enrichment and from that point on, it would only be a matter of time before they had a nuclear weapon.
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"There needs to be full verification of ...   more »

Tehran moves closer to confrontation with U.S.
By Jerome R. Corsi
Iran today announced a decision to end all oil sales in dollar transactions, moving one step closer to confrontation with the United States.
Iranian oil minister Gholam Hussein Nozari told the press the dollar is not considered a trustworthy currency any more, considering dollar depreciation and the dollar losses experienced by crude-oil exporting countries, according to a report published Saturday by the Iranian Student News Agency, or ISNA, in Tehran.  
Nozari also strongly suggested OPEC should move to a trustworthy currency to stop the loss of oil exporting countries, according to the ISNA report.
OPEC's next meeting is scheduled for Feb. 2 in Vienna.
Iran currently has a proposal before OPEC recommending that OPEC oil-exporting countries move to sell oil in a basket of currencies, rather than dollars.  
Nozari also told the ISNA that Iran plans to fulfill the Sinopec Chinese Company's recent request to purchase more Iranian oil.
In April, WND reported Iran successfully pressured China to begin paying for Iranian oil in euros, not dollars.
At the Abu Dhabi summit last week, OPEC decided not to increase production, concluding there is currently enough oil in ...   more »

Bureau report indicates Muslim group's claims wildly inflated
By Chuck Hustmyre
Two recently released reports highlight the difference between the FBI's calculation of the number of religiously motivated hate crimes and that of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
In CAIR's annual report, "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States – 2007," the subtitle of which, "Presumption of Guilt," foreshadows the report's main theme, the Muslim lobby group claims the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims has risen each year since 1996. CAIR began keeping track of civil rights violations and hate crimes against Muslims that year because of what the report calls the "anti-Muslim backlash that followed the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City."
According to that report, CAIR received 2,467 complaints of civil rights violations in 2006 – 25 percent more than it received in 2005. CAIR also said it received 167 allegations of anti-Muslim hate crimes, up more than 9 percent from last year's 153 complaints.
The report goes on to say that in 2006, "Several key polls indicated that the level of Islamophobia continues to rise today in American society."
But CAIR's report stands in stark contrast ...   more »

Readers bombard Newsweek with evidence after adverse story on Ron Paul
By Jerome R. Corsi
A Newsweek story critical of Rep. Ron Paul and labeling the NAFTA Superhighway a baseless conspiracy theory has generated approximately 250 adverse reader responses on the "comments" section of Newsweek's website, many citing hard evidence that the proposed transcontinental trade corridor is quite real.
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
"There is a broad coalition of Americans developing across the United States who are opposed to a North American Union and know that Ron Paul is right and we need to take action now before it is too late," Jesse Benton, national press secretary for the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign 08 told WND.
Particularly interesting among Newsweek's reader comments were citations of Canadian government websites that openly discuss and declare plans to create a NAFTA Superhighway.
Several readers pointed to a Canadian government video clip gaining wide circulation on the Internet. It involves a Nov. 20 "Speech from the Throne," in which John Harvard, lieutenant-governor of the Province of Manitoba, Canada, opened the second session of the 39th assembly of the provincial legislature with comments proclaiming support for the development of a "Mid-Continent Trade Corridor."
"Manitoba is ...   more »

The only authorized Christian publisher in China is celebrating a milestone on Saturday as the 50 millionth Bible rolls off the presses, according to a report in the Times of London.
Click here for more from the Times of London.
Demand for the Bible is soaring in officially-atheist China, at a time when meteoric economic growth is testing the country’s allegiance to Communist doctrine, the Times of London reports. Now, the demand in China for Bibles is such that Amity Printing, a joint venture between Chinese Christian charity and the United Bible Societies, a Protestant organization, can barely keep pace.
Early next year it will move into a new, much larger factory on the edge of the eastern city of Nanjing to become the world’s single-biggest producer of Bibles.
“This platform has been built as a blessing to the nation. It will print Bibles for China for as long as it takes to do it,” said New Zealander Peter Dean, of the United Bible Societies.
In careful adherence to China’s laws that prohibit evangelizing, the Bible is not on sale in mainstream Chinese bookshops but through a distribution system managed by the official church, such as stalls set up for ...   more »

Chuck Baldwin
These are people I have known most of my life. They are my friends. I have spoken at their gatherings and rallies, participated in their discussions, and prayed with them. Of course, I'm talking about the fine men and women who can be categorized as the Christian Right.
On the whole, we share the same values and principles. We are pro-life; we stand for marriage as God defined it; we believe in the right to keep and bear arms; we support capital punishment (albeit I will be the first to admit that there are many inequities in the application of capital punishment that desperately need to be rectified); we believe children should have the right to pray in school; we believe former Alabama Chief Justice Roy S. Moore Jr. had every right to post the Ten Commandments in the Rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building, and before that, a plaque of the Ten Commandments in his Circuit Court building in Gadsden; and we believe in limited government.
In 1980 and 1984, I joined my friends in the Christian Right in helping Ronald Reagan achieve two landslide victories. In fact, as the Executive Director for the Florida Moral ...   more »