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geek tragedy

geek tragedy's Journal
geek tragedy's Journal
January 31, 2017

Palestinians protest UN chief for affirming Jewish ties to Temple Mount

The PA is insisting the rest of the world adopt their alternative facts. Not a good look, to be kind.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinians-protest-un-chief-for-affirming-jewish-link-to-temple-mount/

Palestinian officials are demanding an apology from the new United Nations chief after he said it was “completely clear that the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple.”

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also told Israel Radio in an interview Friday with its New York correspondent that “no one can deny the fact that Jerusalem is holy to three religions today,” including Judaism.

On Sunday, Adnan al-Husseini, the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Affairs minister, told the Chinese news service Xinhua that Guterres “ignored UNESCO’s decision that considered the Al-Aqsa mosque of pure Islamic heritage.” He also said Guterres “violated all legal, diplomatic and humanitarian customs and overstepped his role as secretary general … and must issue an apology to the Palestinian people.”

Xinhua also spoke with an adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmad Majdalani, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who said that Guterres’s comments “undermine the trustworthiness of the UN as a body that should support occupied peoples” and that Guterres “should clarify his remarks that give Israel a green light for more measures against Jerusalem.”


When tragedy becomes farce.
January 30, 2017

No point in feud with Trump over Holocaust statement-- top minister

What'a a little soft Holocaust denial between friends? Anyhoo, he supports the settlements so all good.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/no-point-in-feud-with-trump-over-holocaust-statement-top-minister/

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Monday said the omission of Jews from the White House’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement was likely a “mishap or a misunderstanding,” even though the Trump administration has insisted it was intentional.

The White House came under fire from Jewish groups and others Friday after releasing a statement to mark Holocaust remembrance that did not mention Jews or anti-Semitism, but officials have said they were intending to highlight the fact that the Nazis had many victims, not just Jews, and that they had “no regrets” about the formulation.
January 28, 2017

Facing Mexicos fury, Israel backtracks on Trump border wall praise

http://www.timesofisrael.com/facing-mexican-fury-israel-backtracks-on-trump-border-wall-praise/


A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry stressed Saturday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not commenting on US-Mexican relations when the Israeli leader said earlier that US President Donald Trump was “right” in pushing for a wall along the US-Mexico border to block illegal immigration.

The backtracking came after Mexican officials phoned Jerusalem and angrily demanded a clarification, the Haaretz daily reported on Saturday night.

Earlier Saturday, Netanyahu had welcomed praise from Trump for Israel’s security barrier. Referring to the recently built fence along Israel’s border with Egypt, the prime minister said the measure had been a “great success” in keeping out migrants, who mainly came from African nations.

“President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea,” Netanyahu wrote in English on Twitter, Trump’s preferred method of communication.

“[Netanyahu] referred to our specific security experience which we are willing to share,” spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon wrote on Twitter.


POS rightwing ethnonationalist governments are forming a new axis of evil and alienating the rest of the world in the process.
January 27, 2017

Palestinian family was first to help bus crash victims, call police

http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-family-was-first-to-help-bus-crash-victims-call-police/

A Palestinian family was the first to rush to the scene of a fatal West Bank bus crash on Thursday night, called police and administered aid to victims under pouring rain until rescue forces arrived, the Ynet news website reported Friday.

Cpt. Sivan Raviv, the medical officer of the IDF’s Binyamin Brigade, told Ynet that members of the family helped save the lives of some of the bus’s Israeli passengers.

“Usually we are scrambled to a scene after calls from the regional hotline on such accidents. This time it was members of the Palestinian family who called police quickly to report the accident,” Raviv said.

“They didn’t think about it or consider it,” Raviv added. “They saw saving lives as their first priority. When we got there we saw the family trying to extract passengers and treating them.”
January 27, 2017

Trump's approval ratings are the highest they'll ever be. And they suck.

Congress hasn't taken one difficult vote, he's still in the honeymoon phase of his presidency, and the economy is only going to get worse under him. He hasn't had a single setback yet, no event beyond his control to test him.

There are a lot of people still holding out hope for this profane beast. Just wait until things go sideways, and then all the bad stuff that they know in the back of their minds is true will start becoming harder to deny.

January 26, 2017

Time to brand Trump's border tax as The Wal-Mart Tax

Because by far the biggest payor of this tax will be Wal-Mart, and that will mean higher prices for Wal-Mart shoppers.

January 26, 2017

The End of the American Century-

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/end-of-the-american-century/514526/

The inaugural address of Donald Trump did not contain the word justice or cooperation or ideals or morals or truth or charity. It has only one reference to freedom. It did mention carnage and crime and tombstones and a variety of words never uttered before in a presidential inaugural. Since then, the president has doubled-down on his desire to build a wall on America’s Southern border and has said his administration will re-evaluate accepting refugees from designated Muslim countries and cut back by half the relatively small number of refugees accepted by the Obama administration. I spent seven years as editor of Time before I worked in the State Department as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. While I was editor of Time, I never wanted to be the first of Luce’s successors to pronounce the end of the American Century. In part, this was because of a misunderstanding of the term. Most people thought it meant American power or hegemony and there was not much diminution in America’s global power. What it really means is America as a global model and guarantor of freedom and rule of law and fairness.

Trump ’s administration is the death knell of the American Century.

...

And that was often the case. And no other nation, I promise you, ever talked to that foreign minister about transparency. That is America’s strength, not its weakness. The Chinese, and now the Trump administration, will resolutely practice non-interference in other nations’ affairs. America First is not a policy that any of our allies around the world want to hear. Our adversaries are delighted. Our power and influence with our friends and adversaries came in large part because we were the one nation that did not always put ourselves first.

American presidents operate along the realistic and idealistic sides of the foreign-policy continuum. But ever since Woodrow Wilson, Americans have always seen themselves as being the moral beacon that Luce talked about all those years ago. As Obama has said many times, our ideals are our policy. Trump appears to see those ideals as, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, effete.

Having traveled around the world on behalf of the State Department for the past three years, I can promise you that governments do not worry that America is too engaged—they worry when we disengage. And wherever we may disengage around the world, we are never replaced by a better actor. The president’s vision of putting up our national drawbridge and hunkering down mirrors the transformation of Great Britain to Little England after the end of World War II. The American Century was a term of pride for many and it represented the flowering not only of American power but American values.

That seems to have ended beginning last Friday.

The American Century, RIP.


It's time we refuse to call Donald Trump the leader of the free world. He is not, and no American president ever will be again.
January 26, 2017

Germany: New settler homes cast doubt on Israels commitment to 2 states

http://www.timesofisrael.com/germany-new-settler-homes-cast-doubt-on-israels-commitment-to-2-states/

Germany on Wednesday issued a harsh condemnation of Israel’s approval of thousands of new settlement homes in the West Bank, saying Jerusalem’s actions cast doubt on Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution.

German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said Tuesday’s announcement of new construction went “beyond what we have seen… in the last few months both in terms of its scale and its political significance,” Reuters reported.

He said Berlin now doubted whether Israeli leadership remained committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. Without such a commitment, he warned, there would be little basis for Mideast peace.


Only the Trump regime refused to criticize. Even Australia got into the act.

January 25, 2017

Trump Prepares Orders Aiming at Global Funding and Treaties

Source: New York Times

The first of the two draft orders, titled “Auditing and Reducing U.S. Funding of International Organizations” and obtained by The New York Times, calls for terminating funding for any United Nations agency or other international body that meets any one of several criteria.

Those criteria include organizations that give full membership to the Palestinian Authority or Palestine Liberation Organization, or support programs that fund abortion or any activity that circumvents sanctions against Iran or North Korea. The draft order also calls for terminating funding for any organization that “is controlled or substantially influenced by any state that sponsors terrorism” or is blamed for the persecution of marginalized groups or any other systematic violation of human rights.

...

The second executive order, “Moratorium on New Multilateral Treaties,” calls for a review of all current and pending treaties with more than one other nation. It asks for recommendations on which negotiations or treaties the United States should leave.

...

Taken together, the orders suggest that Mr. Trump intends to pursue his campaign promises of withdrawing the United States from international organizations. He has expressed heavy skepticism of multilateral agreements such as the Paris climate agreement and of the United Nations.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/united-nations-trump-administration.html?_r=0



The era of America's global leadership is over. Never again will the President of the United States be known as the leader of the free world.
January 25, 2017

New settlement homes are just a taste, Netanyahu tells MKs

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-settlement-homes-are-just-a-taste-netanyahu-tells-mks/



Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that the 2,500 new West Bank settlement homes approved a day earlier were just a “taste” of things to come now that Barack Obama is no longer in the White House, and said he would discuss the issue with US President Donald Trump.

...

But, the prime minister said, “We are leaving the period. This building [approval] was a taste. We are going to be doing many things differently from now on,” he said.


The US is no longer the bad cop for his pro-apartheid coalition members.











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