Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

US Rejects Bush's Promise; Maaleh Adumim on Chopping Block
Jun 7th, 2009
Daily NewsArutz Sheva - Tzvi Ben Gadalyahu
Categories: Today's Headlines;The Nation Of Israel;Peace Process

Maaleh Adumim, Betar Illit, Ariel and Gush Etzion are on the chopping block. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said she refuses to honor an American promise that Israel retain large population centers.

Former President George W. Bush, in a letter to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, wrote, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.”

Secretary Clinton’s blunt dismissal of the “informal” promise places more than 100,000 residents of Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, Betar Illit and Gush Etzion on the list for future expulsions to make way for a Palestinian Authority state.

The State Department previously had dodged taking a stand on whether the Obama administration would honor the promise.

"There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements. If they did occur, which of course people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States government," Clinton said at a news conference with the Turkish Foreign Minister.

She repeated a claim that the Roadmap requires Israel to surrender all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, although the document only calls for the future borders of Israel and a new PA state to be negotiated.

President Bush wrote his letter after Sharon proposed the “Disengagement" plan to expel nearly 10,000 Jews from Gush Katif and parts of northern Samaria and turn the Gaza communities over to the PA, which was taken over by Hamas in the area following implementation of the plan.



The letter also states, “I remain committed to my June 24, 2002 vision of two states living side by side in peace and security as the key to peace, and to the road map as the route to get there…. Under the road map, Palestinians must undertake an immediate cessation of armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere, and all official Palestinian institutions must end incitement against Israel….

“Your government has stated that the barrier being erected by Israel should be a security rather than political barrier, should be temporary rather than permanent, and therefore not prejudice any final status issues including final borders, and its route should take into account, consistent with security needs, its impact on Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities.”

Palestinians like what they see from Obama
Jun 7th, 2009
Daily NewsIsraelNN
Categories: Today's Headlines;Peace Process;Anti-Israel

A day before his reconciliation speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, senior Palestinian officials on Wednesday said they like what they have seen so far from US President Barack Obama.

Obama is determined to endear America to the Muslim world, and the Palestinians are confident that effort will come at Israel’s expense.

“Looks like we finally have a friend in the White House who is sympathetic to the Arab cause,” a Palestinian cabinet minister told The Jerusalem Post. The minister said he was following with “great satisfaction” the growing rift between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A senior aide to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said the US has always been the only country capable of imposing the two-state solution on Israel, and looks like with Obama, there is finally a president willing to use that power.

Abbas returned from a visit to Washington last week optimistic that Obama was going to put an end to the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and the eastern half of Jerusalem. Since then, Obama has put heavy pressure on Israel to halt even natural growth of Jewish communities in those areas.

Obama does not recognize Israel land claims, security needs
Jun 7th, 2009
Daily NewsIsraelNN
Categories: Today's Headlines;The Nation Of Israel;Peace Process

In his much anticipated address to the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, US President Barack Obama said he does not recognize the legitimacy of any Israeli presence on the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, and scolded the Jewish state for security measures he said are unnecessary and counterproductive.

In a speech in which he repeatedly referred to the “Holy Koran” and the many lessons of peace it holds for us, Obama appeared to paint Israel’s reluctance to surrender land for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state as the sole remaining obstacle to ending the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The audience at Cairo University was silent as Obama began by recalling the Jews’ painful history, deriding anyone who would deny that history and reaffirming the Jewish people’s righteous quest for a homeland. They erupted in applause as he continued by equating that history and that quest to the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs and their own efforts to forge an independent state.

His listeners were left to believe that Obama views the Palestinian plight in the same light as the Nazi Holocaust, and sees little difference between the Nazi death camps and the Palestinian “refugee” camps. That the Palestinians’ situation has been brought on largely by their own violence, while the Jews did nothing to provoke the Nazis but be Jews, was conveniently glossed over.

Obama insisted that for peace to reign over the region, Israel must halt all “settlement activity” in the areas it has greatest historical claim to. He said America and the rest of the world will never recognize the legitimacy of those settlements.

The president scoffed at Israeli security measures imposed on those areas that have been surrendered to the Palestinians, saying they were only producing the opposite result. He was adamant that imposing a blockade on Gaza and manning checkpoints in Judea and Samaria cannot bring security to Israelis. He failed to address the rampant Palestinian terrorism that plagued Israeli cities before those measures were put in place.

Obama did take issue with Palestinian violence in general, but attempted to downplay it by saying very few participate in it or support those groups that do. His remarks ignored years of public opinion polls showing that the vast majority of Palestinians support violence against Israel and the most recent Palestinian legislative election in which Hamas won a landslide victory. A recent survey revealed Hamas will score an even bigger victory when Palestinians again go to the polls later this year.

Israelis were anxious prior to the speech, fearful that Obama was going to sacrifice Israel to bring reconciliation between America and the Muslim world. After watching the speech live on television, many were left feeling that is precisely what happened.

Netanyahu to lay out peace policy
Jun 7th, 2009
Daily NewsIsraelNN
Categories: Today's Headlines;The Nation Of Israel;Peace Process

Hot on the heals of US President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world on how peace should be achieved in the region, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that next week he will announce his government’s official peace policies.

Netanyahu told the weekly cabinet meeting that he desires no less than Obama to see peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but indicated he has very different ideas about how to get there.

Netanyahu said he will be busy consulting with coalition partners this week as he finalizes his policies.

Israel wary of focus of Obama's speech
Jun 7th, 2009
Daily NewsIsraelNN
Categories: Today's Headlines;The Nation Of Israel;Peace Process

Israeli officials cited across the Israeli media at the weekend responded cautiously to US President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last Thursday.

While some expressed satisfaction at the degree of reciprocity present in the speech, and hoped it would translate into action, most were unhappy that Obama had focused so heavily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and all but declared the lack of a Palestinian state the key component of the region’s problems.

One official who spoke to The Jerusalem Post noted that Iran’s nuclear program is clearly the most pressing regional issue, but lamented that Obama is going to instead put his weight behind a premature Israeli-Arab peace deal because he has an overriding need to make nice with the Muslim world.

A day before the speech, Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper released the results of its monthly “Peace Index” survey showing that a wide majority of Israelis do not trust Obama to look out for their interests when overseeing the negotiations, and feel that he is very clearly siding with the Arabs.

Across the Arab world, reaction to Obama’s speech was mixed, though most major newspaper editorials agreed that there had been a clear shift in America’s outlook, and that Washington’s new positions clearly favored the Arabs in their conflict with Israel.

Many editorials, however, said that a wait-and-see approach should be adopted as the declarations of most US presidents regarding peace in the region have typically failed to backed up by firm action.

Blessed Maladjustment
Jun 7th, 2009
Thought for the WeekA. W. Tozer
Categories: Inspirational;The Church

The second prominent tragedy is that the gospel churches are confused and intimidated by numbers. They accept the belief that there has been change and that Christians must adjust to the change. The word used is adjustment. We must get adjusted, forgetting that the world has always been blessed by the people who were not adjusted. The poor people who get adjusted cannot do much anyhow. They are not worth having around. In every field of human endeavor progress has been made by those who stood up and said, "I will not adjust to the world." The classical composers, poets and architects were people who would not adjust. Today society insists that if you do not adjust you will get a complex. If you do not get adjusted, you will have to go to a psychiatrist. Jesus was among the most maladjusted people in His generation. He never pretended to adjust to the world. He came to die for the world and to call the world to Himself, and the adjustment had to be on the other side.