Zaid Hamid discusses the latest events in Egypt and how they are more than likely part of the century-old plan of breaking up the larger states of the Middle East into smaller ones as a precursor to Israel expanding her borders to encompass her 3,000 year old dream of owning all the land between the Nile and Euphrates rivers.
We have long contended that the Vatican has designs on Jerusalem, it has been reported by, among others, Barry Chamish that Rome may hold title to the site of the Temple mount. This article may be the prelude to a Vatican grab for significant real estate:
By Jack Khoury
President Shimon Peres is urging the government to yield control of key Christian holy sites to the Vatican, a position believed to be opposed by Interior Minister Eli Yishai.
The Vatican’s longstanding demand that Israel transfer sovereignty of key Christian sites to the Holy See has created dissension among senior officials in Jerusalem.
The Interior Ministry has vowed to retain control of the sites, calling relinquishment a “sacrifice” of Israeli sovereignty.
“This matter is under the minister’s authority, and he is not prepared to sacrifice Israeli sovereignty, even if it is only symbolic,” Yishai’s spokesman Roi Rachmanovitch said.
Peres is pressing the government to agree to the Vatican’s request that Israel surrender control of six religious sites, among them the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth; the Coenaculum on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, where Jesus is said to have held the Last Supper; the Gethsemane, which sits at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem; Mount Tabor; and the Church of the Multiplication, which hugs the Kinneret’s shore.
israel-settlements-all-en-2009.pdf
“Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers…”-1Timothy 1:9
It is a great irony that many pro-Zionist Christians, who defend the nation-state of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people, cite Romans 13 (the”higher powers”) as the admonition to obey civil authorities. Yet these same Zionist zealots willingly overlook the defiance of international laws and treaties which govern the administration of land rights within the Palestinian region.
Now, through the exposure of the existence of an Israeli settlements database, its subsequent translation by the CIA’s Open Source Center, and the leak of the document by Stephen Aftergood, editor of the US based Federation of American Scientist’s Secrecy News, the extent of Israel’s lawlessnes in statistically documented.
CIA OSC: Secret Israeli database shows full extent of illegal settlements, Apr 2009
One of the main reasons for this effort was the need to have credible and accessible information at the ready to contend with legal actions brought by Palestinian residents, human rights organizations and leftist movements challenging the legality of construction in the settlements and the use of private lands to establish or expand them. The painstakingly amassed data was labeled political dynamite.
The defense establishment, led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, steadfastly refused to publicize the figures, arguing, for one thing, that publication could endanger state security or harm Israel’s foreign relations. Someone who is liable to be particularly interested in the data collected by Spiegel is George Mitchell, President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, who came to Israel this week for his first visit since his appointment. It was Mitchell who authored the 2001 report that led to the formulation of the road map, which established a parallel between halting terror and halting construction in the settlements.
The official database, the most comprehensive one of its kind ever compiled in Israel about the territories, was recently obtained by Haaretz. Here, for the first time, information the state has been hiding for years is revealed. An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements – about 75 percent – construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. -Summary by Uri Blau, writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 1 Feb 2009
Source: CIA OSC: Secret Israeli database shows full extent of illegal settlements, Apr 2009