IRAN BETTER DO MORE THEN USELESS WORDS

JEREMEIAH 49:35-37 (IN IRAN AT THE BUSHEHR NUKE SITE SOME BELIEVE)
35  Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Behold, I will break the bow of Elam,(IRAN/BUSHEHR NUCLEAR SITE) the chief of their might.(MOST DANGEROUS NUKE SITE IN IRAN)
36  And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven,(IRANIANS SCATTERED OR MASS IMIGARATION) and will scatter them toward all those winds; and there shall be no nation whither the outcasts of Elam shall not come.(WORLD IMMIGRATION)
37  For I will cause Elam (IRAN-BUSHEHR NUKE SITE) to be dismayed before their enemies, and before them that seek their life: and I will bring evil upon them, even my fierce anger,(ISRAELS NUKES POSSIBLY) saith the LORD; and I will send the sword after them, till I have consumed them:(IRAN AND ITS NUKE SITES DESTROYED)

UK: Iran’s words must be matched by concrete steps

British FM welcomes chance for improved relations; Iranian Jews in US refuse to meet Rouhani

By AP and Times of Israel staff September 24, 2013, 2:32 am 1-The Times of Israel

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif held a series of bilateral meetings with Western officials on Monday, including his British counterpart William Hague, who welcomed Iran’s recent change of tone as well as the release of political prisoners.Just hours after Iranian President Hasan Rouhani departed Iran for New York earlier in the day, his government announced that it had freed 80 prisoners arrested in political crackdowns.“There’s a chance, I think, for improved relations with Iran,” Hague told reporters after the meeting. “Because if the statements of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif really mean something, if they really mean what they are saying, then certainly there’s a chance for us to improve relations and to work together across a whole range of subjects. But it will be important, as I have stressed before, for those statements to be matched by concrete steps and action.”Iran’s new foreign minister will join nuclear talks with his US counterpart and five other world powers later this week, the latest sign that long-standing tensions with the West might be easing.The talks will be the highest level contacts between the US and Iran in six years.European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told reporters of the new round of talks after she met Zarif at the United Nations on Monday, a day before the opening of the UN General Assembly. She said the nuclear talks would resume Thursday on the sidelines of the General Assembly and US officials said Secretary of State John Kerry would participate.“We had a good and constructive discussion,” Ashton said of her half-hour meeting with Zarif. “We didn’t talk about the details of what we would do. The purpose of this meeting was to establish how we would go forward.”On Twitter, the US-educated Zarif called the meeting with Ashton “positive” and added: “Need new start under new circumstances.”The meeting would be the first between a US secretary of state and his Iranian counterpart since May 2007, when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Ashton said she and Zarif had also agreed to meet with their teams again in Geneva in October. Zarif confirmed there will be another round of nuclear negotiations in October.Iran’s new president is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Tuesday in his first appearance on the world stage since he was elected in June.The Iranian Jewish community in the US reportedly declined an official invitation to meet with Rouhani while he is in New York.Community leaders were concerned that such a meeting would “send the wrong message to the administration and to American public opinion at this sensitive time,” Sam Kermanian, who serves as a special adviser to the Iranian American Jewish Federation, told Haaretz.

According to Kermanian, the Iranian president’s refusal to disavow his predecessor’s Holocaust denial in a recent NBC interview was “an important factor” in the decision.Rouhani is considered a relative moderate among his country’s hard-line clerical leaders and he has raised hopes of a thaw in relations with the US with a series of comments and gestures that appear more conciliatory than his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.US-Iran relations have been frozen since Washington severed ties after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The US and its allies have long demanded that Iran halt nuclear activities that they suspect are geared toward producing an atomic bomb. Iran has repeatedly insisted its nuclear activities are only for producing energy and medical research.The UN Security Council has imposed four rounds of sanctions against Iran because of concerns it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons and its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment — a process that can be used to make fuel for both energy and nuclear weapons. The US and its Western allies have imposed even more punishing sanctions.Iran is hoping to get relief at the so-called P5+1 nuclear talks from the punishing Western sanctions that have crippled its economy, particularly by slashing its vital oil exports and severely restricting its international banking transactions.Ashton, the chief nuclear negotiator for the world powers, said she was struck by the “energy and determination” in Zarif’s attitude toward the nuclear talks, which include Germany and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, Russia, China, Britain and France.“I have worked, I think, very hard to find a way in which we can address this issue of great concern, and I will take every opportunity to try and do that — and I hope this will be one.”The meeting on Thursday will be the first since P5+1 nuclear talks stalled after an April round in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Rouhani last month made a potentially important shift by designating the foreign ministry to lead nuclear talks with world powers instead of security officials.State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the US hopes the new Iranian government “will engage substantively with the international community to reach a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program and to cooperate fully” with the International Atomic Energy Agency —the UN nuclear watchdog — in its investigation.“We remain ready to work with Iran should the Rouhani administration choose to engage seriously,” she said.

Netanyahu to compare Iran to North Korea at UN

Prime minister’s speech to General Assembly will seek to keep Western pressure on Tehran, Rouhani’s recent overtures

By JTA September 24, 2013, 2:01 am 0-The times of Israel

WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly will liken Iran to North Korea in his UN General Assembly speech.The speech is Netanyahu’s bid to emphasize Israeli reservations about any rapprochement with Iran by the United Nations.“Iran must not be allowed to repeat North Korea’s ploy to get nuclear weapons,” an Israeli official told The New York Times in a story posted online Sunday describing Netanyahu’s planned Oct. 1 speech to the General Assembly.“Just like North Korea before it, Iran professes to seemingly peaceful intentions,” the Times quoted the official as saying. “It talks the talk of nonproliferation while seeking to ease sanctions and buy more time for its nuclear program.”North Korea suspended its nuclear program in 1994 under a deal brokered by the Clinton administration, but the agreement foundered in the mid-2000s amid tensions between the rogue state and the George W. Bush administration, and North Korea now claims to have nuclear weapons.President Obama has exchanged private letters with the new Iranian president, Hasan Rouhani, and Obama administration officials have greeted as positive offers by Rouhani to make Iran’s nuclear program more transparent in exchange for an easing of international sanctions.Although Netanyahu has not explicitly opposed Obama’s overtures, the Israeli leader has made it clear that he is opposed to the reported contours of any deal with Iran.Last week, he said any deal with Iran “requires” an end to enrichment and the removal of all enriched uranium. Western officials reportedly are ready to accommodate a degree of continued Iranian enrichment.Netanyahu also has called Rouhani a “wolf in cheep’s clothing.”“A bad agreement is worse than no agreement at all,” the Israeli official told the Times.US officials have said they will pursue a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue this week during the launch of the General Assembly while continuing to consult closely with Israel.

“We coordinate very closely with the Israeli government in terms of our monitoring of the Iranian nuclear program,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said Friday in a conference call with the media outlining Obama’s UN activities this week.Later, he said, “it’s our assessment that there is time to pursue a diplomatic outcome, particularly given the pressure that we’ve put in place.”Obama and Rouhani are both scheduled to address the General Assembly on Tuesday, but Rhodes said they were not scheduled to meet.

Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful.

Iran reportedly resumes backing of Hamas

Egypt, meanwhile, has stopped coordinating with the rulers of the Gaza Strip and will only speak to the PA, Lebanese daily says

By Elhanan Miller September 23, 2013, 4:33 pm 0-The Times of Israel

Iran has resumed its financial backing of Hamas and its government in Gaza, a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese daily reported on Monday.According to As-Safir, a series of meetings have taken place in Iran and Lebanon over the past two weeks between Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian leadership to discuss developments in Egypt and the Palestinian territories following the ouster of Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in early July.Iranian officials have been holding regular meetings with Hamas, the report said, noting that the Islamic extremist group that rules Gaza plays a crucial role in coordinating between Islamist movements in the Arab world and the regime in Tehran.Last week, Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar declared that his movement had formed a joint command with Islamic Jihad, a more radical Islamist movement in Gaza and a close ally of the Iranian regime.Hamas’s relations with Iran soured last year following its decision to leave its headquarters in Damascus in early 2012. Hamas was protesting the Assad regime’s violent crackdown against a mostly-Sunni protest movement since March 2011. Iran, Assad’s close ally, considered the move an act of treason on the part of Hamas, which had received ongoing financial and logistical backing from the Islamic Republic.But Hamas’s subsequent reliance on a new Egyptian ally in the form of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi collapsed early last month with Morsi’s ouster in a military coup that emerged from widespread popular protests. Since the coup, Hamas has primarily been engaged in rebuffing Egyptian accusations that it is involved in terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula, where smuggling tunnels provided for a large portion of Gaza’s commodities.On Monday, the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported that Egyptian security had stopped coordinating with Hamas, insisting on speaking solely to the “official Palestinian authority,” a reference to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.“Coordination with Hamas is out of the question at the moment, especially given the attacks on [Egyptian] police and army posts, and the plan to occupy Sinai in a bid to expand Hamas’s foothold for the benefit of others,” Al-Akhbar’s unnamed security sources said.Egypt’s near-complete closure of the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip for the second consecutive week prompted Hamas political bureau official Izzat Al-Rishq to warn of a looming humanitarian crisis on Monday which “only serves the agenda of the Zionist enemy.”

Holland opposes import ban on Israeli products

Dutch to continue specifically labeling goods made in Golan Heights, West Bank and East Jerusalem

By JTA September 24, 2013, 1:31 am 1-The Times of Israel

The Netherlands opposes any kind of import ban on Israeli products, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, though it must enforce European Union legislation on labeling settlement goods.“I would like to stress that the Netherlands opposes any type of import ban or the boycott of Israeli products,” a Dutch official wrote in Rutte’s name last month to the European Jewish Congress, or EJC.The letter, obtained by JTA, was sent to EJC President Moshe Kantor in response to Kantor’s letter to several EU heads of states, including Rutte, in which Kantor warned that labeling products from areas the European Union considers as illegal settlements was counterproductive to efforts to reach a peace settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Rutte’s letter followed reports in July that several Dutch supermarkets were boycotting settlement goods, though the supermarkets denied they had such a policy.In March, the Dutch government advised business owners to refrain from labeling products from the Golan Heights, West Bank and East Jerusalem as made in Israel.A decision last year by the EU Foreign Affairs Council to label settlement goods “obliges the Dutch government to fully and effectively enforce existing EU legislation,” Rutte wrote.The council has yet to release practical guidelines on labeling.British Foreign Secretary William Hague struck a less conciliatory note in his reply to Kantor’s letter.“I am afraid that I cannot agree with your concerns about EU labeling of settlement produce,” he wrote. “The settlements are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace.”On Sept. 16, Kantor published a full-page ad in the Financial Times of London arguing against new EU guidelines prohibiting EU funding for Israeli projects in areas the European Union considers settlements.The ad said the guidelines singled out Israel for criticism and “serve to minimize the chances for lasting peace.”

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