JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T
MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE
MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET
SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO
OTHER.
1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST
FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the
firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23
And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of
the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the
adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
First century BCE Greek inscription from Jerusalem's Temple Mount
forbidding the entry of Gentiles to the Temple precinct, reading “..no
foreigner shall enter…” (© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
REBUILT 3RD TEMPLE
REVELATION 11:1-2
1 And there was given me a(MEASURING) reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.
2 But the court which is without the temple leave out,(TO THE WORLD NATIONS) and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.(JERUSALEM DIVIDED BUT THE 3RD TEMPLE ALLOWED TO BE REBUILT)
DANIEL 9:27
27 And he( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2 yrs in TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
MICAH 4:1-5
1 But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it.
2 And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
3 And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
4 But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.
5 For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.
DANIEL 11:31
31 And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.(3RD TEMPLE REBUILT)
DANIEL 12:11
11 And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away,(AT THE MIDPOINT OF THE TRIBULATION PERIOD)(3RD TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED BY DICTATOR) and the abomination that maketh desolate set up,(TO WORSHIP THE DICTATOR OR DIE) there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.(1,290 DAYS)(AN EXTRA 30 DAYS AT THE END OF THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD FOR JESUS TO DESTROY THE ARMIES AGAINST JERUSALEM.AND TO JUDGE THE SHEEP AND GOAT NATIONS OF MATTHEW 25:31-46-HOW THEY TREATED ISRAEL DURING THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD.AND THEN I BELIEVE JESUS WILL REBUILD THE 4TH TEMPLE 25 MILES FROM THE CURRENT TEMPLE MOUNT.AND THEN JESUS RULES FOR THE 1,000 YEARS-THEN FOREVER FROM THAT 4TH TEMPLE.)
MATTHEW 24:15-16
15 When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)(THE DICTATOR SITS IN THE REBUILT 3RD TEMPLE CALLING HIMSELF GOD AT THE MIDPOINT OR 3 1/2 YEAR PERIOD OF THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD.OR 7 YEAR PEACE TREATY BETWEEN ISRAEL-ARABS AND MANY OF DANIEL 9:27)
16 Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:
The Temple complex was a series of concentric circles of purity, each area limited to a more select group of people-Ancient Temple Mount ‘warning’ stone is ‘closest thing we have to the Temple’-Carved in bold Greek letters, 2,000-year-old Herodian inscription marked off the section of Jerusalem’s most sacred site where gentiles couldn’t go — and shows they were welcome elsewhere in holy area By Ilan Ben Zion October 22, 2015, 3:22 pm 25-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
The unassuming slab of limestone doesn’t look like much. It’s crudely fractured and chipped on the sides, pockmarked with age, and is perched not too prominently on a shelf at the Israel Museum. But its smoothly hewn face and crisply etched Greek letters still bearing faint traces of red paint belie monumental significance. “If we talk about the closest thing to the Temple we have,” said David Mevorach, senior curator of Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Archaeology, “on the Temple Mount, this was closest.”Two millennia ago, the block served as one of several Do Not Enter signs in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, delineating a section of the 37-acre complex which was off-limits for the ritually impure — Jews and non-Jews alike. Written in Greek (no Latin versions have survived), they warned: “No foreigner may enter within the balustrade around the sanctuary and the enclosure. Whoever is caught, on himself shall he put blame for the death which will ensue.”There are actually two extant copies of the warning notices — a partial one here in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum, and a second, complete, one in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum — and they are among a small handful of artifacts conclusively belonging to the shrine built by Herod toward the end of the first century CE. Contemporary accounts mentioned their existence, and 1,800 years after the Temple’s destruction, a French archaeologist found a complete copy that had been incorporated into the wall of a Muslim school in Jerusalem’s Old City.“It is remarkable that this stone that… comes from the ancient Jewish Temple hasn’t been carried away far from from its original location,” Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau wrote about his 1871 discovery. “Indeed, the place where I found it is only 50 meters away from the Haram al Sharif, the sanctuary of the Jews.”Shortly after that stone was found it vanished, only to reappear — “mystérieusement,” Clermont-Ganneau wrote — in Istanbul 13 years later. It has remained there ever since. Decades later, the second copy, the partial inscription found in the Israel Museum today, was found during a 1935 excavation being used as spolia in a tomb outside the Lion’s Gate.When it stood, the Temple was the epicenter of religious worship; the place on which it stood remains the holiest site for Jews. But Temple Warning Inscriptions point to universal inclusion — not exclusion — of gentiles on the Temple Mount. (Whether or not Jewish authorities could execute violators, or whether the warning was meant metaphorically, a curse to those who breach the cordon, remains the subject of fierce academic debate.)-The sole literary accounts providing detailed descriptions of the Second Temple’s layout — Josephus’s Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities and Tractate Middah of the Mishna — mention an internal courtyard inside the Temple Mount complex which contained the altar and Holy of Holies. The rabbis of the Mishna, which was compiled and redacted in the century after the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, said the boundary wall (in Hebrew “soreg”) stood roughly three feet high. Josephus gave a detailed description of the warnings placed along it.“Josephus was a priest who was on the Temple Mount a lot and must have gone past this on a weekly basis,” Jonathan Price, a professor of Classics at Tel Aviv University who specializes in Jewish life in the Roman Empire. “When he’s recalling it, he uses a different Greek word each time, but they all mean foreigner, a non-Jew.”Together they provide archaeologists with precise archaeological context and “physical evidence of what [Josephus] said,” according to Price.Scholars are uncertain of where exactly this balustrade ran (or where precisely the Temple’s inner shrine stood on the Temple Mount, as The New York Times edified in a recent article), what it looked like, or what exactly it was made of. The Israel Museum’s scale Second Temple model features a low fence running around the central sanctum, but that’s merely the artist’s interpretation, Mevorach said. “The important thing is that it divides the Temple Mount into secular and holy, into Jewish and international.”The Herodian Temple was a massive undertaking that it took decades to complete and was funded both from the royal coffers and by international donations. Like any public institution in Israel nowadays, the complex was likely covered with dedicatory inscriptions to patrons who donated funds for Herod’s undertaking. One such inscription, now housed at Haifa’s Hecht Museum, was found in a pile of debris to the south of the Temple Mount. It honors a Paris, son of Akeson of Rhodes for helping fund the paving of the Temple complex in 18 or 17 BCE.“The level of destruction on the Temple Mount was so extensive that it’s lucky we even have those fragments,” Price said.Herod decked out the already five-century-old Jewish sanctuary in Classical splendor by engineering an enormous platform atop the hill and ensheathing the refurbished sanctuary in a colossal peristyle courtyard in Greco-Roman fashion. He aimed for that complex, which is today referred to as the Temple Mount and comprises a sixth of the Old City, to be showcased to all.“The Temple Mount shows us very, very clearly how Herod does his dance between Rome and Judea, between internationalism and Judaism, between his patrons and the people he rules,” said Mevorach, who curated the Israel Museum’s Herod the Great exhibit. “It’s his greatest achievement, he knows that. He wants everyone to come and he wants to host them and show them.”Contrary to a recent New York Times report which stated that Herod’s Temple was “surrounded by partition walls that were meant to separate gentiles and Jews,” the warning was meant to protect “not the whole Temple Mount, but the inner sanctuary, the inner courtyard,” Price said. The modern notion “that the entire area is somehow holy is contrary to the original purpose and status of this huge plaza of the Temple Mount.”Gentiles were not only welcome to ascend the Temple Mount, they were also permitted, if not encouraged, to donate animals for sacrifice. Josephus recounts how Marcus Agrippa, Emperor Augustus’s right hand man, visited Jerusalem shortly after the Temple was built and offered up a hecatomb — 100 bulls — as a sacrifice on the altar. Likewise daily sacrifices paid for by the Roman state were offered up for the welfare of the emperors. Philo records in his Embassy to Gaius that on no fewer than three occasions “we did sacrifice, and we offered up entire hecatombs, the blood of which we poured in a libation upon the altar, and the flesh we did not carry to our homes to make a feast and banquet upon it, as it is the custom of some people to do, but we committed the victims entire to the sacred flame as a burnt offering.”Marcus Agrippa and other gentiles could enter the Temple compound, just not the area where holy rituals took place.“It was not ethnic or race as much as [ritual] purity,” Price said. “Jews who were not purified or ritually impure could not pass the soreg either.” Unlike gentiles from across the Roman Empire, Jews were expected to know better than to enter the holy sanctum when impure.Jewish law required any adherent who entered the Temple to be ritually pure, and forbade the entrance of Jews who hadn’t bathed in a mikveh or sprinkled with the purifying ashes of a red heifer since coming in contact with the dead or other defiling agents.The Temple complex was a series of concentric circles of purity, each area limited to a more select group of people. The innermost, the Holy of Holies, was only accessible to the high priest, and only on the holiest day of the year, the Day of Atonement.Second Temple-era Judaism had deemed gentiles “intrinsically impure” based on interpretation of a passage from Numbers 18:7, Matan Orian, a PhD student at Tel Aviv University who just completed his dissertation on the Temple Warning Inscription, told The Times of Israel over the phone. Consequently, they were in theory banned altogether from the Temple. Josephus recounts that the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III, father of the villain of the Hannukah story, issued an edict banning “any foreigner to enter the enclosure of the Temple which is forbidden to the Jews, except to those of them who are accustomed to enter after purifying themselves in accordance with the law of the country.” Herod changed that. He wanted to exhibit the grandeur of his compound, the largest temple in the ancient world, but not enrage his Jewish subjects.“The exclusion of the gentiles, according to the inscription, is a kind of compromise between allowing them into the Temple but still excluding them from the inner temple, which is the properly holy ground,” Orian said.“Reality necessitates compromise in different aspects of Jewish law,” he said. But “even if they were not viewed as impure, they would still be excluded from the [inner sanctum] of the Temple.”Despite the Herodian-era status quo, in which gentiles and Jews mingled atop the Temple Mount, most rabbis today maintain the tradition that the entire complex is holy ground and Jewish entry is forbidden. That ban stems from uncertainty over where precisely the Holy of Holies stood.Echoing the ancient Temple Warning Inscriptions, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate published warning signs, including one on the Mughrabi Bridge leading to the Temple Mount, after Israel assumed control of the site in 1967. “According to the Torah,” these signs stated, “it is forbidden for any person to enter the area of the Temple Mount due to its sacredness.”
Jordan king warns Israel over Temple Mount status quo-After meeting with UN’s Ban, Abdullah II calls for an end to the violence, new efforts to achieve a two-state solution-By AFP and Times of Israel staff October 22, 2015, 7:45 pm 15
Jordanian King Abdullah II warned Israel Thursday against any move to change the status quo at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound, while reiterating calls for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.The king, whose country operates the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf which has custodial rights over the Temple Mount, made his remarks in a statement after a meeting with UN chief Ban Ki-moon.Ban has already met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a bid to get the two leaders to rein in violence that has killed dozens of people in recent weeks.Spurred by allegations that Israel is seeking to change the rules governing the site, angry Palestinians clashed with Israel police over several days in September, sparking the latest wave of violence. Jordan has previously denounced alleged Israeli actions at the compound which houses the al-Aqsa Mosque, saying they amount to “aggression” against Arab and Muslim nations.The king warned against “any attempt to change the status quo,” which Netanyahu has repeatedly promised to preserve. Israel has denied that it intends to change the status quo on the Temple Mount, asserting that such accusations amount to “incitement.”The Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, is revered as the location of both the ancient Jewish temples. It is also the third-holiest site in Islam, known as the Noble Sanctuary.He added that “achievement of a just and comprehensive peace, on the basis of a two-state solution, is the only way out of the crisis in the region.”For his part, according to a statement from the royal palace, Ban stressed what he said was the “responsibility of the international community… to achieve a just and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian question.”US Secretary of State John Kerry, who met with Netanyahu in Germany Thursday in an effort to coax an end to the violence, is expected to travel on to Jordan for a meeting with the king and Abbas.The recent wave of Palestinian violence has seen 10 Israelis killed in the past month and a half, along with more than 40 Palestinians — almost half of them killed in the act of attacking Israelis. Many of the others were killed in clashes in the West Bank and at the Gaza border.Until 2000, the entry of Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount was coordinated with the Waqf. The area was then closed to Jews for three years until 2003 as the Second Intifada raged. Since it was reopened to Jewish visitors, the Israel Police has overseen the visits by Jewish groups. Under Israel’s regulations, imposed after the Old City was captured in the 1967 war, Jews are allowed to visit but not to pray on the Temple Mount.
The Gaza border fence won’t protect you, but the IDF will-Palestinians have broken through the southern barrier several times this month, but some 20-year-old chain links aren’t the last line of defense against terrorists-By Judah Ari Gross October 22, 2015, 11:55 pm-the times of israel
Over the course of the past month, the fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip has been breached by Palestinians multiple times in multiple locations along the border. But that’s not necessarily cause for concern.The threat of terrorists infiltrating Israel from Gaza is certainly a real one, as is the sniper fire that drove the IDF to recommend that farmers near the border stay at least one kilometer (0.6 miles) from the border. This is especially troubling when you consider that there are Israeli communities, like Nahal Oz, located barely two kilometers (1.25 miles) from Gaza.Many have therefore wondered why it possible, even easy, for Gazans to cut through the barrier separating Israel from the Strip.But the IDF’s 20-year-old chain-link fence along the border was never designed to prevent that by itself. It is merely one element in the border security — an undoubtedly important element, but not the sole protector of Israel’s southern communities.A combined effort of surveillance systems, boots on the ground and the fence has successfully repelled the numerous attempts by Palestinians to enter Israel during violent riots along the border.The original fence was built following the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, aimed at demarcating the Palestinian control over the Strip and preventing terrorists from sneaking into the surrounding Israeli communities. Parts of that fence were destroyed in 2000 in the early days of the Second Intifada.The IDF rebuilt those parts of the barrier in 2000-2001. For the past 15 years, the bulk of the improvements and upgrades have not been to the chain link, razor wire-topped fence, but to the security systems surrounding it.The 60-kilometer (37-mile) barrier is now covered in sensors that detect breaches, and a command center — staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week almost solely by female soldiers — monitors the border via a series of closed circuit cameras equipped with night vision.When those lookout soldiers, known in Hebrew as tatzpitaniot, spot a person or group approaching the buffer zone — a one kilometer (0.6 mile) area surrounding the border where Palestinians were forbidden to enter — from the Gaza side, they quickly alert IDF troops on patrol in the area.According to official IDF protocol, those entering the zone would first receive a verbal warning, then a warning gunshot in the air and finally, a gunshot to the legs or lower body to halt their approach. There are, however, exceptions to that protocol, notably one that allows the IDF to fire at anyone seen crawling toward the fence at night.Unmanned vehicles called Guardiums also patrol the border both autonomously and under the control of nearby operators. They can also be equipped with loudspeakers to warn potential infiltrators, and even with guns and other weaponry.With this combined effort — surveillance, fence and troops — the IDF has successfully blocked the dozens of Palestinians who have broken through the border fence in the past month.The more troubling threats to Israel’s border communities remain the same as the ones from last summer’s Operation Protective Edge — undergrounds tunnels and infiltration from the sea.Though most of the information surrounding the project is still being kept secret, the IDF announced in April that it was advancing its research and installing tunnel detection systems along the borders.Since the infiltration of Hamas naval commandoes into the shores of Zikim near Ashkelon in the early days of the Gaza war, the Israeli Navy has stepped up its patrols along the coast. That front remains difficult to control as the vastness of the sea gives Gazan ships sufficient room to evade capture and detection, but newly installed cameras and underwater surveillance systems may help to end that danger.The growing number of riots and demonstrations on the Gaza-Israel border is problematic not primarily because of the threat to the Eshkol region in southern Israel. The true threat comes from the possible development of an additional front for the IDF and the rest of Israel’s security forces to handle.An increasingly complicated dynamic is unfolding in Syria, especially with the addition of Russian and Iranian troops in the region, and the IDF is devoting more and more resources to blocking the outburst of full-scale, violent rioting in the West Bank.For now, Hamas is actively working to prevent other terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip from firing rockets and carrying out other attacks against Israel. But should those riots along the border increase, it would require more military resources to control and potentially distract the IDF from its other fronts.But regardless, the IDF has already announced plans to replace the aging fence with one similar to the barrier along the Israel-Egypt border in the coming months. That fence is 7 meters (21 feet) high at its tallest point and contains an even greater number of sensors and surveillance cameras.
UN fires Palestinian aid workers over incitement claims-Monitoring group had identified UNRWA employees who used social media to call for attacks on Israelis-By Stuart Winer October 22, 2015, 11:51 pm 3-the times of israel
A United Nations monitoring group said on Thursday that several employees of the UN’s aid agency for Palestinian refugee have been disciplined, including “suspension and loss of pay,” over expressions of sympathy for attacks against Israelis.The UN Watch organization, which first raised the concerns over United Nations Relief and Works Agency workers’ comments posted to social media, welcomed the development while accusing the UN of trying to gloss over the firings.UN Watch said in a statement that the information about the employment terminations were “buried deep in a UN transcript” published on Tuesday, rather than publicly announced in a separate document.In a daily briefing, the UN secretary general deputy spokes person Farhan Haq explained the action against the workers.“Already, working closely with Facebook’s legal team, UNRWA has brought about the removal of more than 90 impostor or unauthorized Facebook pages,” Haq said. “In some cases, it has determined the alleged ‘UNRWA staff’ are not in fact UNRWA employees or are no longer UNRWA employees.“However, and very regrettably, in a number of cases so far, the agency has found staff Facebook postings to be in violation of its social media rules,” Haq continued. “These postings have been removed and the staff have been subject to both remedial and disciplinary action, including suspension and loss of pay. The remaining allegations are under assessment.” Last week UN Watch published a report claiming that UNRWA employees were inciting Palestinians to commit terror attacks against Israelis from social media accounts on which they explicitly identify as UN workers.“We need to know, first, which of the UNRWA teachers identified in our reports were suspended, what were the findings, and whether the UN investigations found any additional incitement to anti-Semitic violence,” UN Watch director Hillel Neuer said of the suspensions.“Second,” Neuer continued, “In light of the above, UN Watch is demanding a full apology from UNRWA spokeswoman Chris Gunness for his McCarthyite tirade against what he called UN Watch’s ‘baseless allegations about antisemitism’.”Neuer claimed Gunness had made an appeal to journalists to ignore the story and launched a verbal assault on UN Watch to discredit it.In the report, Neuer cited nine UNRWA employees and presented screenshots of what the group said were inciting posts from their Facebook pages that call for the murder of Jews, or promote conspiracy theories claiming terrorists killed by Israeli security forces were innocent.Neuer had last week submitted the report to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, to UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl and to US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. The US, according to the United Nations monitoring group, is the largest funder of UNRWA with $400 million annually.
White House pans Netanyahu’s ‘inflammatory’ mufti remarks-Obama spokesman says there’s no doubt Germany was behind Holocaust, calls for an end to statements that ‘can feed the violence’-By Times of Israel staff October 22, 2015, 10:49 pm 21
The White House warned Benjamin Netanyahu against “inflammatory rhetoric” Thursday, in a sharp response to a statement by the Israeli prime minister to the effect that a Palestinian religious leader had provoked the Holocaust.Netanyahu on Tuesday suggested Adolf Hitler was not planning to exterminate the Jews until he met Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian nationalist, in 1941.“I don’t think there’s any doubt here at the White House who is responsible for the Holocaust that killed six million Jews,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in his response to the controversial claim, which Netanyahu has since attempted to walk back.“We here continue to stress publicly and privately… the importance of preventing inflammatory rhetoric, accusations or actions on both sides (that) can feed the violence,” he added. “We believe that inflammatory rhetoric needs to stop.”Netanyahu’s comments were widely criticized, with Palestinian leaders and the Israeli opposition accusing him of distorting the past. Meanwhile, Holocaust experts and survivors slammed the comments as historically inaccurate and serving the interests of Holocaust deniers by lessening the responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis.“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu had said in a speech to the World Zionist Congress. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said: ‘Burn them.’”Netanyahu was apparently trying to use the anecdote to illustrate his claim that Palestinian incitement goes back decades, is rooted in anti-Semitism, and is not related to Israeli policies.On Wednesday, standing alongside Netanyahu in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasized her nation’s inherent responsibility for the Holocaust. “Germany abides by its responsibility for the Holocaust,” she said. “We don’t see any reason to change our view of history.”Netanyahu backpedaled on the claim, denying that he was exonerating Hitler of the responsibility for the Holocaust. He said the “responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people.”At the same time, he insisted that the Grand Mufti’s role should not be forgotten. “He told the Nazis to prevent the fleeing of Jews from Europe and he supported the Final Solution,” insisted Netanyahu.He reiterated his belief that Palestinian incitement was fueling recent unrest of the past few weeks, which have seen almost daily shooting and stabbing attacks against Israeli security forces and civilians across Israel and in the West Bank.Netanyahu pointed to Abbas’s refusal to condemn the attacks, and his accusations to the effect that Israel has been changing delicate prayer arrangements at Jerusalem’s holiest site.“Abbas joined the Islamists in inciting the recent wave of violence,” Netanyahu said and accused the Palestinian leader of “false” claims that Israel was “seeking to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque” on the Temple Mount.The flashpoint compound, which is the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam, is located in the southeastern corner of the Old City in Jerusalem. Muslims call it Al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) while Jews revere it as the Temple Mount which housed the first and second temples.AFP and AP contributed to this report.
Kerry: 'Cautious measure of optimism' after talks with Netanyahu on ways to defuse violence-By Matthew Lee, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press – OCT 22,15-YAHOONEWS
BERLIN - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday expressed a "cautious measure of optimism" following a four-hour meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about proposals that could help defuse the deadly wave of recent violence in Israel.Kerry, his voice hoarse after an overnight flight and the lengthy talks, told reporters that he planned to raise the proposals with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan's King Abdullah in meeting Saturday in Jordan's capital, Amman."I come directly from several hours of conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu and I would characterize that conversation as one that gave me a cautious measure of optimism that there may be some things that may be in the next couple of days put on the table which would have an impact — I hope," Kerry said."I don't want to be excessive in stating that, but I am cautiously encouraged."Before their talks, both Kerry and Netanyahu condemned the wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Kerry urged an end to all incitement and violence. Netanyahu repeated earlier accusations that Abbas was to blame, saying the Palestinian leader was "spreading lies" about Israel and the status of the holy site at the centre of the tensions."There is no question this wave of attacks is driven directly by incitement, incitement by Hamas, incitement from the Islamist movement in Israel and incitement, I am sorry to say, from President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority," Netanyahu told Kerry."I think it is time for the international community to say clearly to President Abbas to stop spreading lies about Israel," he said. "Lies that Israel wants to change the status quo at the Temple Mount, lies that Israel wants to tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque, lies that Israel is executing Palestinians. All of that is false."Netanyahu, however, has himself infuriated Palestinians by comments about a former Palestinian leader inspiring Hitler's Holocaust.Netanyahu said Israel was committed to keeping the status quo at the Jerusalem site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism and home to the biblical temples. For Muslims, it is the Noble Sanctuary, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam and a national symbol for the Palestinians. The site, captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war, is a frequent flashpoint of violence.The Palestinians accuse Israel of trying to change the status quo at the site, which allows Jews to visit but not to pray. They point to a growing number of Jewish visitors who seek an expanded Jewish presence and prayer rights at the site.Netanyahu rejected those claims and said ending incitement was the only way to ease tensions."To generate hope, we have to stop the terrorism," he said. "To stop the terrorism, we have to stop the incitement and I think it's time the international community told President Abbas to stop the incitement and hold him accountable for his words and his deeds."Kerry was more circumspect and did not single out Abbas for blame. But he also did not address Netanyahu's Holocaust comments."We have to stop the incitement, we have to stop the violence," Kerry said. He said he had spoken to Abbas and Abdullah, who is charged with overseeing the Jerusalem site, in the past day and both assured them of their commitment to calm."I believe people want this to de-escalate," he said.Kerry added that these conversations would be "very important to settle on the steps that can be taken beyond the condemnation and beyond the rhetoric" to end the violence.Kerry has said he wants clarity about the status quo about the site, but officials say he doesn't believe that needs to be in writing.With only a general outline of goals in these discussions, Kerry embarked on his five-day trip to Europe and the Middle East intending to listen as much as talk, as he steers attempts to restore relative calm in Israel and the Palestinian territories and revive efforts to spark a political transition in Syria.After Kerry's meetings with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Berlin on Thursday, he planned to go to Vienna for meetings Friday with the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia about Syria.___Associated Press writers David Rising and Geir Moulson contributed to this report.
First century BCE Greek inscription from Jerusalem's Temple Mount
forbidding the entry of Gentiles to the Temple precinct, reading “..no
foreigner shall enter…” (© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)REBUILT 3RD TEMPLE
REVELATION 11:1-2
1 And there was given me a(MEASURING) reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.
2 But the court which is without the temple leave out,(TO THE WORLD NATIONS) and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.(JERUSALEM DIVIDED BUT THE 3RD TEMPLE ALLOWED TO BE REBUILT)
DANIEL 9:27
27 And he( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2 yrs in TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
MICAH 4:1-5
1 But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it.
2 And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
3 And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
4 But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.
5 For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.
DANIEL 11:31
31 And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.(3RD TEMPLE REBUILT)
DANIEL 12:11
11 And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away,(AT THE MIDPOINT OF THE TRIBULATION PERIOD)(3RD TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED BY DICTATOR) and the abomination that maketh desolate set up,(TO WORSHIP THE DICTATOR OR DIE) there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.(1,290 DAYS)(AN EXTRA 30 DAYS AT THE END OF THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD FOR JESUS TO DESTROY THE ARMIES AGAINST JERUSALEM.AND TO JUDGE THE SHEEP AND GOAT NATIONS OF MATTHEW 25:31-46-HOW THEY TREATED ISRAEL DURING THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD.AND THEN I BELIEVE JESUS WILL REBUILD THE 4TH TEMPLE 25 MILES FROM THE CURRENT TEMPLE MOUNT.AND THEN JESUS RULES FOR THE 1,000 YEARS-THEN FOREVER FROM THAT 4TH TEMPLE.)
MATTHEW 24:15-16
15 When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)(THE DICTATOR SITS IN THE REBUILT 3RD TEMPLE CALLING HIMSELF GOD AT THE MIDPOINT OR 3 1/2 YEAR PERIOD OF THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD.OR 7 YEAR PEACE TREATY BETWEEN ISRAEL-ARABS AND MANY OF DANIEL 9:27)
16 Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:
The Temple complex was a series of concentric circles of purity, each area limited to a more select group of people-Ancient Temple Mount ‘warning’ stone is ‘closest thing we have to the Temple’-Carved in bold Greek letters, 2,000-year-old Herodian inscription marked off the section of Jerusalem’s most sacred site where gentiles couldn’t go — and shows they were welcome elsewhere in holy area By Ilan Ben Zion October 22, 2015, 3:22 pm 25-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
The unassuming slab of limestone doesn’t look like much. It’s crudely fractured and chipped on the sides, pockmarked with age, and is perched not too prominently on a shelf at the Israel Museum. But its smoothly hewn face and crisply etched Greek letters still bearing faint traces of red paint belie monumental significance. “If we talk about the closest thing to the Temple we have,” said David Mevorach, senior curator of Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Archaeology, “on the Temple Mount, this was closest.”Two millennia ago, the block served as one of several Do Not Enter signs in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, delineating a section of the 37-acre complex which was off-limits for the ritually impure — Jews and non-Jews alike. Written in Greek (no Latin versions have survived), they warned: “No foreigner may enter within the balustrade around the sanctuary and the enclosure. Whoever is caught, on himself shall he put blame for the death which will ensue.”There are actually two extant copies of the warning notices — a partial one here in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum, and a second, complete, one in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum — and they are among a small handful of artifacts conclusively belonging to the shrine built by Herod toward the end of the first century CE. Contemporary accounts mentioned their existence, and 1,800 years after the Temple’s destruction, a French archaeologist found a complete copy that had been incorporated into the wall of a Muslim school in Jerusalem’s Old City.“It is remarkable that this stone that… comes from the ancient Jewish Temple hasn’t been carried away far from from its original location,” Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau wrote about his 1871 discovery. “Indeed, the place where I found it is only 50 meters away from the Haram al Sharif, the sanctuary of the Jews.”Shortly after that stone was found it vanished, only to reappear — “mystérieusement,” Clermont-Ganneau wrote — in Istanbul 13 years later. It has remained there ever since. Decades later, the second copy, the partial inscription found in the Israel Museum today, was found during a 1935 excavation being used as spolia in a tomb outside the Lion’s Gate.When it stood, the Temple was the epicenter of religious worship; the place on which it stood remains the holiest site for Jews. But Temple Warning Inscriptions point to universal inclusion — not exclusion — of gentiles on the Temple Mount. (Whether or not Jewish authorities could execute violators, or whether the warning was meant metaphorically, a curse to those who breach the cordon, remains the subject of fierce academic debate.)-The sole literary accounts providing detailed descriptions of the Second Temple’s layout — Josephus’s Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities and Tractate Middah of the Mishna — mention an internal courtyard inside the Temple Mount complex which contained the altar and Holy of Holies. The rabbis of the Mishna, which was compiled and redacted in the century after the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, said the boundary wall (in Hebrew “soreg”) stood roughly three feet high. Josephus gave a detailed description of the warnings placed along it.“Josephus was a priest who was on the Temple Mount a lot and must have gone past this on a weekly basis,” Jonathan Price, a professor of Classics at Tel Aviv University who specializes in Jewish life in the Roman Empire. “When he’s recalling it, he uses a different Greek word each time, but they all mean foreigner, a non-Jew.”Together they provide archaeologists with precise archaeological context and “physical evidence of what [Josephus] said,” according to Price.Scholars are uncertain of where exactly this balustrade ran (or where precisely the Temple’s inner shrine stood on the Temple Mount, as The New York Times edified in a recent article), what it looked like, or what exactly it was made of. The Israel Museum’s scale Second Temple model features a low fence running around the central sanctum, but that’s merely the artist’s interpretation, Mevorach said. “The important thing is that it divides the Temple Mount into secular and holy, into Jewish and international.”The Herodian Temple was a massive undertaking that it took decades to complete and was funded both from the royal coffers and by international donations. Like any public institution in Israel nowadays, the complex was likely covered with dedicatory inscriptions to patrons who donated funds for Herod’s undertaking. One such inscription, now housed at Haifa’s Hecht Museum, was found in a pile of debris to the south of the Temple Mount. It honors a Paris, son of Akeson of Rhodes for helping fund the paving of the Temple complex in 18 or 17 BCE.“The level of destruction on the Temple Mount was so extensive that it’s lucky we even have those fragments,” Price said.Herod decked out the already five-century-old Jewish sanctuary in Classical splendor by engineering an enormous platform atop the hill and ensheathing the refurbished sanctuary in a colossal peristyle courtyard in Greco-Roman fashion. He aimed for that complex, which is today referred to as the Temple Mount and comprises a sixth of the Old City, to be showcased to all.“The Temple Mount shows us very, very clearly how Herod does his dance between Rome and Judea, between internationalism and Judaism, between his patrons and the people he rules,” said Mevorach, who curated the Israel Museum’s Herod the Great exhibit. “It’s his greatest achievement, he knows that. He wants everyone to come and he wants to host them and show them.”Contrary to a recent New York Times report which stated that Herod’s Temple was “surrounded by partition walls that were meant to separate gentiles and Jews,” the warning was meant to protect “not the whole Temple Mount, but the inner sanctuary, the inner courtyard,” Price said. The modern notion “that the entire area is somehow holy is contrary to the original purpose and status of this huge plaza of the Temple Mount.”Gentiles were not only welcome to ascend the Temple Mount, they were also permitted, if not encouraged, to donate animals for sacrifice. Josephus recounts how Marcus Agrippa, Emperor Augustus’s right hand man, visited Jerusalem shortly after the Temple was built and offered up a hecatomb — 100 bulls — as a sacrifice on the altar. Likewise daily sacrifices paid for by the Roman state were offered up for the welfare of the emperors. Philo records in his Embassy to Gaius that on no fewer than three occasions “we did sacrifice, and we offered up entire hecatombs, the blood of which we poured in a libation upon the altar, and the flesh we did not carry to our homes to make a feast and banquet upon it, as it is the custom of some people to do, but we committed the victims entire to the sacred flame as a burnt offering.”Marcus Agrippa and other gentiles could enter the Temple compound, just not the area where holy rituals took place.“It was not ethnic or race as much as [ritual] purity,” Price said. “Jews who were not purified or ritually impure could not pass the soreg either.” Unlike gentiles from across the Roman Empire, Jews were expected to know better than to enter the holy sanctum when impure.Jewish law required any adherent who entered the Temple to be ritually pure, and forbade the entrance of Jews who hadn’t bathed in a mikveh or sprinkled with the purifying ashes of a red heifer since coming in contact with the dead or other defiling agents.The Temple complex was a series of concentric circles of purity, each area limited to a more select group of people. The innermost, the Holy of Holies, was only accessible to the high priest, and only on the holiest day of the year, the Day of Atonement.Second Temple-era Judaism had deemed gentiles “intrinsically impure” based on interpretation of a passage from Numbers 18:7, Matan Orian, a PhD student at Tel Aviv University who just completed his dissertation on the Temple Warning Inscription, told The Times of Israel over the phone. Consequently, they were in theory banned altogether from the Temple. Josephus recounts that the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III, father of the villain of the Hannukah story, issued an edict banning “any foreigner to enter the enclosure of the Temple which is forbidden to the Jews, except to those of them who are accustomed to enter after purifying themselves in accordance with the law of the country.” Herod changed that. He wanted to exhibit the grandeur of his compound, the largest temple in the ancient world, but not enrage his Jewish subjects.“The exclusion of the gentiles, according to the inscription, is a kind of compromise between allowing them into the Temple but still excluding them from the inner temple, which is the properly holy ground,” Orian said.“Reality necessitates compromise in different aspects of Jewish law,” he said. But “even if they were not viewed as impure, they would still be excluded from the [inner sanctum] of the Temple.”Despite the Herodian-era status quo, in which gentiles and Jews mingled atop the Temple Mount, most rabbis today maintain the tradition that the entire complex is holy ground and Jewish entry is forbidden. That ban stems from uncertainty over where precisely the Holy of Holies stood.Echoing the ancient Temple Warning Inscriptions, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate published warning signs, including one on the Mughrabi Bridge leading to the Temple Mount, after Israel assumed control of the site in 1967. “According to the Torah,” these signs stated, “it is forbidden for any person to enter the area of the Temple Mount due to its sacredness.”
Jordan king warns Israel over Temple Mount status quo-After meeting with UN’s Ban, Abdullah II calls for an end to the violence, new efforts to achieve a two-state solution-By AFP and Times of Israel staff October 22, 2015, 7:45 pm 15
Jordanian King Abdullah II warned Israel Thursday against any move to change the status quo at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound, while reiterating calls for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.The king, whose country operates the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf which has custodial rights over the Temple Mount, made his remarks in a statement after a meeting with UN chief Ban Ki-moon.Ban has already met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a bid to get the two leaders to rein in violence that has killed dozens of people in recent weeks.Spurred by allegations that Israel is seeking to change the rules governing the site, angry Palestinians clashed with Israel police over several days in September, sparking the latest wave of violence. Jordan has previously denounced alleged Israeli actions at the compound which houses the al-Aqsa Mosque, saying they amount to “aggression” against Arab and Muslim nations.The king warned against “any attempt to change the status quo,” which Netanyahu has repeatedly promised to preserve. Israel has denied that it intends to change the status quo on the Temple Mount, asserting that such accusations amount to “incitement.”The Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, is revered as the location of both the ancient Jewish temples. It is also the third-holiest site in Islam, known as the Noble Sanctuary.He added that “achievement of a just and comprehensive peace, on the basis of a two-state solution, is the only way out of the crisis in the region.”For his part, according to a statement from the royal palace, Ban stressed what he said was the “responsibility of the international community… to achieve a just and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian question.”US Secretary of State John Kerry, who met with Netanyahu in Germany Thursday in an effort to coax an end to the violence, is expected to travel on to Jordan for a meeting with the king and Abbas.The recent wave of Palestinian violence has seen 10 Israelis killed in the past month and a half, along with more than 40 Palestinians — almost half of them killed in the act of attacking Israelis. Many of the others were killed in clashes in the West Bank and at the Gaza border.Until 2000, the entry of Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount was coordinated with the Waqf. The area was then closed to Jews for three years until 2003 as the Second Intifada raged. Since it was reopened to Jewish visitors, the Israel Police has overseen the visits by Jewish groups. Under Israel’s regulations, imposed after the Old City was captured in the 1967 war, Jews are allowed to visit but not to pray on the Temple Mount.
The Gaza border fence won’t protect you, but the IDF will-Palestinians have broken through the southern barrier several times this month, but some 20-year-old chain links aren’t the last line of defense against terrorists-By Judah Ari Gross October 22, 2015, 11:55 pm-the times of israel
Over the course of the past month, the fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip has been breached by Palestinians multiple times in multiple locations along the border. But that’s not necessarily cause for concern.The threat of terrorists infiltrating Israel from Gaza is certainly a real one, as is the sniper fire that drove the IDF to recommend that farmers near the border stay at least one kilometer (0.6 miles) from the border. This is especially troubling when you consider that there are Israeli communities, like Nahal Oz, located barely two kilometers (1.25 miles) from Gaza.Many have therefore wondered why it possible, even easy, for Gazans to cut through the barrier separating Israel from the Strip.But the IDF’s 20-year-old chain-link fence along the border was never designed to prevent that by itself. It is merely one element in the border security — an undoubtedly important element, but not the sole protector of Israel’s southern communities.A combined effort of surveillance systems, boots on the ground and the fence has successfully repelled the numerous attempts by Palestinians to enter Israel during violent riots along the border.The original fence was built following the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, aimed at demarcating the Palestinian control over the Strip and preventing terrorists from sneaking into the surrounding Israeli communities. Parts of that fence were destroyed in 2000 in the early days of the Second Intifada.The IDF rebuilt those parts of the barrier in 2000-2001. For the past 15 years, the bulk of the improvements and upgrades have not been to the chain link, razor wire-topped fence, but to the security systems surrounding it.The 60-kilometer (37-mile) barrier is now covered in sensors that detect breaches, and a command center — staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week almost solely by female soldiers — monitors the border via a series of closed circuit cameras equipped with night vision.When those lookout soldiers, known in Hebrew as tatzpitaniot, spot a person or group approaching the buffer zone — a one kilometer (0.6 mile) area surrounding the border where Palestinians were forbidden to enter — from the Gaza side, they quickly alert IDF troops on patrol in the area.According to official IDF protocol, those entering the zone would first receive a verbal warning, then a warning gunshot in the air and finally, a gunshot to the legs or lower body to halt their approach. There are, however, exceptions to that protocol, notably one that allows the IDF to fire at anyone seen crawling toward the fence at night.Unmanned vehicles called Guardiums also patrol the border both autonomously and under the control of nearby operators. They can also be equipped with loudspeakers to warn potential infiltrators, and even with guns and other weaponry.With this combined effort — surveillance, fence and troops — the IDF has successfully blocked the dozens of Palestinians who have broken through the border fence in the past month.The more troubling threats to Israel’s border communities remain the same as the ones from last summer’s Operation Protective Edge — undergrounds tunnels and infiltration from the sea.Though most of the information surrounding the project is still being kept secret, the IDF announced in April that it was advancing its research and installing tunnel detection systems along the borders.Since the infiltration of Hamas naval commandoes into the shores of Zikim near Ashkelon in the early days of the Gaza war, the Israeli Navy has stepped up its patrols along the coast. That front remains difficult to control as the vastness of the sea gives Gazan ships sufficient room to evade capture and detection, but newly installed cameras and underwater surveillance systems may help to end that danger.The growing number of riots and demonstrations on the Gaza-Israel border is problematic not primarily because of the threat to the Eshkol region in southern Israel. The true threat comes from the possible development of an additional front for the IDF and the rest of Israel’s security forces to handle.An increasingly complicated dynamic is unfolding in Syria, especially with the addition of Russian and Iranian troops in the region, and the IDF is devoting more and more resources to blocking the outburst of full-scale, violent rioting in the West Bank.For now, Hamas is actively working to prevent other terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip from firing rockets and carrying out other attacks against Israel. But should those riots along the border increase, it would require more military resources to control and potentially distract the IDF from its other fronts.But regardless, the IDF has already announced plans to replace the aging fence with one similar to the barrier along the Israel-Egypt border in the coming months. That fence is 7 meters (21 feet) high at its tallest point and contains an even greater number of sensors and surveillance cameras.
UN fires Palestinian aid workers over incitement claims-Monitoring group had identified UNRWA employees who used social media to call for attacks on Israelis-By Stuart Winer October 22, 2015, 11:51 pm 3-the times of israel
A United Nations monitoring group said on Thursday that several employees of the UN’s aid agency for Palestinian refugee have been disciplined, including “suspension and loss of pay,” over expressions of sympathy for attacks against Israelis.The UN Watch organization, which first raised the concerns over United Nations Relief and Works Agency workers’ comments posted to social media, welcomed the development while accusing the UN of trying to gloss over the firings.UN Watch said in a statement that the information about the employment terminations were “buried deep in a UN transcript” published on Tuesday, rather than publicly announced in a separate document.In a daily briefing, the UN secretary general deputy spokes person Farhan Haq explained the action against the workers.“Already, working closely with Facebook’s legal team, UNRWA has brought about the removal of more than 90 impostor or unauthorized Facebook pages,” Haq said. “In some cases, it has determined the alleged ‘UNRWA staff’ are not in fact UNRWA employees or are no longer UNRWA employees.“However, and very regrettably, in a number of cases so far, the agency has found staff Facebook postings to be in violation of its social media rules,” Haq continued. “These postings have been removed and the staff have been subject to both remedial and disciplinary action, including suspension and loss of pay. The remaining allegations are under assessment.” Last week UN Watch published a report claiming that UNRWA employees were inciting Palestinians to commit terror attacks against Israelis from social media accounts on which they explicitly identify as UN workers.“We need to know, first, which of the UNRWA teachers identified in our reports were suspended, what were the findings, and whether the UN investigations found any additional incitement to anti-Semitic violence,” UN Watch director Hillel Neuer said of the suspensions.“Second,” Neuer continued, “In light of the above, UN Watch is demanding a full apology from UNRWA spokeswoman Chris Gunness for his McCarthyite tirade against what he called UN Watch’s ‘baseless allegations about antisemitism’.”Neuer claimed Gunness had made an appeal to journalists to ignore the story and launched a verbal assault on UN Watch to discredit it.In the report, Neuer cited nine UNRWA employees and presented screenshots of what the group said were inciting posts from their Facebook pages that call for the murder of Jews, or promote conspiracy theories claiming terrorists killed by Israeli security forces were innocent.Neuer had last week submitted the report to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, to UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl and to US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. The US, according to the United Nations monitoring group, is the largest funder of UNRWA with $400 million annually.
White House pans Netanyahu’s ‘inflammatory’ mufti remarks-Obama spokesman says there’s no doubt Germany was behind Holocaust, calls for an end to statements that ‘can feed the violence’-By Times of Israel staff October 22, 2015, 10:49 pm 21
The White House warned Benjamin Netanyahu against “inflammatory rhetoric” Thursday, in a sharp response to a statement by the Israeli prime minister to the effect that a Palestinian religious leader had provoked the Holocaust.Netanyahu on Tuesday suggested Adolf Hitler was not planning to exterminate the Jews until he met Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian nationalist, in 1941.“I don’t think there’s any doubt here at the White House who is responsible for the Holocaust that killed six million Jews,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in his response to the controversial claim, which Netanyahu has since attempted to walk back.“We here continue to stress publicly and privately… the importance of preventing inflammatory rhetoric, accusations or actions on both sides (that) can feed the violence,” he added. “We believe that inflammatory rhetoric needs to stop.”Netanyahu’s comments were widely criticized, with Palestinian leaders and the Israeli opposition accusing him of distorting the past. Meanwhile, Holocaust experts and survivors slammed the comments as historically inaccurate and serving the interests of Holocaust deniers by lessening the responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis.“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu had said in a speech to the World Zionist Congress. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said: ‘Burn them.’”Netanyahu was apparently trying to use the anecdote to illustrate his claim that Palestinian incitement goes back decades, is rooted in anti-Semitism, and is not related to Israeli policies.On Wednesday, standing alongside Netanyahu in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasized her nation’s inherent responsibility for the Holocaust. “Germany abides by its responsibility for the Holocaust,” she said. “We don’t see any reason to change our view of history.”Netanyahu backpedaled on the claim, denying that he was exonerating Hitler of the responsibility for the Holocaust. He said the “responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people.”At the same time, he insisted that the Grand Mufti’s role should not be forgotten. “He told the Nazis to prevent the fleeing of Jews from Europe and he supported the Final Solution,” insisted Netanyahu.He reiterated his belief that Palestinian incitement was fueling recent unrest of the past few weeks, which have seen almost daily shooting and stabbing attacks against Israeli security forces and civilians across Israel and in the West Bank.Netanyahu pointed to Abbas’s refusal to condemn the attacks, and his accusations to the effect that Israel has been changing delicate prayer arrangements at Jerusalem’s holiest site.“Abbas joined the Islamists in inciting the recent wave of violence,” Netanyahu said and accused the Palestinian leader of “false” claims that Israel was “seeking to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque” on the Temple Mount.The flashpoint compound, which is the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam, is located in the southeastern corner of the Old City in Jerusalem. Muslims call it Al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) while Jews revere it as the Temple Mount which housed the first and second temples.AFP and AP contributed to this report.
Kerry: 'Cautious measure of optimism' after talks with Netanyahu on ways to defuse violence-By Matthew Lee, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press – OCT 22,15-YAHOONEWS
BERLIN - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday expressed a "cautious measure of optimism" following a four-hour meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about proposals that could help defuse the deadly wave of recent violence in Israel.Kerry, his voice hoarse after an overnight flight and the lengthy talks, told reporters that he planned to raise the proposals with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan's King Abdullah in meeting Saturday in Jordan's capital, Amman."I come directly from several hours of conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu and I would characterize that conversation as one that gave me a cautious measure of optimism that there may be some things that may be in the next couple of days put on the table which would have an impact — I hope," Kerry said."I don't want to be excessive in stating that, but I am cautiously encouraged."Before their talks, both Kerry and Netanyahu condemned the wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Kerry urged an end to all incitement and violence. Netanyahu repeated earlier accusations that Abbas was to blame, saying the Palestinian leader was "spreading lies" about Israel and the status of the holy site at the centre of the tensions."There is no question this wave of attacks is driven directly by incitement, incitement by Hamas, incitement from the Islamist movement in Israel and incitement, I am sorry to say, from President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority," Netanyahu told Kerry."I think it is time for the international community to say clearly to President Abbas to stop spreading lies about Israel," he said. "Lies that Israel wants to change the status quo at the Temple Mount, lies that Israel wants to tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque, lies that Israel is executing Palestinians. All of that is false."Netanyahu, however, has himself infuriated Palestinians by comments about a former Palestinian leader inspiring Hitler's Holocaust.Netanyahu said Israel was committed to keeping the status quo at the Jerusalem site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism and home to the biblical temples. For Muslims, it is the Noble Sanctuary, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam and a national symbol for the Palestinians. The site, captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war, is a frequent flashpoint of violence.The Palestinians accuse Israel of trying to change the status quo at the site, which allows Jews to visit but not to pray. They point to a growing number of Jewish visitors who seek an expanded Jewish presence and prayer rights at the site.Netanyahu rejected those claims and said ending incitement was the only way to ease tensions."To generate hope, we have to stop the terrorism," he said. "To stop the terrorism, we have to stop the incitement and I think it's time the international community told President Abbas to stop the incitement and hold him accountable for his words and his deeds."Kerry was more circumspect and did not single out Abbas for blame. But he also did not address Netanyahu's Holocaust comments."We have to stop the incitement, we have to stop the violence," Kerry said. He said he had spoken to Abbas and Abdullah, who is charged with overseeing the Jerusalem site, in the past day and both assured them of their commitment to calm."I believe people want this to de-escalate," he said.Kerry added that these conversations would be "very important to settle on the steps that can be taken beyond the condemnation and beyond the rhetoric" to end the violence.Kerry has said he wants clarity about the status quo about the site, but officials say he doesn't believe that needs to be in writing.With only a general outline of goals in these discussions, Kerry embarked on his five-day trip to Europe and the Middle East intending to listen as much as talk, as he steers attempts to restore relative calm in Israel and the Palestinian territories and revive efforts to spark a political transition in Syria.After Kerry's meetings with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Berlin on Thursday, he planned to go to Vienna for meetings Friday with the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia about Syria.___Associated Press writers David Rising and Geir Moulson contributed to this report.
