Sex convict rabbi set to be honored with bonfire-lighting, perhaps for last time

Amid protests, Religious Affairs Ministry says there’s no law to bar Eliezer Berland from Lag B’Omer ceremony, but signals it will draw up rules to exclude him in the future

For the second time since his release from prison, a fringe religious leader who was convicted of sex offenses will on Thursday be honored at an annual Jewish pilgrimage ceremony in northern Israel.

Amid protests, the Religious Affairs Ministry said it was powerless under law to prevent Eliezer Berland from lighting a bonfire at the public Lag B’Omer ceremony at Mount Meron overnight Wednesday-Thursday, but signaled it would draw up new internal guidelines to exclude him in the future.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are expected to throng to the Galilee burial site of the famed 2nd Century CE sage and mystic, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, on Wednesday evening and Thursday for a festival of bonfires and prayers. Throughout the 24-hour holiday, over a dozen rabbis — most of them prominent Hasidic leaders — are honored with public bonfire-lightings, among them Berland.

The tomb at Meron — the second most visited Jewish pilgrimage site in Israel after the Western Wall — is overseen by a subdivision of the Religious Affairs Ministry.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/sex-convict-rabbi-set-to-be-honored-with-bonfire-lighting-perhaps-for-last-time/

As the U.S. Government Grows, American Prosperity Slows

Myopic accounts of American economic performance are common today, permitting political partisans to cite whatever period they wish to prove any case they want. Republicans today insist that President Trump’s policies have revitalized U.S. economic growth after years of supposed stagnation under President Obama, while Democrats say Obama’s policies started the recent revival, reversing the disastrous “Great Recession” of 2008-09 which was caused by President Bush’s policies. If you pick your own period, you can “prove” almost anything.

Let’s reject partisan analysis for a moment, look back 150 years (from the end of the Civil War), ignore whatever party or president was dominant, and try to discern a relationship between the size, scope and power of the U.S. federal government and America’s economic growth rate. Let’s consider U.S. federal spending, tax revenues and debt as a share of GDP and use the longest, most reliable time series for output: the U.S. Industrial Production Index (IPI). Unlike GDP, the IPI excludes government outlays, so it’s a purer measure of real U.S. output. Avoiding arbitrary period selection, let’s also use three, sequential 50-year periods: 1868-1917, 1918-1967, and 1968-2018.

Figure One illustrates how economic growth has been faster when the federal government has been smaller (relative to GDP) – and vice versa. From 1868 to 1917 (the so-called “Gilded Age”) the IPI grew at a compounded annual rate of 4.9%, while U.S. federal outlays and revenues averaged less than 3% of GDP. In contrast, since 1968 IPI has grown by only 2.1% per annum, while U.S. outlays and revenues have averaged 22.1% and 17.1% of GDP, respectively. Far more federal spending and taxing occurred during the intermediate 50 years (1918-1967) relative to the Gilded Age, but even though those years including two world wars and the start of the New Deal, even greater spending and taxing has occurred since 1968.

https://countermarkets.com/as-the-u-s-government-grows-american-prosperity-slows/

Immunity bill submitted to Knesset with Netanyahu indictment pending

The Israeli Knesset is weighing legislation that would grant government officials immunity from criminal prosecution, and just so happen to spare Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from three looming corruption indictments.

If the proposed amendment to the Immunity Law passes, elected officials cannot be charged with a criminal offense unless the 120-member Knesset and the Knesset House Committee agree to waive immunity. Should Netanyahu’s Likud Party secure a coalition and outnumber its rivals, the measure could effectively place them above the law for as long as they serve in government.

https://www.rt.com/news/459942-knesset-pushes-bill-netanyahu-immunity/

'I'll burn for you': How our Pentecostal PM energised Christian voters

Scott Morrison declared his election victory a “miracle,” told an interviewer he saw people as “agents of God’s love” and used a National Press Club address to promise voters “I will burn for you” - a phrase used by some Pentecostal Christians to signify working tirelessly, often for Jesus.

One of his first acts during the campaign was to allow the cameras to record him worshipping at his church, Horizon.

Mr Morrison is not the first government leader of faith (John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott were all Christians) but in his political language, the re-elected Prime Minister is arguably the most overt.

According to the Australian Christian Lobby’s Martyn Iles, this language - coupled with the PM’s support for religious freedom - is re-energising religious communities and turning them to the Liberal Party.

“It does give people of faith a degree of confidence when they see a Prime Minister who is clearly Christian,” Mr Iles said.

“It doesn’t surprise me when it seems like religious communities played a role in the rising support for the Liberal Party, because I think that confidence probably did play into the psychology of their vote.”

https://www.smh.com.au/federal-election-2019/i-ll-burn-for-you-pentecostal-pm-energises-christian-voters-20190521-p51prq.html

>>6556290

Romans 11:4 (KJV)

4 But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.

Israel's War Criminals In Their Own Words

Shooting unarmed Palestinian demonstrators "preserves Israeli values"

Israel’s public face, sustained and propagated by a wealthy and powerful diaspora that has significant control over the media, insists that the country is the Middle East’s only true democracy, that is operates under a rule of law for all its citizens and that its army is the “most moral in the world.” All of those assertions are false. Israel’s government favors its Jewish citizens through laws and regulations that are defined by religion. It in fact now identifies itself legally as a Jewish state with Christians and Muslim citizens having second class status. Israel’s army, meanwhile, has committed numerous war crimes against largely unarmed civilian populations in the past seventy years, both in Lebanon and directed against the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza.

In response to the past year’s Great March of Return protests staged by Gazans along the fence line that separates them from Israel, Israeli army snipers have shot dead 293 Palestinians and wounded seven thousand more. Twenty-thousand other Gazans have been harmed by other weapons used by the Israelis, to include canisters from the volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. The numbers include hundreds of children and medical personnel trying to help the wounded, which reportedly have been particularly targeted.

The United Nations has reported that many of the wounded have been shot in their legs, which the Israeli army regards as “restraint” on its part. Many of those injured will likely need to have limbs amputated because Gaza lacks the medical facilities required to properly treat their wounds. Israel has bombed hospitals and blocked the importation of medical supplies into Gaza while also not allowing Gazans to leave the enclave for medical treatment elsewhere in the Middle East.

One hundred and twenty amputations have already been performed this year. Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Territories explained “You’ve got 1,700 people who are in need of serious, complicated surgeries for them to be able to walk again…[requiring] very, very serious and complex bone reconstruction surgery over a two-year period before they start to rehabilitate themselves.”

The U.N. would like to provide $20 million in assistance to enable medical treatment rather than amputations but the United States has refused to support emergency funding for the Palestinians through the Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), a step presumably taken to benefit Israel by punishing the Palestinian people.

Interestingly, a document has recent re-surfaced describing in chilling terms the Israel Army’s viewpoint on shooting protesting Arabs. One year ago former British diplomat Craig Murray posted on his blog, “Condemned By Their Own Words”, which provided a translated from Hebrew-to-English transcript of an Israeli radio broadcast that had taken place on April 21st. An Israeli Brigadier-General, named Zvika Fogel, was responding to reports of the killing by soldiers of an unarmed fourteen year-old boy. He explained in some detail why his soldiers are absolutely doing the right thing to shoot to kill Palestinians who approach the barrier separating Gaza from Israel.

General Fogel’s comments are reflective of the Israeli government view of how to control the “Palestinian problem.” Only the rights, including the right to life, of Israeli Jews are legitimate and Arabs should be grateful for what the Jewish state allows them to have.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israels-war-criminals-in-their-own-words/

==Macron Goes Full Machiavelli Ahead of the European Elections

The French president is gathering unlikely allies to challenge the populists. But he's so unpopular, it might not even matter.

It’s rare that the likes of Emmanuel Macron is compared to Roger Stone. But Stone’s cardinal rule, “In order to win, you must do everything,” very much applies to the French president. And the latest political alliance he’s struck ahead of the upcoming European elections only reinforces that.

Macron’s La République En Marche (“the Republic on the move”) party presented its European election manifesto in Paris two weeks ago, then traveled to Berlin and other European capitals to rally French expat voters. It also promoted its ally parties from other countries, namely the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Spanish center-right Ciudadanos, the Dutch D66, the Hungarian Momentum, the Belgian liberal MR, the Austrian liberal NEOS, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD. Through this group—which is humbly called “Renaissance”—Macron is trying to win 100 seats in the European Parliament (out of 778). But getting there will be tough, because even the aforementioned parties that actively wield power haven’t won significant shares of the vote.

This is where the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), a transnational political grouping, comes in. Macron’s plan is to adopt the platform of the ALDE, drop the word “liberal” (which in Europe still refers to economic liberalism), and use its resources to argue for a stronger EU. But the ALDE itself has struggled to establish a power base and forged some shady alliances in trying to do so. For instance, it currently includes the Czech party ANO, whose leader, Andrej Babiš, is being investigated for allegedly misallocating €2 million ($2.24 million) for an infrastructure project he himself owned, in what is currently one of his country’s biggest corruption scandals. Babiš was a member of the communist party in the 1980s. He is on the European Court of Human Rights’ list of the former Czechoslovak dictatorship’s secret agents. He created a business empire in the post-Soviet 1990s, and now owns a very significant part of the Czech Republic’s media landscape.

And he isn’t the only media mogul on the list of Macron’s likely allies. Delyan Peevski from the ALDE affiliate Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) was identified by Reporters Without Borders as one of the main reasons for the poor state of the media in Bulgaria. RWB points out that the “New Bulgarian Media Group” controls nearly 80 percent of print media distribution in that country, and that it covers up corruption scandals by intimidating those trying to investigate shady business deals.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/macron-goes-full-machiavelli-ahead-of-the-european-elections/