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Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.

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The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

Despite Peace, UAE, Bahrain and Sudan Continue Anti-Israel Voting at UN

Anti-Israel bias still a hurdle to overcome as countries stick with their old voting patterns to condemn Israel in the latest UN voting.

By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel

The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan used their old anti-Israel voting patterns this week at the United Nations despite the recent advancements in peace the three countries made with Israel.

On Monday, all three nations voted to adopt a resolution that referred to Jerusalem's Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Haram al-Sharif, one of seven resolutions passed that singled out or condemned Israel at a committee of the United Nations General Assembly.

Israel's new ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, called the resolution an "audacious attempt to rewrite history."

Erdan noted that the the pressure to denigrate Israel at the UN is still a big hurdle to overcome, but tweeted before the vote that he would "not allow this anti-Israel vote to go uncontested."

He said the UN voted on "the annual 'Palestinian package' of resolutions" that single out Israel for condemnation.

Despite the Israeli envoy's efforts to "call out the hypocrisies and lies of these resolutions, and the damage done by the countries that support them," he admitted that he was making an "impassioned but ultimately unsuccessful plea for countries to reject the motions."

The human rights watchdog group, UN Watch, noted that the UAE and Bahrain, which signed the Abraham Accords and established peace treaties with Israel, as well as Sudan, all voted against Israel. Sudan is expected to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in the near future.

"The UN today showed contempt for both Judaism and Christianity by passing a resolution that makes no mention of the name Temple Mount, which is Judaism's holiest site, and which is sacred to all who venerate the Bible," said UN Watch head Hillel Neuer.

"Today's farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the UN's automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone's human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations is to scapegoat Israel," said Neuer.

Kelly Craft, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, told the meeting that the United Nations takes up a disproportionate number of texts that are critical of Israel.

"Anti‑Israel resolutions only lock both sides in an intractable conflict," Craft said, explaining why the U.S. would vote against the resolutions.

For two of the resolutions, the U.S. was the only country supporting Israel, but in one resolution that tried to accuse Israel of human rights violations against the Palestinians, Israel got support from the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Malawi, Micronesia and Nauru.

The Rescue Of Syrian Jews - Judy Feld Carr

Judy Feld Carr describes how she was able to rescue more the 3,200 Jews from Syria.

For thirty years, the Jews of Syria knew that in the free world has a mysterious woman, "Miss Judy" doing everything possible to rescue them.
She is the mother of six children, a music teacher from Toronto, Canada who created its own secret information network in Syria. Judy has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom payments to contacts inside and outside Syria, and managed to rescue entire families.
She managed to rescue more than 3,000 Jews from Syria
Director: Eyal Tavor
Editor: Roi Ben-Ami
Photographer: Dani Gershon
Producer: Aran Reilinger

Here is the link to the You tube:

The Coming Storm in US-Israel Relations

By Caroline B. Glick

The day before the U.S. presidential election, the progressive Israel Democracy Institute published the results of a poll of Israeli Jews asked whether they believed President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden would be better for Israel. Some 70 percent named Trump, 13 percent chose Biden and 17 percent said they didn't know.

Since Election Day, and since U.S. networks proclaimed Biden the winner, Israel's media, along with its diplomatic and security establishments and political leadership, busied themselves by scouring the lists of candidates for senior foreign policy positions in the Biden administration and considering the implications of so-and-so's appointment to national security adviser. The notion behind the name game is that the appointment of one person over another will significantly impact a Biden administration's Middle East policy either in Israel's favor or to its detriment.

There is nothing new about the name game. Israel's political and national security leaders and its media know-it-alls play it every four years, and indeed, often personnel has been policy. For instance, when Trump replaced his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, with Mike Pompeo, things changed. Tillerson opposed leaving the Iran nuclear deal and opposed moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Pompeo supported both.

But in the case of the apparently incoming Biden administration, who fills what job is basically irrelevant, and worrying about it should certainly not be a priority. Biden's policies are basically set in stone.

Biden, his running mate Kamala Harris and his team repeatedly set out his Middle East policies, in detail, over the course of the campaign. And in the days since it became clear that Biden is far more likely than Trump to be inaugurated on Jan. 20, his advisers have restated those policies and, in some cases, have taken initial steps towards implementing them.

If statements and actions by Biden, Harris and their campaign during the course of the election and in its immediate aftermath were not enough to convince Israel's leadership and our media of the depth of their commitment, the Democrat Party as a whole stands behind them.

In the days since the election, Democrats, particularly in the House of Representatives, have been playing the blame game regarding their significant losses. Whereas everyone was certain that the party would expand its House majority, with the loss of at least 12 seats, the Democrat majority has moved from comfortable to endangered. Moderates now insist that the progressives took the party too far to the left and lost it precious votes in mixed districts. Radicals for their part note that nearly everyone who ran with their policies won their races and demand even greater sway in party decision making and leadership circles.

But the rancor and infighting between moderates and radicals revolves around domestic issues like socialism and defunding the police. It has nothing to do with Israel or the wider Middle East. Policies on those issues are effectively consensual.

They are consensual because as statements and actions by the Biden campaign, by Biden, by Harris and by the Democrat National Committee have made clear, Biden's policies on Israel, Iran and the wider Middle East are the Obama-Biden administration's policies. A Biden-Harris administration Middle East policy will pick up precisely where the Obama-Biden administration left off four years ago. Trump's policies will be unceremoniously annulled, ignored, set aside, or rendered irrelevant.

Biden has committed himself to restore the Palestinians to center stage and to reinstate U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority. Following the passage of the Taylor Force Act which bars the United States from funding the P.A. so long as it pays salaries to terrorists, Trump ended U.S. financial support for the P.A. because it refused to stop funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists. Likewise, P.A. funding of terrorists caused Trump to close the PLO's representative office in Washington, D.C., which Biden has committed to reopening.

Biden also committed himself to reinstating U.S. humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Such a move will be a boon for the Hamas terrorist regime, which currently relies on cash payments from Qatar.

The Obama administration's endpoint insofar as the Palestinians were concerned was the lame-duck passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234 in December 2016. While Obama and his advisers insisted that they had nothing to do with the resolution but simply didn't feel right vetoing it, as we have learned over the past four years, 2234 was initiated by Obama and his U.N. ambassador Samantha Power. They pushed it obsessively, attaching the highest priority to harming Israel as much as possible before they left office.

Resolution 2234 was geared towards setting up Israeli leaders and civilians to be prosecuted as war criminals in the International Criminal Court by claiming, baselessly, that Israeli communities in unified Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are illegal. In the words of the resolution, those communities and neighborhoods, which are home to more than 700,000 Israelis, have "no legal validity" and "constitute a flagrant violation under international law."

President Trump's recognition of Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's determination last November that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are not illegal were of a piece with the Trump administration's attempt to nullify Resolution 2234, at least from a domestic U.S. perspective. A Biden administration will ignore the Pompeo Doctrine and the State Department's legal opinion substantiating his position just as Obama ignored Trump's repeated statements of opposition to 2234 in the weeks before its passage.

Driving home their plan to pick up where Obama left off, Biden, Harris and their advisers have all said they will reinstate the Obama administration's demand that Israel bar Israeli Jews from asserting their property rights to build homes and communities in Judea and Samaria.

As for Jerusalem, while Biden has said that he will not close the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and reinstate the embassy in Tel Aviv, he has pledged to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem to serve Palestinians. Until Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem operated independently of the embassy. The U.S. consul in Jerusalem was not accredited by the Israeli president because the United States refused to acknowledge that Jerusalem is located inside Israel.

Although Biden congratulated Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on signing the Abraham Accords—which Sudan has since joined as well—his advisers have spoken of them derisively. This week, Tommy Vietor, who served as National Security Council spokesman under Obama, spoke derisively of the normalization deals, which just weeks after the accords were signed have already blossomed into a deep and enthusiastic partnership and alliance encompassing private citizens and government ministries in all participating countries.

Vietor said they were not peace deals but a mere vehicle for the UAE to acquire F-35s. Vietor then alleged that the UAE wants to use the deals to help Saudi Arabia win its war against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

Biden, Harris and their advisers have pledged to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia in the war and to reassess the U.S.-Saudi alliance.

If implemented, these policies will not end the Saudi war against the Houthis. They will end the U.S.-Saudi alliance. For the Saudis, the war against the Houthis is not a war of choice, it is an existential struggle. The Houthis are an Iranian proxy regime. Their control over the strait of Bab el-Mandeb threatens all maritime oil shipments from the Red Sea. Houthi missile strikes already temporarily disabled Saudi Arabia's main oil terminal and have hit Saudi cities. If the U.S. ends its alliance, the Saudis will continue their war and replace their alliance with the United States with an alliance with China.

Supporting Iran's Yemeni proxy against the United States' strategic ally is not, of course, the only way that a Biden administration will help Iran to fight its Arab allies and Israel. Biden, Harris and their campaign advisers have all pledged repeatedly to reinstate the U.S. commitment to the nuclear deal the Obama administration concluded with the Iranian regime in 2015. Various reports have emerged in recent days regarding how precisely Biden intends to achieve that aim. But one thing is clear, having committed himself to restoring the U.S. commitment to the deal, Iran will hold all the cards in any future negotiation on the terms of a U.S.-Iran nuclear rapprochement. And that means that the U.S. will back Iran's nuclear weapons program more or less from the outset of a Biden-Harris administration.

It cannot be underscored enough that these policies are not simply Biden's positions. They are the Democrat Party's positions. And this is the big change that has happened in the past four years. Israelis remember that when Obama concluded the nuclear deal, it was opposed by a 2:1 majority in the Senate and a similar majority in the House. But the Democrat Party has changed since then. Today, after four years of radicalization, on issues related to the Middle East generally and Israeli specifically, there is no meaningful distinction between the reputedly moderate Anthony Blinken, who served as then secretary of state John Kerry's deputy, and the clearly anti-Israel Susan Rice, Obama's former national security adviser. So it matters little if Blinken or Rice (or anyone else) is appointed secretary of state.

Because these are the positions of the party, they are not subject to change. If Biden's radical, deeply destabilizing plans for the Middle East somehow manage to destabilize the Middle East, Biden won't be in a position to reconsider any of his policies. They have been grafted on to his party's DNA. Representative Elliot Engel was slaughtered in his primary race against new "squad" member Jamal Bowan. Standing with the Palestinians is a party position. That's why Obama's former ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told Israeli media that "the establishment of a Palestinian state will return as the strategic goal of the Biden administration." He didn't even mention peace in that statement.

Likewise, appeasing Iran and giving it an open road to a nuclear arsenal is a domestic political issue for Democrats.

Talk of Biden's joviality and personal warmth, and of moderates versus radicals, are soothing distractions for Israelis who are about to face the most hostile U.S. administration in history. But the facts are the facts. And to meet the challenge a Biden administration will pose to Israel's national and strategic interests, Israel must steel itself for what awaits it, not worry who will occupy which post in a Biden administration.

Sean Connery: 15 Quotes by the Late Actor and His Iconic Roles Edited By: Natalia J.

Sir Thomas Sean Connery will forever be remembered as a great actor whose 50-year-long career brought us a great number of outstanding films. The endless charisma and screen magnetism that the Scottish actor had displayed in his iconic role as the original James Bond has since become the stuff of legend, and it was Connery who made us all fall in love with the British secret agent.

The veteran actor was agent 007 in seven James Bond films shot between 1962 and 1983, and his overall portfolio included over 60 films, most of which featured Connery in the main role. Many of these films, such as "The Untouchables," "The Offence," "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," "The Hill," and "The Man Who Would Be King," are now considered cinema classics.

Unfortunately, the world lost the great actor on late Friday, October 30, 2020, or early Sunday, October 31, at the age of 90. Both Connery's son and his publicists confirmed that he passed peacefully in his sleep, at his home in Lyford Cay, the Bahamas.

Let's remember and reflect on Sir Sean Connery as an actor and as a person by looking at 15 of the most iconic quotes ever uttered by the late actor.

1. On age: Some age others mature

2. On love: Love may not make the world go around, but it makes the ride worthwhile.

3. On life's challenges: There is nothing like a challange to bring out the best in man

4. On choices: If you are afraid of getting a rotton apple, don't go to the barrel, get it off the tree instead.

5. On faith: Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil, there is no need for G-d

6. On agent 007: I care about James Bond and what happens to him. You can not be connected to a character for this long and not have an interest in him

7. On other Bond films: All of the Bond films had their good points

8. On influences: Your background and your influences are with you for life

9. On creativity: You must write the first draft with your heart. You do the redraft with you head

10. On privilege: I think the most difficult thing to displace is privlege

11. On traveling: I haven't found any place I like to be all the time. The best part of life is moving

12. On aging: More than anything else I would like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcok or Picasso

13. On his attitude towards others: I take the good with the bad, I can't take people in slices

14. On luck: You call it luck, I call it destiny

15. And finally...The name's Bond. James Bond

https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=37768

The Real Netanyahu (and Trump) Dilemma

By Caroline B. Glick

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee's decision to award the prize to the World Food Program this year assuaged the fears of elitists from New York to Paris and Berlin. The Abraham Accords, which include bilateral peace treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and most recently Sudan, have fundamentally changed the Middle East. They have upended 50 years of failed peace processing on the part of Western foreign policy elites who seem to fall into deeper and deeper funks with word of each new peace deal.

Newsweek's cover story on Oct. 2 nicely encapsulated their distress. The cover featured a leering black and white photo of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a red and white headline: "The Netanyahu Dilemma: Can The Nobel Prize Say No to Bibi?"

By giving the prize to the World Food Program, the committee kicked the can down the road. Maybe President Donald Trump will be defeated next week. Maybe Netanyahu will be ousted from power. And then things can return to normal, they console themselves. They will be able to forget all about the unpleasantness.

What is it about the Abraham Accords that makes the foreign policy "experts" so upset?

Three aspects of the deals really get their goat. The first is their authors. For the likes of the British Foreign Office and the Council on Foreign Relations, few are held in greater contempt than Netanyahu and Trump. The Newsweek article, which dealt with Netanyahu specifically, called him "widely loathed." And of course, there hasn't been a U.S. president as despised by "the smart set" as Trump since Andrew Jackson.

The second aspect of the Abraham Accords that drives the peace processors to distraction is the fact that they exist at all. The Arab-Israel conflict isn't supposed to end this way. For 50 years, the "experts" have all agreed that the road to peace goes through the PLO, that so long as Israel doesn't make peace with the Palestinians, it cannot make peace with the Arabs. And in the two instances where Israel was able to sidestep the Palestinians—its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt and its 1994 peace treaty with Jordan—both the Jordanians and the Egyptians refused to implement the normalization clauses of the deals so long as Israel didn't make peace with the Palestinians.

The absence of normalization reduced the deals from actual peace to little more than long-term ceasefires. The same hostility and anti-Semitism that fueled the Arab wars against Israel which Egypt and Jordan led, remained and even grew within their societies in the years and decades after they signed the peace agreements.

As Newsweek put it, with barely disguised fury, "The agreements that Netanyahu has wrangled with Arab states of the Persian Gulf fail to resolve, or even address the situation of the Palestinians – a cause with passionate supporters in Europe, on US college campuses and with many US liberals."

The fruits of this widely held passion are the most powerful reason for the elites' heartbreak over the news that peace is finally arriving.

For decades, the foreign policy establishments in the United States and Europe have held as sacred the notion that peace between Israel and the Arab world can be forged only after the Palestinians. Two strategic assumptions that have guided Western Middle East peace policies have been founded on this sacrosanct idea.

The first is that the Palestinians will only make peace with Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state encompassing all or virtually all of Judea and Samaria, northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

The second assumption flows naturally from the first. Since the experts all agree that the only way to achieve peace between Israel and the Arabs if for a Palestinian state to be established on lands Israel controls, and indeed, has the sovereign right to control, settle and govern, Israel is to blame for the absence of peace.

These twin assumptions have been the foundations of all international peace efforts since the 1970s. They are also the way that European governments, the United Nations and much of the American left (which commingles with large swaths of the American foreign policy establishment) justify their ever-increasing hostility towards Israel.

They are used to justify discriminatory treatment of Israelis and of Israel in everything from arms sales to cultural cooperation to free trade deals. The European Union uses them to justify their anti-Semitic labeling rules for Jewish products from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights and their finance of anti-Israel political pressure groups in Israel and around the world. These assumptions—that peace goes through the Palestinians and Israel is to blame for the absence of peace with the Palestinians—are also used to justify campaigns that demonize Israel and its supporters and reject Israel's very right to exist.

And this brings us back to the Abraham Accords.

The events of last week make clear just how completely the Abraham Accords repudiate the foreign policy establishment's core convictions.

Monday, the top leadership of the UAE's Dubai Ports World, one of the largest maritime logistics companies in the world, traveled to Israel's Red Sea port in Eilat to discuss the prospect of opening a shipping line from Eilat to the Saudi port of Jeddah. The initial purpose of the line would be to transport Israeli Muslims to Mecca for the Haj. Jeddah is a mere 43 miles from Mecca, and the idea is to sail to Jeddah and then travel by bus to Mecca. Until now, Israeli Muslims have been compelled to travel overland through Jordan to get to Saudi Arabia.

DP World's leadership expressed enthusiasm for the project and plans have been put in motion to implement it very quickly. According to Gideon Gulliver, the CEO of the Port of Eilat, over time the Eilat-Jeddah line has the potential to bring two million visitors to Eilat.

The meeting in Eilat came fast on the heels of DP World's deal last month with an Israeli firm to bid on a tender to rebuild and operate the old port in Haifa. The first cargo ship from the UAE docked at the Port of Haifa on Oct. 12.

Last Tuesday, the UAE Pro Football League signed a memorandum of understanding with Israel's Professional Soccer Association pledging to cooperate to further develop the sport in both countries. The UAE Pro League referred to the MOU as a "historic agreement."

Also on Tuesday, A&E, the largest wine distributor in the UAE, announced it will begin distributing wines from Israel's Golan Winery in the UAE.

Bahrain, for its part, continues to astonish Israelis with its enthusiasm over its newly opened peaceful ties with Israel. Last weekend, Sheikh Khaled bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, a member of Bahrain's royal family who serves as the chairman of the King Hamad Global Center for Co-Existence and Peace, signed an agreement in Washington with Elan Carr, the U.S. anti-Semitism monitor, where both sides committed to work together to fight anti-Semitism. The Bahraini center adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of anti-Semitism. The IHRA definition defines anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism.

In the MOU, the Bahraini institute and the State Department committed "to work together to share and promote best practices for combating all forms of anti-Semitism, including anti-Zionism and the delegitimization of the State of Israel."

When Israel on Oct. 14 approved new housing construction in Israeli towns and cities in Judea and Samaria, the United Nations, the European Union, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy were quick to condemn the move. The UAE and Bahrain joined the United States in ignoring the internal Israeli decision.

These steps alone serve as a total repudiation of the Western foreign policy establishment's anti-Israel Rosetta Stone.

Consider the following. Six years ago, "peace activists" in San Francisco convinced the longshoreman union in Oakland to refuse to offload cargo from an Israeli merchant ship because it was from Israel. The ship was forced to sail to the Port of Los Angeles. The "peace activists" declared victory.

In 2015, the Palestinian Authority nearly caused the Israeli Football Association to be expelled from FIFA. The idea was that if the P.A. was able to get FIFA members to vote on such a move, they would support it because as is the case in the United Nations, there would be an automatic majority in favor of jettisoning Israel from the international soccer league. It took hard maneuvering by Israel to block the measure from going to a vote, no thanks to Europe.

Golan Wineries and its Mt. Hermon, Gamla and Yarden labels, which will now be proudly sold at wine stores, hotels and restaurants in the UAE, have long been targeted for boycott by "peace" activists.

Bahrain's adoption of IHRA's definition of anti-Semitism is a sword in the heart of the foreign policy establishments. It's not that the presidents of Harvard and Columbia and the University of Michigan necessarily disagree that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. But their students do. And Bahrain has called their hand.

How are the university administrators going to be able to continue enabling their students to hold "Israel Apartheid Month" and harass pro-Israel students, faculty and invited speakers in the name of "free speech" when Bahrain says it's anti-Semitic to delegitimize Israel or hold it to a standard to which no other state is held?

The BDS campaigns will no doubt continue. The likes of Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and their comrades don't care what Bahrain, Sudan and the UAE say about Israel. Like the Iranian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood, they want the Jewish state gone. But the institutions that have enabled their anti-Semitism to run rampant in their campuses and corporations will be hard-pressed to defend them without being judged anti-Semitic themselves.

And this brings us back to Newsweek and the agony of the elites its cover story described.

The Nobel Committee's decision to give the peace prize to the World Food Program rather than to Netanyahu, Trump, Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and the UAE's Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan was a play for time. But even if Trump and Netanyahu are forced off the stage, the Abraham Accords will not go away. The peace that is bursting out from all quarters is real. It reflects the real desires of the people who live in the region. And it turns out their desires are far different from the sacrosanct anti-Israel catechisms taught and internalized by the peace processors of the West.

And this brings us to the real "Netanyahu Dilemma." The real dilemma embittering the lives of the foreign policy elites is not whether to give the Nobel Peace Prize to men they hate. It is how to react to the peace these men have achieved.

For 50 years, the elites have insisted that ending the Arab-Israel conflict their greatest goal. Should they embrace and celebrate the peace that is now emerging? Or can they ignore it and continue condemning Israel, and so risk being exposed, along with their false peace predicates, as phonies and far worse.