While optimistic Israelis accept the inevitability of peaceful coexistence under the two-states-for-two-peoples formula, unless the Palestinians abandon their rejectionism, there is no possibility of a dialogue that might lead to peace.

It is ironic that the Balfour Declaration has also become the subject of one of the most important observances on the PA calendar. Each year, PA schools devote special sessions to discussing it. In 2011 Palestinian schoolchildren were instructed to write the queen of England to condemn “the 94th anniversary of the cursed Balfour promise.” [Official PA daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida, November 3, 2011]

While Palestinian revisionism is nothing new regarding the Temple Mount, their denial of the Balfour Declaration’s actual history defies common sense. The support of British Christian Zionists for the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland dates from the early 19th century. This is a matter of historical record that no deluge of PA propaganda can deny.

“If you’re not ready to admit that the universe is chaos, I’m not sure how far you’re going to go,” Bracciale said to the class, describing witchcraft as a way to exercise power in a world without transcendent moral rules, a supernatural technology for taking care of yourself when no one else will. Witchcraft, Bracciale said, lets you be the “arbiter of your own justice.”

I suspect that this assumption of chaos — the sense that institutions have failed and no one is in charge — helps explain the well-documented resurgence of occultism among millennials. Attempts at spell-casting are obviously not unique to today’s young people; the Washington writer and hostess Sally Quinn just published a book in which she boasts about hexing the renowned magazine editor Clay Felker, my former journalism professor, before his death from cancer. Still, magic and witchcraft have a renewed cachet, one that seems related to our current climate of political and cultural breakdown.

This was the second meeting of a group called the "International Union of Resistance Scholars," attended by Shia and Sunni clerics of 80 countries, including the head of Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, according to reports. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, wrote a letter to the congress, urging, "all individuals, who feel the importance of this great responsibility [of freeing Palestine], to continue different methods of fighting against the usurper Zionist Regime."

"Without a doubt, scholarly elites, clerics, and politicians, as well as the officials of Muslim countries carry the heavier part of this responsibility; this is a sacred and well-ending Resistance," wrote Khamenei. He called it a "holy fight" with certain victory promised against the "enemy Zionist entity."

Francis arrived at the cemetery well ahead of the Mass, spending time walking among the graves of the fallen soldiers. “Please Lord, stop. No more wars. No more of these useless massacres,” the Pope said, adding that remembering the victims of the wars of the past was crucial “today that the world once more is at war and is preparing to go even more forcefully into war.”

He reiterated his point made the day before during an address at St Peter’s Square in Vatican, that the “wars produce nothing other than cemeteries and death.” Pope addressed today’s warmongers, warning them against pushing for a larger conflict, since “everything is lost with war.”

“There are men, who are doing everything to declare war and to enter into conflict. They end up destroying themselves and everything,” Francis said. “But humanity has not learnt the lesson and seems not to want to learn the lesson.”

Now China’s most powerful leader in decades, Xi has sought to reassure the world that his country’s rise would be peaceful — a bid to avoid the so-called Thucydides trap that says a growing power will clash with an established force. Still, China’s growing military and economic interests are reason enough for the world’s strongest powers to worry.

“Xi’s vision includes — for the first time in contemporary Chinese history — staking out a global leadership role,” said Jonathan Sullivan, director of University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute. “This will inevitably bring China’s interests up against those of other powers.”

China’s next chance to demonstrate its confidence could come as early as next week, when Xi hosts US President Donald Trump on a state visit to Beijing. Topping the agenda will be North Korea and trade, issues that highlight both the US’s unease about Chinese economic might and its desire for Beijing to take greater responsibility as a regional peacemaker.

This fact was known at the beginning both to former CIA director John Brennan and to former FBI director James Comey. Yet both went along with the DNC-invented story of Russian election hacking and Christopher Steele’s fake “dossier” on Trump’s imagined relations with Russians.

The presstitute media told the lies that they were supposed to tell. The consequence of this plot has been to waste the first year of Trump’s presidency and to prevent President Trump from reducing the dangerously high tensions with nuclear power Russia. This is a disservice not only to President Trump but also to the American people and the planet itself.

Every half century, many Christian Zionists believe, history makes a concerted push toward its endpoint: the return of the Messiah to Jerusalem. According to this pattern, something momentous should happen to Israel before the end of 2017.

“Reading Israel’s modern history, there seems to be something unusual in 50-year cycles,” said David Parsons, the vice president of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. “It means we should expect something incredible to happen this year to further propel Jerusalem and Israel into its prophetic destiny.”

Christian Zionists, most of whom are part of the world’s 700 million-strong evangelical community, view themselves as the Jews’ partners in God’s plan. Like many Orthodox Jews, they believe that after a world war, the Messiah will take the throne of a Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem and lead the world to peace and prosperity.

“If I did write something, I wanted it to be of help to Pope Francis, to the Church, and to the faithful,” he said. Although Weinandy wrote the letter last July, he only made it public after he received assurances from the Vatican that it had been delivered to the Pope. He chose to publish the letter, he said, because it “expresses the concerns of many more people than just me, ordinary people who’ve come to me with their questions and apprehensions. I wanted them to know that I listened,” he said.

In the letter, Father Weinandy lists five points that illustrate the “chronic confusion” that seems to mark the Francis pontificate, namely, intentional ambiguity, disdain for doctrine, the naming of heterodox bishops, sowing division in the Church, and vindictiveness in the face of criticism.

Almost two-thirds of Americans, or 63 percent, report being stressed about the future of the nation, according to the American Psychological Association’s Eleventh Stress in America survey, conducted in August and released on Wednesday.  This worry about the fate of the union tops longstanding stressors such as money (62 percent) and work (61 percent) and also cuts across political proclivities. However, a significantly larger proportion of Democrats (73 percent) reported feeling stress than independents (59 percent) and Republicans (56 percent).

The “current social divisiveness” in America was reported by 59 percent of those surveyed as a cause of their own malaise. When the APA surveyed Americans a year ago, 52 percent said they were stressed by the presidential campaign. Since then, anxieties have only grown.

A majority of the more than 3,400 Americans polled, 59 percent, said “they consider this to to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember.” That sentiment spanned generations, including those that lived through World War II, the Vietnam War, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. (Some 30 percent of people polled cited terrorism as a source of concern, a number that’s likely to rise given the alleged terrorist attack in New York City on Tuesday.)