by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Washington : US President Donald Trump has raised the prospect of cutting off aid to the Palestinian territories unless its leaders agree to resume negotiations to broker a peace deal with Israel, the media reported.
“We pay the Palestinians hundred of millions of dollars a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
“We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”
Trump’s tweets came nearly a month after he became the first sitting US President to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, drawing Palestinians into the streets in protest and causing Palestinian leaders to reject the US’s decades-old role as the central negotiator in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks,reports CNN.
He also said he would move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, where all other nations have their consulates.
The decision was overwhelmingly condemned at the UN, where 128 countries voted against Trump’s fulfilment of a campaign promise.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital, discredited the US as an honest broker in the peace process.
While Trump administration officials have said they expected a “cooling off period” with the Palestinians, Trump’s tweets on Tuesday signaled that the President has grown frustrated with Palestinians’ refusal to partake in a US-led peace process in the wake of his Jerusalem decision, CNN reported.
The tweets also came after the White House confirmed that the US plans to withhold some of its aid to Pakistan to pressure the country into better counterterrorism cooperation with the US.
The US had spent $616 million on aid to the Palestinian territories in 2016, according to the US Agency for International Development, which includes humanitarian assistance, private sector debt payments and infrastructure development assistance.
Jerusalem is one of the world’s most contested sites. Israel claims the whole of the city as its capital.
The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : President Donald Trump began the New Year on Monday with a stinging attack on long-standing ally Pakistan, saying it will get no more US aid as it was giving “safe haven to terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan”.
“The US has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump tweeted in his strongest denunciation of Islamabad.
“They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!” he added.
The Pakistan government vowed to respond soon.
“We will respond to Trump’s tweet shortly Insha Allah… Will let the world know the truth… Difference between facts and fiction,” tweeted Foreign Minister Khwaja M. Asif.
Trump’s announcement follows an increasingly tense back-and-forth between Washington and Islamabad after the US President unveiled his administration’s National Security Strategy.
He had then reminded Pakistan about its obligation towards helping the US because it got “massive payments” from Washington every year.
“We have made it clear to Pakistan that while we desire continued partnership, we must see decisive action against terrorist groups operating on their territory,” Trump had said. “They have to help.”
Pakistan is also accused by Afghanistan and India of harbouring terrorists ranged against the two countries. Islamabad routinely denies such charges.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : US President Donald Trump has said that there will be no deal to protect hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation without funding to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, the media reported.
“The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed wall at the Southern Border and an end to the horrible Chain Migration and ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc,” Trump tweeted on Friday.
“We must protect our Country at all cost!”
Trump’s declaration casts doubt over how Democrats and Republicans will come together to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) participants, of which there are nearly 800,000 who were brought to the United States illegal as children, from deportation because it is unlikely that Democrats will agree to substantial funding for Trump’s border wall in exchange for DACA protections, CNN reported.
Drew Hammill, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, responded to Trump’s tweet late Friday by stating that Democrats were “not going to negotiate through the press and look forward to a serious negotiation at Wednesday’s (January 3) meeting when we come back”.
Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly will meet on January 3.
The top discussion topic will be renewed government spending talks.
Trump’s tweet is his clearest statement to date on his negotiating position with Democrats to achieve a deal on DACA, programmme launched by former President Barack Obama that Trump ended in September.
Trump has demanded that funding for the border wall would need to be part of any deal, but it remains unclear how far he would be willing to go to protect DACA recipients.
Earlier this year, the President had said that his administration was not looking at “citizenship” or “amnesty” but that they are “looking at allowing people to stay here”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
New York : US President Donald Trump has mocked the Vanity Fair magazine for apologising to Hillary Clinton over a video that poked fun at the former Secretary of State, the media reported.
“Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologising for the minor hit they took at Crooked H (Hillary Clinton),” Trump tweeted on Thursday.
The video featuring Vanity Fair staffers offering cheeky New Year’s resolutions for Clinton was first published on December 23, reports CNN.
“Take up a new hobby in the new year,” technology writer Maya Kosoff said in the video.
“Volunteer work, knitting, improv comedy — literally anything that will keep you from running again.”
However, three days later one line in the video became the focus of intense criticism leading to widespread outrage among Clinton supporters who decried the reference to “knitting” as sexist.
A hashtag, #CancelVanityFair, spread on Twitter.
Adam Parkhomenko, a former Clinton adviser, tweeted a photo of the magazine engulfed in flames.
Hollywood actress Patricia Arquette reacted with similar anger, CNN reported.
“Hey stop telling women what the f**k they should do or can do,” Arquette tweeted. “Get over your mommy issues.”
On Wednesday night, a Vanity Fair spokesperson had put out a statement saying the video was “an attempt at humour and we regret that it missed the mark”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Tanmaya Lal
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : In an aid programme that confounds the US policy in the region, India is partnering with Iran to send Afghanistan the assistance that President Donald Trump has said New Delhi should provide.
“Last month, the first consignment of wheat grain assistance from India reached Afghanistan through Chhabahar port in Iran,” India’s Deputy Permanent Representative Tanmaya Lal told the Council on Thursday.
“While it was regrettable that the denial of overland access to Afghanistan “hurts the welfare of the Afghan people,” he said, “a new era of enhanced, reliable and robust connectivity” through Iran has begun.
Pakistan does not allow Indian assistance to Afghanistan pass through its territory.
This Indian aid, which predates Trump’s request and is an element of India’s broader international assistance policy, puts two elements of the US President’s regional policies at odds: He wants India to provide aid to Afghanistan but he also wants to isolate Iran.
Announcing his new policy for Afghanistan in August, Trump said that he wanted India “to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development”.
The National Security Strategy he unveiled earlier this week called upon India to increase aid in the region, but it declared that the US “was rallying the world to confront “the danger posed by the dictatorship in Iran”.
Trump sees Iran as one of its greatest foes, accusing it of creating regional instability and sponsoring terrorism, even as he makes common cause with some countries from where support in men, money and materials flow to terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The US is dependent on Pakistan for ferrying supplies sent by sea for it troops and its programmes in landlocked Afghanistan.
But India will not be able to provide any substantial material assistance to Afghanistan through Pakistan and will have to rely on Iran, making Tehran by default a hidden collaborator furthering an element of Trump’s policy involving New Delhi and Kabul.
The first consignment of 1.1 million tonnes of wheat India had committed to providing Afghanistan reached Zaranj through the Chhabahar port in Iran and the Indian-built Delaram-Zaranj highway from the Iran border.
India pledged a $1 billion dollar package for Afghanistan last year.
Afghanistan’s Parliament costing $90 million was built by India, symbolic of its commitment to Afghanistan’s democracy and it has been attacked by the Taliban, a terrorist force supported by elements in Pakistan’s government.
Another key project, the 215-kilometre Delaram-Zaranj highway built at a cost of over $150 million and several Indian lives taken by terrorists was used for delivering the wheat to Afghanistan.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
