It's good there are signs that Jews are finally rejecting the anti-Israel and anti-America Obama. If only they woke up before the election, as we were trying to get them to do. It's also great that Jews in Israel are defiantly building wherever they must build. Obama has no right to tell us where we can and cannot live in our own Holy Land. We mustn't appease Islamic terrorists just because the Obama administration and rest of the world want us to.
By Tom Perry, Reuters
And in other news news:JERUSALEM, Nov 18 President Barack Obama may be telling Israelis that building settlements round Jerusalem risks dangerously fuelling Palestinian anger, but some of his fellow Democrats brought the opposite message to the city on Wednesday.
Dov Hikind, a member of New York state's assembly, looked out over Jerusalem's Old City and dismissed the "extreme" view on the matter taken by his party's president.
He urged fellow American Jews to buy homes on occupied land rather than in traditional U.S. vacation spots.
"I'm trying to get a whole bunch of my friends to actually buy," said Hikind during a tour of settlement housing projects for several dozen potential U.S. investors.
"Rather than buying second homes in Florida, we want people to buy in Israel," he said, having watched a foundation stone laid for an extension to the Nof Zion, or Zion View, settlement.
His views, shared by significant numbers of American Jews, many of them Democrat voters, are an indication of Obama's difficulties in holding to his demands that Israel halt its expansion of settlements in the interests of a peace agreement.
Hikind's active participation in the settlement policy that has seen Israel move close to a tenth of its Jewish population onto land captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war is not very common among Jews in the United States. But financial support from Americans, some benefiting from U.S. tax relief on charity, is a significant source of funding for West Bank settlements.
Settlements, home to significant numbers of immigrants from the United States, also benefit from support from American Christians -- like Republican former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
"The thing that prompted me to organise this group is being so angry at the Obama administration," said Hikind.
Israel triggered a fresh rift with Washington over settlement building on Tuesday by approving the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality.
The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth said U.S. President Barack Obama's envoy, George Mitchell, had asked an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a meeting in London on Monday, to block the proposed construction at the settlement of Gilo.
But a government planning commission approved the addition of 900 housing units at Gilo, where 40,000 Israelis already live.
The Israeli decision drew an unusually sharply worded rebuke from the White House, which said it was "dismayed" and accused Israel of undermining Obama's efforts to resume peace talks with Palestinians stalled since December.
"At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.
