“The conference will be a meeting place of Jews and Christians with different perspectives. This should be done with mutual respect, acknowledging differences, and finding common ground on important issues without signing up for any political or religious position. We ask that all participants show grace toward each other.”

Doron Keidar, one of the organizers and the executive director of Cry for Zion, has high hopes for the event. “This is like the first Zionist conference which brought people together to talk about their hopes and dreams for a Jewish state,” Keidar told Breaking Israel News. “That led to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. We are bringing people together to talk about the Temple Mount. It is pretty clear what can come from this.”

But for many, the draw is not any sort of political activism, but rather various “conspiracy theories,” Keidar admitted.“ The Temple Mount is now a mainstream concern, in Israel and around the world. There’s an awakening of interest in the Christian world, but unfortunately it’s more in the direction of conspiracy theory, you know, the Indiana Jones ‘I’m going to find the treasure and I’m going to be the one who does it,'” Keidar told reporters on Wednesday.

The crux of a “hoax” addressed during the conference is a long discredited theory by Ernest L Martin — recently revived in books, articles and viral YouTube videos with millions of combined views — that claims the Jewish temples never stood on the Temple Mount, but rather in the nearby City of David in the East Jerusalem Silwan neighborhood, despite an abundance of archaeological and textual evidence to the contrary. For proponents of the theory, it provides a “solution” to the apparently irreconcilable claims to the compound by Muslims and Jews.

Doron Keidar, one of the conference organizers and founder of Cry for Zion, an NGO advocating for Jewish rights on the Temple Mount, was aware that he would likely be accused of incitement when he set out. Keidar pointed out that the peace agreement between Jordan and Israel ensured freedom of religion for all faiths at the holy sites.

“Freedom of worship is also established in international law as described by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,” Keidar said. “The right for all faiths to pray on the Temple Mount was upheld by the Israeli Magistrate’s court. Right now there is illegal discrimination taking place where only Muslims can pray.”

“Allowing the Jewish flag on the Temple Mount would guarantee that this freedom of religion will exist, just as it does at every other holy site that is under Israeli sovereignty,” Enarson said. “Many Christians believe that there will be a Third Temple but that is not relevant to what our organization or this conference do. We want equality of religion on the Temple Mount, plain and simple. How the Third Temple comes about and what form it takes is in God’s hand.”

While the name has not changed; the definition certainly has. It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show their true colours only after the public vote.

So it has been within the two-and-a-half year unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.

In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily.  But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.

For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers…

• Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.

• Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.

• Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.

• When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.

• Four players control the entire US beef market and have carved up the country.

• After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the US corn-seed market.

I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.

On Tuesday, France delayed for six months a plan to raise already steep taxes on diesel fuel by 24 cents a gallon and gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon. Macron argued that the taxes were needed to curb climate change by weaning motorists off petroleum products, but violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris and other French cities forced him to backtrack – at least for now. “No tax is worth putting in danger the unity of the nation,” said Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who was trotted out to announce the concession.

It was a setback for the French president, who has been trying to carry the torch of climate action in the wake of the Paris accords of December 2015. “When we talk about the actions of the nation in response to the challenges of climate change, we have to say that we have done little,” he said last week.

Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for climate-policy experts, because it came just as delegates from around the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference designed to advance climate measures.

President Donald Trump, who has said he does not believe climate science, also took to Twitter to say Macron’s setback showed Trump was right to spurn the Paris climate agreement.

But the third, in the form of an amendment by arch Tory rebel Dominic Grieve, could have the effect of giving Parliament, rather than the Government, total supremacy in shaping Brexit. In principle, this may sound admirably democratic. But in a hung Parliament, where the majority of MPs are in conflict with the will of the people and want Britain to remain in the EU, it is a recipe for chaos and betrayal. True, this vote makes the chances of crashing out with no deal vanishingly small. But it also means that Brexit may never happen at all.

Just consider how that would shatter the integrity of our democracy and erode what’s left of public trust in our political class. On June 23, 2016, 17.4 million people voted in the referendum to leave the EU. It was the biggest mandate in the history of the UK, and the turnout of 72 per cent was the largest since the 1992 general election.

Eight months later, the decision to trigger Article 50 – the formal mechanism for leaving – was passed in the Commons by 498 votes to 114. And at the 2017 general election 85 per cent of the vote went to parties who promised to honour the referendum result. Yet now, in their vanity and arrogance, many of those very same MPs who pledged to keep the Brexit flame alive now risk extinguishing it. Could there be a worse breach of faith?

“Something is broken within our society and that is why you have seen the big changes – the vote for Brexit, Trump, and indeed the new Italian Government, and these riots. People want to feel they have got some power over their own future.”

The comments come after Prime Minister Theresa May faced widespread humiliation last night after suffering three separate Brexit defeats in the House of Commons. Mrs May’s Government was found in contempt of Parliament as it suffered three Commons defeats in quick succession. If Mrs May loses her crunch Brexit vote next Tuesday, the Government has 21 days to come back to the Commons to outline what happens next.

And without a doubt, any rational person should be able to see that signs that the US economy is slowing down are all around us. So it isn’t as if those that are preparing for the worst are being irrational. It is just that when large numbers of people all start to move in the same direction, it has a very powerful effect. We witnessed this in the stock market in recent years when people just kept buying stocks even though they were massively overvalued.

The collective belief that there was money to be made in the stock market became a self-fulfilling prophecy which pushed stock prices up to absurd heights. But now that process is beginning to reverse as well, and ultimately the unwinding of that bubble will be quite painful.

Over the past couple of years the dominant economic narrative that the mainstream media was pushing was that the US economy was “booming”, and this encouraged businesses to expand and consumers to go out and spend money. But now the dominant economic narrative has changed, and businesses are starting to take actions that are consistent with the new narrative. In the retail industry, if executives truly believed we would see an economic boom in the years ahead they would be expanding, but instead stores are being closed at a record pace…