A British Minister on Tuesday kept up his nation’s mantra that Israeli construction is a material bar to final status talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority saying it is “counter productive.”

British Minister for the Middle East and North Africa Alistair Burt’s comments came one day after a round of talks between officials from Jerusalem and Ramallah in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

Addressing a group of Bar-Ilan University political science students this afternoon, Burt said “Many will argue that now is not the time to make bold gestures.  My advice is if you want stability, security and peace with your neighbors, and the best relations with the rest of the world, then making a deal with the Palestinians is urgent.”

Burt also said that the building of settlements beyond the so-called ‘Green Line’ is counter-productive and insisted Jerusalem would have to be divided. Observers say Burt’s comments carry a characteristic British undercurrent of criticism for Israel while remaining pointedly silent on the abject refusal of PA officials to come to the table for two years running.

PA officials have set preconditions known to be unacceptable to Israel as a fait accompli for forestalling talks that would require concessions they have no prepared their public for. These include a release of all Arab terrorists from Israeli prisons, a renewed building freeze in Judea and Samaria, and the pre-1967 lines as a starting point for talks.

Israeli officials say they are ready to negotiate without preconditions from either side at any time. A previous 10-month building freeze by Israel, they note, resulted not in renewed talks but additional preconditions – and PA unilateralism.

PLO officials in recent weeks have said they have moved to include the Hamas terror organization in their ranks while saying they are not interested in cooperation with Israel. Instead, PLO officials have adopted “a strategy based on continuous efforts along with the international community to secure full recognition and full United Nations membership, pursuing internal reconciliation, and keeping up the popular resistance.”

While they have not defined “popular resistance,” regional observers note Article 9 of the PLO charter continues to assert, “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.”

Mieanwhile, Burt indicated his country will continue to drive forward international efforts in 2012 to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.   He said his government recently imposed some of the toughest sanctions yet on Iran, and expressed confidence that these sanctions would work.  He added that no option is being taken off the table, and that the UK is working closely with Israel on this issue.

Steering away from political issues, Burt said 2011 had been a key year for UK-Israel bilateral relations in trade, and research and development. He reassured the audience that British universities are not hostile toward Israel, and urged students thinking of studying abroad to study in the UK.

The session was moderated by Prof. Amikam Nachmani, Chairman of Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Political Science.  Dr. Jonathan Rynhold, Director of the University’s Argov Center for Israel and the Jewish People, dedicated the session in memory of Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov, who was shot by terrorists in an attempted assassination while serving in his post as Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Imagine the difficulty of trying to put together a 2500-piece jigsaw puzzle if you had all the pieces, but not the box with the picture. You could examine all the details with as much care and precision as possible, but it would be very difficult to figure out how the pieces relate to one another and how each one fits into the overall picture. And even if you were to successfully assemble several groups of pieces scattered around the picture by matching colors and patterns, it would still be very difficult to figure out how these groups fit together when they don’t seem to match up in any obvious way. It wouldn’t take very long for most people to resign themselves to the fact that this is about as far as they will ever get.

Unfortunately, this is the way many try to understand the Bible – spending a lot of time looking at the details, but without having the big picture as a point of reference. They read the same familiar passages over and over, realizing that they must fit together in some way, but find it daunting and perplexing to try to move much beyond this. Or going back to the puzzle analogy, some have even concluded that the pieces don’t really fit together to form a single picture, but are really just parts of many different, unrelated pictures. This can all make it virtually impossible to understand and appreciate the fact that God has a plan that He has been sovereignly and faithfully executing throughout history.

I am very thankful that I came to realize this through the book What on Earth is God Doing? Satan’s Conflict with God by Renald Showers and the course he taught (based on the book) at the Word of Life Bible Institute in 1986. The book and course together had a profound impact in shaping my understanding of the Bible because they allowed me to see how all the pieces fit together to form the big picture. This laid a foundation for both my studies and my teaching over the last 25 years.

In 2000, I began teaching a course I called “Conflict of the Ages: Satan’s War Against God,” which began with an introduction to dispensationalism and then took Dr. Showers’ basic theme and approach and developed them within the context of dispensationalism. I have since taught this course seven or eight times and have always been excited to watch as many students started to see the big picture of the Bible and how it all fits together.

I will be teaching a similar course, “God’s Plan throughout the Ages,” in about a month, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It will be one of two courses that will be taught during the next School of Prophets conference which will be held January 30 to February 3 at the Willow Valley Inn. The course Dr. DeYoung will be teaching is the Book of Daniel These are being offered as graduate-level in the School of Prophets master’s and doctoral programs, but are open to anyone who would like to take them for credit or just audit them.

For more information you can go to the Lancaster Conference website by clicking on the conference ad to the right or this link: www.schoolofprophets.org/lancaster.

If you have been considering enrolling in the School of Prophets, these courses offer a great opportunity to get a jump start on the program with 6 credits in just 20 class-hours (along with the reading and course
paper).

A large Russian naval force arrived at the Syrian port city of Tartus, the French AFP news agency reported on Sunday, in what the regime of President Bashar Assad is calling a show of “friendship.”

Last November, a Syrian news agency reported that Russian warships were planned to arrive at Syrian territorial waters, indicating that the move represented a clear message to the West that Moscow would resist any foreign intervention in the country’s civil unrest.

Citing the official Syrian news agency SANA on Sunday, AFP reported that a large Russian naval flotilla, led by an aircraft carrier, is making a six-day port call to Tartus. SANA also quoted a Russian naval officer as saying that the a visit was “aimed at bringing the two countries closer together and strengthening their ties of friendship.”

“The commanders of the Russian naval vessels docked in Tartus took turns to express their solidarity with the Syrian people,” SANA added.

The Russian visit came as the Arab League ruled out considering a withdrawal of its widely criticized peace observers from Syria, ahead of a meeting in Cairo to assess the performance of the mission.

Led by Qatar, an Arab League committee on Sunday was to review a report about the mission, which was dispatched two weeks ago to Syria to verify the Damascus government’s compliance with a plan to end a violent crackdown on dissent.

According to leaked excerpts, the report cites continued violence by the Syrian government on pro-democracy protesters, Doha-based broadcaster Al Jazeera reported.

The report mentions that Syrian authorities hold detainees in unknown places, Al Jazeera said.

The Arab League’s assistant chief, Adnan Eissa, said Saturday it was unlikely for the meeting to discuss the possibility of recalling the observers any time soon.

“No Arab country has talked about the necessity of withdrawing the observers,” he told reporters in Cairo.

He said that the Arab countries were favoring more support for the observers and better equipping them to do their job.

The observer mission reached 163 members on Saturday, after 10 more colleagues from Jordan arrived, according to Eissa.

Meanwhile, Syrian activists say 11 soldiers and several civilians have died in clashes and attacks.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting between government troops and military defectors in the town of Basr al-Harir in southern Daraa province Sunday killed 11 soldiers and wounded more than 20.

The Observatory and other activist networks reported several civilians killed in government raids in the central Homs region and eastern Deir el-Zour province. The number of civilians killed was not immediately clear and the reports could not be independently confirmed as Syria has barred most foreign journalists from the country.

To judge by some of the headlines, Russian Orthodox patriarch Kirill I appeared to side with the protesters against Vladimir Putin when the clergyman urged the authorities to listen to the protesters. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the church’s voice in the media and in the interfaith dialogues, also appeared to be sympathetic, warning the authorities of being “slowly eaten alive” if they stonewalled the popular protests.

These remarks were interpreted as showing that the church, identified with the Putin regime, was slowly starting to break ranks. This would be the equivalent of the estrangement between the Catholic Church in Spain and the regime of General Francisco Franco after years of close cooperation, that presaged the breakup of the Spanish dictatorship.

Such expectations are far-fetched. The Russian church needed to put a modicum of daylight between itself and the regime, but it had no intention of siding with the protesters. The protesters, argue the prelates, must content themselves with peaceful protests because violence might lead to a replay of the 1917 revolution which set Russia back. Were it not for the revolution, “Russia would have had a population of more than 300 million and would have challenged or maybe even surpassed the United States from the point of view of economic development,”

Like Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church is innately anti-Western. Kiril’s predecessor, Patriarch Aleksei II, associated the West with corruption involving pornography and social decay, all part of a  “planned bloodless war” geared at destroying the Russian people.

Before he ascended to the highest post in the church, Kiril I praised the “Christian patriotism” of the Russian people, who view Orthodoxy as a national religion, while the Western competitors – Catholics and Protestants (whom Kiril called “sects”) were threats to the religion of the nation and thus to the nation itself.

Back in November 1996, the same Kirill, then Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, condemned the activity of the Western churches in the post-Soviet era. Carol expected these churches to help Russian orthodoxy revise and instead “hordes of missionaries dashed in, believing the former Soviet Union to be a vast missionary territory.” Instead of aiding the Russian Orthodox Church in its missionary endeavors, these proselytizing groups worked against the Church “like boxers in a ring with their pumped-up muscles, delivering blows.”

When Alexei died, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov eulogized him as follows:, “It is impossible to overestimate the contribution of the Primate of the Church to strengthening the positions of our Fatherland in the world and enhancing the international prestige of Russia.”

In return, Putin has helped the church abroad, using the ample state reserves to buy up expensive real estate on which to erect churches outside Russia, for example These ties are not going to be abandoned for a protest movement.

Speculation is mounting that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has cancer, and political jostling has already begun in Ankara to replace the rabble-rousing prime minister who is Turkey’s most popular leader since Kemal Ataturk.

Last month Turkish media revealed that Erdogan had had stomach surgery the month before – the reports said doctors had removed polyps from his intestines, but found no traces of cancer.

The 57-year-old spent several weeks at home recuperating, but President Abdullah Gul, an Erdogan ally, was quick with reassurances the premier remained in good health.

“It was a preventative operation,” Gul said. “There is nothing more normal than someone who has undergone an operation to rest for a while.”

But a Turkish blogger said a physician with ties to the Turkish executive branch told him Erdogan is suffering from colorectal cancer and is under close examination to determine its severity. On the condition of anonymity, the blogger said a respected authority in academia had told him the prime minister was expected to start chemotherapy last month.

The blogger said Turkish media have reported almost nothing about Erdogan’s condition, leaving most Turks totally unaware anything might be wrong. Still, he said, it’s an “open secret” in the Turkish medical community that Erdogan has been diagnosed with cancer.

Last month the Jerusalem-based intelligence website DEBKAfile quoted “Western intelligence sources” as saying Erdogan had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer, also known as colon cancer.

Official Turkish sources have remained tight-lipped. Following Erdogan’s surgery the AKP’s English- language website ran a three-sentence news item headlined “Premier Erdogan says he is fine,” quoting the premier as saying only, “I’m fine and I will be better.”

Erdogan is immensely popular not only in Turkey but around the Muslim world for promoting Islamic values, growing the economy and adopting a hardline foreign policy that is often at odds with Ankara’s former allies Israel and America.

First elected in 2003, Erdogan was reelected in June for a third-straight term after his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) won fully half of the national vote.

AKP bylaws, however, prevent candidates from running for parliament for a fourth time. Instead, Erdogan was widely expected to stand for president in the next national elections in 2014, when Gul’s two-term tenure expires. (Like its Israeli counterpart, the Turkish presidency is largely a ceremonial position.) Four senior AKP figures – Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, Economy Minister Ali Babacan and Gul himself – have been named as possible successors.

None of the candidates, however, match Erdogan’s popular appeal: A recent poll conducted by an independent US-based NGO found one-third of Turks would “definitely not” vote for AKP if it were run by anyone other than Erdogan.

“From an electability perspective, there is no one who can replace Erdogan,” the blogger said.

Davutoglu is an erudite former political-science professor fluent in English, German and Arabic, and his piety and sense of Turkish exceptionalism endear him to many conservative voters. Gul boasts leadership experience (he served four years as foreign minister and briefly as premier) who has the backing of the Fethullah Gulen movement, an opaque but powerful Islamist movement led by a US-based religious scholar.

Another potential candidate is Kemal Kılıçdarog˘lu, leader of the Republican People’s Party, an opposition movement known by its Turkish acronym CHP. But despite its venerable legacy – it was founded by Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey – the CHP remains driven by internal divisions that make a challenge to AKP dominance unlikely.

The geopolitical implications of Erdogan’s exit from politics would be immense. US President Barack Obama counts the Turkish premier as both an ally and friend – The New York Times reported the two leaders spoke at least nine times by phone last year, and Washington has often looked to Erdogan as a diplomatic bridge to an Arab world roiled for the past year by popular unrest.

For Israel, meanwhile, change in Ankara can’t come soon enough. Erdogan defended the 2010 Turkish flotilla to Gaza, demanded a public apology for the nine passengers killed in the ensuing Israeli raid and fostered close ties with the Hamas government in the Strip.

This week he welcomed Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to his private residence in Istanbul and later accompanied him into a parliamentary session in Ankara.

Erdogan reiterated the unyielding positions that have become his hallmark – Hamas, he said, is not a terrorist group but “freedom fighters protecting their land.”

Images from the meeting showed him looking pale and gaunt.