Quick Takes: News From Israel You May Have Missed

 For the past week, Hamas’s official television network has broadcast Islamic prayer services live from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, WorldNetDaily has learned.

   Nightly, Hamas’s Al Aksa TV has broadcast from the Mount’s Al Aksa Mosque the Tarawih prayers, or additional nightly prayers recited during Ramadan, which began last week. Tawawih prayers include recitation of parts of the Koran, and takes about an hour.

  The Hamas broadcasts are a coup for the terror group, since it has the only Palestinian television network featuring the Tarawih from the Al Aksa Mosque.

  Hamas’s Al Aksa television routinely calls for jihad against Israel and broadcasts extreme anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda.

  Jerusalem Police Spokesman Shmulik Ben Ruby said “some measures” were taken to halt the broadcasts, but the transmissions continued all week nonetheless.

  Some neighborhoods in Jerusalem could become the capital of a future Palestinian state as part of an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview last week with Al Jazeeera.

  “We can find a formula under which certain neighborhoods, heavily-populated Arab neighborhoods, could become, in a peace agreement, part of the Palestinian capital that, of course, will include also the neighboring villages around Jerusalem,” Barak said when asked whether he envisioned the future division of Jerusalem.

  Barak is a senior member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s coalition government, which has been conducting nearly daily negotiations with the PA aimed at creating a Palestinian state, at least on paper, before President Bush leaves office in January.

  Although Olmert repeatedly denied that Jerusalem was being discussed, Olmert’s office last week confirmed to The Jewish Press that a mechanism had been created to deal with the issue of Jerusalem and that it was indeed on the negotiating table. Palestinian officials claim the talks are in advance stages.

  Republican Sen. John McCain is “absentminded” and “terrible” and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, doesn’t have any appropriate experience. Sen. Barack Obama, by contrast, is “highly educated” and “eloquent” and would serve the world much better and improve America’s overall situation. And Sen. Joe Biden is a “very respectable” man with a “good reputation.”

  All this according to an interview broadcast this week on Iranian state-run media.

  “[McCain] doesn’t know anything, poor thing. He is terrible. Let me tell you, he’s awful,” stated Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh, a political science professor at Shahid Behshti University, which is an Iranian state-funded school.

  Fardanesh was speaking Tuesday on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting television network in an interview translated today by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

  He lavished praise on Obama, stating his election would “improve the situation in America in general.”

  “The flaw they see in Mr. Obama – which they don’t admit – is that he is highly educated and very eloquent. What does he speak so eloquently for?!”

  
  Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com. He appears throughout the week on leading U.S. radio programs and is the author of the book “Schmoozing with Terrorists.”