Efforts to bring Hollywood stars to Israel have extended to include Latin America, with a delegation of TV personalities and news executives arriving Monday from Central and South America as well as from the United States for a week-long visit.

The trip was announced by America’s Voices in Israel (AVI), part of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and is partly sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, David InterContinental Hotel, Inbal Jerusalem Hotel and El Al Israel Airlines.

The latest visitors will tour Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech and medical industries and listen to briefings with the IDF, Israeli diplomats and Knesset Members.

Among the personalities in the Latin-American delegation are superstar Mexican actress and comedienne Angelica Vale, best-selling author Teresa Rodriguez, who also is the first woman to anchor a national newscast in the United States, and media and [political strategist Alida Garcia, who orchestrated a large turnout of Latino voters for President Obama and now works for Mark Zuckerberg’s new advocacy organization.

Also in the group is Otto Padron, President and CEO of the Muruelo Media Holding, based in Los Angeles.

The Obama administration’s $3.2 billion annual military aid has been suspended due to the U.S. government shutdown over the debt ceiling. The sum for 2104 was to be transferred to Israel on October 1, but this is not the first time budget crises in the United States have delayed aid to Israel.

“We are not talking about a specific step regarding Israel,” Israel’s Minister of Economic Affairs to the United States, Eli Groner, told Globes. “There is no budget for most government activities because there is no Budget Act or decision for a continuing resolution for ongoing financing for the coming financial year, and that includes the budget for foreign aid.

The terrorist attack on a nine-year-old girl Saturday night in Psagot in Samaria, reported here, has set off another storm of protests within the Likud party to call off the talks with the Palestinian Authority.

The victim of the latest attack is in good condition after being shot at closed range by a terrorist who had infiltrated into the community, located between Jerusalem and Beit El-Ofra. The terrorist still is at large.

Last month, Palestinian Authority terrorists murdered two Israeli soldiers, one of them having been kidnapped in the metropolitan Tel Aviv area by a PA resident without a work permit. He had intended to use his victim as barter to force Israel to release his brother, a terrorist, but instead threw his victim, Sgt. Tomer Hazan, into a pit.

All of the attacks came at the same time Israeli negotiators java been speaking with their Palestinian Authority counterparts at the rate of approximately once a week.

The resumption of the talks in late July was conditioned on Israel’s releasing 104 Palestinian Authority terrorists but in several stages,  in order test PA  chairman Mahmoud Abbas commitment to stop terror instead of inciting it,

The first group was released before talks began, and senior government coalition members are demanding that Israel, for a change, make the Palestinian Authority pay for not living up to an agreement.

“Anyone that backs terrorists cannot be called a negotiating partner,” asserts Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon of the Likud.

Tzipi Hotovely, another senior Likud Knesset Member and a very popular nationalist, insisted Saturday night that the government halt the talks with the Palestinian Authority.

Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett and party MK Shuli Moallem have been against the whole idea of linking peace talks with freeing terrorists.

The attack in Psagot, following two terrorist murders last month, has solidified their case. MK Moallem called the attack on Psagot “a red light” for the government” and added, “Whoever wants to preserve security doesn’t free prisoners.”

Bennett said, “Our ‘partner’ [Abbas] has not changed 20 years after the Oslo Accords,” he said that the murders of the two soldiers “shows us what kind of partner he is. We do not make peace with terrorists who throw dead bodies into a pit. We fight them without mercy.”

But the United States has a different view and likes to quote President Shimon Peres for having said numerous times, “One makes peace with enemies, not with friends, one of the most banal, pithy and naïve statements of the 21st century but one which reflects American impotence.

The recent terrorist attacks would be the death knell for the U.S.-backed peace talks if it weren’t for the fact that President Barack Obama and  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry  now are doing what they said they would not do – forcing the talks on Israel despite the Palestinian Authority’s lack of will or inability to stop terror.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Friday that the talks are going nowhere and that the Palestinian Authority still refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Maariv reported.

But Martin Indyk, Obama’s personal negotiator for Israel, has stepped into the talks. He met with negotiators on Friday to create a better atmosphere, which means forcing Israel to swallow more dirt and forcing Abbas to smile and talk nicely.

The Palestinian Authority insists on talking about borders, and Israel insists on discussing security, according to several media reports.

The United States already has stated its case on borders by calling every Jew who lives in Judea and Samaria and formerly Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem an “illegitimate” settler.

So much for not forcing an agreement on Israel.

But the issue of releasing terrorists is bound to be the one that will blow up the negotiations – or, more likely, force Israel to concede again, lest it lose Obama’s “good will.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu focused the Iranian nuclear threat on the United States Thursday, telling Americans through a CBS interview that Iran is developing Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) to threaten them.

“The American intelligence knows as well as we do that Iran is developing ICBMs not to reach Israel. They want to reach well beyond,” he said on the network’s “This Morning” program. “They’re not developing those ICBMs for us. They can reach us with what they have. It’s for you.”

The networked quoted a senior Israeli security official as saying that the threat of Iranian ICBMs is a “few years” away.

A police official said during Monday’s court hearing on remanding Iranian-born spy Ali Manosuri that the decision to lift the gag order on his arrest came from high–level government officials.

The decision to go public with news about the spy appears timed to coincide with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s trip to the United States, where he will attempt to combat the recent softening of President Obama and the Western world’s stance toward Iran.

The Petach Tikvah Magistrates’ Court on Monday agreed to extend the remand of Mansouri, who traveled throughout Israel as Belgian businessman Alex Mans, for another eight days.

A gag order on the arrest of Mansouri, which occurred on Sept. 11 at Ben Gurion Airport, was lifted on Sunday.

He reportedly told Israeli investigators that he was recruited by Iranian intelligence, the Revolutionary Guards’ Al-Quds Force, to spy on Israel and was promised about $1 million for his services.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrived in the United States Sunday morning on his way to diplomatic charades with President Barack Obama on a stage where each player suffers consequences for telling the truth.

The Prime Minister also is up against a media that, according to Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, is full of lies almost across-the-board and especially when it comes to reporting on President Obama.

The president set the agenda in his speech to the United Nations last week, when he said that the Iranian nuclear threat and the Israeli-Palestinian Authority dispute are the two biggest issues threatening world peace.

When he puts a nuclear bomb in the hands of the Ayatollahs on the same scale as Israel’s effort to remain a state in the face of Palestinian Authority demands, and gets away with it thanks to a cooperative media, there is a limit as to what “truths” Netanyahu can tell. If Obama had told the truth and said that the PA is a pimple and that Iran is a cancer, the world might be better place, but he might lose his Nobel Peace Prize.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu boarded his plane late Saturday night, he said, “One must talk facts and one must tell the truth. Telling the truth today is vital for the security and peace of the world and, of course, it is vital for the security of the State of Israel.”

That is a tall order.

Newly-elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani played out his script excellently in the United Nations, praising the United States as a “great nation” and calling for negotiations over its nuclear program.

Most media lapped up the speech and went ga-ga over the fact that the President of the United States of America spoke directly with an Iranian president on the telephone for 15 minutes for the first time in years.

That is the truth.

It also is just about equally meaningless, but as Hersh said in a weekend interview with the London Guardian, The New York Times spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would.”

Concerning the media in general, Hersh said, “It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].

“They [media]… work out how to re-elect the president.

“Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?”

When it comes to covering Israel, Hirsh’s comments are an understatement. Whatever truths Netanyahu will say will be met with the comebacks already stored in the “Screw Israel” folder.

The Guardian “revealed” Sunday that Prime Minister Netanyahu will hand over to President Obama new evidence that Iran is on its way to the Big Bomb.

Been there, done that. Israel has been disclosing evidence for years, and it only encourages the chorus to sing “engagement at any cost.”

Given the White House’s fiasco after President Obama said he would attack the Assad regime because of its  use chemical weapons, the Prime Minister knows darned well that Obama will guarantee that Israel that it has nothing to worry about. The United States is behind Israel. All the way – until push comes to shove.

Thoroughly condemned, and correctly so, by the media for making the United States look like a pussycat against Assad and Russia, President Obama stumbled on “engagement” with Iran as the perfect antidote for his lost prestige, and the heck with Israel. He will cross that bridge when he comes to it – or he won’t.

On the Iranian issue, Netanyahu will tell the truth. It will be printed in the newspapers the following day and will quickly be used to wrap the fish.

Netanyahu will be challenged, correctly, with the accusations that Israel has nuclear weapons, which of course exist, and he will have to put on some zany stunt as payment for keeping it an open secret.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will not dare tell the truth about the Palestinian Authority, which announced on Saturday it has put Haiti and Grenada in its pocket, stuffed with more than 130 countries that it says now recognize it is a country.

J Street, the pro-Palestinian Authority Jewish lobby that calls itself “Pro-Israel,” offered weak applause to Israel’s chief negotiator Tzipi Livni when she defended the IDF in a speech Saturday night at the opening of the annual J Street conference.

While Livni received a rousing welcome and warm support from the crowd for her comments defending the two-state solution, the reception was more ambivalent when Livni switched gears to defending the Israeli army.

She made an impassioned case for peace with the Palestinians, arguing, “It’s not a favor to the Palestinians, to the Arab world, to President Obama; It’s in our interest” to give up land for peace.

J Street has been warmly received by the Obama administration. The same day that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak with President Barack Obama in Washington, Vice President Joe Biden will address J Street, which opposes a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and areas of Jerusalem occupied by Jordan before the Six-Day War in 1967.

The JTA contributed to this report.

Islamic terrorists killed 70 plus people in Kenya, 78 Christians in Pakistan, 142 people in Somalia and about 100 in Iraq the past four days, but President Barack Obama told the United Nations Tuesday, ”The world is a more stable place than it was five years ago.”

The President quickly added that, sure, there are “problems” in Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq and other countries, but so what?

“Al Qaeda does not have the capacity to carry out another 9/11,” he explained. That may or may not be true, but it reflects the egocentric attitude of the American government, which takes responsibility for safeguarding the world even though it lost its authority years ago.

Al Qaeda still is a “problem” for other governments, President Obama admitted. but there are bigger problems, such as Israel trying to exist.

President Obama outlined where the United States stands on world conflicts. Syria must not be allowed to have chemical weapons, he said, without batting an eyelash over the fiasco of his hastily climbing down the ladder of a confused foreign policy.

But more important, he said there are two great issues that can be solved to make peace for the world: Iranian’s nuclear aim and the “occupation.”

He repeated the term “occupation” several times to make it clear that the United States backs the Palestinian Authority while saying it really is just bringing Israel and the Palestinian Authority to the so-called negotiating table to thrash it out by themselves.

When he insisted that Israel’s security is dependent on the creation of a Palestinian Authority country within Israel’s current borders, President Obama did not mention that two Palestinian Authority terrorists murdered two IDF soldiers the past four days. Maybe the numbers are not high enough to be considered terror.

He obviously and sincerely believes that if Israel simply would duplicate its idiocy in 2005, when it expelled all Jewish civilians and withdrew the IDF from Gaza, the Palestinian Authority will have no reason to attack Israelis.

President Shimon Peres is almost the only person in the world still trying to figure out why Hamas attacks with missiles and rockets after the expulsion eight years ago. President Peres may soon have company because Obama assumes that PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas would never do such a thing if Israel pulls out Judea and Samaria.

Just in case Obama thought he could fool all of the people all the time, he added that the United States “is not taking sides” in Egypt, after having ushered out Mubarak, ushering in the Muslim Brotherhood and then ushering it out a year later.

It was not one of Obama’s greatest speeches. He tried to bury the Islamic terrorist attacks the past few days as footnotes so they would not get in the way of his view that the world is such a more stable place today.

For the record,  more than 130 people have been murdered in Iraq the past four days, 96 in two suicide bombings on Saturday in a Shi’ite neighborhood in Baghdad. Dozens more were killed in terrorist attacks at funerals, including 14 on Monday.

Thousands of people have  been killed in terrorist attacks the past few months, 12 years after the Bush administration declared “victory” to make Iraq safe for democracy. Speaking of democracy, the suicide bombings on Saturday came as Kurds in an autonomous northern region voted in local legislative elections.

Al Qaeda is increasing its attacks in Iraq, where Sunni rebels are terrorizing the Shi’ite government – one group of terrorists against another. Terrorists in Iraq on Tuesday launched an attack against police and military sites with car bombs, rockets and machine guns in western Iraq, killing at least nine policemen.

In Pakistan on Sunday, Islamic terrorists killed at least 78 Christians and wounded more than 100 others in a suicide attack on a church.

Meanwhile, terrorists in Nigeria dressed up as soldiers and gunned down at least 142 people on a highway and burned homes on Sunday.

The terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi is not over. After four days, Kenyan authorities continue to say they have secured the mall and there are not more hostages, but fighting continues.

Local officials told the Associated Press that the morgue is preparing for the arrival of a large number of bodies, meaning that the official death toll of 68 is likely to reach three figures.