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ISRAEL THE BEAUTIFUL: AN ORCHARD AT DAWN ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS
Posted by Yehoshua Halevi, May 31, 2009. |
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This is one of Yehoshua Halevi's Golden Light Images. Yehoshua Halevi writes: "HOW I GOT THE SHOT: One of the first assignments I give students in my introductory photography course is to bring two pictures to class for discussion — one which they like and one which they dislike. In presenting their choices to the class, students begin to develop an internal language for identifying elements in their own work that succeed or fail. I came across this week's photo in my library while researching images for a book project and stumbled upon an interesting insight into how I evaluate my work. When I first shot this photo of an orchard on the Golan Heights, I rejected it. I don't recall exactly why, but I may have been striving to create something different or I may have been emotionally disconnected from it when editing the shoot. Upon rediscovering it in my library, while perusing hundreds of files late at night in my office, the image evoked a softness, orderliness and a genuinely peaceful early-spring-morning kind of quiet that fit my mood at the moment perfectly. One of the best times to photograph trees is late winter or early spring, when bright green new leaves or colorful buds give the tree a unique coloration which fades as the new growth matures. I stood on an embankment looking down into the valley where these trees had been planted, and using a telephoto lens, composed an image that removed all other growth save for a small errant patch toward the top of the frame. I try to explain to my simcha clients that the real value of their
investment in professional photography will only become apparent in 5
or 10 years. Sometimes pictures deserve a second look after a period
of time, so that when you return to them, you are in a place to see
their true value.
Contact Yehoshua Halevi by email at smile@goldenlightimages.com
and visit his website:
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MICHELLE OBAMA'S NON-TRIP TO THE MIDDLE EAST
Posted by Boris Celser, May 31, 2009. |
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This below was written by Netty Wisbaum of Phoenix, Arizona. Contact her by email at netty@tasteofaz.com |
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Michelle Obama's trip...Interesting Information!...It explains a lot! I was at Blockbusters on Saturday renting videos, and I was going along the wall and there was a video called "Obama". I told the men next to me that I wouldn't waste my time. We started talking about Obama. These guys were Arabs, and I asked them why they thought Michele Obama headed home following her visit in France instead of traveling on to Saudi Arabia and Turkey with her husband. They said she couldn't go to Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Iraq . I said "Laura Bush went to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Dubai." They answered, "Obama is a Muslim, and by Muslim law, he would not be allowed to bring his wife into the countries that accept Sharia Law." Just thought it was interesting that the Arabs at Blockbuster's accept the idea that we're being led by a Muslim who follows the Islamic creed... They also said that's the reason he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. It was a signal to the Muslim world. Just thought you would like to know. Odd, I thought HE SAID he was a Christian. Now he wouldn't lie to us would he? Boris Celser is a Canadian. Contact him at celser@telusplanet.net |
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SPINELESS JEWS? AGAIN? OR NEVER AGAIN!
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 31, 2009. |
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Melanie Phillips, a straight talking news commentator, laid it on the line about American Jews. She called them "spineless", a descriptive term with which I sadly agree. Find following her article which was posted on Arutz Sheva May 11th, entitled: "Netanyahu Prepares For Obama: Israel To Be Left Alone In World?" This features astute, pungent comments by Melanie Phillips and Caroline Glick both straight talkers. However, before you get to their observations, I would like to remind our readers about the WW2 war years and the same 'spineless' American Jews who refused to aggressively protest the Hitler Genocide, well known to the Roosevelt Administration. The American Jews feared that anti-Semitism would ramp up in America if they protested the Roosevelt policy of doing absolutely nothing, even to the point of refusing to issue a diplomatic warning to Hitler to cease his policy of Genocide. The Jews of that era (except for some) were shameful examples of the "pintele Yid" (Jewish spark) buried too deep within many among the Jewish people. Frightened, hand-wringing leadership of Jewish organizations kept their collective mouths shut tight to insure that the Jewish public were simply kept in the dark about the Holocaust in Europe. Most of the Jewish leadership of the '30's and '40s acted as if they were co-partners with the likes of the New York Times, owned by the German Jewish Sulzberger dynasty. They had reporters in England, France, Germany and the rest of Europe who were eye witnesses to the round-ups, the slave labor camps, the concentration camps and the death camps. Yet they invariably reported atrocities as "unsubstantiated" reports or "rumors" that some Jews were being killed — and always on the deep, inner pages of the vaunted New York Times. Not until the end, when General Eisenhower was photographed walking through the death camps, viewing the piles of bodies and walking skeletons of those barely alive, did the New York Times and the rest of the Media express shock (or what passed for shock). Most of the American Jewish leaders were spineless and speechless then and, regrettably, now! They learned nothing from the Nazi Holocaust that they would implement to prevent the next coming (probably) nuclear Holocaust. The Nations of the world gather, led by President Barack Hussein Obama, to force Israel into national suicide via a two-state solution in order to appease the Muslim and Arab Terrorist nations and their proxies. But, the Jews continue to support Obama. It was reported that as many as 80% of the American Jewish population voted for Obama. Even AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations have failed to show sufficient courage and the proper leadership. One cannot help but think of the Judenratt of Europe — those Jews who worked for the German Nazis in rounding up Jews to transport them to the death camps. They thought they might save themselves and their families if they betrayed their fellow Jews. Hopefully, they were themselves hunted down, although most of the compliant Judenratt were, in the end, also sent to the gas chambers and the Krupp ovens. As 60 and 70 years ago, the American Jewish leadership is spineless and they float "disinformation" to the Jewish public about "how friendly Obama and his Arabist advisors are to the Jewish State of Israel". The Jews in the Obama inner circle are themselves shameless and without a Jewish backbone — or are merely latter day Judenratt. It would be better if they acted like Shabtai Zvi and converted to Islam or Christianity than to pretend or act like they are courageous Jews. They may only be good for being pallbearers to the Jewish nation and building museums and memorials to the Jews who were murdered or about to be murdered while they remain silent in their "golden medina". It appears that we Jews who do care will have to rely upon our courageous settlers and our Christian friends to speak up on our behalf. Those Jews who have the courage to defend Israel — even at the real risk of being singled out by a hostile Administration — know who you are. Kol Ha Kavod. (All honor to you.) As for the Jews in Israel, there are two kinds. First are those who love the Land and are ready to fight to defend it by building their homes, schools and synagogues on it. Then, there are those called the "radical Left" who seem to "hate the ground they walk on". They bond with the Leftist leaders who, in turn, would abandon the Land G-d gave to the Jewish people and surrender our Land to pagan Muslim Terrorists and the oil-rich Islamic nations. The article below is entitled "Netanyahu Prepares for Obama: Israel
to Be Left Alone in World?" and was written by Hillel Fendel,
It appeared May 10, 2009 in Arutz Sheva |
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(IsraelNN.com) As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu prepares for his visit to the United States next week, warnings abound that the Obama Administration's policies will leave Israel to face Iran and Hamas alone. The warnings are summed up in recent articles by the West's two main pro-Israel female commentators: Melanie Phillips and Caroline Glick. Writing in the Spectator (United Kingdom) last week, Philips warns that "Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus." She cites the report that Obama's National Security Adviser told a European foreign minister that Obama will be 'forceful' with Israel, and plans to impose, with the EU and moderate Arab states, "a satisfactory endgame solution" upon Israel. PA State: Evil and Stupid "This is all not only evil," Phillips says, "but exceptionally stupid… The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran… A Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense that it will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel's security is ludicrous." American Jewry: Spineless After expressing incredulity at the American demands for further Israeli concessions in the light of the utter failure of the Disengagement, Phillips writes that U.S. Jews are reacting "with a total absence of spine… Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America's elite." Netanyahu must therefore take Israel's message to "the ordinary American people," she concludes: "They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and certainly America's Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk." Glick: Obama Forcing Israel into Corner Caroline Glick, writing in The Jerusalem Post, states that ahead of Netanyahu's visit to Washington, "the Obama administration is ratcheting up its anti-Israel rhetoric and working feverishly to force Israel into a corner." She notes that quartet mediator Tony Blair has announced that within six weeks the US, EU, UN and Russia will unveil a new framework for establishing a Palestinian state, and that it is "being worked on at the highest level in the American administration." Obama Humiliates Peres Yet another milestone in the U.S. path towards abandoning Israel is the "humiliating reception" President Shimon Peres received from Obama. Visiting in Washington last week, "Peres was tasked with calming the waters ahead of Netanyahu's visit. It was hoped that he could introduce a more collegial tone to US-Israel relations." However, the Obama government barred all media from covering the event, thus "transform[ing] what was supposed to be a friendly visit with a respected and friendly head of state into a back-door encounter with an unwanted guest, who was shooed in and shooed out of the White House without a sound." Abrogating 40 Years of Understanding Another point raised by Glick and Eli Lake of The Washington Times: US Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller told the UN that Israel and others must adhere to the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), thus effectively abrogating a 40-year-old US-Israeli understanding that the US would remain silent about Israel's nuclear program because it understood that it is defensive, not offensive in nature. The statement also erases "any distinction between nuclear weapons in the hands of US allies and democratic states and nuclear weapons in the hands of US enemies and terror states," Glick wrote. "The fact that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, all chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab world will disappear," Glick continues, "is of no interest to Obama and his advisers. They do not care that the day after [Hamas said it was] suspending its attacks against Israel from Gaza, the Iranian-controlled terror regime took credit for several volleys of rockets shot against Israeli civilian targets from Gaza." "The operational significance of the administration's anti-Israel positions is that Israel will not be well served by adopting a more accommodating posture toward the Palestinians and Iran," Glick concludes. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org |
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FROM ISRAEL: STANDING TOUGH
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 31, 2009. |
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So much to discuss within a rapidly shifting scenario. I begin with a clarification of my previous stated position on Netanyahu, Obama, and the outposts. There were a handful of readers who saw in my recent words a shift towards appeasement, and G-d forbid, that is not what I intended to convey. I had the impression that Netanyahu believed that agreeing to take down a few outposts would allow him to acquire greater support from Obama for being tough on Iran. What I call a quid pro quo, which is not the same as appeasement. Here in Israel we are facing down the Iranian threat directly. I was not recommending, and would never, ever recommend, appeasement of Iran. I am mightily contemptuous of Obama's terribly dangerous tendency to appease. I believe it likely that we will attack Iran and I support that. But I am mindful that acquiring certain bunker busters from the US can make us more effective, and that not having the US object to our flying over Iraq can make our mission enormously easier (and provide it with greater chance of success). And, yes, I reasoned that IF (this is the critical qualifier) taking down a few outposts is the cost of acquiring these things, it would be a trade that is worth making. I still reason so. This is what I heard in Netanyahu's comments. My position was that we must not get so caught in the ideology of protecting our right to some part of the land that we miss out on an opportunity to better protect all of the land and all of the people, vis-a-vis a more effective attack on Iran. I believe Netanyahu speaks truth when he says we are not living in normal times. ~~~~~~~~~~ However, what I wrote about was "a few outposts." Not all of them, and certainly nothing in the way of large settlements. I acknowledged as I wrote that going this route presents the danger of a slippery slope. What reassured me was the position of key members of the gov't, who are watching Netanyahu and demanding that he (or Barak) not do wholesale taking down of settlements. I trust Benny Begin, and Moshe Ya'alon, and Yisrael Katz, etc. etc., more than I trust Netanyahu. And I had what I consider fairly solid reason to believe that Netanyahu knew full well what his constraints would be with regard his own government. I also had reason to believe that a token — taking down a tent here, a few shacks there — would be what we would see, in order to give Obama the semblance of "movement" towards peace, and not a whole lot more. And yes, from a purely ideological position, those few shacks are the same as a settlement of 40 or 50 families. But this has not been my focus because of the existential threats we face. Sometimes, I believe, we have to settle for the best deal we can get, on balance, within a given set of parameters. Please note, I have been taking my cue in part from the settlers, who are rather sanguine about what's happening because they know with these small outposts they can re-build and re-build until they are victorious. That, in the long run is what matters. At any rate, I thank those who wrote to me with heartfelt anguish and prompted some serious thought and discussion. I take none of this lightly, ever. Many nights, I lose sleep over these issues. ~~~~~~~~~~ But the situation is now changing, and there is a great deal more to consider. My earlier words may become moot, my perspective superseded by new situations and new information. Obama met with Abbas on Thursday. With the holiday of Shavuot upon us, I had no chance until now to write about what followed from that meeting. There are a number of factors to consider: Obama surprised me in one respect regarding what he reportedly said to the media after the Abbas meeting. He actually mentioned PA incitement, an issue rarely addressed. What he said was that Abbas had to "continue to make progress on reducing incitement." I believe we have to grab hold of this issue as if we were pit bulls, who bite down and don't let go. So much is said about settlements as "an obstacle to peace." (See below) But this is nonsense, because were there to be some peaceful arrangement, settlements could be (not should be, but could be) negotiated out of existence. That is, their presence does not block peaceful negotiations from advancing. But incitement is another matter all together. The hatred for us that has been inculcated by the PA in the Palestinian population cannot be negotiated out of existence. We cannot have peace with these Arabs at our periphery, or in our midst, unless and until they accept our presence and our right to be where we are. Unless and until they no longer believe that Allah wants them to martyr themselves in a jihad to destroy us. Unless and until they understand that Jews are entitled to dignity. Palestinian Arabs need to be told consistently by their leadership that genuine peace with us is a good thing. That there is an ancient Jewish history in Jerusalem. That our presence in the land is acceptable and not an affront. And no where is this more urgently needed than in the schools, where the textbooks that are used are invidious and undermine any genuine possibility for peace. The work to change the textbooks must begin immediately. This, above all, must be a demand we hold fast to, with the premise, always, that no peace is possible otherwise. That the PA hasn't demonstrated peaceful intent, otherwise. That it's a farce to make demands of Israel, otherwise. We are being put on the defensive, and this is a necessary offensive stance. And it's absolutely valid. ~~~~~~~~~~ The PA will not agree to make these changes. The ideology of radical Islam is too mainstream (especially with the growing influence of Hamas). No PA leader could change the line this radically and expect to remain a leader, never mind to live. To demand this is to unmask the insincerity of Palestinian Arab statements. ~~~~~~~~~~ But I would demand this not of Abbas, but of Obama, first: "Mr. President, if you are sincere about promoting ME peace, this is essential. If you cut the PA slack on this, you are destroying chances for peace and putting the lie to your intentions." And the time to start is now.
~~~~~~~~~~ It seems that Obama intends to cut us no slack on the issue of settlements. He is demanding (and Hillary has reiterated this) a total settlement freeze, even with regard to natural growth. This means if a young man returns to his community after serving in the army and wants to marry and build a home near his family, he cannot. Of if young couples in a neighborhood have a number of small children, a new nursery school (gan) cannot be built. This is the case even if the new home or nursery school would be built entirely within the existing boundaries of the community and not extended a single meter into "contested area." In fact, a new room could not even be added to an existing home, if a family became larger. Commentators are observing that this represents an essential change from previous American policy. ~~~~~~~~~~ But Obama cannot ultimately demand anything. For we are a sovereign nation. The response I'm picking up from various gov't officials is mixed. From Daniel Herschkowitz, Science Minister and head of Habayit Hayehudi: The American demand to prevent natural growth is unreasonable, and brings to mind Pharaoh who said: 'Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river.' "If there is a family that expands from one child to four or five, what should we tell them — to ship the children off to Petah Tikva? This is an unacceptable demand, even [even?] if it comes from the Americans, and Israel should reject it decisively." From Eli Yishai, Interior Minister and head of Shas: "The American demand to freeze construction means expulsion for young people living in large locales. I hope the US administration understands that. If not, I don't want to be an apocalyptic prophet saying we're facing struggle and confrontation. The concessions they're demanding of us are a security impediment we cannot withstand." ~~~~~~~~~~ But then we have Information Minister Yuli Edelstein (Likud): "The recent days prove what luck we have that it is Netanyahu's government conducting talks on West Bank natural growth and construction in Jerusalem. Just imagine someone else, he would have led us to an entanglement lasting generations. And Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog (Labor): "The current American administration sees things differently than the last two presidents did. Construction is being undertaken around Jerusalem according to understandings with previous administrations. Israel wants very much to reach understandings, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak's upcoming trip to Washington proves it." At which point an unease moves in.... ~~~~~~~~~~ So it's time to sound the alarm with Netanyahu, who to this day has not agreed to freeze settlements. Let him know that you're behind him as he stands strong, that you are outraged by what Obama is demanding. Remind him that Israel is a sovereign state and does not have to give in to demands from abroad. Implore him to instruct Barak not to cave on settlements when he is in Washington. Fax: 02-670-5369 (From the US: 011-972-2-670-5369)
~~~~~~~~~~ There is one other point of interest I noted with regard to Obama's comments. This provides a glimmer of hope. Obama said: "...obviously Prime Minister Netanyahu has to work through these issues in his own government." This seems to indicate that Obama knows that Netanyahu can take issues regarding outposts and settlements just so far before he will be blocked. Thus it's important to make sure this is the case. And so, I would encourage, lastly, communication with key ministers of the gov't, imploring them to stand strong and to block any Barak/Netanyahu initiative that takes down major outposts or freezes settlements. Express your outrage with Obama and say you're counting on them to carry the day. Minister Moshe Ya'alon: myaalon@knesset.gov.il (no fax given) office phone: 02-640-8891
For additional ministers:
~~~~~~~~~~ Then we have an article, "Israel and the Axis of Evil," written by Caroline Glick right before Shavuot, in which she says: "No destruction of Jewish communities will convince Obama to act against Iran." She says a great deal more, and I would like to return to her in a day or two. But here I wish to say simply that if the evidence points to her being correct, if there is going to be no quid pro quo, as Netanyahu had indicated — either naively or hopefully or disingenuously — then there is no reason to countenance taking down of outposts. ~~~~~~~~~~ In point of fact, another outpost was dismantled last night. This was at Shvut Ami, near Kedumim in Samaria. What was dismantled? One hut; six young people were sent away, without violence. There was talk immediately after of putting up the hut again, but, according to Arutz Sheva, for now the youths have decided to take up residence in a cave on the property, as a cave is difficult to dismantle. And so, yes, ideologically this is the same as a more significant outpost. But, really, one hut? One has the feeling that Barak is going for what creates the least fuss. ~~~~~~~~~~ I note as well that the office of the defense minister has declared that it will not, at least not now, take down nine homes in Ofra — a significant settlement northeast of Jerusalem in Samaria — that have been declared "illegal." What we're seeing here is evidence that the defense minister indeed has latitude as to what should be dismantled and that politics play a role in the decision process. In fact, the situation in Ofra serves as a model of exactly how politicized this whole issue of "illegal" is. This, too, I would like to return to in due course. ~~~~~~~~~~ I welcome a statement reported by the Washington Post that an Abbas associate made following Abbas's visit with Obama: "It will take a couple of years" for Obama to force Netanyahu from office. It is to be welcomed because of the stupidity of the remark, and because it serves to stiffen the spines of members of our government. The question is whether this was a unilaterally stupid remark, or one based on something said by Obama off the record. My purely intuitive hunch is that it's the latter. And that's certainly the take as well of Likud Faction Chair MK Ze'ev Elkin, who commented, "With all due respect to the United States...we are an independent democratic country..." ~~~~~~~~~~ Dear friends, bear with me, as the number of issues to address seems to overwhelm my time and ability to address them all. My UNRWA report awaits my serious and reasonably undivided attention. I will post as I can. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" — An Israeli company called Opgal has developed the Fever Detection and Alarm System, which can spot persons with fevers in a crowd in transportation hubs such as airports and train stations. This may have potential in combating pandemics. Drawing on non-invasive heat sensor technology and cameras, the system requires no installation of equipment and is relatively inexpensive to utilize. Persons pegged as feverish would be stopped for culture swabs or further questioning. — Special Israeli security companies are greatly in demand for providing protection against pirates on the open seas who attack cruise ships and commercial liners. Israeli anti-pirate teams are deemed the best trained and are proving effective. They function on board in hidden capacities (e.g., as life guards) so that pirates collecting intelligence won't be aware of them. The Israeli teams also use hi-tech optic systems to identify pirate ships a distance away. — A kibbutz called Kishorit, in northern Israel, has become a model of how to provide full living experience for adults who are mentally challenged — whether because of autism, schizophrenia, or other problems. The roughly 150 members, who are resident for life (a facility for seniors is being developed), have established the largest organic goat farm in Israel, run a TV station and have developed a line of toys. Their efforts are supported by a strong sense of community and an aesthetic environment that is comforting. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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THE THIRD JIHAD
Posted by Susana K-M, May 31, 2009. |
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Last week a major plot to blow up two New York synagogues and shoot down a plane was foiled. The FBI and NYPD caught a ring of four local terrorists who were in the act of planting the explosives to be used in the attack. Important plot detail: Three of the four terrorists converted to Islam while serving prison terms. Radical Islamic chaplains are converting inmates at an alarming pace. After moving to Newburgh, these criminals joined the mosque where they were met by an FBI informant posing as a master terrorist. What the terrorists didn't know was that the FBI was on to their plot for almost a year, and that the explosives sold to them were fake. What most Americans do not know is that the threat of jihad by radical Muslims is already very real within the U.S. The threat is not only violent. A sophisticated cultural jihad is steadily progressing within America's borders. Funded by Saudi money and fueled by extreme ideology, radical Islamists are attacking western freedoms and the American way of life from within. The Third Jihad, from the makers of the critically-acclaimed Obsession, documents these threats with expert interviews and never before seen media footage from the Arab World. The Third Jihad is a must-see for all Americans. To play the movie, click here.
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MISSING IN ACTION
Posted by Susana K-M, May 31, 2009. |
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In their 2007 book The Israel Lobby, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued that there exists a loose coalition of groups that attempts to steer American policy in a pro-Israel direction at a high cost to American national interests. Mearsheimer and Walt's definition of pro-Israel was so broad and their sense of how injurious Israel's existence is to America so deep that, in their telling, the "Israel Lobby" is both all-powerful and all-inclusive. Nevertheless, at the center of Mearsheimer and Walt"s "Israel Lobby" are American Jews — the villainous neo-cons and the pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC chief among them. The sad truth, however, is that if an Israeli Lobby exists, American Jews have failed to enlist. American Jews are demonstrably innocent of putting Israel's interests first, or even high, on their list of concerns — at least if Israel's interests have anything to do with how they are defined by the overwhelming consensus of Jews living in Israel. A vast majority of Israeli Jews would be prepared to cede a good deal of the West Bank in return for peace. But the experience of the last 15 years has convinced them that peace cannot be obtained without a dramatic reformation of Palestinian society. From the standpoint of the Israeli consensus, the Obama administration's mantra about the necessity of Israel declaring its support for the "two-state solution" is misguided, for it sends the wrong messages to both Israelis and Palestinians. By focusing on what Israel must do, that mantra ignores what it has already done, and the lessons learned from its past actions. Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Gaza, resulted in their becoming launching pads for suicide bombers and rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. Those withdrawals did not even improve Israel's international standing. The focus on Israel's next step ignores those never taken by the Palestinians — i.e., moving one iota from any of their positions as of the outset of Oslo. And it conveys the message that nothing is expected of the Palestinians in the future, unlike the Road Map, which made the Palestinians oft-promised end to incitement and terrorism preconditions for further negotiations. Palestinian statehood, not peace, has become the watchword of American policy. And to that end, the Obama administration has indicated a willingness to impose a solution. National Security Advisor James Jones recently conveyed to a senior European official that "an endgame solution" would be formulated by the U.S., EU, and moderate Arab states, with Israel and the Palestinians relegated to the role of bystanders. On a happy note, he allowed that Israel would "not be thrown under the bus." That same week the chief U.S. arms negotiator called for Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — a clear break with a 40-year understanding between the U.S. and Israel on the issue, and an equally clear indication of how nasty the pressure on Israel might get. The theory of an imposed solution is that the final contours of a settlement are already well known so it might as well be now. Even if the former proposition were true, the intention of the parties and their ability to perform would still be relevant. The Palestinians cannot run a state — certainly not one that Hamas would not quickly take over — nor do they seek to. Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid declared after the Hamas-Fatah civil war in Gaza, "We do not deserve a state." Fatah prefers the present kleptocracy to a state. Statelessness allows Palestinians to attack Israel without being held responsible, as would a state, and to remain the world's favorite mendicants. Meanwhile the contrast between the Obama administration's urgency with respect to the Palestinian-Israel tract and its lackadaisical approach to Iran's nuclear ambitions could not be starker. The linkage of Iran to progress on the former is backwards. No more than a year likely remains to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. Peace will not come in that period to a region in which there is still no Palestinian leader who can even recognize Israel's right to be a Jewish state. The Sunni states fear a nuclear Iran much more than Israel, and they are saying so. They will support an alliance against Iran because it is their interests to do so, as long as they believe America will act decisively and not leave them to Iran's tender mercies. What has been the response of American Jewry and the vaunted Israel Lobby to the mounting threats to Israel abetted by Washington? Silence. President Obama"s popularity among American Jews remains sky high and rising. Delegates at the recent AIPAC convention dutifully lobbied Congress for the two-state solution. Whom, one wonders, was this feared group lobbying against? The overwhelming American Jewish support for President Obama demonstrates how far the perspectives of Israeli and American Jews have diverged. For Israeli Jews survival remains the primary desideratum. For American Jews the simulacrum of peace, in the form of a treaty, any treaty, is primary. For many American Jews, an Israel without peace is misbegotten, not worth the scorn it engenders in The New York Times and on Ivy League campuses. Daniel Gordis records, in his important new book How Israel Can Win a War That May Never End, being asked by an American Jewish friend: "Why has Israel given up hope?" And with no genuine chance for peace, why forge on?" It is left to Gordis's teenage daughter Talia to set their visitor straight: The purpose of Israel is not to achieve peace with the Arabs, however devoutly such peace might be wished for. Israelis have not given up hope, just hope for peace in the near future. American Jews remained largely quiescent during the Holocaust, in part because of their adulation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who could do no wrong in their eyes. Stephen Wise, the most influential voice in American Jewry, could not overcome his worship of FDR to challenge the latter's position that nothing could be done to save Jews other than win the War. (David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews details how much could have been done.) To avoid embarrassing or pressuring the President, Wise sat on a telegram from Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in August 1942, detailing plans to exterminate three to four million Jews in German-controlled Europe, until pressured by the Orthodox and Revisionist Zionists to do something. American Jews are besotted again and the Israel Lobby of Walt and Mearsheimer's febrile imaginations never existed. Never has that been so obvious as today.
Contact Susana K-M by email at suanema@gmail.com |
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THE VIEW FROM THE HEIGHTS
Posted by Yehuda and Rebecca Poch, May 31, 2009. |
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We are a new blog. We are at
Below is an essay entitled "Who We Are Dealing With." |
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It seems to me that in Israel, the media is suffering from the same disease as in the United States. They are simply afraid to say anything negative about US President Barack Obama or his policies. The difference is in the degree. Where in the United States, the media makes no attempt to hide its love affair with Obama — even admitting it openly in several instances — in Israel, the situation is somewhat more reserved. Here, we know that Obama is up to no good, but the media remains to afraid to say it openly. Yet if any indication was needed to prove just how unfriendly Obama is toward Israel, take the developing nuclear arms race among the "Axis of Evil" states. Iran, which for years has been quite open about its nuclear plans and its earnest wish to "wipe Israel off the map", tested a ballistic missile last week capable of hitting targets within 2000 km — which includes most of Europe and the American forces stationed there, as well as any target within Israel. This missile, operated with solid fuel rather than the more primitive liquid variety, has greater accuracy at longer ranges than previous missiles deployed by Iran. And the missile was test fired during Obama's meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, timing that was surely no accident. Yet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could not quite put her finger on why Iran is such a concern. In comments she made late last week, she stated that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons would cause a nuclear arms race in the region, which would run counter to the interests of most Arab states and constitute a danger to America. Not one word was mentioned about Israel, or Ahmadinejad's oft repeated threat to destroy this country. Clinton's complete naivete, or willful ignorance, is a very big reason why she should not be allowed to continue in her post. If the major threat to the US comes from a potential arms race in the Middle East, and not from the possibility that Iran might try to fulfill its threat to destroy another nation — and one that is strongly allied with the United States no less — then Clinton has quite a lot to learn about the world and is simply unqualified for her position. Contrast this with President Obama's very forceful response to the North Korean nuclear test this week, which was followed almost immediately by the testing of three long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Obama correctly condemned the tests and stated that they run counter to United Nations resolutions and that they pose a clear threat to both South Korea and Japan, "which the world must act against". Why is it that North Korea remains part of the "Axis of Evil" and warrants such stiff condemnation and calls for concerted international action against its nuclear arms program? Has North Korea voice any kind of clear threat against anyone? Has Kim Jong-Il threatened to sink Japan or wipe South Korea off the map? Has he attended a UN sponsored conference to do nothing other than call for the annihilation of another State? North Korea simply tested some of their own emerging technology, and this was enough for the US to issue the strongest condemnation of Barack Obama's term in office. Yet Iran, which openly and belligerently threatens another country; whose president uses every stage and opportunity to proclaim his desire to annihilate a member State of the United Nations, and who thumbs his nose at American interests in a large part of the world, merits no such condemnation. Not only that, Obama is interested in opening a dialogue with Iran in an effort to make nice and to appease Iran's leaders into changing their mind. Regarding North Korea, America's leaders are very clear on where the threat emanates from and what it actually is — even though North Korea doesn't state any threat openly. But regarding Iran, Clinton simply can't bring herself to say that Iran's threat is an open military threat against Israel. To her, the real threat is not important. It is only the perceived threat of a regional arms race that concerns her. It is clear from this comparison that what is driving US policy toward Israel is nothing short of anti-Semitism. Let's face it — where Israel is not the issue, the American response is in line with its historical posture. The US has always been strongly opposed to a nuclear North Korea. And rightly so. But when Israel is the issue, no one's home. Iran could fire a missile at Tel Aviv and wipe out a million Jews, and the current US administration would continue with its negotiations in the hope of preventing an arms race. It is high time for Israel — the media, the government, and the nation as a whole — to wake up and understand the Obama Administration's policies for what they are — a kick in the stomach to Israel's existence. Prime Minister Netanyahu may already be aware of this and acting accordingly if his performance in Washington last week is to be continued. But the logical conclusion is that Israel must find new allies to stand alongside us as America leads the rest of the world in turning against us. One such possible ally is India, which faces a grave threat from the possibility that Pakistan's government will fall apart and leave its nuclear arsenal in the hands of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Finding such new alliances is not so difficult. But it will take courage to do so. |
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POLL: NEARLY 40% OF GAZANS AND 30% OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA 'PALESTINIANS' WOULD LIKE TO EMIGRATE
Posted by Carl in Jerusalem, May 31, 2009. |
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A poll taken in the month of April, and published by the
'Palestinian' Center for Development Studies on Wednesday, shows that
39.6% of Gazans and 28.8% of Judea and Samaria 'Palestinians' would
like to emigrate. Here are some of the poll highlights:
1. How do you describe the current economic situation of your family?
2. In the current period, do you feel that you and your family are safe?
3. Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
4. Is the family provider currently employed?
5. If you had the opportunity to migrate and live abroad, would you
immigrate?
6. Have you been personally exposed to any of the following practices by the occupation army?
...
To get out of the current Palestinian crisis, which of the following propositions do you approve?
Will you approve a solution taking in consideration the UN resolutions and including a Palestinian independent state in West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital and a just solution for the refugee problem?
...
Within the different practiced strategies, which of the following is more likely to achieve national liberation and establishment of the independent state?
Note especially that most 'Palestinians' do not claim to have been abused by the 'occupation army' (and I would bet that many of the claims that were made have been exaggerated), and that despite the fact that most 'Palestinians' would accept solutions that Israel has offered, a plurality of 'Palestinians' want to use both 'resistance and negotiations' and substantial numbers want to leave. I view that as despair that the 'Palestinian' leadership will ever accept a solution to the 'Palestinian' problem offered by Israel.
By the way, the picture at the top is a collapsed cesspool in Gaza a couple of years ago.
Carl in Jerusalem blogs at Israel Matzav. This essay is
archived at
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2009/05/
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'HEBREW BOOK-BURNING' MINISTER FAROUK HOSNI IS FRONT-RUNNER TO HEAD UNESCO
Posted by CPocerl, May 31, 2009. |
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A reader of the article, Roger, Los Angeles, USA, wrote: "Hosni is a perfect example of his brethren in Egypt. This is their mindset and this is who they are. This is why UNESCO is a joke." That says it. This below was written by Charles Bremner in Paris. It appeared in Times Onlinehttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6391201.ece |
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Farouk Hosni says he regrets his outburst in the Egyptian parliament An Egyptian Cabinet minister who offered to burn Hebrew books last year enters the final straight as favourite for leadership of Unesco today in the face of fierce opposition from Jewish groups and intellectuals in Europe. Farouk Hosni, 71, an artist who has served as Culture Minister for 21 years, apologised this week for his book-burning call and is still deemed front-runner among seven contenders for the post of director-general of the Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Applications close tonight after a ten-day battle between Mr Hosni and his accusers, conducted largely in the pages of Le Monde, the highbrow French newspaper. Israel decided this week to back Mr Hosni and it is held to be the Arab world's turn for the plum international post, but if the furore in France and Germany spreads he may lose when Unesco members vote in September. Mr Hosni, who is supported by the Arab League and African nations, had until recently been deemed an easy choice to succeed Koichiro Matsuura, of Japan, as the ninth chief since Sir Julian Huxley was Unesco's first director-general in the late 1940s. The latest in a long history of Unesco storms erupted last week with a blistering attack in Le Monde by three Jewish celebrities under the title: "The shame of a disaster foretold". Bernard-Henri Lévy, the philosopher-journalist, Claude Lanzmann, the film-maker, and Elie Wiesel, the Nobel peace laureate, urged the international community to block the appointment of a man whom they described as a racist and inciter of hate. They cited his call in the Egyptian parliament last May to burn all Hebrew language books in the Alexandria library. "If there are any there, I will myself burn them in front of you," he said. They also summarised Mr Hosni's "nauseating" anti-Israeli positions, including allegations that Jews had infiltrated the world's media and spread lies. "We invite all countries dedicated to liberty and culture to take the initiatives necessary to avert this threat and avoid the disaster that would be his nomination," they said. Mr Hosni responded on Wednesday with an apology. "I want to solemnly say that I regret the words that I used," he wrote. "Nothing is more distant to me than racism, the negation of others or the desire to hurt Jewish culture or any other culture." He said that his remark on the books was delivered in the heat of the moment and should be understood in the light of the suffering of the Palestinian people. He pleaded for understanding and noted that he was deemed to be a disgraceful liberal by Egyptian and Arab conservatives. "My failure would be a victory for the most intolerant circles in my own country," he said. The French criticism was echoed by the German Council of Culture. Olaf Zimmermann, its chief executive, said that someone who "failed to respect the diversity of the world's cultures" should not be allowed to run global cultural and education policy. The publicity has shone a light on Mr Hosni's record as a leader of Egyptian orthodoxy. He has censored the media and films. He once banned heavy metal music and its fans were arrested. Two years ago he barred from Egypt The Band's Visit, an Israeli comedy about an Egyptian police band marooned in a poor Israeli town. The controversy may be turning European governments against Mr Hosni but it is too early to predict an outcome, diplomats say.
Contact CPoerl by email at Cpocerl@aol.com
This appeared in the Times,
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HOW SPAIN DEALS WITH NATIVE TERRORISM; SETTLEMENT FREEZE IMPLICATIONS; THE AMERICAN ISRAELI ACTION COALITION
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 31, 2009. |
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Spain has rebuked Israeli anti-terrorist efforts as inhumane. It plans to prosecute Israeli officials for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Everyone knows the real motive is to persecute Israel for defending itself. How does Spain deal with its native terrorist movement, the ETA, seeking independence for the Basque provinces. Unlike Palestinian Arabs, the Basques are a distinct nationality, and had independence at various times. Basque terrorists have killed about 800 people, a fraction of the number of Israelis murdered by Arab terrorists, even smaller in proportion to population, inasmuch as Spain has several times the population of Israel. Here is how Spain deals with its own, Basque terrorists. Spanish paramilitary forces routinely torture captured terrorists or innocent people caught up in arrests. Spanish death squads exterminate Basque terrorists or innocent people caught up in raids. The government claims no knowledge of this, but several high government officials were convicted for it. Spanish anti-terrorist forces routinely injure bystanders. Sometimes this result from bombs those forces plant without knowing who will set them off. Some squads invade foreign countries, to do this. Spain demanded that other countries deport Basque terrorists. Spain hypocrisy demands that Israel not "occupy" Judea and Samaria. Hypocritically, Spain maintains a couple of enclaves on the coast of Morocco. Morocco claims them. Jews have more legitimate a right to reside in the Jewish Territories in their homeland than Spaniards have in enclaves of Morocco. Africans try to get into the Spanish enclaves, so Spain built a fence to bar them, but demands that Israel tear down its own fence. Israel's much-criticized security fence was built to keep out murderers, not the case with Spain's enclaves (Prof. Steven Plaut, 5/12). SPANISH EFFORT TO RESTRICT WAR CRIMES TRIALS Spain's legislature resolved that the government should end prosecution of alleged human rights abuses of non-Spaniards for crimes committed abroad and against non-Spaniards. The practice makes diplomatic problems and could become a "judicial free-for-all." (Victoria Burnett & Marlisa Simons, NY Times, 5/21, A10.) What does free-for-all mean, here? The report devoted itself to defending the practice. It did not explain the real problems with it. Those problems are abuse of the privilege by terrorists to make phony charges against innocent opponents for propaganda and to embarrass them, and perhaps to get a biased court to convict enemies. The New York paper did not serve its readers on that issue. Is it by coincidence that it doesn't like the same U.S. and Israeli leaders who are likely to be indicted under the practice? SPECIAL REPORT ON JERUSALEM HOUSING Jerusalem Mayor Barkat said that his new, master plan seeks to keep people from moving out of the city. I asked my Israeli associate for an explanation. She informs us that real estate is pricy there, whether rental or purchase. Business people from all ethnic and religious segments can afford it. Newlyweds cannot. They live with their parents or move to suburbs, such as Male Adumim, Efrat, Neve Daniel, etc.. People are drawn from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, center of the hi-tech industry. Jerusalem needs affordable housing and high-tech industry. You may recall that the master plan projects thousands of new
apartments; see
IMPLICATIONS OF SETTLEMENT FREEZE When foreign critics of Israel claim that Israeli settlements in the Territories are illegal, they fail to cite the international law and to consider the law-based arguments that they are legal. They know that the Arabs want the Territories, but overlook their desire for all of Israel, whose conquest they consider the Territories a major stepping stone. Not a "two-state solution" but a final solution. The Arabs want the Territories; but wanting is not entitlement. Why should foreigners prefer the Arab desire to the Jewish desire? Prejudice? The specious assumption is that the Jews who returned to their ancient homeland there are foreigners, and not entitled to the area, whereas the Arabs, who invade or immigrated to the Jewish homeland are aboriginal. Don't expect the governments and journalists who have that assumption to remember or acknowledge that the post-WWI peace accords broke up the Turkish Empire into a mostly Arab Mideast with the traditional Land of Israel to be returned to the Jewish people from whom it was usurped. Or that afterwards, Britain gave most of the Jewish homeland to the Arabs, anyway. Now they want to divide Israel again, making it non-viable. It's the usual foreign policy foul-up. DIPLOMATIC GAMES If Israel makes a nationalistic or self-defense decision before a meeting with U.S. officials, critics claim Israel insults the U.S. officials. Childish carping. RUSSIAN ARMS SALES TO IRAN Russia did it again. Criticized for preparing to sell advanced jet fighters to Iran, Russia claims it is freezing the deal. It did the same with advanced anti-aircraft missiles. It did the same with nuclear power plants that promote development of nuclear weapons. But the nuclear technology transfer went on anyway. I think that Russia backs off only temporarily, until the criticism dies down. That gangster state (run by the KGB and not by rule of law) does anything for money and to embarrass the U.S. Wait till the Muslims start shaking down Russia or subverting it from within! INTRODUCING THE AMERICAN ISRAELI ACTION COALITION The American Israeli Action Coalition consists of Americans in Israel, but has an office in New York City, too. It has a quarter-million people to draw upon. The membership love and understand both countries. They are in a position to advise both on productive policy. Their principles: 1. Cultivating cooperation between the peoples and governments of the United States and Israel. The Coalition sponsored the first U.S. presidential-style debate held abroad. Both candidates sent representatives to participate. The Coalition, itself, is non-partisan, being interested in broader issues. Hundreds attended. The debate was more feisty than those between the actual candidates. Such activity helps keep expatriates focused on U.S. politics and U.S. politicians focused on Israel. Press releases, endorsements or criticism of policies, meetings with U.S. politicians, newspaper advertisements — it has done that, too. See its website: http://www.aiacoalition.org/ Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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ISLAMIC SPEAKERS BUREAU BACKED BY RADICAL PROFS
Posted by Jonathan Schanzer, May 31, 2009. |
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A California nonprofit dedicated to "teaching about Islam & Muslims" at U.S. high schools and college campuses features a board of advisors that is stacked with some of the most controversial activist professors in the field of Middle Eastern studies today. The imprimatur of these scholars may signal a troubling shift toward the support of proselytizing efforts and the further unraveling of Middle East Studies in America. The board of Islamic Networks Group (ING) is a veritable Who's Who of Islamist apologists and activists. Leading the list is John Esposito, the founding director of the Saudi-funded Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He famously stated that the suicide-bombing Hamas organization engages in "honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture." Joining Esposito on the ING board is Sherman Jackson of the University of Michigan, who was a trustee at the North American Islamic Trust and worked with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both un-indicted co-conspirators in the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation. There's also Ingrid Mattson, a convert to Islam, who is a professor at the Hartford Seminary and president of the un-indicted co-conspirator ISNA. While much of her work is controversial, she is famous for a CNN chatroom interview in 2001 in which she stated that the radical Saudi Wahhabi ideology is "a reform movement" that "really was analogous to the European Protestant reformation." Hamza Yusuf Hanson, who is not a scholar but sits on the ING board, publicly declared his own extremism at an ISNA convention. In 1991, he reportedly delivered a speech titled "Jihad is the Only Way" to the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), which is an arm of the radical organization Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan. While Maha El-Genaidi, the founder, president and CEO of ING, does not appear openly to embrace radicalism, she reportedly has worked with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), also an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. El-Genaidi also participated in an event sponsored by the Muslim Students Association with Siraj Wahhaj, an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. ING's reach is wide. Its web site lists more than a dozen affiliated organizations in North America. They reflect a broad network involved in Islamic outreach (da'wa), otherwise known as proselytizing. The list of ING affiliates includes such Muslim outreach organizations as: The Islamic Speakers Bureau of Nebraska; the Islamic Resource Group in Minnesota; the Islamic Education and Resource Network in Michigan; the Islamic Center of Cincinnati; the Organization of Islamic Speakers Midwest Illinois; the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Atlanta; the Kentucky Islamic Resource Group; the Islamic Speakers Bureau of San Diego; and the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Vancouver. Because ING charges nothing for its campus speeches, hosts aren't deterred by financial needs. Thus, with a modest 2007 budget of $356,000, the latest figure available via public tax returns, ING made an astonishing 750 classroom visits in one year, a figure that doesn't include visits to churches, senior centers, corporations, and forums for policemen and healthcare workers. According to a recent ING newsletter, the group reached 14,000 students and adults after public schools and universities responded to a large-scale ING direct mail campaign. ING also disseminates its message through the printed word. Access to the ING online store is now denied for reasons unknown, but a few of the organization's publications are available on the Internet. Among them is Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture by Jack Sheehan, a former communications professor at Southern Illinois University who was also a visiting professor at Esposito's Center for Muslim Christian Understanding. Another title is Presenting Ramadan and Eid in Elementary School: Grades K-6 Kit for Parents and Teachers, designed to generate excitement about these Muslim holy days through art, music, and "lunar activities." ING also appears to have created a curriculum about Islam for grades 7 through 12. It also appears that the State of California, at least at one point, used ING curriculum. However, the ING links on the California Department of Education website are now dead. There is nothing even vaguely radical on the ING website. The organization's behavior appears to be consistent with its message of pluralism. One might only observe that the organization attempts to whitewash the radical strains of the religion (a common theme in the work of Esposito and Mattson). Without challenging ING's freedom to preach, two important observations should be made. First, it is now clear that some Middle Eastern Studies professors have ceased being observers of Islam and are now engaging in its propagation. Countless analysts have noted that Middle Eastern Studies professors substitute scholarship with apologia for radicalism. Still others openly agitate against the United States or Israel. However, it is rare to see scholars openly lend their support to proselytizing efforts of this kind. It is too early to know whether the scholars on the ING board represent an anomaly or a trend. The motivations of Mattson and Sherman — both converts to Islam — are somewhat understandable. Esposito, a non-Muslim, is more of a mystery. On a more practical level, elementary school, high school, or college administrators mulling a free visit from El-Genaidi's group should be forewarned about the academic engine that powers ING. ING's leading thinkers have a history of cavorting with apologists for radicalism-and the radicals themselves. Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism analyst for the U.S. Treasury Department, is deputy executive director for the Jewish Policy Center and author of Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine. Contact him at jschanzer@jewishpolicycenter.org This appeared in the American Thinker and is archived at www.jewishpolicycenter.org/973/islamic-speakers-bureau-backed-by-radical-profs The original has live links to additional material. |
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WHAT DOES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAVE AGAINST JEWISH BABIES?
Posted by Yid with Lid, May 31, 2009. |
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The issue of natural growth of existing settlements is an important one for Israel. Without that growth, parents who have lots of children will not be able to move into a bigger apartment, children who get married and have kids will not be able to live near their parents. Elliott Abrams, the former deputy national security adviser who was intimately involved in the issue of Israeli settlements, acknowledged that there were understandings regarding natural growth in a Washington Post article in April, in which he said, "For the past five years, Israel's government has largely adhered to guidelines that were discussed with the United States but never formally adopted: that there would be no new settlements, no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements and no new construction except in already built-up areas. The clear purpose of the guidelines? To allow for settlement growth in ways that minimized the impact on Palestinians." Source But President Obama, and SOS Clinton have made it absolutely clear that the old US/Israel agreement is is no longer OK with the US. The clear message being given to Jerusalem by some key supporters in the US is that this time, there is not going to be a lot of understanding in the Democratic Congress for any building in the settlements. So what is going on here? Is Obama breaking the agreement in order to be able to use the settlements to distance himself from Israel and toward the Muslim world? Or did he make an issue of the settlements because like the moderate terrorist Abbas, he thinks it the easiest way to get Bibi out of office? Or maybe the Democratic Party just has a problem with Jewish babies? THE WASHINGTON TIMES EDITORIAL: What does Hillary Rodham Clinton have against Jewish babies? Last week, the secretary of state issued a demarche to Tel Aviv stating that Washington "wants to see a stop to [West Bank] settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions." The euphemism "natural growth" refers to children. About 9,600 babies were born in West Bank settlements in 2007, and the State Department views these bundles of joy as a threat to its precious peace process. This comes from the Yid with Lid website:
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THE DOCUMENTS ABOUT SAMARIA AND JUDEA PRESIDENT OBAMA APPARENTLY DECIDED TO IGNORE
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 31, 2009. | ||
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This comes from Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director of IMRA, Independent Media Review and Analysis, an Israel-based news organization which provides an extensive digest of media, polls and significant interviews and events relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Its website address is http://www.imra.org.il Write him at imra@netvision.net.il | ||
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"In light of new realities on the ground, including already
existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to
expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full
and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous
efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same
conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement
will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that
reflect these realities."
"On behalf of the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Mr. Ariel Sharon, I wish to reconfirm the following understanding, which had been reached between us: 1. Restrictions on settlement growth: within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria. An Israeli team, in conjunction with Ambassador Kurtzer, will review aerial photos of settlements and will jointly define the construction line of each of the settlements." In return for PM Sharon's unilateral retreat from the Gaza Strip, President Bush agreed to the following exchange of letters which provided for settlement construction to continue within building lines with recognition that these "realities" would be reflected in an agreement. The exchange of letters was critical in gaining approval for Sharon's proposed retreat by the various Israeli authorities. It should be noted that the construction lines were never set. By the same token, a list of unauthorized outposts was never prepared. The complete text of the letters follow:
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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ISRAEL and THE AXIS OF EVIL
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 31, 2009. |
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How did Barack Obama become either an active or passive partner to the Axis of Evil? Does his passivity to the nuclear development of North Korea and/or Iran shows us a weak leader who cannot be trusted to protect the nation? That weakness become even more obvious when Obama threatens Israel, the only nation he dares to threaten and the only nation that can or has fought Terror on her own soil. Obama seems to be a Muslim who had that religion imprinted upon him by his Muslim father. Even as Islamic nations and their Terrorist proxies, like Hamas and Hezb'Allah, target America and her Allies of the Free West, President Obama ignores their aggressive attacks all over the world while apologizing for America. Last month Mahmoud Ahmadinejad test-fired an ICBM — Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, named the Sajjil-2 with the capacity to reach 1200 miles (2000 kilometers). The Sajjil-2 could carry a 2,200 pound nuclear warhead and reach Southern Europe, Israel and American military bases housing between 200,000 and 250,000 American troops. It seems as if Obama is a de facto fellow-traveler for Islam while betraying to the "Jihadists" (Holy Warriors for Islam) America's one ally (Israel) who might be able to knock out Iran's growing nuclear threat to the world. Regrettably, America will pay a terrible price, either from the Muslim "Jihadist" sleeper cells implanted inside America by the Arabist State Department. Or, some of the manifest catastrophes (money crash, weather disasters, biological infections) may be simply the mystical retribution imposed by the G-d of Abraham on a once great nation for turning against the Jewish State and her people. The American people and a super-majority of the American Congress always supported Israel, while those who rose to political power represented the hatred that the Muslims had for Israel. This is by Caroline Glick. It appeared May 27, 2009 in the
Jerusalem Post
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North Korea is half a world away from Israel. Yet the nuclear test it conducted on Monday has the Israeli defense establishment up in arms and its Iranian nemesis smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Understanding why this is the case is key to understanding the danger posed by what someone once impolitely referred to as the "Axis of Evil". Less than two years ago, on September 6, 2007, the IAF destroyed a North Korean-built plutonium production facility at Kibar, Syria. The destroyed installation was a virtual clone of North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium production facility. This past March the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported that Iranian defector Ali Reza Asghari who, before his March 2007 defection to the US, served as a general in Iran's Revolutionary Guards and as deputy defense minister, divulged that Iran paid for the North Korean facility. Teheran viewed the installation in Syria as an extension of its own nuclear program. According to Israeli estimates, Teheran spent between $1 billion and $2billion for the project. It can be assumed that Iranian personnel were present in North Korea during Monday's test. Over the past several years, Iranian nuclear officials have been on hand for all of North Korea's major tests including its first nuclear test and its intercontinental ballistic missile test in 2006. Moreover, it wouldn't be far-fetched to think that North Korea conducted some level of coordination with Iran regarding the timing of its nuclear bomb and ballistic missile tests this week. It is hard to imagine that it is mere coincidence that North Korea's actions came just a week after Iran tested its solid fuel Sejil-2 missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers [1200 miles]. Aside from their chronological proximity, the main reason it makes sense to assume that Iran and North Korea coordinated their tests is because North Korea has played a central role in Iran's missile program. Although Western observers claim that Iran's Sejil-2 is based on Chinese technology transferred to Iran through Pakistan, the fact is that Iran owes much of its ballistic missile capacity to North Korea. The Shihab-3 missile, for instance, which forms the backbone of Iran's strategic arm threatening Israel and its Arab neighbors, is simply an Iranian adaptation of North Korea's Nodong missile technology. Since at least the early 1990s, North Korea has been only too happy to proliferate that technology to whomever wants it. Like Iran, Syria owes much of its own massive missile arsenal to North Korean proliferation. Responding Monday to North Korea's nuclear test, US President Barack Obama said, "North Korea's behavior increases tensions and undermines stability in Northeast Asia." While true, North Korea's intimate ties with Iran and Syria show that North Korea's nuclear program, with its warhead, missile and technological components, is not a distant threat, limited in scope to faraway East Asia. It is a multilateral program shared on various levels with Iran and Syria. Consequently, it endangers not just the likes of Japan and South Korea, but all nations whose territory and interests are within range of Iranian and Syrian missiles. Beyond its impact on Iran's technological and hardware capabilities, North Korea's nuclear program has had a singular influence on Iran's political strategy for advancing its nuclear program diplomatically. North Korea has been a trailblazer in its utilization of a mix of diplomatic aggression and seeming accommodation to alternately intimidate and persuade its enemies to take no action against its nuclear program. Iran has followed Pyongyang's model assiduously. Moreover, Iran has used the international — and particularly the American — response to various North Korean provocations over the years to determine how to position itself at any given moment in order to advance its nuclear program. For instance, when the US reacted to North Korea's 2006 nuclear and ICBM tests by reinstating the six-party talks in the hopes of appeasing Pyongyang, Iran learned that by exhibiting an interest in engaging the US on its uranium enrichment program it could gain valuable time. Just as North Korea was able to dissipate Washington's resolve to act against it while buying time to advance its program still further through the six-party talks, so Iran, by seemingly agreeing to a framework for discussing its uranium enrichment program, has been able to keep the US and Europe at bay for the past several years.
THE OBAMA administration's impotent response to Pyongyang's ICBM test last month and its similarly stuttering reaction to North Korea's nuclear test on Monday have shown Teheran that it no longer needs to even pretend to have an interest in negotiating aspects of its nuclear program with Washington or its European counterparts. Whereas appearing interested in reaching an accommodation with Washington made sense during the Bush presidency, when hawks and doves were competing for the president's ear, today, with the Obama administration populated solely by doves, Iran, like North Korea, believes it has nothing to gain by pretending to care about accommodating Washington. This point was brought home clearly by both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's immediate verbal response to the North Korean nuclear test on Monday and by Iran's provocative launch of warships in the Gulf of Aden the same day. As Ahmadinejad said, as far the Iranian regime is concerned, "Iran's nuclear issue is over." There is no reason to talk anymore. Just as Obama made clear that he intends to do nothing in response to North Korea's nuclear test, so Iran believes that the president will do nothing to impede its nuclear program. Of course, it is not simply the administration's policy toward North Korea that is signaling to Iran that it has no reason to be concerned that the US will challenge its nuclear aspirations. The US's general Middle East policy, which conditions US action against Iran's nuclear weapons program on the prior implementation of an impossible-to-achieve Israel-Palestinian peace agreement makes it obvious to Teheran that the US will take no action whatsoever to prevent it from following in North Korea's footsteps and becoming a nuclear power. During his press briefing with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last Monday, Obama said the US would reassess its commitment to appeasing Iran at year's end. And early this week it was reported that Obama has instructed the Defense Department to prepare plans for attacking Iran. Moreover, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, has made several recent statements warning of the danger a nuclear-armed Iran will pose to global security — and by extension, to US national security. On the surface, all of this seems to indicate that the Obama administration may be willing to actually do something to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Unfortunately, though, due to the time-line Obama has set, it is clear that before he will be ready to lift a finger against Iran, the mullocracy will have already become a nuclear power. Israel assesses that Iran will have a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb by the end of the year. The US believes that it could take until mid-2010. At his press briefing last week Obama said that if the negotiations are deemed a failure, the next step for the US will be to expand international sanctions against Iran. It can be assumed that here, too, Obama will allow this policy to continue for at least six months before he will be willing to reconsider it. By that point, in all likelihood, Iran will already be in possession of a nuclear arsenal. Beyond Obama's timeline, over the past week, two other developments made it apparent that regardless of what Iran does, the Obama administration will not revise its policy of placing its Middle East emphasis on weakening Israel rather than on stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. First, last Friday, Yediot Aharonot reported that at a recent lecture in Washington, US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton, who is responsible for training Palestinian military forces in Jordan, indicated that if Israel does not surrender Judea and Samaria within two years, the Palestinian forces he and his fellow American officers are now training at a cost of more than $300 million could begin killing Israelis. Assuming the veracity of Yediot's report, even more unsettling than Dayton's certainty that within a short period of time these US-trained forces could commence murdering Israelis, is his seeming equanimity in the face of the known consequences of his actions. The prospect of US-trained Palestinian military forces slaughtering Jews does not cause Dayton to have a second thought about the wisdom of the US's commitment to building and training a Palestinian army. Dayton's statement laid bare the disturbing fact that even though the administration is fully aware of the costs of its approach to the Palestinian conflict with Israel, it is still unwilling to reconsider it. Defense Secretary Robert Gates just extended Dayton's tour of duty for an additional two years and gave him the added responsibility of serving as Obama's Middle East mediator George Mitchell's deputy.
FOUR DAYS after Dayton's remarks were published, senior American and Israeli officials met in London. The reported purpose of the high-level meeting was to discuss how Israel will abide by the administration's demand that it prohibit all construction inside Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. What was most notable about the meeting was its timing. By holding the meeting the day after North Korea tested its bomb and after Iran's announcement that it rejects the US's offer to negotiate about its nuclear program, the administration demonstrated that regardless of what Iran does, Washington's commitment to putting the screws on Israel is not subject to change. All of this of course is music to the mullahs' ears. Between America's impotence against their North Korean allies and its unshakable commitment to keeping Israel on the hot seat, the Iranians know that they have no reason to worry about Uncle Sam. As for Israel, it is a good thing that the IDF has scheduled the largest civil defense drill in the country's history for next week. Between North Korea's nuclear test, Iran's brazen bellicosity and America's betrayal, it is clear that the government can do nothing to impact Washington's policies toward Iran. No destruction of Jewish communities will convince Obama to act against Iran. Today Israel stands alone against the mullahs and their bomb. And this, like the US's decision to stand down against the Axis of Evil, is not subject to change. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org |
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WELL SAID
Posted by Milton Franks-Lhermann, May 30, 2009. |
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This came from Frank Sequeira, who writes,
"Finally — someone said everything I have been thinking and feeling, in a more eloquent manner than I ever could.
It is by Robert A. Hall, who is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts state senate. |
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I'll be 63 soon. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce, and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired — very tired. I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth around" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it. I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money. I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women's rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Aren't multiculturalism and diversity beautifully divisive? I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christians and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an (aka Koran) and Shari'a law tells them to do so. I believe "a man should be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin." I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of President Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone and in the appointment of US Senators from Illinois. I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less in an all-knowing government. I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fund raising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama's at triple the cost, were wonderful. That thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress, that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his, that slammed Palin with two years as governor for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever. Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and scary Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004. I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and Madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance. I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough. I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs.. And I'm tired of harassment from "cool" people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana. I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare or who serves honorably for five years in our military. Those are the citizens we need. I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people then themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. People die. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years-and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian. Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear. I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers — bums are bi-partisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bi-partisanship. I live in Illinois, where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats and Republicans has worked together harmoniously to loot the public for years. And I notice that the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet are bi-partisan as well. I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor. Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing. I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination, or big-whatever for their problems. Yes, I'm damn tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, mostly, I'm not going to get to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughters. Contact Milton Franks-Lhermann at midenise@zahav. net.il |
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WHO IS FLEEING ISRAEL?; WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE ELECTRIC/HYDRO/GREEN CAR INDUSTRY?
Posted by Seth J. Frantzman, May 30, 2009. |
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1) Who is fleeing Israel? May 24, 2009 A recent survey of the Israeli population claimed to show that 23 percent of Israelis are considering leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb. This concern about mass flight from Israel has been voiced before by scholars. It is also voiced in the academy where professors speak of Israelis "returning" to Europe. But all of this talk is predicated on a leftist Ashkenazi view of who lives in Israel. It is true that the primarily Ashkenazi leftist population of Israel's wealthiest areas where anti-Israel protest is the pastime for Friday afternoon and military service is considered something "for suckers" may be considering "returning" to Europe, their cultural center. But the poor Israelis, the ones with roots in Russia and the Middle East and the right wing Ashkenazim aren't going anywhere. They can't "return" to Europe, they aren't from there. On May 24th the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University released a study that showed that 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving Israel if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon. The report didn't give a geographic, religious or ethnic breakdown of who these people were but several statistics reveal more about them. Those over the age of 40 were more fearful than their younger counterparts. Some 39 percent of women said they would consider leaving the country whereas only 22 percent of men said so. In addition those most fearful defined themselves as left wing voters. Thus those seeking to flee were mostly left wing, older and female. What demographic in Israel fits that description? Jewish-Ashkenazi descendants of the second and third aliyah who live in Tel Aviv and the Kibbutzim and who, as a demographic, vote left or extreme-left. This says much about this group. While living in Israel they support the Palestinians. Their secular culture is primarily directed at learning more about the "Arab other". On Israeli independence day these are the people who go to commemorate the Nakhba. These are the people responsible for the fact that most University graduation ceremonies in Israel feature Arab music, rather than Jewish, western or Israeli music. These are the people who attend the belly-dancing classes. These are the wealthy people who drive cars and don't suffer terrorism because they have poor people to work security for them at their left wing film festivals and they are not forced to ever ride a bus. These are the people with the dual citizenship who can flee the country easily because they have EU citizenship which they obtained based on claims that they were refugees from the Nazis. These are, in short, the exact same people who poured out of Europe in the 1930s fleeing he rise of Nazism, the same people who suddenly fled to Palestine, not as Zionists, but as Jewish refugees, when their beloved Europe, the culture of assimilation they so loved, turned on them. And now they are going back. Not only are they going back but their culture so dominates the Israeli discourse that authors and writers falsely imagine that the nation of Israel is entirely made up of these people. Consider Benny Morris' assertion in his One State, Two States that "The Arab community is predominantly Asiatic in character, the Jewish community predominantly European." Or consider Ian Lustick who claimed in an article entitled "'Israel's Fight or Flight Response'" published in the National Interest that fears that Iran "might obtain a bomb could lead to substantial Jewish immigration from Israel." Or Professor David Newman of Ben-Gurion University who noted in a recent Jerusalem Post editorial that "Much to their parents' and grandparents' dissatisfaction, young Israelis are returning to Europe in droves and are demonstrating their preferences for European lifestyles and culture just two short generations after the Holocaust. Many of them are taking up their rights to European passports, even through the problematic adoption of Polish and German citizenship." But Newman, Lustick and Morris are wrong. Israel is not primarily a European country, most of its citizens are not lining up to flee and most of them can't "return" to Europe because they aren't from Europe. The Ashkenazi leftist elite who helped found the state of Israel have given birth to a false Israeli-European narrative of a country full of Holocaust survivors who have dual citizenship and might one day return to Europe. But their narrative represents only that spineless 23 percent of Israel. It represents the wealthy in Tel Aviv, the people in Rishon and Hertziliya and Ceaseria. The people in Rehavia, Talbieh and Katamon. The people in the Kibbutzim. It doesn't represent any of the people in the settlements, and there are 250,000 of them, or the people in the development towns. It doesn't represent the Yemenites, the Ethiopians, the Russians or the Mizrahim and Sephardim. It doesn't represent the right wing Ashkenazim and the settlers, who are mostly Ashkenazi as well. It doesn't represent the Americans. Most importantly it doesn't represent the religious Jews, the orthodox and black haters, the Hasidim, the Mitnagdim, the Lithuanians. The Ashkenazi elite of Israel worked for a long time to destroy the soul of the country. Through self hatred and comparing the country to Nazi Germany they torn down the country from within for years. They settled the poorer immigrants on the borders in the 1950s and didn't arm them to fight the infiltrators that murdered and raped them. In the 1980s they drove up the prices of real estate inside the Green Line forcing the next generation of immigrants and vulnerable people to seek housing in the settlements. Those people who settled outside the green line they then called "Nazis" and "obstacles to peace" and bulldozed their houses and left them on the street. When the Russians came, some 1 million of them, they stuck them in new communities and settled them in areas that they were supposed to "judaize". But their communities, from Gilo to Nazareth Alit didn't become Jewish, they became areas of Arab migration where Russians, who have few children, either sold their homes to Muslims or gave their daughters in marriage to them. The entire Russian aliyah, 1 million strong, may not produce more than 200,000 children in the second generation, they are a community whose demographic decline is more severe than Russia itself. But there is an Israel that is not fearful and has decided to stay. Some of them also have dual citizenship but they are not planning on "returning" to Europe. They know that Europe is the land that spit them out, the land that is littered with their graveyards, graveyards that are often defaced by the new favored, loved and coddled immigrants to Europe; Muslims. Whereas the Jews were crushed and destroyed the new immigrants to Europe receive amenities and welfare and support from the leftists in Europe, people who did nothing for the Jews when they lived their but do everything for those who hate Jews today. Those who will stay in Israel know that Europe offers nothing but a dead end and that there can be no return because it is not from whence the Jews came. Israel will be better off without the 23 percent, those who represent a parasitical elite, people who do not work but do protest, people who do not pitch in but call their fellow citizens "Nazis", those who run from terror rather than run towards it to prevent it. When the 23 percent have left the best people will be left behind, the good hard working people, the poor without foreign citizenship and the wealthy patriots, the settlers and the religious, those who know how to fight and those who want to fight. Those who love the land and those who are part of it and wish to lay down to be interred in it. There is no going back, no returning for these people. These people are home and they will remain home to face the threat. 2) What is wrong with the electric/hydro/green car industry?: May 23, 2009
The continuing flailing about of attempts to make 'green' cars is the ever present adoration of the media. Each week sees another new "invention" and another wonderful miracle on wheels that has no petrol and whose only pollutant is a few drops of clean water. The latest in a long line of these programs on the 'car of the future' was a BBC program on a hydro car in California. The car in question seems more reasonable than some of her cousins. It has a range of around 160-200 miles, burns on Hydrogen (the same substance used to power the Hindenburg) and can reach a top speed of 85 miles per hour. This is leaps and bounds above some other electronic cars which have a range of some 40 miles and reach a top speed of 35miles per hour, basically a glorified golf cart. Come to think of it we already had golf carts, which are battery powered, so is this such an innovation? The problem with this industry, even when it is backed up by government funding and the major auto companies, is that it doesn't provide a car anyone wants to drive, because despite the technology the cars don't have the range or power of cars fueled by gasoline. Furthermore the development costs of these cars are astronomical and they are thus cost prohibitive to buy. As if that were not enough some of them require replacing the fuel cells every few years, yet another cost. And as if that were not enough, there is no place to "fuel" these cars. There are no charging points for the electric ones and no gas stations for the hydro ones. The industry is a great failure, almost as great as the old car industry in the U.S, which is a complete failure. However the seeming failure should be seen in light of the original invention of the automobile and the barriers it had cross in order to become a mass market invention available to the average consumer. Let's consider this history. The first automobiles were experimented with in the 1860s and 1870s in Europe and the U.S. There were steam powered vehicles even in the 18th century, and in fact steam was used to power locomotives and ships. However the modern gas powered car using the internal combustion engine was only first put to use in 1860 by a Frenchman. In the 1880s Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz were both working on perfecting motorcycles and tricycles in Germany, powered with the gas cylinders first invented in the 1860s. Petrol engines were used in trams and carriages and also for fire engines. But there were no cars. Only in 1893 was the first gasoline powered car driving on America's streets, and there was only one prototype of these. In 1896 Henry Ford built his first car and sold it the first year. But it was until 1903 that he sold another. In these days, according to one report, almost every major town in the U.S. had a "mad scientist" working on his own car. Automobile companies such as the Duryea Motor Wagon, came and went. In 1899 Olds Motor Vehicle established a successful production making the "Curved Dash MotorWagon", a sort of large bucket on four wheels that apparently turned a profit. By 1904 they were selling 5,000 a year. The years 1906 t 1925 represent the beginnings of the automobile industry. However these early cars, such as those made by the Duryeas and Rolls Royce, could only be purchased by the elite. Ford's Model K of 1907 for instance was priced at $65,000 in today's currency. By 1909 Ford's Model T was selling at around 18,000 a year. By 1920 Ford was producing a million cars a year. The ability of people to buy cars was linked to being able to re-fuel them. To that end the first gas station was built in St. Louis in 1905. The second was built by Standard Oil in 1907. Earlier attempts at selling gas to consumers was actually as a side business at pharmacies in Germany the 1890s. But consider the inefficiency of the early cars in fuel consumption. The Model T got about 13-20 miles per gallon (5 to 9 km per litre). It had a 10 gallon tank. Thus its maximum range was only 200 miles. It could drive at a top speed of 45 miles per hour. If we consider the length of time that modern car development took and the time it took before the average consumer could both afford and refuel it we see that it took some 40 years or more. If we consider that Iceland built the first commercial Hydro-fuel station in 2003 we are experiencing a similar slow-revolution in the direction of these 'renewable energies'. Those prophets of electric cars and hydro gas are correct that economies of scale should bring the prices down, just as they have done with computers. The problem is that unlike cars, which were a true revolution from the days of the horse-drawn wagon, the development of new technologies today is not a great leap from the existing gasoline powered cars. Because the new technologies do not compete, but are in fact more expensive and rudimentary, it presents a real barrier to success in the market place. The government believes that it can intervene in this fight, making fuel efficiency standards higher and taxing gasoline or giving tax credits. However the success of the first automobiles were not helped through government intervention. Thus the government mandate for electric cars may not aid their entrance into the market, but slow and hinder it. Seth J. Frantzman is a graduate student in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, living in Jerusalem. Contact him at sfrantzman@hotmail.com and visit his website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com These essays are from Terra Incognita #87. |
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WHEN IS A JEW A JEW
Posted by GWY, May 30, 2009. |
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When Paul Newman died, they said how great he was but they failed to mention he considered himself Jewish (born half-Jewish). When the woman (Helen Suzman) who helped Nelson Mandela died last week, they said how great she was but they failed to mention she was Jewish. When Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Martha Stewart, Randy Cunningham, Gov. Edwards, Conrad Black, Senator Keating, Gov Ryan, and Gov Blagojevich messed up, no one told me what religion or denomination they were because they were not Jewish. When Ivan Boesky or Andrew Fastow or Bernie Madoff committed fraud, almost every article mentioned they were Jewish. This reminds me of a famous Einstein quote — In 1921, Albert Einstein presented a paper on his then-infant Theory of Relativity at the Sorbonne, the prestigious French university. "If I am proved correct," he said, "the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew." Contact GWY at gwy123@aol.com |
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NATURAL GROWTH EXPLAINED
Posted by Steve Kramer, May 30, 2009. |
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[EDITOR'S NOTE: Obama — the guy that groveled to the Saudi King and is murmuring to the Iranians — has decreed that there is to be no natural growth in Samaria and Judea (AKA the West Bank.) There are now 128 Jewish communities in Samaria and Judea, with a population of almost 300,000 Jews. 18 Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem are included in this ukase, although Israeli Arabs, of course, continue to buy and build everywhere in Jerusalem. Obama now insists these towns and communities not build housing or schools or synagogues. Obviously, the U.S.A. administration has decided that the Palestinian state they intend to create will be free of Jews and it will be built on all the land the "Palestinians" currently claim in the Territories. (They actually claim all of Israel, but that's for the next big diplomatic step.) And they are to have a swatch of Jerusalem as their "capitol."] |
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"Natural growth" is an important subject when it comes to relations between America and Israel. In a nutshell, Israel's greatest ally insists that Israel not enlarge any settlements in Jewish communities beyond the Green Line, nor build any new ones. Israel agrees, but considers that natural growth within existing legal communities is okay. (There are scores of tiny Jewish enclaves that Israel has already declared to be illegal and has promised to dismantle, although this is easier said than done.) Natural growth in Israel refers to space to accommodate adult children who want to settle near their families. Escalating criticism is being leveled against this concept by the Obama administration, as well as by many liberal Jews. They say, "Where is it written that a right exists to live near your family or in your home town?" I'll grant that in America, this doesn't seem to be important. It's a different story in Israel. In America, many families are separated by several thousand miles and rarely see each other. But in Israel, which is roughly the size and shape of New Jersey, most families live within a half hour's drive of each other and frequently have dinner together at least a few times each month, if not weekly. Close proximity to family members and frequent visits are much more common in Israel than in America. Family size is another factor which makes natural growth important to Israelis. In Israel, with the highest fertility rate of all Western countries, the typical family has three children. Among the twenty per cent of the population who are religious, the birthrate is even higher. Huge apartment blocs, from two-bedroom units to those with up to five bedrooms, are very common. These blocs have been built on both sides of the Green Line because developers utilize vacant space within the communities for projects geared to young married couples. In many Israeli cities, government-subsidized apartment projects for young couples are under construction or are in the planning stages. Natural growth is very important for Arab families throughout the Middle East. Householders enlarge their homes until they resemble small apartment houses, adding quarters for young married couples, their parents, and their grandchildren. Jews share the regional desire to keep their families in close proximity. Perhaps the most obvious reason Israelis build over the Green Line is that unused space is available WITHIN existing communities. Israel expects to retain these communities when and if a peace agreement is finalized with the Palestinians. (Let me remind my readers that prior to the Six Day War of 1967, all of Israel's villages, towns, and cities were within the Green Line — there were no "settlements" until after Israel won that defensive war.) Currently, about ten per cent of Israeli Jews live beyond the Green Line. The Palestinians and other Arabs must come to terms with Israel's retaining its significant communities in the disputed areas. The Arabs must also give up the idea of a Palestinian right of return to Israel. For its part, Israel must find a way to convince the Arabs and its allies that these are immovable Israeli demands. The current brouhaha about natural growth is a smokescreen for the real dispute over Israel's borders. New construction doesn't enlarge the Israeli settlements, it just increases their population. Since the end of the 19th century, long before the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 which paved the way for the modern state of Israel, the Arabs vociferously objected to Jews occupying (their word) ANY land in their midst. The only Arab countries to come to terms with Israel's existence, Egypt and Jordan, do so strictly because of the money they receive from Western countries, the EU, and the UN. In neither country is there any popular support for recognition of Israel. In fact, the rejection of Israel is rampant throughout both populations and in all of their organizations, except among the formal diplomatic establishment. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently said, "President Obama wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not 'natural growth' exceptions. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly." The new American administration is loudly saying what the Arabs want to hear. The administration wants to change Israel's policy on building inside settlements and they seem determined to use political and economic pressure to achieve this. Obama's intention to force Israel to stop ALL construction beyond the Green Line is seen as the "solution" which would bring about a Palestinian state, which his administration believes is the key to solving the problems in the Middle East. But leaning on Israel won't produce a Palestinian state for the simple reason that it's not in Israel's power to create such a state. True, it's easier to coerce Israeli politicians than Palestinian ones. That's because Israelis are not doctrinaire, while Palestinians all speak with one voice: "It's the occupation (that prevents a Palestinian state)." Nevertheless, the Palestinians haven't developed the institutions necessary to run a state. More fundamentally, they haven't stopped hating Jews enough to start building state. The biggest obstacle of all to a Palestinian state today is the enmity between Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Fatah, which has a tenuous hold on the West Bank. This is closely followed by the simmering dispute between the younger generation of Fatah and the "old guard" Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas. If Prime Minister Netanyahu capitulated completely to President Obama's demands and said, "Let there be a Palestinian state," I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "Palestine" to come into being. Clearly, preventing Israelis beyond the Green Line from building inside existing communities isn't the "make or break" determinant for Palestinian statehood, despite the Obama administration's desire to quickly bring peace to the region. Steve Kramer lives in Alfe Menashe. He has written a weekly opinion column for the Jewish Times of southern New Jersey (www.jewishtimes-sj.com) for the last ten years. He writes, "They're about history, politics, touring, or whatever excites me." |
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PRAVDA MOCKS US DESCENT INTO MARXISM AT BREAKNECK SPEED
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 30, 2009. |
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This comes from Gateway Pundit
The original article was written by Stanislav Mishin for the Russian-language newspaper, Pravda. (Pravda is not a government newspaper.) |
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If only we had a fair and balanced media outlet like Pravda. The last time we heard from this former Soviet news agency they were commenting on how there was major bias by the US media in this past year's national elections. Now they are warning America about creeping Marxism. You wouldn't dare see a US journalist do this. They'd risk getting dragged from the airport tarmac if they did. The reporters at Pravda are mocking America's decent into Marxism at breakneck speed: It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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JERUSALEM WATCHMAN: WHAT WILL HISTORY RECORD?
Posted by Hands Fiasco, May 29, 2009. |
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This comes from Stan Goodenough, editor of Jerusalem Watchman a Christian Zionist newspaper based in Jerusalem. |
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What will history record? That in mid-May, 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to the United States to make a priority of stopping Iran from pursuing the nuclear bomb that threatens Israel's existence. That the Obama administration refused. And that just over one week later, America was standing on the edge of a potential nuclear conflict with North Korea, which test-fired an atomic warhead and launched a handful of surface-to-surface missiles in a defiant show of force. Let me be clear: I do not claim that what I am about to write is "a word from the Lord." Some of the thoughts I will express here have simply "dropped into my head" over the last 24 hours; they came without any leading from a third party and, while they resonate in my spirit, they have not been confirmed by two or three witnesses; or even one. Nor have I had any dreams or visions about this. See below.* On May 18, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in the White House with the president of the United States, Barack Obama. Both the run-up to and aftermath of that much anticipated meeting have been spun every which way by the media, with a solid majority of columnists and talk show hosts focusing in on "the relationship," on "reading between the lines" and on analyzing the "body language" between the two. Some harked back to the days when frigid winds blew in the Clinton White House after a Netanyahu visit during the Israeli's first tenure in office. Would "Bibi" again forget his "place?" Watchers saw a nervous "regional power medium weight" sitting opposite a self-assured "global superpower heavyweight," and they gave the American kudos for not allowing Netanyahu to "deflect" him from the "real obstacle to peace," that is, Jewish settlements. To other observers,Netanyahu strongly withstood the not inconsiderable pressures an American administration can bring to bear. He stuck to his guns, refused to subscribe to the "two-state solution" and should have been welcomed home as a hero. (He wasn't.) There was more; much more analysis, from serious reporters and from the fringe, underscoring why the profession is often referred to as a media circus. But let's put aside the fluff of press predilections and spinmeister speculations, and get to the substance of what's really taken place. It's a matter of gravest consequence. Netanyahu didn't go to the White House seeking a photo opportunity. He went to ask for American leadership and support in dealing with the out-of-control Iranian nuclear threat that is primarily directed against the Jewish state. From the day of his inauguration on March 31, Netanyahu has been looking for Washington to take Iran seriously. "If you don't stop Iran, I'll have to," he messaged Obama, just hours before being sworn in. Instead of responding appropriately, the American dissembled. Get going with the two-state solution, Obama shot back, and we'll be better able to deal with Tehran. This was Obama's response too when the two leaders spoke to the press after their May 18 meeting. Netanyahu said "the worst danger Israel faces is that Iran would develop nuclear military capabilities." "Iran openly calls for our destruction, which is unacceptable. It threatens the moderate Arab regimes in the Middle East. It threatens US interests worldwide. But if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it could give a nuclear umbrella to terrorists or worse, could actually give them nuclear weapons. And that would put us all in great peril." Netanyahu's position was that it was necessary to deal with Iran first, and with the "Palestinian" question later. Obama publicly disputed him. "If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way," the American said. "To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians — between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat." The president went on to suggest that he might reassess his "let's talk" approach to Iran if, by year's end, there was no sign it was having an affect. Netanyahu expressed his appreciation, but administration officials "close to Obama" later quickly emphasized that no deadline had been set. What, in fact, do we have here? Israel's leader has asked the US to help stop Iran from acquiring the means to inflict a holocaust on the Jews. America's leader is not willing to go that way. On the contrary, as The Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick wrote, the Obama "administration has made its peace with Iran's nuclear aspirations. Senior administration officials acknowledge as much in off-record briefings. It is true, they say, that Iran may exploit its future talks with the US to run down the clock before they test a nuclear weapon. But, they add, if that happens, the US will simply have to live with a nuclear-armed mullocracy." Two days after Netanyahu met with Obama, Iran successfully test fired a 'Sajil' surface-to-surface missile with a 1,200 mile range. Israel is less than 1000 miles from Iran. Two days later, on May 22, a public survey indicated that one in four Israelis is so fearful of the specter of a nuclear Iran that they plan to leave their homeland forever if the mullahs get their hands on the bomb. On May 24 Iran's former Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen Rezai warned that his country "understands missiles and tanks as well as foreign policy and knows exactly where Israel's sensitive spots are. It could stop them forever with one strike." On May 25, a grim-faced Bibi told his cabinet: If we don't deal with Iran, no one will. On May 27, a new poll found that 51 percent of Israelis want the IDF to strike Iran's nuclear facilities now. This despite Bibi's warning to expect a large number of Israeli casualties if a strike goes down. Iranians have boasted that they have the capability to destroy Israel within just 11 days. Also on May 27, Iran deployed six warships and other vessels into international waters in what Fox News called a "saber-rattling" move. For five days this coming week the world, and specifically the United States government, will watch the Israeli nation ready for full scale war in the largest ever national military exercise since 1948. But Netanyahu's appeal for America to step up to the plate has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, the Obama administration finds the idea of "reaching out to the Muslim world" more appealing just now. And it knows that one of the most effective ways it can do that is by pushing Israel into compliance with the 'Arab Peace Initiative.' Thus did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasize Wednesday the American "expectation" that Israel would immediately comply with the Arab demand that it halt any and all settlement activity. President Obama "wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not 'natural growth' exceptions," Clinton said. "We think it is in the best interests [of the peace process] that settlement expansion cease. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly. … And we intend to press that point." Do they? How interesting then, that exactly one week after spurning Israel's appeal, the United States this week suddenly finds itself confronting a nuclear-detonating, missile launching North Korea? Is it really just happenstance that Hillary Clinton Wednesday evening, at the same news conference, in almost the same breath, was leveling stern warnings at both Jerusalem and Pyongyang? Or is Someone Else fighting for Israel? History will tell. ----------------------------------------------------- But now, thus says the LORD, who created you, O Jacob,
Therefore please hear this, you afflicted,
-------------------------------------------------------- * When, in 2004/5, the Sharon government was preparing to uproot the Jews of Gaza, destroy their homes and hand over that territory to the Palestinian Arabs, I widely — in my writing and in meetings across the United States — expressed my strong feelings that the Disengagement would not happen, that God would not let it take place. I based my position strongly on God's word through the prophet Amos when He said: "...I will plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them," says the LORD your God. (Amos 9:15). It was also clear to me that God had, in the 1967 Six Day War, miraculously restored Gaza (and Judea and Samaria and "East" Jerusalem) to Jewish sovereign rule after nearly 2000 years. Despite the mounting evidence before my eyes that the plan was going to be executed, I held to the conviction it would not take place. It did, of course. And not long afterwards I was challenged by an emotional fellow believer who told me: "You had better publicly confess that you were wrong when you said God told you that there would be no Disengagement." In fact, to the very best of my recollection, I had never said that God told me anything of the sort. All along I had expressed MY thoughts; MY sense, MY conviction, even MY belief. But I never said that God had spoken. Following that uprooting I watched, mesmerized, as Hurricane Katrina prepared to unleash its devastating fury on the south-eastern United States. Deep inside I just KNEW that this was the Divine response to years of America's relentless pushing of Israel that had culminated in the Gaza disaster. Did God TELL me it was Him? Maybe He did — through what I read in the Bible and through the spiritual witness shared by so many others — among them Katrina's victims — that this was indeed God's judgment. Even so, what I did as the hurricane roared ashore in Louisiana was ask the question: Was Katrina the 'fist of God?' However certain I may be of the answer to that question, I never claimed to have heard from Heaven God saying "the storm is My response." One day we will know. Contact HandsFiasco at handsfiasco@webtv.net |
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DOES BARACK OBAMA BELIEVE ISRAEL IS A SOVEREIGN STATE?
Posted by Milton Franks-Lhermann, May 29, 2009. |
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Dear Colleagues, I have been reading our communications (and watching TV and listening to the radio and reading the paper) for quite some time. I've been rather struck by reports that BHusseinO and HillaryC DEMAND that we in Israel will do or won't do something or some things. My immediate thought every time is "Who the hell do these people think they are — to DEMAND"? "Our parents?" They can request, advise, even threaten but their demands are equivalent to buckets of horse manure dumped into a farm wagon. I suggest that we will refrain from discussing (see below) these noises coming out of Washington and patiently wait for the farm wagon to enter the white house gate and deliver its load to the rose garden, where it can do some good. The article below was written by Richard Baehr, chief
political correspondent of American Thinker. It appeared today in the
American Thinker Good luck to us all,
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Does Barack Obama believe Israel is a sovereign state? Wednesday, his diplomatic mouthpiece Hillary Clinton said Israel must stop all settlement activity — outposts, new settlements and natural growth of existing settlements. What exactly is natural growth of existing settlements? It means adding a new room to a home within the boundaries of a settlement if a family gets larger, say though a new baby, or building a new home in this settlement, if a couple gets married. In essence, Obama is now telling Israelis not to have children and not to marry. Such a friend. Does anyone really believe that adding on that new room or that new home, is what has stopped the Arabs and Palestinians from making peace with Israel the last 40 years? Virtually all Americans, whether from the Clinton or Bush administrations, who have participated in The Israeli Palestinian negotiating track since the Oslo process began, have accepted that most of the settlements near the green line will become part of Israel if a peace deal is reached. Is Obama signaling that he believes the 1949 armistice lines should be the new boundaries of Israel, as demanded in the Arab League proposal? There really are only two conclusions to draw from this new American chokehold on Israel. One is that Obama and his people are stupid (that's right: fools, despite all the fancy degrees) in believing that peace is at hand if only all settlement growth ended. The other is that they really mean to put the screws to Israel, and are looking for an opening to create conflict between the nations (excuse me, between the US and its vassal). But hey, 78% of Jews voted for this guy. You know who you are. Why would Obama want to screw with Israel? Two possibilities here as well. One is that he was never a friend, despite all that money and support that came into his campaign from the adoring liberal Jewish masses. Some of us (think Ed Lasky) kept warning last year, that all those years with Bill Ayers, and Reverend Wright, and Samantha Power, and Rashid Khalidi, and Ali Abunimah, maybe, just maybe, shaped Obama a bit on the Israeli Palestinian issue. After all, our most empathetic President tends to see the world in terms of winners and losers, the haves and have nots. And on that power equation he has to love the Palestinians. The other explanation gets back to stupidity. Could Obama actually believe that our enemies in the Muslim world will start playing nice if only we distance ourselves from Israel? Could he be that naive? Do the Taliban care about the natural growth of settlements? Does Al Qaeda? Would Ahmadinejad embrace Israel if only natural growth of settlements ceased? What is particularly distressing is how Democrats in Congress, ostensibly such great friends of Israel when they send out campaign fundraising letters, are now lining up with Obama on the settlements issue. Why would they do this? I think it is because Israel is not really a top concern, just as it is not for many American Jews. For liberal politicians, and liberal Jews, global warming, and single payer government health care matter, not the survival of Israel. The clock is ticking on Iran's nuclear program. Any of you have faith Obama will lift a finger to stop the mullah's march to the bomb? Will the US allow Israeli jets to over fly Iraq if it decides to attack Iran? Count me as a skeptic. But hey, why worry? We may soon have cap and trade, and the planet will heal, and new national healthcare that will spend the country into oblivion. Who cares abut Israeli babies, or for that matter Israelis of any age? Contact Milton Franks-Lhermann at midenise@zahav. net.il |
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OBAMA & COUNTER-INSURGENCY IN CHINESE COLOURS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 29, 2009. |
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This email came from Ganesh Sahathevan. The article below was posted by B. Raman, who is Additional Secretary (ret'd),
Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, currently,
Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also
associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail:
seventyone2@gmail.com). It is archived at
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Nothing illustrates more starkingly the helplessness and confusion that prevails in the corridors of the Obama Administration over its Af-Pak policy than a report carried by the Los Angeles Times on May 25, 2009, regarding a recent visit which Richard C. Holbrooke, the Administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is reported to have made to China and Saudi Arabia in pursuance of his mandate. 2. To quote a news agency message based on the report carried by the LA Times: "The Obama Administration has appealed to China to provide training and even military equipment to help Pakistan counter a growing militant threat, US officials said. .....Richard C Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, has visited China and Saudi Arabia, another key ally, in recent weeks as part of the effort, says Paul Richter of LAT. The American appeal to China underscores the country's importance in security issues. The United States considers China to be the most influential country for dealing with militaristic North Korea. China also plays a crucial role in the international effort to pressure Iran over its nuclear ambitions......A senior US official, while acknowledging China's hesitation to become more deeply involved, said, "You can see that they're thinking about it." He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the subject. US officials believe China is skilled at counterinsurgency, a holdover of the knowledge gained during the country's lengthy civil war that ended with a Communist victory in 1949. And with China's strong military ties with Pakistan, US officials hope Beijing could help craft a more sophisticated strategy than Pakistan's current heavy-handed approach." 3. I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read that the Obama Administration believed that "China is skilled in counter-insurgency", that it acquired its skills during its "war of liberation" against the KMT troops and that it can teach Pakistan "a more sophisticated strategy than Pakistan's current heavy-handed approach." 4. What do the Chinese regard as terrorism or insurgency? Which are the terrorist/insurgent organisations in their perception? Anyone, who has been following Chinese methods of internal security management would know that in the Chinese assessment there are two "terrorist/insurgent" organisations posing a threat to China's internal security — the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), which they project as no different from Al Qaeda in its modus operandi and the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET) of the Uighurs. Since the pro-Dalai Lama uprising in the Tibetan-inhabited areas of China in March, 2008, the Chinese have been repeatedly and consistently condemning the TYC as a terrorist organisation. They have arrested a large number of Tibetan monks and youth and mass trials have been going on. If Obama and his advisers want to have details of what the Chinese have been doing in Tibet since March, 2008, under the pretext of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, all they have to do is to read the transcripts of the broadcasts of Radio Free Asia funded by the US State Department and to read the various statements issued by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his followers. Does the Obama Administration consider this as skilful and sophisticated counter-insurgency techniques? 5. What the Chinese have been doing against the Uighurs in the Xinjiang Province? Indiscriminate arrests, trials and executions. To get details, Obama and his advisers should read the periodic reports of the Human Rights Watch, which is a reputed non-Governmental organisation of the US, and the annual reports of the US State Department on human rights in China. The Chinese counter-insurgency strategy against the Uighurs is based on the principle "catch and kill". That was why the George Bush Administration refused to hand over to China the Uighur jihadis arrested in Afghanistan. The entire community of the human rights organisations of the West was against their being handed over to China since they apprehended that the Chinese would execute them. That was why Albania was persuaded to give sanctuary to these Uighurs. 6. There are two components to the Chinese counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism strategy in Xinjiang — "catch and kill" and impose restrictions on the practice of Islam. Under this policy of restrictions, construction of new mosques is not allowed, many old mosques have been forced to close down under the pretext that they were constructed illegally and the people are forced to observe their holy fast inside their houses and not to congregate in public places. This is China's "skilful and sophisticated" counter-insurgency. 7. IF Pakistan follows even some of these methods, the day will not be far off when Pakistan will become a State ruled by a combine of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As it is, there is considerable anti-US and anti-Army anger in Pakistan. Instead of finding ways of containing and reducing this anger, the Obama Administration is coming out with shocking ideas such as "Counter-insurgency in Chinese colours", which could make an already difficult situation even more difficult to handle. (The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is alaso associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com) Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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EGYPT ARRESTS MAN RE KIDNAPPED ISRAELI; CHECKPOINTS REMOVED; TWO-STATE
SOLUTION FRAUD
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 29, 2009. |
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EGYPT ARRESTS MAN ABOUT HAMAS' ISRAELI PRISONER Not for the first time, Egyptian police arrested someone suspected of
involvement in Hamas' kidnapping of an Israeli soldier or of knowing
the prisoner's whereabouts. Egyptian sources say that the police are
trying to help Israel recover the prisoner
What shall we make of this? Is Egypt, formerly a repeat aggressor against Israel now at peace with Israel and an ally of Israel's? Is Egypt, formerly a sponsor and supplier of terrorism, now against terrorism? No to both. Egypt does hope that Israel would destroy Iran's nuclear facilities for it, though it has a first class air force and probably could do it, itself. Egypt does not want terrorists to subvert its government or attack its tourists. But Egypt remains the chief diplomatic enemy of Israel and still allows arms to be smuggled into Gaza. I interpret Egypt's behavior about the prisoner as tactical measures, not part of strategic accommodation. First, Arab rulers like the prestige of mediating, even if nothing comes of it. Mediating in this case makes Egypt seem on the side of peace. Second, if Egypt can help get the prisoner released, the transaction likely would be part of some deal, in which the Arabs get far more in return. The State Dept. acts similarly.
UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION'S SELF-DEFENSE The UN was denounced for Durban II perpetuating antisemitism in Durban I. The Human Rights Commissioner tried to rehabilitate her reputation. She: 1. Said that Durban II did not mention Israel and did not focus only on one issue. However, it reaffirmed Durban I, which falsely accused only Israel of racism. Therefore, when referring to "victims of racism," Durban II is calumniating Israel. 2. At Durban II, Iran's President falsely called Zionism racism. Then Durban II did mention Israel or its stand-in, Zionism. 3. Her press release claimed a consensus. Not true, either. Delegates from some democratic states walked out. 4. She said the Conference opposed all forms of racism. Actually, it refused to discuss specifics except for Zionism. "The silence of its outcome on egregious
manifestations of racism — including discrimination against Tibetans, ethnic
cleansing of Berbers and Bahais, genocide in Darfur, slavery victimizing
migrants and minorities in the Arab world, and the murder and expulsion of
Jews from Arab lands — is deafening." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/10 from Hudson Institute in New York).
Other indication of UN bias on human rights:
ISRAEL TO OPEN EMBASSY IN TURKMENISTAN Israel has been cultivating relations with Central Asian countries. In the early 1990s, Israel established diplomatic relations with Turkmenistan. It trains Turkmen in agriculture. Relations warming, Israel is opening an embassy in Ashkabat, the capital (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/20). Israel is tolerant. It tries to develop good relations with Muslim governments. When Israel exchanges diplomatic relations with one, Israel heralds the achievement as an example of the "peace process" taking effect. During times of publicized friction between Israel and some Arabs, however, some Muslim states break off or restrict relations with Israel. Sometimes the Muslim states hold relations hostage to an Israeli concession to the Arabs. Praise for the "peace process" was premature. ISRAEL REMOVED 140 CHECKPOINTS Israel removed 140 checkpoints and roadblocks last year and others this year, including two by Ramallah. The stated purpose is to ease life for the Palestinian Arabs. PM Netanyahu said Israel would east conditions consistent with security (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis,5/11). To ease Arab life, Israel removed its troops from cities in the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) right after signing the Oslo peace agreement. The result was anarchy and a wave of terrorism in Israel. In 1997, Netanyahu, PM then, too, removed Israeli troops from most of Hebron. A few years later, Arabs in the hills fired down into the Hebron Jewish community. The attacks lasted for two and-a-half years. About four years ago, for the sake of Arab freedom of movement and in the hope of peace, Israel not only withdrew its troops from Gaza and northern Samaria, it expelled almost 10,000 Jewish residents. Gaza Arabs got freedom of movement, and self-rule. They went over to Hamas, which launched more than 10,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli cities. To improve Arab living conditions, Israeli officials proposed re-opening to Arab traffic the road leading past the Jewish community of Hebron. Arabs are likely to try running over Jews there. Jews there staged demonstrations against the proposal (David Wilder, spokesman, Hebron Jewish Community, 5/13). Israel's security director deferred the re-opening because he said it would pose a security risk to Jews in Hebron. He thus confirmed their concern. He also implied confirmation of accusations that the officials who had ordered the road re-opened to Arab traffic were putting Arab convenience before Jewish lives (Hebron Jewish Community, 5/19). Checkpoint removal is not consistent with security. The US, which demands removal, complains, whatever Israel does, that it is not enough. SYRIA RENEWS TERRORIST FLOW; US RENEWS SANCTIONS While the U.S. sent envoys to try to come to terms with Syria,
Al-Qaida brought terrorists into Iraq by way of Syria. The U.S.
believes that Syrian intelligence permitted this. The U.S. renewed
sanctions against Syria
HOUSING SHORTAGE IN JUDEA-SAMARIA The media claims that Jewish construction is proceeding in Judea-Samaria as if unrestricted by promises to the US not to expand settlements. [Peace Now has claimed that Israel or Israelis build excessive numbers of houses in Judea-Samaria, houses unable to be sold.] Jewish leaders there claim that construction is greatly restricted. To add a room, a Jew now needs the Defense Minister's permission. Not often granted. Israel has reduced funds for the Territories. Most newlyweds there have to move far from their communities, even beyond the Territories. This is subtle expulsion (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/11). LEBANON ARRESTS "SPIES" FOR ISRAEL Lebanese security forces arrested several groups of alleged spies for Israel. They were able to do it because of greater internal cooperation among various security forces. They also had gotten U.S. training in security matters, part of the billion dollars the U.S. has given Lebanon in the past few years. Israel warned the U.S. that aid to Lebanon would end up benefiting
Hizbullah
U.S. aid to the PLO ended up benefiting Hamas. FRAUD OF THE "TWO-STATE SOLUTION" "With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made — just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, from MEMRI from PLO Ambassador to Lebanon, 5/14). The "two-state solution" is a fraud. The Ambassador reveals Muslim Arab duplicity and a better understanding of Zionism than do many Jews. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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WORLD WAR III HAS STARTED
Posted by Modieabc, May 29, 2009. |
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This was written by Eitan Haber, an Israeli journalist and
publicist, who writes on military matters. It appeared in YNET
Israeli leaders must understand the broad implications of North Korean nuke test |
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One needs to be deaf, blind, and an idiot at this time in order not to understand that the nuclear bomb tested in North Korea two days ago also exploded in the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem. The North Koreans blatantly disregarded the Americans and publicly presented them as a meaningless power, yet officials in Jerusalem are still reciting the "Road Map" and making note of the evacuation of some minor West Bank outpost. The world is changing before our eyes, yet here we see Knesset members earnestly explaining that the Americans will agree that we stay in Judea and Samaria if we only evacuate some tin shacks. Two days ago, in North Korea, World War III officially got underway — the war that would pit "crazy" states such as North Korea and Iran, for example, against states we shall characterize as "moderate," including Egypt, Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia, which at this time leads the Arab initiative for peace with Israel. Ever since Sunday, the world has gone crazy, and this crazy world is monitoring with horror the struggle between the "moderate" and "crazy" states. The problem is that some of those crazy states — Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea — already have, or will have, a nuclear button to push, while the moderates, headed by the United States, are not eager to rush into battle. Why? Because America is already entangled in wars, and there was someone who recently won the presidential elections there, among other reasons because he pledged to remove US troops from the Iraqi and Afghani quagmire. That same president promised that we shall live in a world free of nuclear weapons. Remember that? A Gordian knot This is the same North Korea that spat in America's face three years ago, and this week it did it again. Based on the reactions in Washington (unless they are part of a deception campaign,) it doesn't appear that the great America will respond. Now all we need is for Iran to blatantly disregard America and Israel in order to prompt us to slide into real emergency turmoil (as opposed to the drill planned for the coming days.) Iran is here already. There is a direct and intimate link between the Korean bomb and the planned Iranian bomb; between Iran's and North Korea's spit in America's face, Washington's desire and ability to lead the fight against the crazy world, and the Israeli government's conduct. One does not need to be a supporter or rival of the settlement enterprise in the territories to understand this Gordian knot — and the question is whether we want the American sword to undo it for us. If the answer is positive, we need to be familiar with the Americans to realize that three tin huts removed from the Maoz Ester outpost are not good enough. Contact modieabc at modieabc@aol.com |
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MUSLIM GROUP SHUTS DOWN CONSERVATIVE CONFERENCE
Posted by LEL, May 29, 2009. |
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This item appeared yesterday in NewsMax
www.newsmax.com/insidecover/geert_wilders/2009/05/28/219305.html |
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The manager of a prominent Nashville hotel cancelled a contract with a conservative foundation to hold a conference this weekend on radical Islam, apparently after learning that the group would feature a keynote address by controversial Dutch parliamentarian and filmmaker, Geert Wilders. Muslim groups succeeded in preventing Wilders from screening "Fitna," his 15-minute movie on radical Islam, in the House of Lords this February, on claims it was insulting to Muslims, and dogged him during a recent U.S. tour as well. Thomas A. Negri, managing director of Loew's Vanderbilt Hotel and Office complex in Nashville, told Newsmax on Wednesday that he had taken the extraordinary step of cancelling the conference at the last minute "for the health, safety and well-being of our guests and employees." Negri refused to say why he felt the conference would adversely affect the "health, safety and well-being" of the hotel's guests and employees, except to refer to the website of the New English Review, the group organizing the conference. The website features articles that warn about radical Islam written by activists, journalists and scholars, including former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, and former Muslim scholar, Ibn Warraq. One article, written by a retired U.S. army intelligence officer, Jerome Gordon, warns of the growing problems caused by the recent influence of several thousand Somali Muslim refugees who have come to work for a nearby Tysons Food plant to replace illegal Hispanic meat packers. Negri appeared at a 2003 pro-immigration event on the same dias with a well-known Somali warlord, Gordon told Newsmax. In a written statement to the conference organizers, Negri said that the hotel had "not received any information related to a specific security threat concerning this event," and declined to provide any justification for cancelling it at the last minute. One of the conference organizers told Newsmax on Wednesday that the group was considering a lawsuit against Negri and the Loew's hotel chain for "unlawful breach of contract." Negri also serves on the board of advisors of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, TIRRC, an activist group that states its mission "is to empower immigrants and refugees throughout Tennessee to develop a unified voice" and "defend their rights." The group boasts of having helped to defeat an "English only" amendment this January that would have required all Nashville government communications to be in English. Earlier this month, the group won an award from the Migration Policy Institute, which is funded by grants form the J.M. Kaplan Fund, a left-wing group that also funds the ACLU, the Tides Foundation, the Tides Center, the Sierra Club, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other left-wing causes. The award singles out TIRRC for its "Welcoming Tennessee Initiative," to"foster constructive public dialogue on immigration within the state." When asked if he objected to Geert Wilders appearance at the conference, Negri refused to comment. In a recent interview with FoxNews, Wilders complained that Europe "has pampered" Muslim immigrants. "If you want to come and stay here, that's okay, but only if you adhere to our values, our principles, our laws… and our constitution," he said. "With all the tolerance we are having, we are also tolerant to the intolerant." Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com |
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WE ARE CONCERNED THAT ABU MAZEN
Posted by Molly, May 29, 2009. |
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... will make a fool out of our president and we are more than concerned that Obama will cover up the same way Shimon Peres does when he, too, finds himself conned, cornered, and humiliated, which is to say that Obama, like Peres, will pretend that Saudi spittle is rain in his face. The Saudis have gotten away with their lies and spitting in the face of everyone who defies their oil monopoly because the World created its economy based on the consumption of oil. Abu Mazen, now pulling faces and grimacing for his photo-ops, is as slick as his Saudi-sponsored friend, Jimmy Carter. Carter and Shimon Peres pushed themselves onto the realm of the bloody Egyptian assassin, Yasser Arafat so they could all engage in the highly profitable business of pretending to be "friends for peace." Peres, with his eyes on his hoped-for prize, even went so far as to promote the Saudi myth that Israel was to blame for Arab blight. This ersatz friendship was highly profitable for Carter and his NGOs and they received millions from the Saudis. Shimon Peres haggled until they gave him the tail of the chicken, and Yasser received billions from the oily arabs for building his armed forces for to slaughter Jewish and Muslim Israelis and billions more from the US treasury for "humanitarian aid" which Arafat siphoned into his secret accounts in banks all throughout Europe, Cayman, and the US. When he died, billions of US-source funds simply disappeared. Obama either doesn't know the facts about how Israel was cheated out of its lands and its sovereign rights, or else he doesn't want to know, in which latter case he is about to transform himself into a threat to democracy and American values. We hope Mr. Obama is smart enough to avoid being bribed or manipulated or subjected to extortion by the Saudis and the UAE. The Saudis had to have known about the plans of the Saudi al Q cells that attacked the US because of its extensive spy and intelligence "agencies" — more sophisticated, we fear, than the US. One fact is clear, the Saudis have been spying on the US far longer than the US has spied on them. Abbas is a threat to democracy and crazy as a fox. We trust Israel will not budge nor succumb to his tawdry extortion or any US "pressure." This time, the so-called "palestinians" must be pushed back to Jordan, from whence they began when the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan was created in 1948. Jordan was always intended to be the "other state" for the arabs who wanted to be transformed into "palestinians." The Jewish Palestinians were attacked by the arabs and the became refugees and fled to Israel to become Israelis. The BBC and the Brits and Reuters have tried every trick known to yellow-sheet news to conceal the truthful history of the Middle East. They never mention the fate of the Jewish Palestinians. After the then "king: of Jordan exterminated 10,000 would-be "palestinians" the remainder were herded into Jordan's concentration camps. This slaughter and oppression had NOTHING to do with Israel. The British use their press to censor the truth. We want Hillary and Bill to disgorge every penny they've ever received from the UAE, Qatar, Dubai, and the Saudis. This money belongs to the American People — our fighting forces died protecting the Saudis and their families deserve all the money. Viva Israel from the Secular Christians of the West. Contact Molly at pelago2000@gmail.com |
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WHAT'S AT STAKE: WE'VE GOT YOUR BACK PLEDGE IS ANTI-ISRAEL
Posted by Saul Goldman, May 29, 2009. |
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The link below describes the work of an organization called Brit Zedek. The Hebrew words mean a just covenant. Actually, some of the people who signed this petition are jewish scholars and intellectuals. Yet, this organization of rabbis and Jewish leaders supports a two state solution which is actually a euphemism for "final solution". Unfortunately, our rabbis and intellectuals were the most vocal in encouraging Jews to deny reality. They were the "cheerleaders" of assimilation and the kind of fuzzy thinking that left the Jews totally unprepared for the holocaust. If one looks at the map, takes into consideration demographics including one million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship as well as the hatred that Palestinians inculcate from their Hamas kindergardens on, the two state option is tantamount to national suicide. Why do I say final solution? Because the Obama Administration has been training Palestinians under the direction of General Dayton who said in a speech, that in two years the Palestinians will be ready to kill Israelis. So, the Obama plan is almost as dangerous as Iran. Please contact your congresspeople and urge them to stand up against what will become another round in the war against the Jews. DO NOT HELP BRIT ZEDEK DESTROY ISRAEL. COUNTERACT THIS PLEDGE. Contact Saul Goldman at gold7910@bellsouth.net |
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ISRAEL ON EDGE AS US PRESSES TO HALT SETTLEMENTS
Posted by Jake Levi, May 29, 2009. |
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Here is an example of the kind of 'news' that Israel does not counter. On first reading it looks innocuous. But reread it. It does not point out that the land the communities are built on are the Heart of the Kingdom of Israel, and that one is the actual land from which Jews get their name — Judea. Nor does it point out that this same land was part of the original area ceded by the Balfour Declaration to be Jewish. Nor that it is also land taken by the Arabs in the 1948 war from Israel and taken by Israel by conquest in 1967. Much as the U.S. acquired huge blocks of its present territory including the state of Florida, and the entire Southwest. It refers to 'Palestinians', a name taken by Arafat from a name given to the Jews by Rome, a 'people' created by Arafat, with no history, no 'Palestinian Capital ever', and no distinctive language, culture, or traditions. No currency, no operating government other then a guerilla force financed by international contributions. Which was created for the express purpose of destroying Israel and replacing it with another dysfuntional Muslim state. And, this 'news' does not review that AP is owned by the Saudis who originated the ' 2 state solution' as a way to reduce Israel to an untenable piece of land indefensible from another war by neighboring Arab States. This 'news item' is propaganda, disguised as news, and is being fed to the world to direct sympathy to the arabs working for the destruction of Israel and away from the true original owners of the Land of Israel, the Jewish People. It was written by Associated Press writer, Ami Teibel. Yaacov Levi |
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JERUSALEM — Israel rejected on Thursday a U.S. demand to freeze all construction in West Bank Jewish settlements to encourage peace talks, deepening a dispute with the Obama administration that has the hard-line Israeli government increasingly on edge. The tensions flared on the same day Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was in Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama. Abbas said the Palestinian demand for a settlement construction freeze would top his agenda. Using unusually strong language, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that Obama wants a halt to all settlement construction, including "natural growth." Israel uses that term for new housing and other construction that it says will accommodate the growth of families living in existing settlements. Government spokesman Mark Regev responded Thursday by saying some construction would go on. "Normal life in those communities must be allowed to continue," he said, noting Israel has already agreed not to build new settlements and to remove some tiny, unauthorized settler outposts. Regev said the fate of the settlements would be determined in peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Former President George W. Bush gave Israel unwavering support during his eight-year term. But that appears to be changing under Obama. The new U.S. administration has been more explicit in its criticism of Israeli settlement policy than its predecessor. Obama also pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their first White House meeting last week to support creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But so far, Netanyahu has balked at that idea, too. The growing pressure, coupled with Obama's outreach to the Muslim world that will be underscored by a speech in Cairo next week, has many Israelis wondering where exactly they fit into the president's plans. They are particularly concerned by Washington's efforts to start a dialogue with Iran, Israel's arch-foe, after nearly three decades of diplomatic estrangement. Clinton said Obama told Netanyahu last week at the White House that the U.S. sees stopping settlements as key to a peace deal that would see a Palestinian state created alongside Israel. "He wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not 'natural growth' exceptions," Clinton said. "We think it is in the best interests (of the peace process) that settlement expansion cease. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly. ... And we intend to press that point." While Israel could flout the U.S. opposition, Netanyahu is wary of a showdown with his most important ally. He has been careful to avoid direct conflict with the Americans, but members of his government have become openly critical. Israel views its close relationship with the U.S. as fundamental to its security and foreign policy. If Israel refused to halt settlement construction, the U.S. could reduce economic or military aid, curtail arms sales, or scale back the close strategic cooperation the two countries currently have, including the sharing of information and joint projects, such as anti-missile systems. During a Cabinet debate on settlement outposts this week, Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared that Israel does not have to "kowtow to every American dictate." "The American administration regrettably ... is showing the Arab and Muslim world that it is distancing itself from Israel and shifting toward them," Cabinet Minister Benny Begin lamented during a separate parliamentary debate. "The message is clear. The will is clear." The U.S. and much of the world consider the settlements an obstacle to peace because they are built on captured land the Palestinians claim for a future state. But successive U.S. administrations have done little to halt settlement activity. Now more than 120 settlements dot the West Bank, and Palestinian officials say their growth makes it increasingly impossible to realize their dream of independence. More than 280,000 Israelis live in the settlements, in addition to more than 2 million Palestinians in the West Bank. An additional 180,000 Israelis live in east Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to establish their capital. With the U.S. turning up the pressure to freeze settlements, Israeli officials proposed a compromise earlier this week. In exchange for removing some 22 outposts, they would ask the U.S. to permit new construction in existing settlements. Clinton's remarks followed that proposal. Along with the calls to halt settlements, Obama's active courting of Iran and pressure on Israel to make progress with the Palestinians have only compounded Israeli fears. Israelis will be anxiously watching Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo, where he will deliver a message to the Muslim world to try to repair relations that frayed badly under the Bush administration. Obama will also visit Saudi Arabia before he goes to Egypt. But he has no plans to stop in Israel, an hour's flight from Egypt, during his swing through the region. The U.S. and many other Western countries have been dealing with Abbas, who leads the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank, while mostly shunning the militant Islamic Hamas group that controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas took over Gaza nearly two years ago after routing Abbas' forces in bloody street battles. Repeated attempts to reconcile between the two bitter rivals have failed to yield any results. A senior Hamas militant was killed Thursday by Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Hebron after a 14-year manhunt. The Israeli military said they surrounded Abed Majid Daodin's house and called on him to surrender, but he instead opened fire, and they shot and killed him. The military said he had recruited and dispatched suicide bombers, including two who killed 10 Israelis and wounded more than 100 in 1995. Hamas vowed to avenge the militant's death. "Our fighters in the West Bank have full freedom to strike any target," the group said. Contact Jake Levi at jlevi_us@yahoo.com |
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WILL OBAMA FLOUT US LAW TO FUND ABBAS AND THE PALESTINIANS?
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 29, 2009. |
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Posted by Freedom Fighter on the Joshua Pundit website. |
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Mahmoud Abbas, the capo del tutti of Fatah is scheduled to be in DC today, meeting with President Obama on Middle East peace and — oh yes — that proposed $900 million aid package to the Palestinians pledged by the Obama Administration on our behalf that the Senate is now mulling over. This is over and above the money they're already getting from us via UNRWA, USAid and the World Bank. Aside from the dubious wisdom involved in shelling out well over a billion dollars in taxpayer funds to Abbas who is not even the legal president of the Palestinian Authority any longer, there's the slight problem that funding the Palestinian Authority openly flouts existing US law. American law expressly prohibits funding of Palestinian buildings and projects that use any portion of their budgets to aid, promote, glorify or honor terrorists or terrorism. That's been an entrenched principle since Oslo. Yet Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have done exactly that with impunity for years, even under 'moderate' Mahmoud Abbas. Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese child killer who was recently freed in a swap for the mutilated and tortured bodies of two Israelis kidnapped by Hezbollah was named an 'honorary Palestinian citizen' a mere two years ago while Abbas was in power. He was publicly celebrated by Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's supposed peace partner, who referred to Kuntar as `heroic' and to his having won 'a big struggle.' The Palestinian media ran numerous programs touting him as a hero and role model. Another Palestinian hero who's been honored as a role model and has had numerous US funded projects named after her is Dalal Mughrabi,who's remains were also part of the same swap that freed Kuntar. She was the leader of what became known in Israel as the Coastal Massacre. On March 11, 1978, Mughrabi led a band of eleven terrorists who murdered several people in cold blood, including an American photographer, Gail Rubin. They then hijacked a bus filled with families going on an outing. When the IDF unit managed to stop the bus, Mughrabi and her gang began shooting the helpless men, women and children at point-blank range and then firebombed the bus itself, turning it into a death trap. At least 35 were killed, including 13 children and a number of Americans. In 2002, Fatah began building a girls' school in Hebron named after Mughrabi, funded by US money. When this came to light, the Palestinian Authority promised to change the name, but as soon as the school was completed, the name change was rescinded and the school is still named after Mughrabi as I write this. She's also had a few streets and a number of other government institutions like summer camps named in her honor, and there have been a number of books, television and radio programs in the PA controlled media about her 'heroic martyrdom.' She's regarded by Palestinian Arabs as a role model. Back in 2004, the US spent $400,000 of your tax money through USAid to construct the Salakh Khalaf soccer field. Interesting fellow, Khalaf. He headed the Black September group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and later tortured to death two American diplomats in the Sudan in 1973 on Arafat's orders, Cleo Allen Noel and George Curtis Moore. Once that got out USAID publicly acknowledged the error and claimed they would demand that the name be changed. It never was. Under existing US law and numerous precedents, the Palestinian Authority should have had its US funding yanked a long time ago. But wait, there's more. On top of all this, the US is in the middle of a $350 million commitment to train, arm and fund a Fatah army. This effort is being directed by US general Keith Dayton, who's been working on this for two years. Apparently the last attempt which did so well in Gaza and resulted in Hamas obtaining millions of dollars in gently used ('only dropped once') American military equipment that it encouraged even more of an investment. Except this time, according to General Dayton the probable target isn't Hamas, but Israel. Dayton, in a talk at the Washington Institute of Near East Policy talked about the three battalions of Fatah soldiers he's already trained and the plans for eight more. And according to Dayton, unless the Israelis decide to commit national suicide by giving in to all of the Palestinian's demands, they could rebel...or in other words, they'll simply turn their weapons on Israel, something Abbas has eluded to a number of times .That's exactly what Abbas' old boss Yasir Arafat did before. In other words, we're paying through the nose to build an army that could menace one of our allies in the hopes of creating a country...and one that, given the realities, will probably be ruled by Hamas as an Iranian proxy. It's enough to make me want to vomit in disgust, frankly.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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CULTURE AFFECTS WHAT ARABS SAY; OBAMA SQUEEZING ISRAEL; LEFTIST OPPOSITION TO JERUSALEM MASTER PLAN
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 28, 2009. |
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MUSLIM DISCRIMINATION AGAINST JEWS IN NEGEV An Islamist party won an election in the Negev town of Rahat. Mayor Faiz Abu Sahiban summarily fired the two Jewish municipal employees, without cause, because of their religion, he explained. Rahat is a Bedouin community So far, no reaction from Israeli human rights organizations, which complain about veterans benefits, for primarily helping Jews. That complaint is unjustified, because Arabs can become veterans (Prof. Steven Plaut, 5/9). Other discrimination against Jews in Israel:
BIAS OF ISRAELI FILM INDUSTRY In the 1970s, a new generation of filmmakers arose in Israel. Dr. Ilan Avishur of Tel Aviv University made of study of Israeli filmmaking in recent decades. He study found that the new generation produced mostly anti-Zionist propaganda, including unpopular films. They enjoyed government subsidy for it. The films mischaracterize Arab terrorists as victims and Israelis as Nazi-like bullies. In this historical revisionism, films lie about the Six-Day War. "On a Clear Day You Can See Damascus" recasts as a hero the Israeli traitor who spied on Israel and who organized a terrorist cell (Prof. Steven Plaut, 5/9). So much lying indicates not a justifiable cause but a psychosis needing treatment. For another example of Israeli leftist bias against Zionism:
CULTURE AFFECTS WHAT ARABS SAY A poll found that 40% of Israeli Arabs denied the occurrence of the
Holocaust. The pollster, a sociologist specializing in Arab-Israel
relations, explains that the Arabs believe that acknowledging the
Holocaust bolster's Israel's cause, so they deny it (NY Times, 5/19,
A12). He attributed polled Arab opinions over the years, even on
factual matters, to the effect they think their statements would have
on their cause
I often contradict popular acceptance of Arab statements as
genuine, based on the same understanding of Arab culture as that
sociologist has. This is confirmation of my admonition not to take
Arab statements at face value, and not to accept their version of
events, because they say what they think makes propaganda. There is
evidence, too, that they believe their own false propaganda. That is
why I do not accept as legitimate the Palestinian Arabs' sudden
self-designation of being a separate nationality, when I know that
they fabricated that notion for propaganda several decades ago. For
more on this:
OBAMA SQUEEZING ISRAEL Add up the Administration's acts of diplomacy. First, "National Security Adviser James Jones told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the..." Palestinian Authority (P.A.). Pres. Obama HAD V.P. Biden tell AIPAC, that Israel should cede the territory. Quartet envoy Tony Blair said the highest U.S. level is polishing the Saudi plan with Arab but not Israeli participation. Israel has exposed that plan as a means of destroying Israel. Its current draft doesn't promise peace but "natural relations." Sounds nice; means nothing. [That indicates subterfuge.] When Israeli Pres. Peres went to visit Obama, to thaw relations, Obama froze out the media, turning the trip into a non-event. In demanding that Israel acquiesce to the Saudi plan, with modifications that the Arabs have been rejecting, the US implies Israeli responsibility for Arab wars of aggression. The Administration also is making Israel a scapegoat for Iran's nuclear program. How? Obama's chief of staff advised AIPAC that Israel's refusal to give up territory keeps the Arabs from supporting steps to curb Iran's nuclear development. False advice! The Arabs acknowledge that Iran and territory are separate issues. Now the Administration is blaming Israel on the pretext that if Israel gave up its nuclear weapons, Iran wouldn't develop its own, anyway. This breached a U.S.-Israel understanding that the U.S. would not bring up Israel's nuclear capability. This new U.S. rationalization gives Iran an excuse for its program. Obama's policy is not realistic but stubbornly ideological. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, it would become emboldened to promote more war. Although Hamas still is firing rockets into Israel, the U.S. demands that Israel cede land to a coming joint Hamas-Fatah regime, and the U.S. continues subsidizing the P.A., which refuses to accept the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty anywhere. Against stubborn ideology, Netanyahu will present facts and logic to Obama, in vain. Now would Israel gain anything by accommodating the hostile Administration. Israel cannot count on the U.S.; it must formulate policy independently. It may as well destroy Iran's nuclear plants (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/9, from Caroline Glick) and gain security. The Arabs want that raid. The U.S. or Israel should carry it out. The Obama administration's actions are unrealistic, counter-productive, and unethical. Obama was supposed to be a reformer. For more on Obama policy on Israel:
LEFTIST OPPOSITION TO JERUSALEM MASTER PLAN You may recall that the Master Plan envisions archeological development, parks, housing, etc.. It all hangs together. [I studied city planning.] The Israeli Left opposes the Plan. It complains that implementation means demolishing some illegal Arab houses. [Why does the Left, which demands law enforcement against Jews, oppose law enforcement against Arabs?] The plan would connect Jerusalem with some Jewish-owned suburbs, strengthening Israel's claim to the area. Leftists argue that that this would change the status of the area. This riles them, because they are under the illusion that if Israel withdrew from those areas, the Arabs would make peace. If the Arabs would make peace, then why should they object to good city planning in areas they may take over, under a peace agreement? [The Left's arguments are mostly false claims and pejorative. Housing does not change the "status" of an area. They are using a laymen's usage of "status," whereas the Oslo injunction against unilaterally changing the "status" of contested areas has a different, legal meaning. The legal meaning is changing the legal status from contested to under new jurisdiction. The Palestinian Authority tries to do that by violating another Oslo provision forbidding it from setting up government agencies in Jerusalem, as if assuming jurisdiction there.] [If building Jews' houses changes the status, then so does building Arabs' houses, but the Left doesn't object to that. What it really objects to is making clear the Jewish people's historical ties to Jerusalem and making it feasible for the Jews to keep the suburbs.] The Left paints the plan as sinister, as a secret plan, whose goal is to retain the historical Jerusalem area. It isn't secret, the Mayor revealed it. He developed the whole plan, first, to avoid premature controversy over a half-baked plan. "Attorney Danny Seidemann of Ir Amim says that if the historic basin surrounding the Old City is transformed in the spirit of extreme rightist organizations, 'there is a dangerous interface between the program and settler projects whose goal is the prevention of a future political solution in the heart of the conflict.'" All that objection because of the Left's false illusion that Abbas intends peaceful coexistence — as Abbas says, the Arabs don't recognize any Jewish right to sovereignty, even over Tel Aviv (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/9). The pejorative "extreme rightist" is name-calling. The lament that the Jews are trying to keep their historical area sounds more like self-hating antisemitism. Who should keep the Jews' historical area, the Arabs? For an outline of the plan:
Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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IS ISRAEL COMMITTED TO FREEZE SETTLEMENTS?
Posted by Ted Belman, May 28, 2009. |
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What settlement freeze commitment? Everyone assumes that Israel is committed to freezing settlement activity without preconditions. Not so. Here's why. The Roadmap demanded that Israel "immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001″ and provided that "Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)". The Mitchell Report was prepared in response to the terror unleashed by Arafat, after he turned down Barak's genererous offer at Camp David. It's goal was to make recommendations to end the violence. It is important to understand the context and the wording of the Mitchell Report because the settlement freeze demanded by the Roadmap had to be consistent with it.
The GOI and the PA must act swiftly and decisively to halt the violence. Their immediate objectives then should be to rebuild confidence and resume negotiations. END THE VIOLENCE * The GOI and the PA should reaffirm their commitment to existing agreements and undertakings and should immediately implement an unconditional cessation of violence. By calling for negotiations, it imposed on Israel the duty to make an even better offer. "Meaningful negotiations"? Wasn't that what just took place, to no avail? REBUILD CONFIDENCE * The PA and GOI should work together to establish a meaningful "cooling off period" and implement additional confidence building measures. If you read this carefully you will note that there are stages set out in this order 1. End the violence Furthermore there is an acceptance that ending the violence and incitement is out of the questions and so only "100% efforts", are demanded. The confidence building measures required of Israel, included * The GOI should freeze all settlement activity, including the "natural growth" of existing settlements. The kind of security cooperation desired by the GOI cannot for long co-exist with settlement activity. Clearly this Report accepted the notion that settlement growth is the cause of the violence. But as we know, the goal of the violence (Arab terrorism) is to destroy Israel rather than to only end the settlement activity. This issue was not addressed. * The GOI may wish to make it clear to the PA that a future peace would pose no threat to the territorial contiguity of a Palestinian State to be established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Report advances the Palestinian desire to be contiguous, as legitimate. Why so? If they want to be contiguous let them offer something in return. This is a matter for negotiations, not fiat. RESUME NEGOTIATIONS * We reiterate our belief that a 100 percent effort to stop the violence, an immediate resumption of security cooperation and an exchange of confidence building measures are all important for the resumption of negotiations. Yet none of these steps will long be sustained absent a return to serious negotiations. Needless to say, the Arabs have never shown "a spirit of compromise, reconciliation and partnership". In the absence of same, the Mitchell Report is groundless. Thus the Mitchell Reports simply puts forward recommendations, predicated on "a spirit of compromise", to be followed in stages. A freeze of settlement activity is only a recommendated measure and not an order and it is accompanied by other recommendations which have yet to be fulfiulled. Since the Arabs did not end the violence and incitement, there is no imperative for Israel to freeze settlement activity. Yet the US would like to consider it an imperative unconnected to performance by the Palestinians. It certainly rewards Arafat for his violence and intransigence by giving him what he could not get in negotiations. In essence, the report demands that Israel give more. So what must the settlement freeze include to be consistent with the Mitchel Report? Until now, Israel has refrained from dismantling the unlawful outposts in any serious way as required by the Roadmap. But this week Barak, with the support of Netanyahu, demolished three such outposts. One wonders if this is being done to show a willingness to honour commitments or whether Israel received a quid pro quo for finally doing what they have been promising to do. Time will tell whether Israel will follow through on this. I believe that she will, in exchange for permission, tacit or otherwise, to continue building elsewhere. Israel will never stop building in the settlement blocks nor should she. After Obama met with Netanyahu in the White House recently he said Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there's a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements. Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. Long before the Mitchell Report, the US has been against settlements calling them "illegal" or just "obstacles to peace". The Mitchell Report recommended a freeze of settlement activity as part of a process and not as an absolute. President Obama has made it an absolute. But, as the Report sets out, the freeze on settlement activity is only a recommended "confidence building measure" to be preformed as the Arabs preform what is recommended of them Beyond that, the the Bush letter in "04 in advance of disengagement provided, inter alia, In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities. Israel interprets this as a license to continue building in such population centers and these include Ariel and Maaleh Adumin. Pres Obama, by demanding a stop to settlement construction, is contravening both of these documents in the name of honouring them. Totally aside from the legalities, the peace process, of which the recommended freeze is a part, is intended to lead to a peace agreement. But what if such an agreement is not obtainable because the Arabs won't compromise or if the freeze, if acted upon, will ensure that an agreement won't be achieved because the Palestinians would have no need to compromise. In both cases, demanding a freeze is counterproductive. The only way to put pressure on the Palestinians to compromise is to continue building in the settlements. The sooner the Palestinians make a deal the sooner the construction will stop. In fact a deal could be done this year if they compromised so why waste time and energy on fighting over the freeze? The answer is obvious. The Arabs con't intend to compromise but want Israel to stop building, period. According to the roadmap, the settlement freeze was not an end in itself as the Arabs demand but a step to an agreement based on compromise and good will. Even if the Palestinians totally ended incitement and violence, the settlement construction should continue and not just in the major settlement blocks. This alone will ensure that the Palestinians compromise to acheive their state or that the two-state solution will be abandonned for something more attainable but excluding a bi-national state. Furthermore, if these arguments aren't enough, the Palestinians, including the Gazans, are divided but must be viewed in totality to judge whether they are living up to the confidence building measures demanded of them. Under the title, Obama-Netanyahu meeting went better than you think, Haaretz reported on what Lieberman said. "On the Palestinian issue, there is agreement as to the final destination," Lieberman said. "Everyone wants to see security, economic prosperity, and stability. Perhaps there is a tactical disagreement as to what is the best way to attain these goals. So there is much more in common and much more positive points. The meeting was much more positive than what one is led to believe." Zalman Shoval believes US-Israel ties will stay strong. Afterall, Israel and the US have always disagreed on the settlement issue and they will continue to disagree. Ted Belman
Ted Belman is a Canadian lawyer and editor of
the IsraPundit.com website, an activist pro-Israel website. Contact
him at tedbel@rogers.com
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CLINTON SPARS WITH BIBI: NO BUILDING IN YESHA — 'NO EXCEPTIONS'
Posted by Tzvu Ben Gedalyahu, May 28, 2009. |
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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came out swinging at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Wednesday night and specifically rejected his policy for allowing building for "natural growth" in Judea and Samaria. Her statement came on the eve of Thursday's visit of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the White House, which two weeks ago told Israel to stop all building for Jews in Judea and Samaria. "The president was very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here. He wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions," Secretary Clinton said at a news conference with visiting Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit. She also dined with Abbas Wednesday night. Mark Regev, spokesman for the Netanyahu government, immediately responded and said that life will continue as usual for residents in towns and cities in Judea and Samaria. He said that the future of the areas will be settled in negotiations. The PA, with support from the Obama government, has implicitly said that negotiation are only possible once its demands are met. After returning from Washington, Netanyahu took steps to please the American government and announced that his administration will remove 26 hilltop communities and outposts. They are termed illegal because they were established after the Sharon government agreed to a U.S. demand not to establish more communities in Judea and Samaria. However, Prime Minister Netanyahu made it clear he would not capitulate to all of the PA demands that are backed by the Obama government. Both he and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have said they cannot "tell families not to have babies" in Judea and Samaria, where growth outstrips the population increase in the rest of the country. The Obama administration has not declared whether its demand includes Jerusalem neighborhoods over which the PA also wants sovereignty for its proposed new Arab country, which would give it control of all of the land restored to Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967. Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last year reversed American policy and defined as a "settlement" the neighborhood of Har Homa, which has the same legal status as French Hill, Talpiot, Ramot and Gilo. All of the neighborhoods were annexed to Jerusalem nearly 30 years ago but are not recognized by the international community as part of the capital. The annexation prompted the removal of all embassies that were located in Jerusalem, leaving consulates in the city. The article below was written by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu and it appeared in Arutz-7 (IsraelNN.com) |
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IS OBAMA LOOKING FOR A FIGHT OVER 'NATURAL GROWTH'?
Posted by Herb Keinon, May 28, 2009. |
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"A 'settlement freeze' would not help Palestinians face today's problems or prepare for tomorrow's challenges," Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser under former US president George Bush, wrote in April in The Washington Post. "The demand for a freeze would have only one quick effect: to create immediate tension between the United States and Israel's new government," he wrote. "That may be precisely why some propose it, but it is also why the Obama administration should reject it." Abrams proved prophetic: the issue has indeed created immediate tension with the US, not over illegal outposts — Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has made it clear he will remove them — but over "natural growth" in the settlements. The question is why the US is looking for this fight, and why Obama has not heeded Abrams's advice and rejected those pushing him in a confrontation over the matter. Truth be told, comments by Obama himself on the subject have not pointed to a looming battle. After his meeting with Netanyahu in the White House last week, Obama spoke — much as Bush spoke before him — in rather general terms about a need for Israel to stop settlement construction. "There is a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements, that settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward," he said, using language heard often in the past. The indication that a fight was brewing came when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in an Al-Jazeera interview — an interview whose transcript was circulated last Wednesday by the State Department — that a freeze is just that: a complete and total freeze, even for "natural growth." That position, as was made abundantly clear at Sunday's cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, is not acceptable to the current Netanyahu government. Even Defense Minister Ehud Barak, representing the left flank of the government, said it was illogical to accept a principle whereby a family could not add on to their 45-meter house to accommodate more children, or whereby veterans of IDF units couldn't return — with their wives — to the settlements of their birth to live near their parents. So a clash is in the making, though coming to some kind of agreement on this issue was one of the main objectives that Intelligence Services Minister Dan Meridor, National Security Advisor Uzi Arad and Yitzhak Molcho, Netanyahu's envoy on the Palestinian issue, took with them to London this week for their meeting with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell. Israel's position, or its hope, is that this issue can be finessed, just as it was finessed under the previous government. Or, as Netanyahu told a visiting Congressional delegation on Wednesday, there is a need to find a way with the US administration to enable "normal life" in the settlements to continue. If Obama says no settlements, but doesn't mention natural growth, leaving Clinton to do that, does that mean there is wiggle room? Nobody knows yet. Not too long ago, Clinton's predecessor Condoleezza Rice caused consternation in Jerusalem when she began referring to Israeli neighborhoods in east Jerusalem as settlements. But then Jerusalem was able to say, "Hey, that's only Rice. Bush doesn't feel that way." The problem is that no one quite knows the dynamics yet on these issues inside the Obama administration. Israeli officials are confident — perhaps overly confident — that if they "line up" with the US administration on the "right side of the fence" on most settlement issues, they could find a formula to work regarding natural growth. This means that if, as the Olmert government declared, the Netanyahu government says it will uproot illegal outposts, not set up new settlements, not give incentives to move to the settlements, and not expropriate any additional Palestinian lands, then the conventional wisdom in the current government is that the US would permit — as it has in the past — natural growth construction as long as it does not go beyond the existing construction lines. But what if Obama, as some maintain, is actually looking for a public fight with Israel on this issue in order to win credit with the Arab world, and legitimacy among the Europeans as a leader who is willing to take Israel on when necessary? That could be a tricky tactic, because if the US president picks a fight with Israel over the natural growth issue at a time when Israel has declared it won't build new settlements, expropriate land or give incentives to move there, then it could be perceived among some Obama supporters in Congress as being unfairly tough on Israel, especially since various verbal understandings were made over the years that Israel interpreted as a green light for natural growth. Indeed, what is lacking is clarity, not about where Israel stands on the issue at this point, but where Obama stands, and how far he will push. Clinton's position is clear — but is she also speaking for the president? As Abrams wrote in April, "for the past five years, Israel's government has largely adhered to guidelines that were discussed with the United States but never formally adopted: that there would be no new settlements, no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements and no new construction except in already built-up areas. The clear purpose of the guidelines? To allow for settlement growth in ways that minimized the impact on Palestinians." The new Netanyahu government has made clear it will abide by those guidelines, and even go further, by taking down illegal outposts. What remains to be seen, what has to be clarified, is whether the Obama administration feels bound by these same guidelines. If it doesn't, then a clash over the issue is all but inevitable. EDITOR'S NOTE: One reader reminded us that the Arabs are building all over the place, mostly illegally. How does USA expect to be perceived as the honest broker? Ignoring Arab building and suppressing Jewish building obviously says that USA has sided with the Arabs. The comment was 94. Media is silent on new Arab settlements in West Bank The Daily Alert is sponsored by Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and prepared by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). To subscribe to their free daily alerts, send an email to daily@www.dailyalert.jcpa.org |
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YESHA RABBIS ADVISE SOLDIERS NOT TO HELP DESTROY OUTPOSTS
Posted by Jake Levi, May 28, 2009. |
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Where are the calls of support when the Rabbis show long-needed leadership? Especially from the Knesset? Barak is running amuck, he must be stopped, and stopped now. This is a time for all of the National Camp to support Israel. This is a time when the Nationalist Camp must stand up, firm and strong and say: Never Again ! The article below was written by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu and it appeared in Arutz-7 (IsraelNN.com) |
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Leading national religious rabbis called on soldiers Wednesday night to refuse orders that involve them in the destruction of Jewish hilltop communities and the expulsion of those living there. Their call sparked a protest in the mass media and among several political leaders, similar to the storm that raged over the same issue during the period of the expulsions from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005 and in Amona two years ago. Kiryat Arab-Hevron Chief Rabbi Dov Lior and Beit El Chief Rabbi Zalman Melamed were among those who wrote a statement that said "the holy Torah prohibits taking part in any act of uprooting Jews from any part of "our sacred land." In radio interviews Thursday morning, Ichud Leumi (National Union) Knesset Member Michael Ben-Ari and officials of the Council of Rabbis for communities in Judea and Samaria (Yesha) explained that Israel was established because of the Torah and therefore one cannot carry out policies that are against it. The rabbis conferred at the small community of Givat Asaf, one of the 26 sites that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has vowed to destroy, by force if necessary. An official for the Council of Yesha Rabbis added, "The government is ruled by non-Jews like [President Barack] Obama and that is our weakness. It is not Jewish sovereignty. They are throwing sand in our eyes with their declarations." Most of the outposts are hilltop sites, some of which are full-fledged communities comprised of dozens of families. The government already has prepared orders telling residents to leave voluntarily or face police and soldiers, similar to the force used last week at the Maoz Esther outpost in Samaria. The same calls for refusing to carry out what the rabbis define as illegal orders resulted in a fierce debate in 2005 as the government prepared tens of thousands of security forces to expel nearly 10,000 Jews from two dozen communities in the Gaza region and part of northern Samaria. The issue has become increasingly significant because a growing number of combat officers come from national religious institutions. Several national religious leaders, such as Moshe Hagar, who heads the group of two dozen pre-army Torah academies (Mechina), previously opposed disobeying orders. However, he said in an interview Thursday morning that "the soldiers no longer need to ask rabbis concerning expulsions because they know what to do." Others have stated that soldiers must not refuse orders but should simply tell their commanding officers they do not feel well and cannot function properly. As in the past, the Yesha rabbis' advice was met with demands that they be arrested for incitement. MK Ofer Pines-Paz said, "The rabbis' call to refuse military orders undermines Israeli democracy. This is dangerous incitement that is liable to break up the IDF." Contact Jake Levi at jlevi_us@yahoo.com |
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NO FUTURE IN NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE PALESTINIANS
Posted by Yoav Sorek, May 28, 2009. |
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This is Newsletter No. 15 — May 28, 2009. |
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Dear friends, Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to Washington has caused resurgence of public debate regarding alternatives to the two-state solution, an idea that America has been pushing for the past few years. Opposition to the two-state solution comes not only from the right wing in Israel, but is gradually becoming the quiet acquiescence of the general public. As time goes on, calls against the two-state solution are becoming more and more dominant. Yuval Diskin, head of the GSS, stated that there is no future in negotiations with the Palestinians. Giora Eiland, former national security advisor, continues to reiterate that Hamas' dominance of the Palestinian street makes negotiations with the Palestinians irrelevant and unproductive. Moreover, Eiland said that the maximum amount of territory that Israel can relinquish to the Palestinians will not be nearly sufficient to procure support for such a plan amongst the Palestinian people. Last week the Jerusalem Post featured an article by Uri Bar Zohar, a historian and former Labor MK, which asserted that the Jordanian option should be resurrected as the Palestinian option cannot bring peace. Even prior to the Prime Minister's visit to Washington, opposition to the two-state solution was already being voiced. MK Danny Danon (Likud) convened those close to the Prime Minister to reaffirm the party's rejection of the two-state solution. These feelings were expressed by Limor Livnat, who said that the negotiations with the Palestinians so far "have not brought any positive results". After Netanyahu's return from the meeting wuth Obama, MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) has organized a very successful conference in the Knesset, to discuss alternative policies to the two-state solution. The Israeli Initiative was one of the alternatives, and we look forward for the next steps of this public debate. In retrospect, there is no doubt that these statements had a strong influence in helping the Prime Minister withstand the American pressure of agreeing to a two-state solution. ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO WE CELEBRATED THE FORTY-SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF JERUSALEM'S UNIFICATION, an achievement of the six day war. That war made clear that Israel's existence is no longer in question, left Israel defendable borders, and gave Israel the ability to deter her enemies. Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, is beautiful as always, and a place where it is possible to walk securely in all parts of the city. However, the joy is not complete. While forty years have passed since the six day war and more than sixty years since Israel's establishment, Israel's legitimacy to exist is still being challenged. There are various explanations for this, some deeply entrenched in psychological stereotypes of the west, which see the Jews as a persecuted and exiled nation, but have difficulty seeing them as a sovereign nation. However, these thought patterns in the west need to be legitimized by some basis in reality. This basis is provided by the Palestinian refugees. With the establishment of Israel's statehood came the refugee problem. These refugees continue to hinder Israel's legitimacy in the eyes of the world. The time has come for our Government to cease being afraid to deal with the refugee problem and initiate a change in the international community on this issue. The current path in the Middle East peace process is heading in a direction which will not provide practical solutions. There is one change that can be effected which can potentially redirect the peace process and open new windows of opportunity. This change is the dismantling of the refugee camps and the rehabilitation of the refugees. Rehabilitating, or resettling those who choose such, is the key to shifting the course of events. It is urgent that this process begin, even if only a small number of refugees are aided. Breaking the stagnant situation will shift the nature of 'the Palestinian problem' in the eyes of the public from a political issue to a humanitarian one. May we all enjoy a Happy Shavuot, Yoav Sorek
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TALE OF TWO QUESTIONS (FOR THE VATICAN)
Posted by Lowell Gallin, May 27, 2009. |
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On Monday, May 4, 2009, Mishkenot Sha'ananim and the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel hosted a briefing at Mishkenot Sha'anaim in Yemin Moshe, Jerusalem, for journalists with His Excellency, Monsignor Antonio Franco, Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, one week before the visit to Israel of Pope Benedikt XVI. Lowell Gallin asked Monsignor Franco the following question: "Your Excellency, My question concerns two dates in church history: Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom from Yerushalayim, Mr. Lowell Gallin
The Root & Branch Association, Ltd. (www.rb.org.il), "an all-volunteer, non-member organization founded by Torah-observant Jews, promotes cooperation between the State of Israel and other nations, and between B'nai Israel (Children of Israel) and B'nai Noach (Children of Noah) in Israel and abroad, to build a better world based on the universal Noahide Covenant and Laws as commanded by the G-d of Israel in the Bible and Jewish tradition." |
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FROM ISRAEL: FIRST THINGS FIRST
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 27, 2009. |
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And the first order of business is Shavuot, which begins tomorrow night. This holiday, the culmination of our counting of the Omer for seven weeks, marks Matan Torah — our receiving of the Torah. The counting from Pesach until now — which has significance in many ways — tells us that there is a spiritual progression from the Exodus to Sinai. We traditionally celebrate this Festival by studying through the night. It is unlikely that there will be another posting after this one until after Shabbat. Chag Shavuot Sameach! ~~~~~~~~~~ Well, the delegation headed by Minister of Intelligence Dan Meridor has gone to London to discuss matters with US officials there, prior to Barak's visit in Washington, and it's being reported that both Iran and settlements are on the agenda. As to Iran, it truly is wait and see how Obama will respond to what Barak brings him. But we cannot escape the link with the enormously threatening and worrisome way in which North Korea is currently behaving. US response will be watched carefully by the world, and one must hope (and pray!) that the American president will be jarred into waking up before it is too late. Guess what? Being nice guys with a renegade regime simply does not work. Not in North Korea and not in Iran. What is more, it's a lot easier (safer for the world) to deal with stopping such a regime from going nuclear than to confront one that already is nuclear. Barack Hussein Obama — do you get the picture yet? ~~~~~~~~~~ Here in Israel there is concern about nuclear proliferation and nuclear material getting into the hands of ME terrorists. But there is also the hope that alarm over Korea internationally may spur a stronger stance with regard to Iran. There is, for example, Russia, which has cut Iran a great deal of slack, but is now alarmed about North Korea. ~~~~~~~~~~ As to settlements: Two other illegal — or more properly, unauthorized — outposts outside of Kiryat Arba were taken down last night. One is at the Federman farm, which was demolished last year. There had been some activity reported regarding re-establishment of the property, but when police went there last night all they actually found was a tent filled with equipment. The other is at Hill 18, otherwise called Givat Avichai, which had been founded by yeshiva students from Kiryat Arba. There authorities found two shacks and some electrical equipment. The handful of yeshiva students present put up no resistance. On the one hand, it seems altogether ludicrous, that authorities are taking the time to dismantle tents and shacks. But there is another way of looking at this. While they may end up doing bigger things, we must remember that as of now it's been mostly a show. Wow! Two unauthorized outposts taken down. They're tough. You think Barak will report to Obama on what he's done so far? ~~~~~~~~~~ A reader (thanks, Don S.) has asked me to elaborate on the different statuses that outposts or settlements can have. And I'd like to devote space to that here, as this is an important issue. The whole business of legal vs. illegal settlements is both complicated and political. Most settlements have had some interaction with some government departments or agencies. They've hooked up water lines, or electric lines, or paved a road, or whatever. There is sanction somewhere along the way. And sometimes that sanction is considerable. But if final papers are not in place, then the settlement can be called "illegal" or "unauthorized." The region comprised of Judea and Samaria is not governed by Israeli civil law — civil law was never extended to this area as it was to the Golan and to eastern Jerusalem. (Note: this is not a case of annexing it, but extending the law of Israel to apply.) The region is administered separately under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense, and it is the office of the Defense Minister that must sign off on a settlement. Thus Barak's involvement here. There are instances in which "illegal" settlements have been later declared legal, and there is hope that this might happen now in a handful of instances at least. That can particularly be the case when so-called outposts are really outlying neighborhoods of recognized settlements. But it can happen in other instances as well. And actually it was explained to me by a lawyer some time ago that many settlements considered authorized today moved through a process this way. ~~~~~~~~~~ There are some charges being made — by far left groups such as Peace Now and Yesh G'vul — that some of the settlements are on private Palestinian land. While these charges are not necessarily accurate, where this might be a problem, shifting of the settlement to other land, rather than demolishing it, is a possible resolution. ~~~~~~~~~~ Several political issues complicate this whole matter. The Obama administration is saying that we have certain obligations with regard to settlements stemming from the Road Map for Peace. Introduced by the US, with Quartet sponsorship, in the spring of 2003, it presented a phased plan, with a timeline, for achieving a two-state solution. You can see the full text here;
In the proposed first phase, it says the Government of Israel must "immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001" and "freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." We may not like it. We may hate it. But it says it. ~~~~~~~~~~ But — wait! — it's not nearly as simple as Obama would have it. First there is the question of whether it still applies, as it was envisioned as resulting in a Palestinian state by 2005. Has a post-2005 situation superseded this document? Unfortunately, our new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has made it more difficult to make this case, as he declared early on that we should scrap Annapolis and go back to the Road Map. It was clear why he did this: Annapolis was trying to jump past the phased program and get to the end result of a Palestinian state at the beginning. Lieberman was undoubtedly reasoning that under the Road Map the PA had obligations it would not honor and thus we'd not get to that end result. ~~~~~~~~~~ Then there is the very important issue of reciprocity (which Netanyahu has made much of) and the need for the Palestinian Authority to simultaneously fulfill its obligations. We cannot be the only party that "walks the walk." According to this same Road Map, the Palestinians must "declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere." Never mind that Fatah is not exactly clean itself, what about Hamas terrorism, with rockets and mortars still launched (170 since the end of our war in Gaza)? What action will the PA take with regard to this? This is a joke. The PA, which has this obligation, cannot do it. And there's more: "All official Palestinian institutions [must] end incitement against Israel." This is an even bigger joke than the terrorism issue. Anyone who has seen an analysis of the textbooks produced and utilized by the PA understands what a huge joke it really is. See my article, "Texts of Hate," for some mind-blowing examples of what PA school kids are taught.
To comply with this requirement, the PA would have to publish a whole set of adjusted texts. And there's no thought of doing so. Not a glimmer of a suggestion that they must do so. But WE have to stop building in the settlements? The Road Map calls for "reciprocal steps by the two parties." It seems to me a very public campaign has to be launched focusing on the inequities of what is demanded of us and of the PA. Most of the world knows about the settlements as an "impediment to peace." Time they knew that there can't be peace when the Palestinian kids are taught to hate us, but that the PA, which is bound to do so under the Road Map, is taking no action in this regard. The PA is always yapping about how we don't want peace because we keep building. Where is the voice of our government saying that clearly the PA doesn't want peace if its youngsters are taught Jihad and Palestine from the river to the sea? ~~~~~~~~~~ And this is not the end to the problems surrounding the demands made of us. The Sharon government of 2003 did not simply accept the Road Map as is. A set of "14 reservations" was attached and given to the Bush government. It was only after the US government committed to "fully and seriously address[ing]" the issues raised by Israel that the Israeli Cabinet voted to accept the Road Map. Unfortunately, this was naive, for a commitment to address the issues is not a promise that they will ultimately be incorporated into arrangements. But the government of Israel is on record as having reservations. Some of those reservations: "...during the process, and as a condition to its continuance. calm will be maintained. The Palestinians will dismantle the existing security organizations and implement security reforms during the course of which new organizations will be formed and act to combat terror, violence and incitement (incitement must cease immediately and the Palestinian Authority must educate for peace). (emphasis added) Additionally, PM Sharon is on record as having objected to the call for a freeze on settlements. It was "impossible," he said to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Our finest youth live there. They are already the third generation, contributing to the state and serving in elite army units. They return home and get married, so then they can't build a house and have children? "What do you want, for a pregnant woman to have an abortion just because she is a settler?" (You can find this quote here:
Unfortunately, bewilderingly, this objection, this perception that a freeze is impossible, was not written into the reservations. ~~~~~~~~~~ And one last factor in helping you understand the complexities of this situation: In April of 2004, PM Sharon met with President Bush and they exchanged letters in the context of the Road Map and the forthcoming "Disengagement." President Bush's letter contained the phrase: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949..." This was broadly understood as an acknowledgement by the US that in any final agreement with the Palestinians we would retain major settlement blocs. Dore Gold, head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, called it a "significant shift in US policy." Netanyahu is currently using this to make the case that it had become informal US policy to acknowledge that we will be retaining settlement blocs in any event, and that there is thus no reason for the US to demand that we be restricted in building within those settlements. (Gold, by the way, is a Netanyahu advisor.) From what I've read, this letter of Bush's is a stumbling block to Obama's demands, a frustration to him as he seeks to move on pressuring us. ~~~~~~~~~~ The good news for today: I've received some off-the-record information coming ultimately from an impeccable source, regarding Netanyahu's sincere resistance to a "two-state solution." We'll keep watching... Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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2009 SHAVOU'OT (PENTECOST) GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
Posted by Yoram Ettinger, May 27, 2009. |
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(based on ancient Jewish Sages) |
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1. Shavou'ot commemorates the receipt of the Torah, which took place over 3,300 years ago, setting the Jewish People on the Road Map to the Land of Israel. Shavou'ot reflects the human path from the murder of Abel, by Cain, to the receipt of the Torah. Thus, the first and the last Hebrew letters of Shavou'ot (constitute the name of the third son of Adam & Eve, Seth, the righteous ancestor of Noah, hence of all mankind. The Hebrew meaning of Seth is the Hebrew word for the granting of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. 2. The receipt of the Torah shaped the nature of the world in general and Western democracies in particular. Shavou'ot is celebrated on the 6th day of the Jewish month of Sivan, 50 days following the Exodus. It took place 26 generations since Adam. The Hebrew word for Jehovah equals 26 in Gimatriya. There are 26 Hebrew letters in the names of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs: Abraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah. 3. Shavou'ot is a derivative of the Hebrew word Shvoua' — vow in English, referring to the exchange of vows between G-D and the Jewish People. The root of Shvoua' — and Shavou'ot — is the Hebrew word Seven — Sheva. Shavou'ot (the Festival of Weeks in Hebrew) is celebrated 7 weeks following Passover, reflecting the 7X7 basic human behavioral characteristics, which individuals are supposed to resurrect/enhance in preparation for Shavou'ot (an all night study session on the eve of Shavou'ot has taken place since the 13th century). 7 key Jewish/universal leaders — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aharon, Joseph and David — represent the qualities of the Torah. Number 7 represents wholesomeness in Judaism — 7 days of Creation and a 7 day week. The Sabbath is the 7th day, the first Hebrew verse in Genesis consists of 7 words, there are 7 directions (north, south, west, east, up, down, one's own position), 7 gates to The Temple, 7 Noah Commandments, Moses' birth/death was on the 7th day of Adar, Jethro had 7 names and 7 daughters, Passover and Sukkot last for 7 days each, each Plague lasted for 7 days, The Menorah has 7 branches, Jubilee follows seven 7-year cycles, 7 Continents, 7 notes in a musical scale, 7 days of mourning, 7 blessings in a Jewish wedding, 7 Jewish Prophetesses (Sarah, Miriam, Devorah, Chana, Abigail, Choulda and Esther), etc. Pentecost is celebrated — by Christians — on the 7th Sunday after Easter. 4. Shavou'ot is the second of the 3 Jewish Pilgrimages (Sukkot-Tabernacles, Passover and Shavou'ot), celebrated in the 3rd Jewish month, Sivan. It highlights Jewish Unity, compared by King Solomon to a triangular cord, which cannot be broken. The Torah — the first of the 3 parts of the Old Testament — was granted to the Jewish People (which consists of 3 components: Priests, Levites and Israel), by Moses (the youngest of 3 children, brother of Aharon and Miriam), a successor to the 3 Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and to Seth, the 3rd son of Adam & Eve. Shavou'ot highlights Ruth, who lived 3 generations before King David, son of Jesse, grandson of Ovad, the son of Ruth. The Torah was forged in 3 ways: Fire (commitment to principles), Water (lucidity and purity) and Desert (humility and principle-driven tenacity). The Torah is one of the 3 global pillars, along with labor and gratitude/charity. The Torah is one of the 3 pillars of Judaism, along with the Jewish People and the Land of Israel. 5. Scroll of Ruth — King David — Honor thy mother-in-law. Shavou'ot is highlighted by the studying of the Scroll of Ruth the first of Old Testament's five scrolls: Ruth (read on Shavou'ot), Song of Songs (Passover), Ecclesiastes (Sukkot), Book of Lamentations (Ninth of Av), Esther (Purim). Ruth was the great grandmother of King David. She stuck by her mother-in-law, NAOMI, for more than 10 years during Naomi's most difficult times, financially and socially. Ruth, the daughter of Eglon and the granddaughter of Balak, kings of the Moabites, had the option to be reunited with her own People, and be assured of affluence. Ruth's leadership legacy: principles (loyalty, concern, modesty and love) over convenience. Boaz — the chief of the Sanhedrin (Jewish Legislature) attributed his initial affection for Ruth, whom he married, to "I am informed of your support of your Mother-In-Law." The total sum of the Hebrew letters of Ruth — in Gimatriya — yield the number of laws granted at Mt. Sinai (606), which together with the 7 laws of Noah total The 613 Laws of Moses. The Scroll of Ruth highlights the Judean Desert as the Cradle of Jewish history — is it "occupied territory?" 6. Shared Israel-US (Judeo-Christian) values. Shavou'ot sheds light on the unique covenant between the Jewish State and the USA — the high regard for the Torah. The Five Books of Moses in particular, and the Old Testament in general, shaped the Western morality. They impacted the world view of the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, Separation of Powers, Checks & Balances, etc. John Locke wanted the "613 Laws of Moses" to become the legal foundation of the new society established in America. Lincoln's famous 1863 quote paraphrased the 14th century John Wycliffe's dedication to his English translation of the Bible: "a book of the people, by the people, for the people." 7. Shavou'ot is the day of birth/death of King David (as well as the day that Moses was saved by Pharaoh's daughter), who united the Jewish People, elevating them to a most powerful position. David — along with Moses and Abraham — was a role model of humility and repentance, hence the Hebrew acronym for Adam (human being in Hebrew): Abraham, David and Moses. In contrast with King Saul, King David assumed responsibility and accountability for his sins. He didn't just talk the talk; he walked the walk! 150 candles are lit at King David's tomb on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, consistent with the 150 chapters of Psalms mostly attributed to David. Number 150 is the numerical value of Nest, the warm environment of the Torah. David's personal history (from shepherd to king) provides a lesson for individuals and nations: Every problem is an opportunity in disguise; the road to success is paved with difficulties and ups & downs; human beings are fallible but they must recognize their own fallibility, as a springboard toward improvement. 8. The Torah was granted on the small, modest Mt. Sinai — to a small People — in the desert. The Torah was delivered by Moses, "the humblest of all human beings". The content of the Torah doesn't require an impressive stage. Humility — a prerequisite for absorbing the lessons of the Torah — is essential for learning and for constructive relationships and leadership. 9. Liberation-Harvest-Optimism. The Torah was granted in the desert, a platform of Liberty, away from physical and spiritual constraints. Celebrated fifty day following the Exodus (physical deliverance) from Egypt, Shavou'ot signifies spiritual liberation. Shavou'ot — Holiday of Reaping, Holiday of First Fruit, Day of Solemn — celebrates the culmination of the agricultural, physical and spiritual harvest season of optimism, which starts on the second day of Passover. Shavou'ot highlights the critical connection between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel. 10. Dairy dishes consumed during Shavou'ot, commemorate the most common food — of shepherds like King David — during the 40 years in the desert, on the way to the Land of Milk and Honey, the Land of Israel. Unlike wine, milk is poured into simple glasses. The total sum of milk is 40 in Gimatriya, which is equal to the 40 days and nights spent by Moses on Mt. Sinai and the 40 years spent by the Jewish People in the Desert. 40 is also the value of the first Hebrew letter M of key Exodus-Terms: Moses, Miriam, Manna, Egypt, Desert, Menorah, Tabernacle, Mitzvah-Commandment, etc. 40 generations passed from Moses — who delivered the "Written Torah" — to Rabbi Ashi and Rabbi Rabina, who concluded the editing of the Talmud, the "Oral Torah." The first and the last letters in the Talmud is the Hebrew M, which equals 40 in Gimatriya. Ambassador Yoram Ettinger is a consultant on US-Israel relations as well as the Chairman of Special Projects at the Ariel Center for Policy Research. Formerly the Minister for Congressional Affairs to Israel's Embassy in Washington, DC, Ettinger also served as Consul General of Israel to the Southwestern US. He is a former editor of Contemporary Mideast Backgrounder, and is the author of the Jerusalem Cloakroom series of reports. Contact him at yoramtex@netvision.net.il |
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AN OPEN LETTER TO GERMANY'S CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL
Posted by H. David Kirk, May 27, 2009. |
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Friends, this letter was sent to the Chancellery a week ago and is now being sent to German media |
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Dear Chancellor Merkel, I am writing to you as a German Jew, born in 1918, and abroad since 1934. You have reawakened images of my childhood in Germany, and memories of my forward-looking and brave mother. Much like you, who are able to see the current renewal of antisemitism as a threat to Jews, my mother had recognized the ever-darkening future in the Germany of 1933. Like my mother, who early on began to prepare my brothers and me for a life abroad, you know how to adapt to difficult circumstances. When you received Ahmadinejad's letter with its hateful threats against Israel, you refused to respond. Today, Israel's very existence is threatened by Iran's nearly perfected weapons of mass destruction, and by its president's virulent rhetoric to wipe Israel off the map. With these threats growing ever stronger and closer one is bound to ask: what is to be done? Surprisingly, my work in the sociology of adoptive kinship, in spite of its very different theme, gives a clue: catastrophic events can sometimes be transformed into opportunities. In that context I propose a new kind of non-financial "Wiedergutmachung", the essence of which is found in the title of my book SHARED FATE. If Germany were to acknowledge the threat that it, like other Western nations, faces from militant Islam, it could recognize a 'shared fate' situation with embattled Israel. Thus, if Germans understood that their country, like other Western nations, would be endangered if Iran had nuclear weapons, they would more readily declare themselves in support of Israel, by diplomacy if possible, by force if necessary. In the era of persecution and genocide none of the democracies dared to step forward to protect Jews. Even today such a step would require great courage and conviction, calling for the kind of leadership that you, Chancellor Merkel, have already exhibited. As pioneer in this mutual aid outreach to Israel, Germany would usher in a worldshaking epoch in its relationship with the Jewish people. Contact the poster at hdkirk@shaw.ca |
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THEM AND US
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 27, 2009. |
| This was written by Rabbi Avi Shafran and it appeared today on the Jewish World Review. |
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Odd as it might seem, the recent report that a library at Yemen Children's Hospital was named after Palestinian suicide bomber Wafa Idris, that terrorist Samir Al-Kuntar spoke at the naming-ceremony and that little girls read poems in honor of the occasion brought back a Shavuos memory. According to the report, which originated in a Yemeni news service and was translated by MEMRI, the local Province Governor expressed pride "that the Arab nation has stalwart resistance [fighters] like Samir Al-Kuntar." In 1974, Mr. Kuntar murdered an Israeli father in front of his four-year-old daughter and then smashed the little girl's skull against a rock with a rifle butt. Every Jewish holiday is special in its own way, but Shavuos, which falls on May 29 and 30 this year, is unusual: it has no specific "active" observances, nothing like Passover's seder and matzoh, or Sukkos' booths or "four species," or Rosh Hashana's shofar-blowing. The 18th century Chassidic master known as Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev perceived something subtle in that fact. Shavuos, he noted, is identified by Jewish tradition as the anniversary of the Jewish people's acceptance of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Since the act of accepting is an inherently passive one, he explained, the holiday is pointedly devoid of physically active observances. It is a time of receiving the Torah anew, and most appropriately expressed through Torah-study. Hence, likely, the ancient Jewish custom to stay awake the entire night of Shavuos immersed in the texts of our tradition. Every year I experience a personal Shavuos miracle; it is one that I suspect is shared by many others. By the end of our family's festive meal on Shavuos night, the prospect of staying awake an hour, much less six or seven, seems an impossible one. Yet, somehow, entering the study-hall, some holy energy seems to seize me, and, even as my mind and body increasingly rebel against the deprivation of slumber, my soul jumps for joy. Seven years ago, my nearly 12-year-old son Dovie — today a strapping 19-year-old studying in yeshiva in Israel — insisted on joining me in study in the large main sanctuary of a local synagogue, which was crowded with scores of Jewish men and boys doing the same. The two of us, salt-and-pepper-bearded, could-stand-to-lose-a-few-pounds father and reddish-haired, dimpled and determined son, spent most of the night engrossed in Talmud. We began with a page of the tractate he was studying in school — a long passage dealing with the imperative of alleviating an animal's pain — and then turned to several pages of another tractate he and I regularly learn together — which concerned the status of land ownership in Jerusalem. Dovie seemed entirely awake throughout it all, and asked the perceptive questions I had come to expect from him. We paused over the course of the night only for him to participate in classes for boys his age in an adjoining room, taught by an older yeshiva boy. The experience was enthralling, as it always is, and while it was a challenge to concentrate (and at times even to keep my eyes from closing) during the prayer service that followed at 5:00 AM, Dovie and I both "made it" and then, hand in hand, walked home, where we promptly crashed. But before my head touched my pillow (a millisecond or two before I entered REM sleep), I summoned the energy to thank G-d for sharing His Torah with us. That silent prayer came back to me like a thunderclap a few days later, when I caught up on some reading I had missed (though only in the word's most simple sense) over the holiday. Apparently, during the precise hours Dovie and I were studying holy texts, the presses at The Washington Times were printing a story datelined Gaza City. It began with a description of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Abu Ali, being "lovingly dress[ed] by his mother in a costume of a suicide bomber, complete with small kaffiyeh, a belt of electrical tape and fake explosives made of plywood." "I encourage him, and he should do this," said his mother; and Abu Ali himself apparently agreed. "I hope to be a martyr," he said. "I hope when I get to 14 or 15 to explode myself." My thoughts flashed back to Shavuos and to my own son, and I thanked G-d again, from the bottom of my heart. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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HOW THE U.S. SHOULD DEFINE IRAN; ARAB-JEWISH DEMOGRAPHICS; US NOT SELLING ISRAEL THE F-35
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 27, 2009. |
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HOW THE U.S. SHOULD DEFINE IRAN Iranians are a cultured people yearning for modernism and democracy. They detest their regime. So do most of the clergy, which thinks that the mullahs should not run government and have perverted Shiism. The regime keeps the people down, robs them, and strives for global conquest for its religion The regime has subverted all institutions or set up parallel, Islamic ones. It has commissars to monitor them and a separate military to control the people. It's like the USSR. The rulers' allegiance is solely to their personal wealth and to their radical version of Islam. They have said they don't care about Iran or its boundaries. Proud of their Persian heritage, the majority resent the mullah's denigration of it. Barring Iran's religious expansion is the U.S. and Israel. Hence the Iranian regime but not its masses hate those states. Iranian emphasizes anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism to curry vafor among the Arabs, thereby magnifying Iranian power to expand. Amir Taheri, in The Persian Night: Iran From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad, suggests trying to utilize the divisions within Iran to help the people overthrow their regime. Unfortunately, the US foreign policy establishment seems oblivious to what Iran is like. It is under the already failed illusion that diplomacy can tame fanatical imperialism. When does it ever? The Islamic Republic [like the Arabs] considers US willingness to negotiate not as friendship but as weakness enabling it to harden its position. Not soften but harden! The mullahs don't recognize other sides' opinions. They consider foreign negotiators not as partners but as adversaries. They can pledge benign intent, but that is part of their war effort. What happens when the US tries to negotiate with fanatical totalitarians, while remaining mindful of their evil? Academics, NGOs, journalists, and others claim that that position thwarts negotiations, though it worked for Pres. Reagan, because he held fast to it. The State Dept. censors the rhetoric and compromises away our position in order to be able to get an agreement on something, anything. Thus the State Dept. marginalized our diplomat on human rights while making a string of concessions to N. Korea [which now has the bomb]. Iran was a menace even before nuclear development. If we let Iran remain a regional power, we betray its people and the rest of the region (Elliott Abrams, Commentary, 5/2009, p.68). Our State Dept. and its liberal supporters remain unaware of such realities. The State Dept. does not know its business. It and Pres. Obama are preparing to sacrifice Israel to Iran. Iran would become a greater menace to us. For an unrealistic U.S. assessment of Iran's menace:
WHAT TO EXPECT OF A NEW PALESTINIAN ARAB STATE Dr. Aaron Lerner of IMRA calls it a "house of cards" and the next terrorist state. The U.S. thinks that granting statehood would earn Arab support and be good for the U.S. (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/7). Dr. Lerner means that whether Abbas succeeds in running the new state or Hamas does, it would be first of all a terrorist base and as a distant second, a state for its people. It would exist for war and Islamist expansion. That would be good neither for the U.S. nor for Israel nor for Arabs nor for civilization. For a likelier scenario: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~ y2009m5d14-Terrorist-forces-of-Hamas-and-Palestinian-Authority-to-combine ARAB-JEWISH DEMOGRAPHICS Politicians attempt to justify their policies about diplomacy and boundaries on demographic grounds. Leftists try to frighten Jews with the Arab "demographic bomb" [just as did rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane]. The politicians, however, have obsolete notions and have been using erroneous statistics. Arab birth rates are converging with Jewish ones. They are moving to stabilize at a 1:4 rate in Israel. The Zionists and British reduced the death rate in Palestine. Since the Arabs had a high birth rate, their population exploded. Intellectuals got used to that situation, and have not realized that eventually, birth rates usually then fall. Israeli Jewish birth rates surpass most Western rates. [The author did not mention the Ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews, who multiply as a religious imperative rather than keep families small for money and convenience. If that explains the anomaly of high Jewish birth rates, the Jewish rate is secure.] Arab women used to have 9 children each. Now, "Israeli women" at a rate of 2.77 have more children than women in Iran, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. It is close in Syria. [The source didn't specify whether his figure for Israeli women includes a higher average for Arabs in Israel and whether he is discounting Christians who immigrated under forged papers identifying them as Jews.] The question is not whether the Arabs would swamp the Jews in
Israel but what kind of minority and citizenry will they constitute
What kind of minority? Long-term political trends are almost as unpredictable as demographic ones. The current trend is toward domination by Radical Islam. Radical Islam wears out its welcome, but fastens its rule by force. I think that bi-national states don't work well, and cannot work when one nationality is Muslim Arab, seeking to dominate the other. ARABS REJECT OBAMA DIPLOMACY? Pres. Obama tried to coax the Arabs into making the Saudi plan more
palatable to Israel. He asked the King of Jordan to persuade them to
delete the demand that Israel let in millions of Arabs. The Arab
League and Syria promptly rejected it, as if it would be an
unreasonable concession (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media
Research & Analysis, 5/8). Abbas rejected it too (Caroline Glick in
The Saudi plan would enable the Muslims to overwhelm the Jews from within Israel. That is its purpose. By adhering to that purpose, the Arabs are telling the US that conquest remains their goal, not peace. They are faithful to their religious imperative. Will Pres. Obama understand? Obama tried to negotiate a solution. The Arabs prefer to negotiate victory. Obama's overture to Syria, to split it from Iran, interests Syria in what it can get, but Syria seems stubbornly faithful to Iran. Obama's type of diplomacy seems doomed in its attempts, as it did in its articulation. About an Obama snub of Israel see:
OBAMA POLICY FOR PALESTINIAN ARAB STATE Pres. Obama is in a hurry to set up a Palestinian Arab state in the Territories. PM Netanyahu suggests first building a civilized society there that can make peace. Who is right? Israel rushed out of Gaza. Gaza was taken over by Hamas, which then fired 10,000 rockets at Israel. Wouldn't it be foolish to invite the same scenario in Judea-Samaria [where Hamas is more popular than Abbas, and anyway Abbas also favors jihad against Jewish sovereignty anywhere]? Hamas sees the West accommodating Hizbullah, so it awaits the same
accommodation, also retaining zeal and terrorism. It offers a 10-year
truce, meaning that for 10 years, it arms, then it resumes war [if it
keeps the truce, which it usually does not].
U.S. STILL NOT SELLING F-35 TO ISRAEL Israel wants to be allowed to repair the warplane's computer itself and promptly, in wartime. The Pentagon refuses, out of concern that Israel would gain access to U.S. technology. It counter-offers a few spare computers, to replace damaged ones. This leaves open the prospect that, just as in the Yom Kippur War, a U.S. Administration might delay re-supply to extort dangerous concessions for the Arabs http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/8). The U.S. is [or was] an ally but also, incompatibly, an arms-selling competitor. For an earlier piece on this subject:
Now what was that, in the NY Times and among the outright antisemites about "unstinting U.S. support for Israel?" Why Israel needs best planes:
Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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YAALON: ISRAEL MUST FREE ITSELF FROM FAILED '2-STATE' PARADIGM
Posted by Maayana Miskin, May 27, 2009. |
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Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe (Boogie) Yaalon believes that the time has come for Israel to "free itself from the failed paradigm" of the "two-state solution." Yaalon spoke Tuesday at a meeting of MKs dedicated to finding an alternative to the creation of a Palestinian Authority-led Arab state. While the creation of a PA-led state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is perceived as a necessity both in Israel and worldwide, such a state would not solve the Israel-PA conflict, said Yaalon. In fact, he said, it is doubtful that the possibility of creating such a state exists, due to Arab and Muslim reluctance to take any step that would imply recognition of Israel or compromise on Arab claims to the entire Land of Israel. Israel's Mistakes Israel's mistake lies in accepting a-symmetrical talks with the PA, Yaalon said. From the beginning of talks, he explained, Israel has accepted the idea of a Palestinian national movement with the PA as its representative, while the PA has resolutely refused to accept the Jewish national movement of Zionism or the idea of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. Furthermore, while the PA demands that Arabs and Muslims be allowed to live in Israel, Israel accepts that a PA state would not have Jewish citizens, he said. And while Israel gives in on crucial issues such as the status of Jerusalem or the borders of a PA state, the PA refuses to bend in the slightest. Israel has also been mistaken in assuming that the Israeli presence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is the cause of Israel-Arab tension, he said. Arab attacks on Israel began well before the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel gained control of those areas, he said, and the Arab world's real goal is not a state in those areas, but rather, on the ruins of the State of Israel. For this reason, he said, the PA is actually uninterested in a "two-state solution." Former PA Chairman Yasser Arafat waged war on Israel in order to avoid the creation of a PA state, he argued. "There are those who will argue that the PA wanted to establish a state in the 1967 borders but was unable to do so," he said. "I say the problem was not one of ability, but of desire." If the PA does not desire an independent state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and will not accept such a state as the fulfillment of its national goals, the "two-state solution" has no chance to bring peace, he concluded. The Solution Israel must give up on seeking to fully solve its conflict with the PA and the Arab world as a whole, Yaalon said. "I believe we should not approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the phrase 'solution' in the foreseeable future," he told his audience. "Instead, we should seek 'crisis management' or long-term coping strategies." Israel should still seek a solution in the long term, he added. However, the process of seeking a solution should be "bottom-up," and not "top-down." Instead of hoping that a diplomatic agreement with the PA will lead to peace and security, the PA should prove that it is capable of self-rule prior to the signing of a diplomatic agreement, he argued. Yaalon presented five crucial elements of the "bottom-up" process: Educational Reform: The PA currently teaches Arab children that the entirety of Israel is an illegal colonialist entity, Yaalon said, and denies any historic Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. In addition, the PA teaches Jihad (holy war) against Israel and honors suicide bombers. Changing the PA school system to teach the value of life, not of death, and to accurately portray Jewish history is crucial, he said. Economic Reform: In order to create a viable economy, the PA must strengthen small businesses and create a stable middle class, Yaalon said. Attempts to create a PA economy through international aid have failed due to a corrupt PA leadership that misappropriates funds, and terrorist groups that attempt to keep PA Arabs living in poverty, he said. To avoid the problems posed by corrupt leadership, the world should focus on PA businessmen and support their initiatives. Political Reform: Beyond creating a political entity, the PA must allow for freedom of expression, freedom of the press and protect human rights. Yaalon referred to "the American mistake" of supporting strong dictators over true democratic activists. Activists who seek true democracy and freedom should win encouragement from the West, he said. Legal Reform: The goal should be "One authority, one law, one weapon," Yaalon said, referring to the disarming of rogue terrorist groups and the enforcement of law throughout the PA territories. Security Reform: The PA must begin to truly fight terrorism, Yaalon said. Among other things, the PA must rid itself of the "revolving door" by which terrorists serve only light sentences, and the sentencing of terrorists who murdered Israelis for "harming the public interest" instead of "murder." These things encourage terrorism, he said. The PA must be able to fight terrorism properly on multiple levels, he said, from gathering intelligence information to putting terrorists on trial. No Guarantees There is no guarantee that the "bottom-up" proposal can be put into effect, Yaalon said, because it relies on the Palestinian Authority to take the necessary action. In order to increase the chances that the PA will do what is necessary, Israel must make it clear that the PA has no chance of defeating Israel, he said, or of forcing further Israeli concessions and withdrawals without making concessions of its own. "The Palestinians' extreme violence does not stem from despair over their situation, as the West tends to assume, but rather from hope — hope that the State of Israel will disappear," he said. "Destroying the hope of defeating Israel will encourage new ideas." Maayana Miskin writes for Arutz-7 (www.IsraelNationalNews.com). |
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PALESTINIAN PACT WON'T DETER IRAN
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 26, 2009. |
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This comes from the May 15, 2009 Investor's Business Daily. |
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Middle East: The fashionable notion that a new Palestinian state would help end Islamofascist Iran's nuclear program isn't just a false premise. Such an Israeli concession would only embolden Iran. The paltry economic sanctions that Western nations have agonized over imposing on Iran have not persuaded the mullahs in Tehran to abandon their nuclear weapons ambitions. A new president of the United States praising Iran's ancient culture in a special video message to the Iranian people is not producing results either. Even the Israeli air force's practice run over the Mediterranean last June of a bombing raid of Iran's widely dispersed and heavily defended nuclear facilities had zero effect in getting the regime to cease its uranium enrichment activities. Instead, Tehran responded to the exercises by placing its Shahab-3B ballistic missiles into launch readiness, and proceeded to include among its targets within Israel the Jewish state's nuclear power plant at Dimona, the facility through which Israel developed the bomb in the 1960s. The Iranian missiles can travel nearly 1,300 miles, and Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Mohammad Jafari, at the time stated that Israel "is completely within the range of the Islamic Republic's missiles. Our missile power and capability are such that the Zionist regime — despite all its abilities — cannot confront it." Clearly, even a credible threat of massive force is ineffectual in stopping or slowing Iran, never mind the various and sundry forms of "tough" and not-so-tough diplomacy the free world has practiced in the years since Tehran's nuclear aspirations were exposed. The only language Iran seems to understand is direct force itself. That this is the case should surprise no one who has had his eyes open to the true nature and behavior of the Islamic Revolutionary regime that took power in Iran 30 years ago, during the foreign policy impotence of the Carter administration. Iran's rulers see themselves not as politicians, whose primary interest is the welfare of their nation and its people. They are revolutionary crusaders who act in the name of worldwide Islam. The interests of waging Jihad against those viewed as Islam's enemies — like Israel, the United States and Western Europe — outweigh even the existence of Iran as a consideration, never mind its well-being. "We do not worship Iran; we worship Allah," the Ayatollah Khomeini said in 1979. "I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world." Pair that sentiment with the statement in March from Khomeini's successor, Iran's current supreme leader the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called Israel a "cancerous tumor." Or place it alongside Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous remark that the Jewish state should be "wiped off the map." It all points to an inescapable conclusion: The fanatics who run Iran want Israel destroyed, and they would gladly let their own land "go up in smoke" as a price. Yet, even the Sunni Muslim nations who fear the prospect of a nuclear Shiite Iran are suggesting that a Palestinian state would appease the ayatollahs. Last Thursday, Jordan's Sunni King Abdullah turned the screws while meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning him there could be no peace in the Middle East without a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, unlike its predecessor, is focusing on Israel relenting and establishing a fully independent Palestinian homeland, not keeping the spotlight on Iran's nuclear program as the pre-eminent threat to the region and the world. Consider that Khamenei's reaction to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza was to gloat. He said while it was "short of Palestinian rights and demands, it is however a big victory that shows the inability of the occupier regime" in Jerusalem. Iran will not react to the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel by recognizing Israel — any more than will the Hamas Palestinian terrorists it funds, which Palestinians elected into power. On the contrary, Tehran will view it as a step toward the Islamic conquest of Israel — a fresh sign of Zionist weakness that its nuclear stance helped bring about. As always, appeasement only fans the flames of evil.
Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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OBAMA CALLS FOR DEMILITARIZED ARAB STATE' — A NAIVE AND STUPID IDEA
Posted by Shoshanna Walker, May 26, 2009. |
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And how could he stop them? Boy is he in la la land! This was written by The Jerusalem Post Staff and it appeared May 20, 2009. |
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Amid much speculation over US President Barack Obama's upcoming address to the Muslim world, reports published on Wednesday outlined the details of his Middle East peace plan, which are said to include a demilitarized Palestinian state. The US president's initiative, which was formulated in consultation with Jordan's King Abdullah II during the two leaders' recent meetings at the White House, reportedly does not significantly stray from the pan-Arab peace initiative proposed in 2002. Rather, it bolsters certain details within the Saudi-proposed plan. The Obama-Abdullah plan was put together in response to concerns from both Israel and the US that the Arab plan was too general and intransigent, and according to a report in Wednesday's Yediot Ahronot, will call on Arab countries to take trust-building measures in order to clear the air with Israel. Obama is expected to present the initiative in an address to the Arab and Muslim world from Cairo in three weeks, and set out conditions for a demilitarized Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital, within the next four years. Yediot reported that Obama's vision for an independent, democratic and contiguous Palestinian state would not have its own army and would be forbidden from making military agreements with other states, in order to provide for Israel's security. The matter of borders would be solved with territorial exchanges between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Old City of Jerusalem would be established as an international zone. The initiative would require the Palestinians to give up their claim of a "right of return," according to Yediot, and Europe and the US would arrange compensation for refugees, including foreign passports for those residing abroad. Obama's plan would also promote holding simultaneous talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and Syria and Lebanon. Yediot said that when such talks come to an agreement on Palestinian statehood, diplomatic and economic relations would be established between Israel and Arab states. The report added that in his Cairo address, Obama would reiterate calls for Israel to cease all settlement construction. Reports of the US president's new initiative came days after his meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Washington. During the premier's visit, Obama emphasized his commitment to a two-state solution. Netanyahu reiterated his goal to live side-by-side with the Palestinians, though he did not specifically mention a two-state solution. Contact Shoshanna Walker at rosewalk@concentric.net |
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A WARY ENCOUNTER
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 26, 2009. |
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This was written by Melanie Phillips and it appeared in the Spectator
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In remarks made after his meeting with Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Obama said: I suggested to the Prime Minister that he has an historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure. That means that all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations that they have previously agreed to. Those obligations were outlined in the road map... But the first obligation in the Road Map was laid upon the Palestinians — to dismantle their infrastructure of terror. It was their failure to meet that first obligation, without which the rest of the Road Map could not be implemented, which led to its collapse as a strategy. Yet Obama appears to think that the only obligations which must be met are those which apply to Israel, with the Palestinians apparently getting a free pass. This is of course all of a piece with his belief that Israel is the cause of the Middle East impasse which would be solved by the creation of a state of Palestine. The fact that even now Fatah states explicitly that it won't accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, let alone Hamas repeatedly restating its intention to destroy Israel and kill every Jew, is not, in Obama's mind, the real obstacle to a solution. Not only does Obama not see the creation of 'Hamastan' in the West Bank as an obstacle — he sees instead the refusal to treat Hamas as part of the solution as an obstacle. Accordingly, he presents as the obstacle not the people continuing to wage war but the country that is the victim of that war — which he blames for not agreeing to destroy its own security. The irrationality and injustice of this is manifest on every level. But what cannot be stressed enough is the way both Obama and the 'progressive' legions behind him have made as their rallying cry support for a proposed racist and religiously exclusionary state that denies civil rights for all. Those screaming 'apartheid' at Israel are demanding the establishment of a putative Palestine state which would allow no Jews to live there, let alone enjoy the equal civil and human rights afforded to Arab citizens of Israel. As the former CIA Director James Woolsey is reported to have observed earlier this month: ...the world has a tendency to 'define deviancy down for non-Jews.' As a result, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, never even mention the possibility that Jews should be able to enjoy the same rights and privileges in any future Palestinian polity that Israeli Arabs exercise today in the Jewish state. On all these essential preconditions for a solution that pass the basic test of civilised values, Obama is silent. Quite apart from the injustice of his approach to the Middle East impasse and the irrationality of linking it with the Iran crisis, his policy of 'engagement' with Iran is hardly making him popular in the Arab world. He agreed with Netanyahu that there was a new and more promising mood in the Arab world. But he seems unable to grasp that what's behind that new mood is terror of Iran getting the bomb — and despair at the way the US is resorting to the policy of appeasement. Accordingly, Obama is actually squandering the opportunity to enlist those Arab states in the fight against a common enemy of Iran. As John Hannah writes in the Washington Post: Notably, the administration's approach is increasingly at odds with that of U.S. allies in the Middle East that seek to maximize pressure on Tehran. For the past month, Egypt has mounted a courageous public effort to rally America's Arab friends in opposition to an Iranian campaign of subversion that stretches from Iraq to Morocco. Instead of rushing to the defense of distressed allies, Obama has largely remained silent, instead opting to reiterate his interest in reaching some sort of accommodation with Tehran, the source of the region's problems. This was amplified by this telling exchange at the press conference after his talks with Netanyahu: Q : Thank you, Mr. President. Aren't you concerned that your outstretched hand has been interpreted by extremists, especially Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Meshal, as weakness? And since my colleague already asked about the deadline, if engagement fails, what then, Mr. President? On the face of it, the evidence that has emerged from this meeting between Obama and Netanyahu could not be more stark — as David Horowitz observes — that the Obama administration is set upon a strategy that would effectively throw Israel to the Islamist wolves. The worst fears of Israel's government and friends appear to have been amply confirmed. And yet and yet; notwithstanding all this, sanity might eventually still prevail. A small hope indeed — but it may just happen. Consider. The fact that Obama is making this lethally false linkage between creating a state of Palestine and tackling the problem of Iran should not blind us to the fact that the overriding issue is indeed not Palestine but Iran. That is the issue which will define Obama's presidency. The great question is whether Obama has concluded that, when push comes to shove, America will have no option but to 'live with' a nuclear Iran. My understanding is that, while there are those in his administration for whom the answer is 'yes', there are others for whom the answer is 'no'. In his post-meeting remarks, Obama himself acknowledged the danger a nuclear Iran poses not just to Israel but to America and the whole of the Middle East. Certainly, he thinks 'engagement' can defuse that danger. But what will he do when it becomes apparent that it will not? Obama has already demonstrated that, when brought up sharply against the suicidal consequences of his naivety, he can shift his position. We saw this in recent days by his twin retreats from publishing more pictures of 'enhanced interrogation' in Iraq and from his previous opposition to military tribunals for al Qaeda suspects. He has stated that if Iran hasn't unclenched its fist by — variously — the autumn/end of the year he will introduce 'tough sanctions'. This is not altogether reassuring, both in the vagueness of the timetable, the weakness of any sanctions regime and the fact that he is still giving Iran the greatest gift of all — time — to progress towards its nuclear goal. But it may just be that he really does think in his liberal hubris that making nice with Iran will draw the poison — and when he realises it has not done so, he may not be too keen on becoming the President that allowed Iran to go nuclear on his watch. A further point about Obama is this. He is a man of the left. The left is not merely Manichean, but insulates itself from any possibility of heresy by surrounding itself only by those with whom it agrees. It is therefore rarely forced to follow through its reasoning and thus see its patent falsehoods and idiocies exposed. From his history and past associations, it's a fair bet that Obama has thus never had his assumptions properly challenged by exposure to rationality and evidence. In recent years, Israel has been led by politicians who were either incapable, for various reasons, of properly articulating that rationality or themselves subscribed to many of the false premises of post-modern, post-moral, ahistorical thinking that characterises 'progressive' opinion in the west. Netanyahu breaks that mould. By simply talking to him, Obama may have heard for the first time an argument that is intellectually capable of puncturing at least one or two of his illusions. We have no way of knowing whether any of that took place; or, if it did, whether it had any significant effect at all. No-one should take too much notice of the public show of relaxation and relative harmony with which this meeting was subsequently spun. Nor should we believe the counter-spin that Netanyahu returned to Israel a grimmer and wiser man. He knew the score about Obama well before he set out on this trip; and he would indeed be a fool if he were not therefore playing a carefully thought-through diplomatic and strategic game. Let's hope he is; because if ideologue Obama does indeed turn out to stifle pragmatic Obama over the issue of Iran, Israel really will be on its own. Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com |
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A DISCUSSION OF SHAVOUT-TORAH BEFORE MOUNT SINAI
Posted by Janet Lehr, May 26, 2009. |
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This study was written by Hillel ben David (Greg Killian)
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In this paper I would like to examine the existence of the Torah before it was presented to Israel, by Moses, on Mount Sinai. There are many who believe that the Torah is to be obeyed only by the Jews. If there is clear evidence that the Torah was observed and taught before Mount Sinai and before there were Jews, then this should end the matter. The Midrash asserts that although they lived long before the Torah was given to us at Mount Sinai, our forefathers kept all the mitzvot (Divine commandments) that the Torah would command their descendants in the future. This idea is reiterated by Chazal in many other places. The patriarchs taught these mitzvot to their children, the twelve tribes. They, in turn, also kept all of the mitzvot of the Torah. And not only were our forefathers mindful of future biblical commands, they even heeded future rabbinic ordinances. HaShem revealed to our forefathers the mitzvot that he was going to give to the Jews at a later time. The forefathers, out of their profound love to do the will of HaShem, voluntarily accepted upon themselves to perform these mitzvot "ahead of schedule." It is an accepted principle that even if one is not subject to a given commandment, it is nevertheless considered meritorious for him to observe that mitzvah. He is even rewarded for doing so. The Hebrew word for commands is mitzvot (plural). The word mitzvot means more than commands, it also carries the meaning of good deeds. In other words, when we obey the mitzvot we are performing the work of HaShem, which, by definition, is always a good deed. So lets begin our study of the mitzvot that our forefathers kept. I would like to work backwards from Mount Sinai. Lets start by establishing when the Torah was given on Mount Sinai: Shemot (Exodus) 19:1-17 In the third month after the Israelites left Egypt — on the very day — they came to the Desert of Sinai. After they set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. Then Moses went up to God, and HaShem called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites." So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words HaShem had commanded him to speak. The people all responded together, "We will do everything HaShem has said." So Moses brought their answer back to HaShem. HaShem said to Moses, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you." Then Moses told HaShem what the people had said. And HaShem said to Moses, "Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. Have them wash their clothes And be ready by the third day, because on that day HaShem will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. Put limits for the people around the mountain and tell them, 'Be careful that you do not go up the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death. He shall surely be stoned or shot with arrows; not a hand is to be laid on him. Whether man or animal, he shall not be permitted to live.' Only when the ram's horn sounds a long blast may they go up to the mountain." After Moses had gone down the mountain to the people, he consecrated them, and they washed their clothes. Then he said to the people, "Prepare yourselves for the third day. Abstain from sexual relations." On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. The Torah was given on the sixth day of the third month, the month of Sivan. We can discern this by counting the days, in the above passage, from the first day of the third month, Sivan one. Sivan six is exactly fifty days after Passover. Passover occurs on the fifteenth day of the first month, the month of Nisan. Because the Torah was given fifty days after Passover, Sivan six is one of the Lord's feasts, and is known in Hebrew as Hag Shavuot, and in Greek as Pentecost. Nisan is the first month, Iyar is the second month, and Sivan is the third month. Moses taught HaShem's laws and decrees days before the Torah was give on Mount Sinai: Shemot (Exodus) 18:13-16 The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said, "What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?" Moses answered him, "Because the people come to me to seek God's will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God's decrees and laws." Moses is telling the people about HaShem's laws and decrees before the written Torah is given. The written Torah will be given in Exodus chapter 20, in a few days from this passage. One of the mitzvot that our forefathers kept before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai was the mitzva of Shabbat: Shemot (Exodus) 16:1-30 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by HaShem's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death." Then HaShem said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days." So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you will know that it was HaShem who brought you out of Egypt, And in the morning you will see the glory of HaShem, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?" Moses also said, "You will know that it was HaShem when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against HaShem." Then Moses told Aaron, "Say to the entire Israelite community, 'Come before HaShem, for he has heard your grumbling.'" While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of HaShem appearing in the cloud. HaShem said to Moses, "I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, 'At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am HaShem your God.'" That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, "It is the bread HaShem has given you to eat. This is what HaShem has commanded: 'Each one is to gather as much as he needs. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.'" The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. And when they measured it by the omer, he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little. Each one gathered as much as he needed. Then Moses said to them, "No one is to keep any of it until morning." However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them. Each morning everyone gathered as much as he needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much — two omers for each person — and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He said to them, "This is what HaShem commanded: 'Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to HaShem. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.'" So they saved it until morning, as Moses commanded, and it did not stink or get maggots in it. "Eat it today," Moses said, "because today is a Sabbath to HaShem. You will not find any of it on the ground today. Six days you are to gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any." Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. Then HaShem said to Moses, "How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? Bear in mind that HaShem has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where he is on the seventh day; no one is to go out." So the people rested on the seventh day. On the sixteenth day of Iyar, the second month, HaShem began sending His people the bread from heaven. As part of His provision, HaShem commands His people to rest on the Sabbath, and not to collect the manna. This Sabbath mitzva was given more than two weeks before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai. Three weeks before the manna was given with the mitzva of Sabbath, another interesting incident occurred: Shemot (Exodus) 15:22-26 Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.) So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, "What are we to drink?" Then Moses cried out to HaShem, and HaShem showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet. There HaShem made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them. He said, "If you listen carefully to the voice of HaShem your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to His commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am HaShem, who heals you." The crossing of the Red Sea took place on Nisan twenty-one, seven days after Passover. Again we see HaShem giving His people laws and decrees before the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. This event took place forty-two days before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai. Before the events at Marah, HaShem gave a very special mitzva to His firstborn, His people. HaShem gave His people the mitzva of Passover: Shemot (Exodus) 12:1-12 HaShem said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, "This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the people of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or cooked in water, but roast it over the fire — head, legs and inner parts. Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it. This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is HaShem's Passover. "On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn — both men and animals — and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am HaShem. We don't know the exact day that this mitzva was given, but we know that it took place in Nisan some time before the tenth day of the month. This is more than fifty-five days before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai. Joseph demonstrated that he knew and obeyed the Torah more than two hundred years before it was given to Moses: Bereshit (Genesis) 39:7-9 And after a while his master's wife took notice of Joseph and said, "Come to bed with me!" But he refused. "With me in charge," he told her, "my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?" Since sin is defined as disobedience to the Torah, we know that Joseph and Potiphar's wife were both aware that adultery was forbidden; and this was known more that two hundred years before the Torah was given to Moses. More than two hundred years before the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, Judah was obeying a part of that Torah, notice: Bereshit (Genesis) 38:6-10 Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in HaShem's sight; so HaShem put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, "Lie with your brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in HaShem's sight; so he put him to death also. How did Judah know it was Onan's duty to lie with his brother's wife to produce offspring? Who taught him this portion of the Torah? Notice the words that the Torah uses to describe this command: Devarim (Deuteronomy) 25:5-6 If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. So, in a couple of hundred years, from Judah's time, the Torah will use Judah's word duty to describe what Judah asked Onan to do. Notice also, in Bereshit (Genesis) 38:6-10, that what Onan did was wicked in the HaShem's sight, so He killed Onan. This would not be very fair if Onan did not already know that it was wicked for him to do such a thing. Thus we see that HaShem had revealed His Torah to Judah and to Onan more than two hundred years before the Torah was revealed to Moses. Isaac knew the Torah that was given to Moses more than two hundred years before Moses. We see this in his command to his son Jacob: Bereshit (Genesis) 28:1 So Isaac called for Jacob and blessed him and commanded him: "Do not marry a Canaanite woman. Moses quoted HaShem when he gave a similar command, some two hundred years later: Shemot (Exodus) 34:14-16 Do not worship any other god, for HaShem, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. "Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same. Thus we see that Isaac had Torah insight more than two hundred years before the Torah was given. More than two hundred years before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai, the following event was recorded in scripture: Bereshit (Genesis) 26:2-6 HaShem appeared to Isaac and said, "Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live. Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you. For to you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, Because Abraham obeyed me and kept my requirements, my commands, my decrees and my laws." So Isaac stayed in Gerar. More than two hundred years before Sinai, Abraham is obeying all of HaShem's requirements, commands, decrees and laws. This is the first time we see mitzvot being obeyed when it is not apparent when HaShem revealed His mitzvot. We do not know whether He made a special revelation to Abraham, or whether Abraham was taught by someone else. The Talmud also noticed that Abraham kept the whole Torah: Yoma 28b Rab said: Our father Abraham kept the whole Torah, as it is said: Because that Abraham hearkened to My voice [kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws]. R. Shimi b. Hiyya said to Rab: Say, perhaps, that this refers to the seven laws? — Surely there was also that of circumcision! Then say that it refers to the seven laws and circumcision [and not to the whole Torah]? — If that were so, why does Scripture say: 'My commandments and My laws'? The Talmud teaches that Avraham kept the entire Torah before it was given to the Jewish People at Sinai. The Midrash says that Isaac kept the laws of shchitah (kosher slaughtering), and Yaakov the laws of Shabbat, before the giving of Torah at Sinai. Truthfully, Isaac and Yaakov kept all of Torah, just as Avraham did. Why, then, is only Avraham mentioned as having kept all 613 mitzvot? Torah's goal is to create a world of chesed, a world of giving and of kindness. Avraham's defining character trait was the same: loving-kindness (chesed). Things being so, Avraham had an innate connection to Torah. Avraham, by his nature, was closer, more similar, to the laws of Torah than were the other Patriarchs. Avraham, specifically, was bound to Torah, in a way that left him alike one commanded to keep all of Torah. HaShem appreciates more a mitzva accomplished by a person commanded to fulfill that mitzva, than when accomplished by someone not so instructed. [The reason HaShem instructs the person that He does, is because He more desires that person's doing it!] Thus, Avraham's observance of Torah was of more significance than its being kept by Isaac or Yaakov. And thus: Avraham, specifically, is mentioned as having kept all of Torah! Nearly four hundred years before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai, Lot was judging the inhabitants of Sodom for not obeying it: Bereshit (Genesis) 13:13 Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the HaShem. In addition, Avraham and Lot both kept Passover! Notice the unleavened bread in the following passage: Bereshit (Genesis) 19:2-7 "My lords," he said, "please turn aside to your servant's house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning." "No," they answered, "we will spend the night in the square." But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom — both young and old — surrounded the house. They called to Lot, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them." Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him And said, "No, my friends. Don't do this wicked thing. How could Lot say that sodomy was wicked unless he knew that HaShem had commanded the people not to commit sodomy? How could HaShem say that the men of Sodom were sinning unless the standard for sin had already been laid down? It is therefore apparent that the Torah was known before it was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Abimelech also knew the Torah before it was given: Bereshit (Genesis) 20:3-7 But God came to Abimelech in a dream one night and said to him, "You are as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman." Now Abimelech had not gone near her, so he said, "Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation? Did he not say to me, 'She is my sister,' and didn't she also say, 'He is my brother'? I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands." Then God said to him in the dream, "Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her. Now return the man's wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die." HaShem could not accuse Abimelech of sinning unless he knew the Torah which defines sin. He also obviously realized that the sin, in this case, was the sin of sleeping with another man's wife, that is adultery. Abimelech lived more than three hundred years before the Torah was given to Moses. This same logic also applies to the Amorites: Bereshit (Genesis) 15:12-16 As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then HaShem said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." It would not be fair for HaShem to judge and punish the Amorites for sin unless they had already been told the requirements of the Torah. We see, again, that the Torah was known more than four hundred years before it was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. After the flood, Noah demonstrated knowledge of Torah, and obedience to it: Bereshit (Genesis) 8:18-21 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds — everything that moves on the earth — came out of the ark, one kind after another. Then Noah built an altar to HaShem and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. HaShem smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. HaShem will command His people to bring burnt offerings, when He gives His Torah to Moses in about a thousand years, from the days of Noah. Yet, a thousand years before the Torah was given, Noah is obeying it! Notice that Noah even knows about the requirement to offer clean animals. This is another requirement which the Torah will spell out in a thousand years. A hundred years before the flood and more than a thousand years before the Torah was given, HaShem was grieved because men were greatly disobeying the Torah: Bereshit (Genesis) 6:5-8 HaShem saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. HaShem was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So HaShem said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth — men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air — for I am grieved that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of HaShem. Evil and wickedness have no meaning unless HaShem had already revealed His Torah to the people. Thus, we know that the Torah was known more than fifteen hundred years before it was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. At the dawn of time, Cain and Abel demonstrated that HaShem had clearly communicated the Torah's sacrificial requirements: Bereshit (Genesis) 4:1-7 Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, "With the help of HaShem I have brought forth a man." Later she gave birth to his brother Abel. Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to HaShem. But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. HaShem looked with favor on Abel and his offering, But on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then HaShem said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." Here we see several parts of the Torah revealed. We see that both Cain and Abel knew that they were to bring offerings to HaShem. We also see that Cain knew that his offering was not correct because HaShem clearly indicated this. We also see that sin is an understood concept in the days of Cain and Abel. Remember the definition of sin: Yochanan (John) 3:4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. The sacrifice that Abel brought, corresponds with what the Torah will command as the proper sacrifice for Passover! This also gives us a clue as to what was wrong with Cain's sacrifice: It was brought one day too early. Firstfruits are to be brought, beginning the day AFTER Passover. Here, at the dawn of time, we see that the Torah was being obeyed. The Torah will not be given to Moses for more than two thousand years. Since there were no Jews before Jacob, then we can see that we have several examples of the Torah being understood and obeyed, before there were any Jews. To put it another way: Cain, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Lot, and Isaac were Gentiles who obeyed the Torah before it was given to God's people on Mount Sinai. If Gentiles obeyed the Torah before it was given on Mount Sinai, how much more should they obey this same Torah, since it has been written?
Janet Lehr is editor/publisher of a daily e-mail called "Israel Lives." She can be contacted at janetlehr@israellives.com |
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KENYAN MAU MAU FOR "DISPROPORTIONATE"
Posted by Frank Adam, May 26, 2009. |
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In 1952 — 64 [Kenyan independence] the British fought a particularly nasty war with MAU MAU in which they hanged a 1000 — more than in any other colonial disengagement from empire campaign after 1945 if not before. This is in contrast to the 100+ hanged in the 36-39 Arab revolt in Palestine and none hanged by Israel. In operations in the field the MAU MAU killed 32 white settlers and another 42 or thereabouts white soldiers and officials, and about 600+ local black police and soldiers. This in contrast to the usual figure for 11 000 blacks MAU MAU killed by British forces; and that British forces Palestine recovered from the battlefield a 1000+ Arab corpses during the Arab rebellion of 36-39. I think these figures will be very useful to throw in question form at at any pompous British journalist or diplomat "carrying on" about "disproportionate" use of violence by Israel in Gaza or anywhere else. Yours,
Contact Frank Adam at frrankadam@aol.com |
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NORTH KOREA AND IRAN TELL OBAMA TO GET BENT
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 26, 2009. |
| This was posted by Freedom Fighters on the Joshua Pundit website. |
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Ahh, hope n'change...it's just not working so well. North Korea carried out a major nuclear test this morning at its Mount Mohyang test site, the site of North Korea's 2006 nuclear test. Today's test showed a major progression in North Korea's nuclear capabilities. According to the seismic reports, the explosion created a 4.7 magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale, which means that energy yield is 10 to 20 kilotons, essentially equivalent to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. North Korea also test-fired three short-range, ground-to-air missiles later Monday from the same site where it launched a rocket last month that flew over Japan. President Obama was quick to assume full responsibility for the launch and acknowledged that US non-reaction to North Korea's prior missile launch was a factor in today's nuclear test. Okay, I may have made that last sentence up. Here's what the president actually said: President Barack Obama, in a statement, called the action a "matter of grave concern to all nations" and said North Korea was undermining stability in northeast Asia. "It will not find international acceptance unless it abandons its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery," he said. Actually, I think the North Korean regime sees nukes as a definite path to international acceptance, at least in terms of getting what they want. It's gotten them pretty far up to now, and seeing who's in the White House, there's no reason for them to fear any significant consequences in continuing along the same path. They've blatantly lied and played the West and especially the US for fools for quite some time now, and it's worked pretty well. And as their expertise and skill in creating nuclear weapons increases, they'll find even more ready customers to buy what they have to sell then they have already, and most of them are not going to be people we're comfortable with having nukes in their hands. The chief irony in all this is that the current occupant of the White House has made so many pious noises about the dangers of nuclear proliferation,yet he ignores the very real danger posed by the emerging nuclear capabilities of Iran and North Korea. As a matter of fact, his chief efforts along this line have been in cutting funds for US missile defense to the bone against the advice of his own secretary of defense. 
Almost on cue, Iran's Ahmadinejad decided to take a slap at Obama's uncleched fist and let him and the West know that he rejected the latest Western proposal to "freeze" its nuclear weapons development in exchange for no further sanctions. He also ruled out any talks on Iran's nuclear program with the US or the other major powers, saying that as far as he was concerned it was a dead issue: Ahmadinejad proposed a debate with Obama at the United Nations in New York "regarding the roots of world problems" but he made clear Tehran would not bow to pressure on the nuclear issue. "Our talks (with major powers) will only be in the framework of cooperation for managing global issues and nothing else. We have clearly announced this," Ahmadinejad said. "The nuclear issue is a finished issue for us," he told a news conference. "From now on we will continue our path in the framework of the (U.N. nuclear watchdog) agency." Ahmadinejad, of course is speaking for the Ayatollah Khamanei, who will continue to call the shots in Iran no matter who wins Iran's June 'election'. I can't help but wonder if Kim Jong-Il and Ahmadinejad deliberately set this up between them,just for giggles. In reality, aside from horsetrading nuclear and missile technology, Iran and North Korea have learned from each other's experience. The US, especially with Obama in the White House is unlikely to do anything meaningful to stop them from obtaining nuclear weapons, and will simply keep meaniongless diplo-speak initiatives churning until it's simply too late to do anything. Obama's meaningless statements about revisiting Iran's nuclear weapons program in six months or so after talking with Israel's Benyamin Netanyahu and hearing his concerns about an existential threat to an ally are a prime example. When serious consequences arise from this, I have no doubt that the president will make suitable remarks in his signature baritone, while swinging his head back and forth like a metronome to scan his stereo teleprompters.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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HOW OUR STATE DEPARTMENT PROMOTES RADICAL ISLAM IN AMERICA
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 26, 2009. |
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This was posted by Freedom Fighters on the Joshua Pundit website. |
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Not only does our government refuse to admit that we're in a war with Islamism, they actually promote it as official policy. The Investigative Project on Terrorism has the facts on how the US State Department is working to promote Islamism in America, under the guise of 'Muslim outreach'. With the United States battling Islamist extremists, making America's case to Muslims around the world has never been more of a priority for policymakers. Unfortunately, the State Department continues to take a counterproductive approach: serving as a veritable infomercial promoting Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) while giving the back of the hand to the very anti-jihadist Muslims that Washington should be cultivating. The latest example is a State Department booklet issued in March titled "Being Muslim in America." Do a search on JoshuaPundit for any one of these organizations, and you will find that they are mainly wahabi and Muslim Brotherhood Islamist fronts, mostly Saudi funded. They are organs of the so-called 'stealth jihad' that seeks to radicalize American Muslims while pushing for sharia law and the ultimate Islamization of the country. The booklet in question, entitled "Muslim In America" is designed for US Diplomatic personnel to hand out to Muslims overseas ostensibly to show that the US is a Muslim friendly country, sensitive to Muslim values. Instead, it touts the values of Islamists like the ones mentioned above: Unfortunately, the substance of the booklet is so flawed that it could undermine the struggle against this form of radicalism. It perpetuates the mythology that American Muslims are united in the belief that law enforcement and the public are willing to flout innocent Muslims' civil rights post-September 11, describing American Muslim reactions to the attacks as follows: Then: "Sadly, suspicions of this kind are not uncommon — in the United States or in other nations — during wartime or when outside attack is feared. But 2008 is not 2002, when fears and suspicions were at their height. Context is also important: Every significant immigrant group has in the United States faced, and overcame, a degree of discrimination and resentment." The message being sent overseas, of course is that America is a willing host to the parasitical growth of Islamism — not the message that Muslims are welcome in America if they adhere to our norms. In a triumphalist honor-shame culture like Islam, that message is extremely dangerous and roughly equivalent to hanging a prominent sign in front of your house detailing the valuables inside and the hours the house is empty. The book makes absolutely no mention of how moderate Muslims practice their faith while still abiding by our laws and traditions, and cites no organizations that embrace that viewpoint. Every example is one of the Muslim Brotherhood wahabi spinoffs cited above. What this does, of course is to reinforce the message of weakness and appeasement coming out of the White House. I don't doubt that this message is being received by both our enemies and our friends quite clearly.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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THE GALL OF THE PALM BEACH POST EDITOR
Posted by Jerome S. Kauman, May 26, 2009. |
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The editor of the Palm Beach Post, May 17, 2009, had the gall to give several orders, via Barack Obama, to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: ... "Barack Obama, who enjoys high approval ratings, must tell Mr. Netanyahu that Netanyahu's political weakness (the editor's estimation) is just one of the "excuses" Obama will reject for Netanyahu not attempting to negotiate a political deal with the Palestinians."My unpublished (naturally) Letter to the Editor is below. |
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"As to Barack Obama Demanding "Excuses" from the Sovereign Nation of Israel"
The Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, does not have to give Barack Obama any "excuses" for not immediately making a so-called "peace" deal with the Palestinian Arabs nor for doing anything else that he and the people of Israel think is not in their best interests, especially when their very survival is at stake. Mr. Netanyahu does not "owe" Mr. Obama another chance to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. Achmadinejad constantly threatens a nuclear attack to eliminate the Jews and the State of Israel. The Jews and the entire world, that ignored Hitler's Mein Kampf, better take him at his word. Mr. Obama's naive approach and sweet talk to the Arab nations, the United Nations, the powerless European Union and the vague promises of the Russians and the Chinese with diametrically opposed objectives to ours, will result in exactly nothing. The farce of unsuccessful nuclear negotiations in North Korea is simply repeating itself. Our "strengthening" Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the expense of Hamas is another farce. Hamas overwhelmingly defeated Abbas in the elections in Gaza and turned it into a launching pad for thousands of rockets into the heart of Israel. Furthermore, if open elections were held today, Hamas would take over the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and do exactly the same thing, five minutes from the heart of Israel. As to the editor's criticism of the Israeli settlements which, by the way, are built only on land that was supposed to have been the Jewish homeland in the first place — since the League of Nations Mandate of 1917: There were no settlements when Israel was founded on a miniscule small strip of land along the Mediterranean coast in 1948. Nevertheless, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon immediately waged all-out war to eliminate that tiny strip. Attempted elimination of the settlements with near 300,000 Israelis living productive lives, is just another Arab Trojan horse. Perhaps the editor should be telling Obama he should be obtaining "excuses" from Ahmadinejad of Iran and Kim Jong-ll of North Korea or the Russians and the Chinese instead of attempting to weaken the only democracy and true ally we have in the entire Middle East. Jerome S. Kaufman is National Secretary of the Zionist Organization of America and hosts the Israel Commentary website (http://www.israel-commentary.org). |
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THE RETURN OF PRESIDENT OBAMA TO THE ISLAMIC FAITH OF HIS FATHER
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 26, 2009. |
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Some will say President Obama never left, despite his seemingly temporary adopting the Christian faith useful in Chicago politics. It appears that President Obama, in his public re-connection to Islam or, as he calls it, "outreach" can be construed to fulfill the pledge of Islamic "Jihadists" (warriors for Islam) to turn all America over to the Islamic faith. When astronauts or astrophysicists study the cosmos, looking for invisible black holes which cannot be seen, even with the most powerful telescopes, they look for other clues. Those clues are more solid objects, like stars, planets — even light being drawn into this black hole by its irresistible gravitational forces. The behavior of these solid objects can be studied, especially when they behave erratically. If one looks, even casually, at the people (objects) who Obama has selected to be drawn into his force field, those are the clues which can tell you there is a seemingly "black hole" in the Washington cosmos. (I'm not speaking of personal coloring.) For example: Look at the solid crowd of Arabists swirling around Obama, leaving little doubt Obama is the center of a pro-Islamic — anti-Israel/Jewish vortex. Granted, the charismatic Obama, with his charming smile and his come-hither speeches that flow like warm chocolate, makes it hard to see his invisible gravitational force. His magnetic force is so strong that, even when the light of truth manages to escape, most of the people observing still ignore the reality of the danger he poses. We delude ourselves that his forceful, smooth speeches are solutions — rather than the emptiness they offer. If you have any doubt that Obama has returned to the Muslim Islamic faith of his father, look at what he doing as he re-connects with some of the most evil terrorist Islamic, anti-America/anti-Israel nations on the Planet Earth. But first, he needed to select a cabal of Arabists to do his bidding. Some are called appointees, while others are called advisors but all are Arabists and virulently anti-Israel — even (perhaps especially) the Jews among them. We observe such people as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III, Baker's former Jew-boys: Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, Daniel Kurtzer with Martin Indyk circling the group. We watch Susan Rice, appointed to the post of America's ambassador to the United Nations, well-known for her earlier recommendations to use force against Israel. Obama made General James Jones his National Security Advisor (who led Melanie Phillips to use the old phrase: "Obama prepares to throw Israel under the bus". (What does that mean as a practical matter? Is Obama to be Israel's High Executioner?) Rahm Emanuel is Obama's Chief of Staff (an Israeli whose father fought in Israel's 1948 War of Independence) but Rahm is now very anti-Israel — or at the very least pro-Arab adopting Obama's doctrine. In his run for President, Obama had Syrian-born Tony Rezko assisting his campaign funding but, he is temporarily out-of-the-loop and sitting in prison for financial misdemeanors. We have yet to hear about the financial assistance to Obama in full through the Justice Department. All had a well-defined history of being pro-Muslim Arabs and virulently against the Jewish State. Needless, to say, the U.S. State Department has acquired the confirmed reputations of being the most dedicated anti-Israel "Shadow Government" since Israel was partitioned over the State Department's objections. One might say the U.S. State Department is like another satellite nation of the Muslim block of 57 Muslim countries (only 22 of which are also Arab). Note! I recommend that you obtain the May issue of THE OUTPOST by AFSI (Americans For a Safe Israel) to get a more complete description of President Obama's inner circle. One might ask the questions: Is Obama a selected plant to alter America's democracy and its support for an ally who actually fights Islamic Terror? Under Obama and his scurrilous cabal, Americans are losing their precious freedoms daily. *** Something else has just come up. In the Chicago Tribune of May 24th, there's a column by Josh Meyer, entitled "FBI Role In Fighting Terrorism To Expand". If the FBI is actually allowed to fight Terrorism, so much the better. However, in the past the FBI was under excessive influence from the Arabist State Department. Woe unto the FBI agent who began to seriously track radical "sleeper" Muslim Terrorists in the U.S. If they didn't back off, they were soon assigned a post to nowhere Nebraska. Clearly, the CIA is to be reduced in purpose and efficiency, particularly when it comes to harshly dealing with the Arab-Muslim Terrorists who plan to target American interests and America herself. Why is President Obama erecting a shield for Global Islamic Terrorism while claiming he is going to do a better job than the CIA? Will the sleeper Islamic cells in the U.S. and suspicious Muslim "Jihadists" be mostly un-investigated under Obama's ideology of reaching out to Muslim "Jihadists" nations well known as Terrorists and enemies of the U.S. (because they so proclaim themselves to be). Obama appointed Leon Panetta as Director of the CIA. Is he supposed to now roll over and play dumb to the Obama FBI ploy? Does Obama and his crowd of Arabist consider the CIA an impediment and, therefore, expendable? Is the "New" FBI to be a covert policeman — not so much against Muslim Terrorists but, as a friendly organization to protect Muslims in America? That would mean suppressing investigations with the State Department and Obama's Arabist cabal overseeing the program. That would also mean threatening any TV or radio news channel, any newspaper, any commentator who speaks out against Muslim extremism to include Obama's frequent apologies for America so Muslim Arab "Jihadists" will 'like' and forgive us white Judeo-Christian folks. IF the 'sleeper' Muslims allowed into the U.S. by the Arabist State Department happens to blow up an American city or release bio-agents, who will Obama then blame? Will he fall back on the age old excuse for government failure and to re-direct the anger of the American people against his passive appeasement doctrine and blame the Jews of Israel — and America? He has put Israel into the position of either attacking Iran (which Obama refuses to do) or waiting for a nuclear explosion over Tel Aviv. Then he could absolve himself of blame as the Muslim Islamists continue their attack against non-Muslim governments all over the world, including and especially America. So, President Obama, who are you really? Is it merely bad judgement, naiveté, a fellow traveler of Islamic ideology or are you a 'sleeper' yourself, now come awake as the infamous Manchurian Candidate in a movie by the same name? Let us hope this speculation is nothing more than that! Perhaps the reality that Muslim "Jihadists" cannot be appeased, actually grow stronger if imprisoned where they convert other inmates to Islam and Terrorism. Will Obama abandon his father's Islamic faith and start protecting America and her Judeo-Christian heritage? This below is entitled "Obama Prepares To Throw Israel Under The Bus" and was written by Melanie Phillips. It appeared May 6, 2009 in The Spectator www.Spectator.Co.Uk. |
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As predicted here repeatedly — Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus, and he's getting American Jews to do his dirty work for him. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly told the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Sunday that efforts to stop Iran hinged on peace talks with the Palestinians. General James Jones, National Security Adviser to Obama, reportedly told a European foreign minister a week ago that unlike the Bush administration, Obama will be 'forceful' with Israel. Ha'aretz reports: Jones is quoted in the telegram as saying that the United States, European Union and moderate Arab states must redefine 'a satisfactory endgame solution.' The U.S. national security adviser did not mention Israel as party to these consultations. Of course not. If you are going to throw a country under the bus, you don't invite it to discuss the manner of its destruction with the assassins who are co-ordinating the crime. As I said here months ago, the appointment of Jones and the elevation of his post of National Security Adviser at the expense of the Secretary of State was all part of the strategy to centralise power in the hands of those who want to do Israel harm. Yesterday Vice-President Joe Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry turned the thumbscrews tighter, telling Israel to stop building more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow Palestinians freedom of movement. This is all not only evil but exceptionally stupid. The idea that a Palestine state will help build a coalition against Iran is demonstrably absurd. The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran. The idea that if a Palestine state comes into being it will be easier to handle Iran is the opposite of the case: a Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense that it will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel's security is ludicrous. It is of course, by any sane standard, quite fantastic that America is behaving as if it is Israel which is holding up a peace settlement when Israel has made concession after concession — giving up Sinai, giving up Gaza, offering all the territories to the Arabs in return for peace in 1967, offering more than 90 per cent of them ditto in 2000, ditto again to Mahmoud Abbas in the past year — only to be attacked in return by a Palestinian terrorist entity, backed in its continued aggression, let us not forget, by the countries of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has made no concessions at all and is not being pressured to do so. It is not the aggressor here but the victim of aggression that America is now choosing to beat up. In any sane world, one might think the Americans would be piling the pressure on the Palestinians to renounce their genocidal ambitions against Israel, to stop teaching and training their children to hate and kill Jews, to adhere to the primary requirement in the Road Map that they must dismantle their infrastructure of violence as the first step in the peace process; one might think, indeed, that they would view Mahmoud Abbas's repeated statements that the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state to be the main impediment to peace. But no. The repeated professions that America will never jeopardise Israel's security are stomach churning when Obama is actually blaming Israel for measures it has taken to safeguard its security — the settlements were always first and foremost a security measure, and the travel restrictions are there solely to prevent more Israelis being murdered — and trying to force it to abandon them. Today comes further news that Obama will also try to force Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would force it to dismantle its nuclear arsenal — which it only has as a last ditch insurance against the attempt to annihilate it to which more than a billion Arabs and Muslims remain pledged. Of course Obama doesn't care that Hamas would run any Palestinian state. Of course he doesn't care that Israel would be unable to defend itself against such a terrorist state. Because he regards Israel as at best totally expendable, and at worst as a running sore on the world's body politic that has to be purged altogether (see this bleak assessment by Sultan Knish). His administration is proceeding on the entirely false analysis that a state of Palestine is the solution to the Middle East impasse and the route to peace in the region. What that state will look like or do is something to which at best the administration's collective mind is shut and at worst makes it a potential cynical accomplice to the unconscionable. So Israel is to be forced out of the West Bank. Far from building a coalition against Iran, Obama is thus doing Iran's work for it. None of this, however, should come as the slightest surprise to anyone who paid any attention to Obama's background, associations and friendships before he became President and to the cabal of Israel-bashers, appeasers and Jew-haters he appointed to his administration, with a few useful idiots thrown in for plausible deniability. Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America's elite. But the ordinary American people are a different matter. They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and America's Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk. This is shaping up to be the biggest crisis in relations between Israel and America since the foundation of Israel six decades ago. Those who hate Israel and the Jews will be gloating. This after all is precisely what they hoped Obama would do. To any decent person looking on aghast, this is where the moral sickness of the west reaches the critical care ward. * An earlier version of this post linked to a story in the Jerusalem Post which said an AIPAC delegation to Congress was asking it to lobby for a two-state solution. This story appears to have been wrong. ** Further update: It now appears from this story and this that the AIPAC position may be more ambiguous still.
Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org |
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DO YOU BELIEVE UN HEAD, BAN?; WHAT IS THE U.S. NATIONAL INTEREST?
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 26, 2009. |
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DOES TONY BLAIR RUN ISRAEL? PM Netanyahu withheld money from the P.A., lest it finance terrorism against Israel. He had criticized his predecessor for releasing funds to the P.A.. Tony Blair, Quartet envoy, appealed to Netanyahu. Next we know,
Netanyahu released about $13 million to Gaza banks, to save the Gaza
banking system. His excuse is that it isn't much and it is sales tax
funds that Israel collects for the P.A.
Netanyahu's hopes to build up the P.A. economy, to under-gird peace efforts. His alternative is to let the Gaza banking system collapse, so as to weaken an unrelenting enemy with whom peace cannot be made. He would be criticized by appeasement-minded Westerners, but they always criticize Israel. Meanwhile, Hamas would have less means for making war. Arabs might move away faster. If enough do, peace becomes likelier. For the danger of financing the P.A.:
ISRAELI PROFESSOR SMEARS ISRAEL ON AL-JAZEERA TV Bar-Ilan sociology Prof. Ornha Sasson-Levy claimed on al-Jazeera TV that Israeli troops who fought in Gaza boast on their tee-shirts of killing pregnant women. They troops were not seen in Gaza, or before combat, or anywhere, wearing them. Prof. Sasson-Levy did not interview Gaza veterans to find out whether they wore them and what it means to them. What is known is that Arabs made them. Perhaps they set the IDF up for the smear. Probably those tee-shirts are teenaged-soldiers' idea of humor. The professor used the existence of such shirts as an excuse to take it seriously. She is in the habit of smearing the IDF (Prof. Steven Plaut, 5/7). ISRAELI LEFT ACCUSES CRITICS OF MCCARTHYISM Israeli leftists criticize their ideological foes, but when their critics debunk then, the leftists cry "McCarthyism." Actually, the accusation is McCarthyism. It is an attempt to squelch discussion, by moral intimidation (Prof. Steven Plaut, 5/7). DO YOU BELIEVE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL BAN? Israel's Pres. Peres chastised Ban for inviting Iran's Pres. Ahmadinejad to speak on human rights, for his speech promoted genocide. Ban said he did not realize Ahmadinejad would speak like that (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/7). Ahmadinejad often speaks like that. How could Ban be surprised? WHAT IS THE U.S. NATIONAL INTEREST? An Israeli Likud politician, Moshe Feiglin, sentimentally urged PM Netanyahu to demand the release of Jonathan Pollard, even if he can't get other agreements with Pres. Obama, due to conflicting national interests. I agree with his appeal to Netanyahu, but not with his notion of "national interest." He confuses national interest with national policy. Obama's policy is to appease Islam. That would destroy our ally, Israel, facilitate jihad, and get U.S. decimated by nuclear weapons. That is not in the American national interest. U.S. policy often is not. Our leaders are not particularly knowledgeable or thoughtful, if they even are experienced. The U.S. and Israel have the same national interest — survival from jihad. Mr. Feiglin unwittingly plays into the hands of those who accuse U.S. Jews of dual loyalty. There cannot be dual loyalty when both countries have the same national interest. I SHOCK BUT PROVE My dinner guest is a fine person. Like most educated people, he specializes in his vocation and relies upon the usual media for other information. Not on books and not on alternative media. He accepts established concepts of government. Among those general concepts are that governments advance the national interests of their country and people. But they often don't. Rulers tend to impoverish their people for egotism or popularity from over-spending. They misunderstand issues or warp them via ideology or political advantage. The fall of empires and regimes tells that story over and over. Nevertheless, people retain the misconception that national interest drives policy makers. The media usually promotes publishers' bias. For a few decades, we Americans enjoyed a relatively objective press. That was decades ago. The European press is more tendentious and some of it and of Israel's is not independent. My guest's newspaper, the NY Times, presents an unfairly anti-Zionist slant, all the while professing to care about Israel. It accepts false Arab propaganda, disguises U.S. policy's deceitful motives and methods, and depicts Israeli policy as too nationalist, when it isn't, and smears the Jewish nationalist view as extremist without defining it. Readers are misled without being aware of it. When I referred to Israel's governments as anti-Zionist and in some ways antisemitic, my guest's face went through contortions of doubt and wondering about my mental balance. He was shocked. He was shocked, because he lacks background. I gave him some proof. Then I advised him to study my couple of hundred posted articles for background and for insight into facts and conclusions he never dreamed of. I am thankful that the Examiner is tolerant of different approaches. If it is difficult to be a dissident, it is even more difficult for a non-dissident to realize when a dissident is rational and the Establishment is not. People need to access diverse sources and maintain an open but skeptical mind. Truth is more elusive than they thought. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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THE MAKING OF MODERN ISRAEL: 1948-1967
Posted by Bryna Berch, May 25, 2009. |
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The Making of Modern Israel: 1948-1967 (Hardcover)
ON MAY 14, 1948 the State of Israel was declared, announced by David Ben-Gurion at a small gathering that assembled in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Art Museum. Within a time frame of only nineteen years, culminating in the Six-Day War, Israel fought three separate wars. But within its first four years, thanks to mass immigration, its population doubled. Furthermore, Israel had been confronted with acute economic difficulties, intra Jewish ethnic tensions, a problematic Arab minority and a secular-religious divide. Apart from defence issues, Israel faced a generally hostile or, at best, indifferent international community rendering it hard pressed in securing great power patronage or even official sympathy and understanding. Based on a wide range of sources, both in Hebrew and English, this book contains a judicious synthesis of the received literature to yield the general reader and student alike a reliable, balanced, and novel account of Israels fateful and turbulent infancy. The book covers all the salient aspects of Israel's early history as
frankly and as honestly as possible. In the process, it provides a
strong antidote to the advocacy of the dismantling of Israel. Elan
Pappe's thesis of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is adequately
debunked and there generally is a wealth of material to assist those
combating anti-Zionism.
Table of Contents Preface.
Editorial Reviews "The deeper into the twenty-first century we get the less we know about the twentieth. This ignorance has so distorted even educated people's grasp of the conflict between Israel and its Palestinian and other Arab neighbours that public discussion of it routinely descends into half-bias, half drivel. Leslie Stein's elegant and learned book is, first of all, truthful, a rare enough quality in this research area. Beyond that, it is well written and argumentative in the sense that his topic requires. The years 1948-1967 constitute the crucible of discord. Without a clear understand of these two decades, which this volume so amply provides, the citizen is in the desert with only mirages to (mis)lead him or her."
"With great verve and a robust appreciation for the Zionist achievement, Leslie Stein accurately captures the drama, excitement and danger of the fledgling Jewish state's first two decades, thus putting its current tribulations in perspective.
"The Making of Modern Israel is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of one of history's most extraordinary and inspiring stories. Leslie Stein is to be commended for authoring what is certain to become an indispensible resource for scholars, decision-makers, and students."
"Continuing his masterful previous history of Israel before statehood, Leslie Stein tells the complicated story of the state's first nineteen years in this highly readable, admirably concise and eminently fair-minded account. Threading his way deftly through controversial minefields with sure footing, Stein manages to convey the best up-to-date scholarship with unusual clarity. This book is strongly recommended for the general reader and as an excellent introductory text for the classroom."
"Anyone who wants to find the way through the internal politics and external wars that accompanied Israel in its early and formative years can rely on Professor Stein. He gives it straight. This ought to become a standard work on the emergence of Israel to the place it holds on the international scene."
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PRESS CONFERENCE ON U.S. PRESSURING ISRAEL
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 25, 2009. |
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PRESS CONFERENCE ON U.S. PRESSURING ISRAEL At JFK Airport terminal 4, 4th floor, at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27, to protest against dangerous U.S. demands of Israel. Examples: Israel should stop Jews from building in Judea-Samaria and turn the area over to the Arabs. The conference arguments in sum: The Land of must not be negotiated
away. With the Jewish people, it has an unbreakable bond. It never
was the basis for another state. No other nation until 1948 claimed
it as their land. It is mistaken to consider it "Palestinian."
Why don't they ask the U.S. government to justify its demands? Why does the State Dept. expect a PLO state to make peace, when the PLO says it wants to take over Israel? Why don't they question the logic of clearing half a million Jews from Judea-Samaria and part of Jerusalem, to make room for an exclusively Arab state, but not clear out the million Arabs from the rest of Israel, which is a Jewish state? Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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JIMMAH THE IDIOT CARTER — ARCHITECT OF OUR TERRORIST PROBLEMS
Posted by Alan Peters, May 25, 2009. | |
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Thanks to Jimmy Carter, we went from a friendly Iran to what it is today — a threat to the West. 
From Iran: Carter's Habitat For Inhumanity, Investor's Business Daily (with AntiMullah editorial comments) In the name of human rights, Jimmy Carter gave rise to one of the worst rights violators in history — the Ayatollah Khomeini. And now Khomeini's successor is preparing for nuclear war with Israel and the West. A Profile In Incompetence When President Carter took office in 1977, the Iran of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a staunch American ally, a bulwark in our standoff with the Soviet Union, thwarting the dream held since the time of the czars of pushing south toward the warm waters of the appropriately named Persian Gulf. Being an ally of the U.S. in the Cold War, Iran was a target for Soviet subversion and espionage. Like the U.S. in today's war on terror, Iran arrested and incarcerated many who threatened its sovereignty and existence, mainly Soviet agents and their collaborators. This did not sit well with the former peanut farmer, who, on taking office, declared that advancing "human rights" was among his highest priorities. The Shah was one of his first targets. As he's done with our terror-war detainees in Guantanamo, Carter accused the Shah of torturing some 3,000 "political" prisoners. [Alan Note: Actual figure from Amnesty International was closer to 2,400 — mostly Tudeh Communists and Soviet supporting Marxist-Islamists.] He chastised the Shah for his human rights record and engineered the withdrawal of American support. The irony here is that when Khomeini, a former Muslim exile in Paris, overthrew the Shah in February 1979, many of these 3,000 were executed by the ayatollah's firing squads along with 20,000 pro-Western Iranians. According to The Real Jimmy Carter, a book by Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute: "Khomeini's regime executed more people in its first year in power than the Shah's Savak had allegedly killed in the previous 25 years." The mullahs hated the Shah not because he was an oppressive dictator. They hated him because he was a secular, pro-Western leader who, in addition to other initiatives, was expanding the rights and roles of women in Iran society. [Alan Note: recently one of the pro-Mossadegh and Tudeh (Communist) party Iranian leaders openly stated: "we were not attacking the Shah for freedoms for the people but for freedom for us to import and install our foreign (Soviet) philosophies without fear and impediment.] Under Khomeini, women returned to their second-class role, and citizens were arrested for merely owning satellite dishes that could pick up Western television. Khomeini established the first modern Islamic regime, a role model for the Taliban and jihadists to follow. And when the U.S. Embassy was stormed that November and 52 Americans taken hostage for 444 days, America's lack of resolve was confirmed in the jihadist mind. On Nov. 4, 1979, some 400 Khomeini followers broke down the door of the embassy in Tehran, seizing the compound and the Americans inside. The hostage takers posed for the cameras next to a poster with a caricature of Carter and the slogan: "America cannot do a damn thing." [Alan Note: unpublicized intelligence at the time indicated that the hostage taking was arranged by Jimmuh the idiot Carter with Khomeini aides, like Yazdi, Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, who were U.S. aligned and attached to Khomeini by Carter, to ensure his re-election, when he (Carter) conveniently arrangd their release just before voting took place. Ronald Reagan found out about it, blocked the plot and arranged the release AFTER the election.] Indeed, America under Carter wouldn't do much. At least not until the 154th day of the crisis, when Carter, finally awakening to the seizure of U.S. diplomats and citizens on what was legally American soil, broke off diplomatic relations and began planning economic sanctions. When Carter got around to hinting about the use of military force, Khomeini offered this mocking response: "He is beating on an empty drum. Neither does Carter have the guts for military action nor would anyone listen to him." Carter did actually try a military response of sorts. But like every other major policy action of his, he bungled it. The incompetence of his administration would be seen in the wreckage in the Iranian desert, where a plan to rescue the hostages resulted in the loss of eight aircraft, five airmen and three Marines. [Alan note: information obtained from post-Shah Iranian military and inteligence sources and more evidence from Americans, who were involved or on scene, all point to the so-called hostage rescue in fact being a failed arms delivery to Afghanistan, ("Green Belt" to contain Soviets project) where the Soviets shot and disabled one of the C130's bringing in weapons. Leaving Carter to either declare war on the Soviets for this act of war or pretend it was something else. Yes, a failed hostage rescue, which was still not operational after something was cobbled together by a cabal of U.S. intelligence and military groups, which all wanted a part in the operation. But whose witches brew was still not fully cooked]. Among the core group of hostage takers and planners of the attack on our embassy was 23-year-old Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who learned firsthand the weakness and incompetence of Carter's foreign policy, one that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid are now attempting to resurrect. According to then-Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Ahmadinejad was among the hostage takers and the liaison between them and then prominent Tehran preacher Ali Khameini, later to become supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. The Shah was forced into exile and on the run from Morocco to Egypt, the Bahamas, Mexico and finally Panama. In July 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Carter they had changed their minds about offering the Shah permanent asylum. Carter's spiteful response was: "F*** the Shah. I'm not going to welcome him here when he has other places to go where he'll be safe." In October 1979, the Shah, gravely ill with cancer, was granted a limited visa for treatment at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. He would die in Cairo in July 1980, an abandoned American friend. Our enemies took notes. If the Shah had remained in power, it isn't likely the Iraq-Iran War, with upward of a million casualties on both sides, a war that saw Saddam Hussein first use mass-murder weapons, would have taken place. [Alan Note: Iraq had tried once before, in the time of the Shah, to invade Iran over the dispute of the Shatt-Al Arab river between the two countries. This lasted all of four days before Saddam Hussein's forces were driven out with their tails between their legs. Nothing like the eight years under Carter's Khomeini.] Nor is it likely there would have been a Desert Storm, fought after Hussein invaded Kuwait to strengthen his strategic position. That led to bases in Saudi Arabia that fueled Islamofascist resentment, one of the reasons given by Osama bin Laden for striking at America, the Great Satan. Carter's Khomeini introduced the idea of suicide bombers to the Palestine Liberation Organization and paid $35,000 to PLO families who would offer up their children as human bombs to kill as many Israelis as possible. It was Carter's Khomeini who would give the world Hezbollah to make war on Israel and destroy the multicultural democracy that was Lebanon. And perhaps Jimmy has forgotten that Hezbollah, which he helped make possible, killed 241 U.S. troops in their Beirut barracks in 1983. The Soviet Union, seeing us so willingly abandon a staunch ally, invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, just six months after Carter and Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev embraced after signing a new arms-control treaty. [Alan Note: the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office sent some 200 observers to monitor the Carter-Reagan election to note whether the Soviets would try to spend enough money to "buy" the election for their "mole" Jimmuh Carter.] And it was the resistance to the Soviet invasion that helped give birth to the Taliban. As Hayward observes, the fall of Iran, hastened by Jimmy Carter, "set in motion the advance of radical Islam and the rise of terrorism that culminated in Sept. 11." Writer Christopher Hitchens recalls a discussion he had with Eugene McCarthy, a Democrat and former candidate for that party's presidential nomination, where McCarthy voted for Ronald Reagan instead of Carter in 1980. The reason? Carter had "quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad (including the Soviets). He was quite simply the worst president we ever had." Quite simply, we concur. Though he is the best SOVIET president America ever elected! [Alan Note: And Carter's liberal, to the point of Communist/Socialist leanings, can be seen in his staunch ties and support of Cuba's Castro, Venezuela's Chavez, other South American leftist governments and his anti-America diatribe attacks on anything that confronts the terrorism he stupidly created. He has a share in all the blood, still on his hands, of all innocents killed by those he actively helped put in place.]
This is from the March 16, 2008 http://Anti-Mullah.com site and
can be found at
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FREE TRIPS & TIPS IF YOU'RE AN ARAB! SEE L.A. AND FIND OUT HOW TO INFILTRATE PUBLIC ACCESS TO RECRUIT TERRORISTS!
Posted by Arlene Peck, May 25, 2009. |
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As Jay Leno says on his late night show, "Folks we're living in tough times" However, that doesn't seem to be the case if you're a member of the press, and a Muslim, wanting to travel to our shores from any one of a dozen countries to learn how to do ''creative broadcasting programming." As many of you know, I have, for the past twenty years hosted a television show, "Wow it's Arlene Peck," which is mostly a celebrity interview show. Recently, the city fathers of Los Angeles, in their infinite wisdom, decided to cancel Public Access. And I, along with others, have been meeting with the L.A. City Council to try to get them to see what a mistake this would be and to have them reconsider their decision. As a result, I happened to be in the office of the woman who has been working with me on this campaign, and who produces a successful Public Access program, "Disclosure", where she tackles issues and brings them to the attention of the public. While there, I glanced down on her desk and saw a letter from the International Visitors Council of Los Angeles. Its contents caused me to do a double-take. It was from Kim Ngoc Le who is the Senior Program Officer of the International Visitors Council of Los Angeles, thanking this producer for "taking time out of (her) schedule to host our delegation of broadcasting experts from North Africa and the Near East." Apparently the nine lucky 'honored guests' were from such countries and television stations as Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel, GAZA, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. And, according to Ms Ngoc Le, "These distinguished visitors have been nominated by our Department of State to travel to the U.S. to learn from their American counterparts about creative broadcast programming. The IVCLA is pleased to entertain them during their short time in L.A." Later in this letter, which I came upon by happenstance, my friend was asked if she could book a room for them to meet with her. "It is difficult for us to find a place. Even though the United States State Department FUNDS their airfare and lodging, there is no provision in the budget for meeting rooms. Hence the IVCLA has been asked to seek out community centers, libraries, and other public institutions willing to donate their meeting space." So, being a citizen of good standing, I got in the car and we booked these representatives of the State Dept We also found a meeting room at a neighborhood park. After all, how could you refuse a request saying, "We just need a private room for thirteen people (the delegation consists of nine visitors and three interpreters). It would be a shame for them not to be able to meet with you because we cannot find a meeting space." Well, for sure! Rumor has it that our country is in a depression. But if we have the money to bring over a group of distinguished representatives, from such marvelous countries as Gaza and Saudi Arabia, we can't be doing so badly. I just hope, in this little junket that Obama and company have arranged, they're taking them to Disneyland and all of our other fun spots. For a brief period, I was looking forward to sitting like a fly on the wall at this meeting to see what transpired. However, in my over zealous effort to bring this information to the public, I contacted terrorism expert, Dr. Carole Lieberman and journalist Ari Bussel, so they might join me, utilizing their expertise on terrorism to contribute to the discussion and to assess their motives for learning how to use the Public Access airwaves. It seemed more than likely that any Public Access TV show put on by journalists from terrorist countries would be used to spread propaganda and recruit terrorists! What's worse is that our government is paving — and paying — the way for them to learn these skills! I was then un-invited and never was allowed to attend. I remember several years ago, going to the local mosque in Mar Vista. They had some visitor's day or something, again sponsored by our Justice Dept. I remember the panel on the dais was teaching their audience how to know when they had a complaint or they felt they were being 'profiled'. I thought it obscene that the members of the mosque were being given information on how to use our laws and customs to harm us. However, the topper was when a well-dressed woman stood up and said, "Our children are now grown and going into the universities. Our next job has to be to propel them into three fields: education, politics and finally media." Well, folks, it is my opinion, that they accomplished it all. Our universities are hotbeds of Muslim teachings and conflict. How many of you have noticed the names on the articles in your local newspapers praising the Muslim lifestyle? The L.A. Times seems to have a three-page spread every week or two deploring the plight of the poor Palestinians. And, as far as politics, I feel it pretty safe to say they have arrived! From the White House on down. And, finally, as Jay Leno says, "We're going through tough times." But don't you feel encouraged? Personally, I think that we are ignorant and ill-informed to consider it positive and hospitable to teach terrorist nations how to use our system of Public Access as a cheap and easy way to recruit more terrorists. And amazingly, even though our programs are being cut and there are no funds for schools and police, we can always find spare money to play host to these visitors from 'poor' countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arabs Emirates and the rest. Arlene Peck is an internationally syndicated columnist and television talk show hostess. She can be reached at: bestredhead@earthlink.net and www.arlenepeck.com. She is author of "Some Of My Best Friends: Only The Names Have Been Changed To Protect The Guilty." Her upcoming book is entitled "Prison Cheerleader: How A Nice Jewish Girl Went Wrong Doing Right." |
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RABBI KAHANE: "A MEZUZA"
Posted by Miki and Herb Sunshine, May 25, 2009. |
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This was written: 11 Kislev 5733 — November 17. 1972 by Rabbi Meir Kahane. His essays are distributed by Barbara Ginsberg, who writes: "Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at: barhow@netvision.net.il " Previously e-mailed Rav
Kahane writings are available at |
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There is no mezuza on the Old City of Jerusalem's Damascus Gate (Shaar Sh'chem). And it is important that every Jew understand why other major entrances to the Old City, such as Jaffa Gate, DO have a mezuzot while this one does not; why there once WAS a mezuza at Shaar Sh'chem (it was taken down by Arabs and never replaced by Mayor Teddy Kollek), and why the Jewish Defense League demanded that it be allowed to put up the mezuza, was refused permission and had a number of its people arrested. The Old City of Jerusalem is surrounded by the famous wall that is such an attraction for all tourists. Entrance to the Old City is through a number of gates, of which Jaffa and Damascus are the two most famous and heavily traveled. After the 1967 War, mezuzot were placed on all the gates, including Damascus or Sh'chem and ARAB EXTREMEISTS RIPPED OFF THE LATTER ONE. The Israeli government preferred not to notice and allowed the desecration to remain unanswered. Why? The answer to this is also the answer to the JDL's making such an issue out of a gate which may very well — due to the majority of Arabs living within the Old City — be free from the religious obligation of a mezuza, in the first place. The Israeli government has followed a careful policy for more than five years of not "aggravating" the Arabs. This has involved Israeli refusal and failure to assert Jewish rights as well as a willingness to, de facto, accept Arab demands that run counter to those Jewish rights. Part of that policy includes the refusal to allow Jews unlimited settlement anywhere in that part of Eretz Yisrael liberated after 1967; refusal to allow Jews to live anywhere except in certain parts of the Old City of Jerusalem; and of course, refusal to declare that the liberated areas of 1967 are formally part of the Jewish State. It has also manifested itself in such things as a kid-gloves policy and collaboration with notorious Jew-haters such as Hebron's Mayor Ja'abari (whose part in the Gush Etzion and Hebron massacres ranges from ugly to murky) as well as government financing and support for an Arab university on the West Bank that will produce the Arab terrorist and nationalist leaders in the next decade. The policy has been hailed as a success, with Dayan declaring that the peace in the liberated areas over the last five years and relative lack of terrorism have proven the wisdom of this policy. In short-range terms he is correct; in the long run this policy is disastrous. Not only does it take away basic Jewish rights, but it tells the world and, worse — the Israeli Jewish youngsters — that these rights in truth do not exist. Should we, in the future, decide to demand them, we will find our won credibility attacked and opposition intense from our own people who will, justly, ask: "But if we really are entitled to these things, why did we not demand them earlier and why did you stop those who did demand them?" For five years we allowed Arabs majority rights in the Hebron Cave — what does this tell the Israeli student? That it really is Moslem and that only the "fanatics" want "more" than the proper Jewish share. For five years we refused Jewish settlement in the West Bank cities of Hebron, Sh'chem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jenin, etc. What does this tell the Israeli youth? That these cities are Arab cities, not Jewish ones. For five years we have had different rules and laws for pre-war Israel and for the liberated lands. What does this tell any logical person? That they are not really Jewish but that Israel is using the lands as cards for bargaining. What will happen when Israel decides to demand certain of these rights or comes up with a "compromise" scheme by which it agrees to return a large part of the lands but keep some of the others for "security" reasons? The answer is simple. All the sensitive and liberal Jewish youth of Israel, its intellectuals, its writers, its professors, will rise up and say: "But we have no right to keep that land because it is not ours and the greatest proof is your own refusal to declare them ours from the very first day. This shows that you, yourself, Dayan, do not believe it is Jewish and your desire to hold on to even some of that land is still robbery and annexation. No matter what the clever propagandists say, the Arab is NOT equal in Israel so long as Israel remains true to the Zionist dream that created it as a JEWISH state. So long as the original rationale for the return to Israel holds true (and if it does not, then we have no right at all to Israel); so long as Israel is ours because it is the home of the Jewish people where they can live free from physical holocaust and spiritual-cultural assimilation; so long as Israel has a Law of Return which applies only to Jews and not to Arabs, then Israel is a JEWISH state (and not one that disregards nationality and religion) and the Arab is NOT equal. The Arab knows this and his placid acceptance of Jewish rule is not an indication that he is happy and has made his peace with the situation. It simply means that five years is a very, very short time in the Middle East; that the Arabs are making a little money now; that a generation of young Arab intellectuals who place nationalism and ideals over that money has not yet fully ripened; and that we face a terrible Northern Ireland-type confrontation in the years to come. And on the Arab side will be ranged thousands of Jews who will back the Arabs because Moshe Dayan — in his short-sighted cleverness — chose not to assert Jewish rights immediately. What a difference it would have made had Israel — immediately after the June, 1967 War — when the while world stood solidly behind her, knowing that she had almost gone under and miraculously survive, declared: All this land is ours, historically; it is Jewish from the times of the Bible; it is officially ours and it will never be returned. How much greater the moral and legal hold than the present sly, diplomatic game! But we did not do it. We did not and we did not say to the world: Israel is a Jewish State, the home of the Jewish people where Jewish sovereignty reigns and where Arabs can live as individuals but as a permanent demographic and cultural minority. And this is why the JDL wants a mezuza on Shaar Sh'chem. Not because there are not other things that are as important or more so. But, because the reason for the lack of a mezuza is the underlying mistake of Israeli policy: We do not want to alienate the Arabs, we do not want to declare blatant Jewish sovereignty over a gate that is in a totally Arab part of the city. We do not want to affix a mezuza and Jewish sovereignty — both! And that is the heart of the JDL intention. Not only the affixing and the stamping of a mezuza, but a fixing and stamping of the word "Jewish" on the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not an Arab-Jewish city. It is a city where Jews and Arabs live, but the city is Jewish, the sovereignty is Jewish and the Arabs live there by individual rights as opposed to the Jewish right of peoplehood there. For this, and in order to save Israel from the short-sightedness of its leaders it is worthwhile fighting for the mezuzah on Shaar Sh'chem and even going to jail. At least when the Israeli youth, in years to come, will march for Arab rights and say to Dayan: But you yourself never asserted Jewish rights and thereby recognized the Arab ones — we can say: True, but we fought this from the beginning, we wanted to tell you the, that this city and this country are JEWISH and not shared and we even were willing to go to jail for the mezuza on Shaar Sh'chem and the settlement in the city of Sh'chem. Herb Sunshine is a lawyer, qualified to practice in U.S.A. and Israel. He and his wife Miki live in Jerusalem. Contact them by email at sunshine.h@012.net.il |
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FROM ISRAEL: OUTPOSTS AND SETTLEMENTS
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 25, 2009. |
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The picture is unsettling — indeed, infuriating, but it's also complex and, I believe, not grim. There are some indications of government intentions to get tough with regard to some 20-plus "illegal outposts," with Defense Minister Barak declaring that he will take them down, one way or another. For the record, an "illegal outpost" is usually a small collection of modest buildings or caravans — often on a hilltop — that has been constructed without permission. The line is not all together clear, however, as to what "without permission" means, as sometimes there has been some legitimacy conferred by some department or other — as, for example, if some electric lines have been put in. Sometimes an "outpost" is no more than a neighborhood of an existing community, and sometimes what was illegal is declared legal — for the political aspects of this are considerable. Many of the "illegal outposts" have had that status for some years. This is not a new development. Yet it is now that action is being taken, or threatened, more vociferously. ~~~~~~~~~~ The news today was that nine outposts have been served with "zoning notices," informing them that they are "illegal." While there was no announcement that they will be taken down, such zoning notices often precede demolition orders. And this follows the very recent demolition of Maoz Esther. One example serves to demonstrate how ridiculous the whole thing can become: Of the nine outposts listed, one is "Hazon David, Kiryat Arba-Hebron." This, it turns out, is not a cluster of buildings and is not an "outpost" in the general sense of that word. It is one structure — a very temporary, tent-like structure — outside of Kiryat Arba, on the road to Hevron. A structure used as a synagogue. That's it. "Hazon David" means David's vision and is named in memory of David Cohen and Hezi Mualem who were murdered by terrorists seven years ago outside of Kiryat Arba. Taking down this modest place of prayer and study, where no one actually lives, really advances peace, right? This is what Barak and company need to be concerned with? They should hang their heads in shame. This makes Obama happy? What? ~~~~~~~~~~ When we ask why this is happening now, there are general answers in terms of Netanyahu having somehow caved to Obama. But I'd like to look a bit closer at the issues (including more below). Nahum Barnea, writing on YNet, makes the observation that the mere fact that Netanyahu refuses to even say "two state solution," never mind to agree now to negotiate such a "solution," puts the heat on the outposts and settlements. Were negotiations advancing, then Obama would be able to boast of "progress," and the issue of outposts would be minimal. But as it is, Obama has nothing to point to, unless there is "progress" on this score. Barnea doesn't say this explicitly, but what his analysis implies is that the very strength of our prime minister for the big issues makes our government more vulnerable on the small issues. And there is the possibility — which hardliners don't accept — that there will be some quid pro quo here. ~~~~~~~~~~ And then there's the upside of what's happening: PM Netanyahu told the Cabinet yesterday that, when he was in Washington, he informed Obama that we would not stop building in Jerusalem or accommodating natural growth in settlements. "Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, and we do not accept limits on construction or on our activity inside of Israel." This in the face of a State Department statement that "Jerusalem is a final-status issue. Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to resolve its status during negotiations..." Well, Jerusalem may have been a final-status issue for Olmert, but it is not now. ~~~~~~~~~~ In addition to this, we have a new strength within the Cabinet — so much so that it's questionable whether support could be garnered among the ministers for dismantling all of the "illegal outposts." As Gil Hoffman has written in the Post:
Leaders of Shas, Yisrael Beitenu and Habyit Hayehudi "each tried to take upon themselves the mantle of the settlers' top advocate, as did Likud ministers Yuli Edelstein, Yisrael Katz, and Benny Begin..." Most vociferous in his defense of outposts was Katz, who said, "the government agenda cannot become a witch hunt against the residents of Judea and Samaria." Edelstein and Lieberman criticized Barak for unilateral action without sanction of the Cabinet. Edelstein indicated that "an entire team of ministers would insist on keeping Barak in check and ensuring that the Cabinet would have the final say on the outposts..." Barak, he said, "has not internalized that a nationalist government had taken over." ~~~~~~~~~~ Additionally we see a new strength on the part of the nationalists of Israel. A meeting of several groups has been held and plans have been put in place that call for reinforcing the numbers at existing outposts, setting up new ones, and immediately rebuilding any outpost that is demolished. I spoke today with David Wilder, spokesman for the Hevron community. His tone was cool, as he explained that Hazon David had been destroyed about 30 times already, and would be built again if the Defense Ministry took it down. There is the feeling, with solid reason, that determined settlers can outlast government demolition efforts. ~~~~~~~~~~ With justification, the nationalists point to the illegal outposts put up by the Bedouin in the Negev and Arabs in the Galil that the government ignores. It is their intention to make this issue more public. ~~~~~~~~~~ It's not entirely clear to me how extensively the US media covered the plan by home-grown Muslim terrorists to target synagogues in New York City and down planes at a military air base. The plot was foiled in a sting operation, and the concern is that the lessons to be drawn from this will not be attended to with sufficient seriousness because the disaster was averted. The attitude, unfortunately, is likely to be one of "Thank goodness nothing happened!" and done. In point of fact, however, a major alarm should go up with regard to the circumstances surrounding this planned attack: Three of the four alleged would-be terrorists were converts to Islam who were converted in prison. ~~~~~~~~~~ Steve Emerson, founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, addresses the serious dimensions of this problem in a recent piece, "Radicals in Our Prisons." Every American needs to take heed. Writes Emerson: "Radicalism in prisons is a problem that has been festering for years... ~~~~~~~~~~ Charles Krauthammer has also written an interesting article, "Obama in Bush Clothing," which I call your attention to. Says Krauthammer: "...the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program. The pattern is an "Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy... "OBSERVERS OF ALL political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government." This agenda includes wire taps, e-mail intercepts, turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries, and denial of habeas corpus to certain detainees. What has happened? "The urgencies and necessities of the actual post-9/11 world, as opposed to the fanciful world of the opposition politician, present a rather narrow range of acceptable alternatives."
~~~~~~~~~~ Now, if only the urgencies and necessities of the actual post-9/11 world would move Obama to shift his policy with regard to Iran. Certainly he's getting only one slap in the face after another from the Iranians in response to his reaching out with offers of dialogue. According to a local news agency, Iranian naval commander Admiral Habibollah Sayyari has announced the dispatch of several warships: "Iran has dispatched six ... warships to international waters and the Gulf of Aden region in an historically unprecedented move by the Iranian Navy." This, he says is, "indicative of the country's high military capability in confronting any foreign threat on the country's shores." This war-like action comes as Ahmadinejad has rejected an offer by the US, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain to hold off on all new sanctions in exchange for a freeze on Iranian nuclear activity. "Our talks [with major powers] will only be in the framework of cooperation for managing global issues and nothing else. We have clearly announced this," he said. "The nuclear issue is a finished issue for us." And Obama will still try to dialogue on the nuclear issue in the face of this? ~~~~~~~~~~ Coming full circle: PM Netanyahu injected a perspective relevant to this in his meeting with the Likud faction today. Giving in to US demands on the outposts is important to do, he says, so that there can be focus on Iran. But there are multiple way to read this. Presumably he expects more from Obama in terms of cooperation on Iran if we give in on this. This may be the quid pro quo. "We're not [living] in ordinary times," he declared. "The danger is gaining on us. The most dangerous threat to a living organism is not to identify danger. My role, first and foremost, is to secure the future of the State of Israel. This comes before anything else." But he also seems to be deflating internal political dissension on the issue because he believes it weakens us: "There must be broad national unity as much as possible, so as to stave off the danger." A ruse simply to weaken dissent? Possible, but I do not believe so. Binyamin Netanyahu has been warning us about the dangers of Iran for years. I take him seriously here. To attempt to severely weaken him politically over outposts — as is being threatened by those on the far right — just as he must make decisions involving attacking Iran would be, I concur, a mistake in judgment. Dissent should not stop but must be moderated in light of the priorities and the times within which we live. Purists see a slippery slope whereby if we surrender claim to a square meter of land we are surrendering our claim to Israel. But it will avail us naught if vociferous protection of that square meter renders us — G-d forbid — more likely to be blown away completely later. ~~~~~~~~~~ Nothing is ever simple, and most certainly not where Russia is concerned. It was very recently announced that we will be expediting the sale to Russia of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) following the cancellation by Russia of plans to sell Syria advanced MIG-31 fighter jets. This was good news. However...Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Hamas's Mashaal on Saturday and has declared that continued contact with Hamas is considered "necessary." In fact, Lavrov hopes to see a delegation from a Palestinian unity government attend the peace conference in Moscow later this year. Oh joy. Such a unity government would have as a major component a Hamas that embraces terrorism. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" — Wheat, which is a staple grain in many societies, is subject to a virulent fungus disease called rust (because its spores have a rust color) that can destroy crops, causing food shortages and economic loss. The answer to combating this lies here in Israel. For it is in Israel that a wild wheat grows, believed to be the original wheat plant before domestication. In the course of 10,000 years of domestication, the wheat was bred for certain properties considered desirable, such as higher yield, but in the course of changes lost resistance to disease. Professor Tzion Fahima of Haifa University's Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology is working with a team that has discovered a gene in the wild wheat that provides resistance to eight strains of rust disease. The next step is to reintroduce this gene to domestic wheat, either by traditional breeding practices or genetic engineering. Additional projects are anticipated that would involve work with the genes in wild wheat that make it more drought resistant and provide it with a higher percentage of protein and minerals. — According to the World Health Organization, Israel is one of the healthiest nations in the world. WHO lists Israel with Europe, and it is with European nations that comparisons are made. (Israel is way way ahead of the nations of the MidEast.) The Israeli infant and maternal mortality rates are much lower than European averages. E.g., in Israel there are three newborn deaths per 1,000 as compared with five in Europe. Israel has 37 doctors per 10,000 people as compared to 32 in Europe. Israel has low rates of infectious diseases and high rates of immunization. And the entire Israeli population has access to improved drinking water, compared to 97% in Europe. — Now for the really important item: Work to be wrinkle free while you sleep (I am not making this up). An Israeli company named Cupron, in Beit Shemesh, makes pillow cases that contain copper. Perspiration from your skin as you sleep releases copper ions, which stimulate the production of collagen, which reduces fine lines and wrinkles. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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OLIVE SCHREINER'S PERCEPTION OF JEWS
Posted by GWY, May 25, 2009. |
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Olive Schreiner is a South African novelist and social activist. |
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"Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather, Abraham, introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of Heaven. They brought the world the Ten Commandments, which many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters. They aggravated mankind by building, in the wink of an eye, a democratic State which others were not able to create in even hundreds of years. They built living monuments such as the duty to be holy and the privilege to serve one's fellow men. They had their hands in every human progressive endeavor, whether in science, medicine, psychology or any other discipline, while totally out of proportion to their actual numbers. They gave the world the Bible and even their "Savior." Jews taught the world not to accept the world as it is, but to transform it, yet only a few nations wanted to listen. Moreover, the Jews introduced the world to one God, yet only a minority wanted to draw the moral consequences. So the nations of the world realize that they would have been lost without the Jews. And while their subconscious tries to remind them of how much of Western civilization is framed in terms of concepts first articulated by the Jews, they do anything to suppress it. They deny that Jews remind them of a higher purpose of life and the need to be honorable, and do anything to escape its consequences. It is simply too much to handle for them, too embarrassing to admit, and above all, too difficult to live by. So the Nations of the world decided once again to go out of 'their' way in order to find a stick to hit the Jews. The goal: to prove that Jews are as immoral and guilty of massacre and genocide as some of they themselves are. All this in order to hide and justify their own failure to even protest when six million Jews were brought to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Dachau; so as to wipe out the moral conscience of which the Jews remind them, and they found a stick. Nothing could be more gratifying for them than to find the Jews in a struggle with another people (who are completely terrorized by their own leaders) against whom the Jews, against their best wishes, have to defend themselves in order to survive. With great satisfaction, the world allows and initiates the rewriting of history so as to fuel the rage of yet another people against the Jews. This in spite of the fact that the nations understand very well that peace between the parties could have come a long time ago, if only the Jews would have had a fair chance. Instead,they happily jumped on the wagon of hate so as to justify their jealousy of the Jews and their incompetence to deal with their own moral issues. When Jews look at the bizarre play taking place in The Hague, they can only smile as this artificial game once more proves how the world paradoxically admits the Jew's uniqueness. It is in their need to undermine the Jews that they actually raise them. The study of history of Europe during the past centuries teaches us one uniform lesson: That the Nations which received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered; and that the nations that have tortured and oppressed them have written out their own curse. Contact GWY at gwy123@aol.com |
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SACRIFICING ISRAEL
Posted by Moshe Dann, May 25, 2009. |
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For Obama, it is win-win. Linking US action against Iran with freezing settlement building, destroying Jewish communities and establishing a second Arab Palestinian state is a set-up for Israel's demonization and destruction. For President Barack Obama, it's a win-win. No matter what happens, Israel will be blamed. President Obama knows that, short of military intervention, nothing will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Making Israeli concessions the key to stopping Iran, therefore, allows Obama a perfect excuse: Israel didn't do enough; it's Israel's fault. "Israeli intransigence" will be given as the reason for America's failure in Iran. 'If only Israel had evacuated more settlements, stopped building in Judea and Samaria, dismantled more checkpoints, given more aid to Hamas, stopped demolishing illegal Arab buildings, etc., then we could have done something,' Obama will say. But Obama's agenda doesn't stop there. The big prize is Israel's nuclear capacity. Egypt especially has been urging the US to force Israel to open its facility at Dimona. Russian spy planes flew over Dimona prior to the Six Day War in 1967 and, according to Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez (Foxbats Over Dimona), wanted to bomb it. No doubt, Arab terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hizbullah have Dimona in their sights as well. Pushing Israel against the wall is also a convenient way of deflecting Muslim terrorism away from American and European investments and interests. As long as Islamists think that Obama is on their side, they'll refrain from attacking, keep oil prices low and keep oil flowing. Iran will make cosmetic adjustments so that Obama can claim victory; the crisis defused. And Israel will pay the price. American troops will leave Iraq soon. It's yet unclear if the Taliban will make agreements with governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan to share power, as Hamas and Hizbullah have done. Jihadists, like the Moslem Brotherhood, will continue to grow in power and influence; they need to consolidate anyway before they move ahead, but their influence throughout the Muslim world and in Europe is substantial. Israel is the perfect scapegoat: isolated, abandoned, it has few real options. It can try to implement Obama's agenda, but nothing it does will be enough to satisfy Arab demands. Nor would Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition allow it. He could ditch the Right and turn to the Left, but it is unlikely that he would have enough votes to remain in power for long. Whether Palestinian terrorists can restrain themselves while Israel carries out some form of withdrawal is uncertain. A freeze on construction in settlements would cripple, but not destroy, the movement; a clear majority of Israelis support settlements and don't want a Palestinian state. Destroying small hilltop "outposts" and even more isolated settlements can be done as a first step and without the trauma of full evacuation. 'Amputation to save the rest,' they will say, trying to justify surrender and buy time. Act II (Munich 1938) Arab heads of state will parade through Washington, as King Abdullah of Jordan this month with the same message: 'We are for peace; Israel must accept the two-state solution as offered in the Arab Initiative of Saudi Arabia — withdrawal to 1949 boundaries, including Jerusalem, Palestinian Right of Return, etc.' Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (both of whom are about to retire) will appear full of smiles: 'We want peace; Israel must accept a Palestinian state.' There will be no mention of terrorism and incitement, or acceptance of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Even Syria may join, in return for American support for getting the Golan Heights. Obama will look like the ultimate "peacemaker"; Israel will look like the bad guy. There will be no hard questions. Meanwhile, three new PA battalions, US-trained and US-equipped, are being deployed in the "West Bank". This augments hundreds of thousands of soldiers and terrorists already in the PA military — the highest ratio per capita in the world. General Keith Dayton, who is responsible for these new troops, admitted that if there is no Palestinian state within two years, these troops would probably rebel and return to terrorism. Act III Members of the Arab League and other Muslim countries will be invited to Washington, along with Israel, to sign "peace agreements" following Arab demands. It will be a gala event, with the Clintons in high gear, the State Department Jews (Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller, Dan Kurtzer and Martin Indyk, who helped force Israeli concessions during the 1990s), and, of course, Shimon Peres and friends. And what would a party to celebrate Israel's demise be without Jimmy Carter and Condoleezza Rice? The Obamas will dance elegantly. Act IV A moment of silence. Moshe Dann is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem.
This article appeared in Arutz-7
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DRY BONES ON STRATEGIC DEFENSE
Posted by Dave Alpern, May 25, 2009. |
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Dry Bones writes I saw the successful launch of the Israeli "Arrow Missile" on TV this evening. It's supposed to knock down Iranian Missiles that are on their way to wipe us off the map. The second news item was about the pressure, demands, and restraints that the Obama White House is putting on Israel. I joined the two items together in today's cartoon.— Dry Bones, Israel's Political Comic Strip Since 1973 Contact Dave Alpern at daveyboy@bezeqint.net |
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HIGH-LEVEL TOUR OF ISRAEL OPEN; PRESSURING ISRAEL; DO YOU BELIEVE UN HEAD, BAN?
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 24, 2009. |
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HIGH-LEVEL TOUR OF ISRAEL OPEN Registration still is open for Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center's Monday, June 8 — June 15 tour of Israel, its 17th. The Center invites professionals from all over the world to intensive "briefings and field tours with Israeli security, military and intelligence officials." The tour investigates the challenges of terrorism to Israeli survival, now that Hizbullah and Hamas are gaining strength. Program highlights: * Briefings by present and past officers in the IDF Intelligence and Operations branches, including the senior commanders of the Shin Bet...and Mossad. "For More Information: info@israellawcenter.org Tel.: (US) 212-591-0073 (ISRAEL) 972-3-751-4175 Full Itinerary & Registration:
If it weren't for the economic crisis, I'd go. PRESS CONFERENCE ON U.S. PRESSURING ISRAEL At JFK Airport terminal 4, 4th floor, at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27, to protest against dangerous U.S. demands of Israel. Examples: Israel should stop Jews from building in Judea-Samaria and turn the area over to the Arabs. The conference arguments in sum: The Land of must not be negotiated
away. With the Jewish people, it has an unbreakable bond. It never
was the basis for another state. No other nation until 1948 claimed
it as their land. It is mistaken to consider it "Palestinian."
Why don't they ask the U.S. government to justify its demands? Why does the State Dept. expect a PLO state to make peace, when the PLO says it wants to take over Israel? Why don't they question the logic of clearing half a million Jews from Judea-Samaria and part of Jerusalem, to make room for an exclusively Arab state, but not clear out the million Arabs from the rest of Israel, which is a Jewish state? Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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THE DEATH OF ISRAEL
Posted by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, May 24, 2009. |
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From Caroline Glick, deputy editor and op-ed writer for the Jerusalem Post, comes alarming news. An expert on Arab-Israeli relations with excellent sources deep inside Netanyahu's government, she reports that CIA chief Leon Panetta, who recently took time out from his day job (feuding with Nancy Pelosi) to travel to Israel "read the riot act" to the government warning against an attack on Iran. More ominously, Glick reports (likely from sources high up in the Israeli government) that the Obama administration has all but accepted as irreversible and unavoidable fact that Iran will soon develop nuclear weapons. She writes, "...we have learned that the [Obama] administration has made its peace with Iran's nuclear aspirations. Senior administration officials acknowledge as much in off-record briefings. It is true, they say, that Iran may exploit its future talks with the US to run down the clock before they test a nuclear weapon. But, they add, if that happens, the US will simply have to live with a nuclear-armed mullocracy." She goes on to write that the Obama administration is desperate to stop Israel from attacking Iran writing that "as far as the [Obama] administration is concerned, if Israel could just leave Iran's nuclear installations alone, Iran would behave itself." She notes that American officials would regard any harm to American interests that flowed from an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as Israel's doing, not Iran's. In classic Stockholm Syndrome fashion, the Obama administration is empathizing more with the Iranian leaders who are holding Israel hostage than with the nation that may be wiped off the map if Iran acquires the bomb. Obama's end-of-the-year deadline for Iranian talks aimed at stopping its progress toward nuclear weapons is just window dressing without the threat of military action. As Metternich wrote "diplomacy without force is like music without instruments." By warning only of possible strengthening of economic sanctions if the talks do not progress, Obama is making an empty threat. The sanctions will likely have no effect because Russia and China will not let the United Nations act as it must if it is to deter Iranian nuclear weapons. All this means is that Israel's life is in danger. If Iran gets the bomb, it will use it to kill six million Jews. No threat of retaliation will make the slightest difference. One cannot deter a suicide bomber with the threat of death. Nor can one deter a theocracy bent on meriting admission to heaven and its virgins by one glorious act of violence. Iran would probably not launch the bomb itself, anyway, but would give it to its puppet terrorists to send to Israel so it could deny responsibility. Obama, bent on appeasement, would likely not retaliate with nuclear weapons. And Israel will be dead and gone. Those sunshine Jewish patriots who voted for Obama must realize that we, as Jews, are witnessing the possible end of Israel. We are in the same moral position as our ancestors were as they watched Hitler rise but did nothing to pressure their favorite liberal Democratic president, FDR, to take any real action to save them or even to let Jewish refugees into the country. If we remain complacent, we will have the same anguish at watching the destruction of Israel that our forebears had in witnessing the Holocaust. Because one thing is increasingly clear: Barack Obama is not about to lift a finger to stop Iran from developing the bomb. And neither is Hillary Clinton. Obama may have held the first White House Sedar, but he's not planning to spend next year in Jerusalem. This was published on www.DickMorris.com on May 24, 2009 |
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HILLARY CLINTON DEMANDS NO ADDITIONAL JEWS IN JUDEA/SAMARIA/EAST JERUSALEM; MADE NO DEMANDS OF PA/ABBAS
Posted by Emananuel A. Winston, May 24, 2009. |
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It is known that as poisonous snakes grow larger and shed their skin, their poison glands also grow larger, making their bite even more deadly in their mature stages. Granted there are a variety of deadly snakes in Washington (no Garden of Eden other than the un-holy snakes). Some have rattles and give warning while others lie camouflaged, pretending they are harmless, even friendly — until they strike. Israel would do well to keep vigilant since the Jews have, over time, encountered them all. In summation, the snake seduced Eve who seduced Adam, resulting in their ejection from the ease of life in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, the snakes of Washington have brought a curse on the nation of America and the American people who are now suffering — with more to come. Moreover, these same snakes have seduced weak leadership in Israel who will similarly make the nation of Israel suffer at the hands of both their mortal enemies and G-d. This below comes from the Zionist of America (ZOA), which was founded in 1897, and is the oldest pro-Israel organization in the United States. The ZOA works to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations, educates the American public and Congress about the dangers that Israel faces, and combats anti-Israel bias in the media and on college campuses. Its past presidents have included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Dr. Abba Hillel Silver. |
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ZOA troubled by Clinton demands The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has expressed strong criticism and concern over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent remarks to not allow Jews to build additional homes or any other Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem; reiterating support for creating a Palestinian state when the Palestinian-controlled territories are in effect a two-headed monster comprising the terror-promoting, glorifying and sponsoring Palestinian Authority (PA) of Mahmoud Abbas in Judea and Samaria and the Iranian armed and funded, genocidal Hamas, which controls Gaza. At the same time, she is asking nothing of the Palestinians in return for these historic and monumental Israeli concessions, which would endanger its security, while giving away part of its ancient, holy Jewish land. Israel has not constructed a single new settlement or community in Judea and Samaria since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. They have only added new homes within the boundaries of communities that already existed at the time of Oslo. The land on which Jews live in Judea and Samaria comprises less than 10 percent of the total area in question, while PA-controlled territory comprises 42 percent of Judea and Samaria. Together with Hamas-controlled Gaza, 99 percent of Palestinians live in these areas. Secretary Clinton made the following statement in an interview on the al-Jazeera cable television network on May 19: Demands total freeze on all Jewish growth and construction in Judea and Samaria: "First, we want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth — any kind of settlement activity. That is what the President has called for. We also are going to be pushing for a two-state solution which, by its very name, implies borders that have to be agreed to. And we expect to see two states living side by side, a state for the Palestinians that will be sovereign and within which the Palestinians will have the authorities that come with being in charge of a state with respect to such activities as settlements. So it's really a two-step effort here. We want to see a stop now, and then, as part of this intensive engagement that Senator Mitchell is leading for us, we want to move toward a two-state solution with borders for the Palestinians." Reiterates intention to create a Palestinian state: "...the President underscored our commitment to a two-state solution and also called for a stop to the settlements. We have made that very clear. I reinforced that last night at a dinner that I hosted for Prime Minister Netanyahu." Reiterates weak conditions for recognizing Hamas terrorist group and including it in negotiations: "I believe that Hamas has to comply with not only the Quartet principles but the underlying principles of the Arab Peace Initiative. You cannot expect either Fatah or the Israelis or Arabs who wish to see this matter resolved, with a two-state solution, to work with a group that does not believe in the outcome of these efforts. And in any peace negotiation that I'm aware of anywhere in the world, groups that are resistance groups, insurgent groups, guerilla groups, when they come to the peace table have to commit to peace. And we would expect Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, to renounce violence as the way to the achievement of a homeland for the Palestinian people, and to recognize the prior agreements that have been entered into by the Palestinians either through the PLO or the PA." Asserts Palestinians seek reasonable, peaceful goals:
The ZOA notes that Secretary Clinton's words diverge sharply from her previous positions as Democratic U.S. Senator from New York, when she spoke of the absolute need for Palestinians to end incitement to hatred and murder as being a prerequisite for any progress on peace-making and also affirmed the indivisibility of Jerusalem under Israeli rule and thus the right of Jews to live and build homes in any part of it. Hillary Clinton's troubling transformation on Israel, as evidenced by previous statements: October 2003: '"How can you think about building a better future, no matter what your political views, if you indoctrinate your children to a culture of death?" Clinton said she supports conditioning aid to the PA on a "cessation of propaganda and hateful rhetoric" in textbooks and the media, and that she has written to US President George W. Bush urging him to demand an end to official Palestinian anti-Semitism and the promotion of terrorism as a pre-condition to resuming Middle East peace talks. It is clear that the Palestinian Authority, as we see on PATV, is complicit" in terrorist attacks, she said. "This is not Hamas [running the television station]. This is the Palestinian Authority."' (Melissa Radler, 'Sen. Clinton blasts PA for teaching children hate,' Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2003). February 2007: "...we must stop the propaganda to which Palestinian children are being exposed. That must be a priority for all people who care about children, who care about the kind of peace, stability, safety and security that Israel deserves to be guaranteed. I have been speaking out against the incitement of hate and violence in Palestinian textbooks for years. In 2000 I joined Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel in New York to denounce the lessons of hatred and violence that are part of the curricula in Palestinian schools. I wrote, with my colleague Senator Schumer, a letter to President Bush, urging his Administration to do everything in its power to persuade the Palestinians to reverse their hateful rhetoric and embrace the opportunity to move toward a strong and lasting peace in the region. these children deserves [sic] an education that instills respect for life and peace instead of glorifying death and violence. "This propaganda is dangerous. You know, words really matter... Because in idealizing for children a world without Israel, children are taught never to accept the reality of the State of Israel, never to strive for a better future that would hold out the promise of peace and security to them ... This has dire consequences for prospects of peace for generations to come. I believe education is one of the keys to lasting peace and security in the Middle East and the greater region. We cannot build a peaceful, stable, safe future on such a hate-filled violent and radical foundation. In the years since, I and others — who have been doing it long before I did in 2000 — raised this issue, there has still not been an adequate repudiation of this by the Palestinian Authority. And I worry about the chance for peace when the next generation is learning that fighting Israel is a glorious, religious battle for Islam." ('Hillary Clinton's full statement introducing PMW's report on Palestinian schoolbook,' US Senate Building, February 8, 2007, Palestinian Media Watch, February 8, 2007). September 2007: "I personally consider Jerusalem the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel." [Citing then-Senator Clinton's paper, 'Hillary Clinton: A Long History of Strong and Steadfast Leadership for the U.S.-Israel Relationship], "Hillary Clinton believes that Israel's right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned" ( New York Sun, September 17, 2007). "The ZOA opposes Secretary Clinton's emphatic call for the ending of Jewish growth and construction in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. We repudiate the proposition that Jews, because they are Jews, may not move to or live in Judea and Samaria, the religious, historical and political heartland of the Jewish people, as it has been from the Bible to the Jewish nation-state 2000 years ago, to the Balfour Declaration to the League of Nations, which reiterated the fact that this is the Jewish homeland. On what basis is it said that 300,000 Jews cannot live among 2 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria, when 1.2 million Arabs can live among 6 million Jews in Israel proper? Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org |
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ISRAEL'S FORGOTTEN RIGHTS IN JERUSALEM
Posted by Mr La, May 24, 2009. |
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This is by Dore Gold, who heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and was the Israeli ambassador to the UN. |
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Israel has not yet declared its detailed positions in future talks with the Palestinians, and for understandable reasons. At this point, the government is justly focusing on the Iranian issue, which constitutes an existential threat. This is the context in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conducted his visit in Washington D.C. However, when the actual talks with the Palestinians are launched, Israel will have to avoid making the basic diplomatic mistake that previous governments have made in defining Israel's primary interests — especially when it comes to Jerusalem. For most of the past two decades, an asymmetry could be observed in how the two parties handled their struggle in the diplomatic sphere. While the Palestinians maintained that their goal was to achieve a Palestinians state whose capital is Jerusalem, most Israeli declarations sufficed with general statements that the goal is peace, or peace and security. In other words, whereas Israel presented an abstract goal, the Palestinians spoke about a clear and well-defined purpose. As a rule, the side that presents clear objectives is the triumphant one in any political conflict. Little wonder, then, that the contemporary diplomatic discourse is focusing on the Palestinian narrative, and Israel's arguments have been swept aside. Thus the asymmetry between how the Israelis and the Arabs presented their arguments to the world became one of the central factors responsible for the ongoing erosion in Israel's diplomatic status. This process comes despite the fact that Israel's claims rest on a broad base, and have in the past received solid international recognition, especially when in comes to Jerusalem. In 1967, for example, when the Israel Defense Forces entered East Jerusalem, the Soviet Union's attempt to label Israel as the aggressor failed. The world's leading jurists recognized its superior right to possess Jerusalem in light of the fact that Israel had entered the city in a defensive war. U.S. State Department Legal Advisor Stephen Schwebel, who also headed the International Court of Justice at The Hague, wrote in 1970 that "Israel has better title in the territory that was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem, than Jordan and Egypt." The esteemed British jurist Elihu Lauterpacht expressed a similar view. Such views are significant in international law, as implied in the constitution of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Because of the historical circumstances of the Six-Day War, the United Nations Security Council did not insist on a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, as clearly stated in Resolution 242. Morover, former U.S. ambassador to the UN, Arthur Goldberg, mentioned at one occasion that Resolution 242 did not include Jerusalem, making it of a different status than the West Bank. In 1994, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, announced at the Security Council that she rejects the assertion that Jerusalem is "occupied Palestinian territory." The late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin stressed that there was no contradiction between the willingness to hold talks with the Palestinians and the insistence on Israel's legal right to Jerusalem. Two years after his government signed the Oslo Accords, Rabin reiterated in a speech to the Knesset his belief regarding the need to keep Jerusalem united. This position received further backing by a decisive majority in both houses of Congress in 1995. Two Israeli governments that proposed to divide Jerusalem have come and gone since then, though they never reached a final agreement. Israel need not be bound to the protocols of a failed negotiation. To protect Jerusalem, Israeli diplomacy must reestablish the unification of the city as a clear national goal, and not abandon the subject of Jerusalem exclusively to Palestinian spokespeople.
Contact the poster at mrla26@aol.com |
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HUNDREDS IN SHDEMA CELEBRATE JERUSALEM DAY
Posted by Shaul and Aviva Ceder, May 24, 2009. |
| This comes from the Women in Green The pictures are by Rivka Ryback. They are part of a group to be found on the Yesha Bulletin and are archived at |
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A beautiful morning in Shdema. Over 250 people came to Shdema on Friday to celebrate the day of the liberation of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan. 
Shaul Goldstein, mayor of Gush Etzion, praised the struggle for a Jewish Shdema and welcomed the new division commander who arrived in Shdema with his entire staff and officers. Shaul Goldstein blessed the new commander with the blessing that under his command Shdema should be settled and populated. Geula Cohen, Israel prize winner and initiator of the laws annexing Jerusalem and the Golan, told us how she passed those laws and gave us a list of mistakes that were done concerning Jerusalem. A few examples: *The mistake of not emphasizing, prior to the Six Day war, our long lasting bond and connection to Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria — a mistake that caused the world to label us "occupiers" after the Six day war, despite the fact that we had liberated our Biblical homeland. Mistakes can be corrected. continued Cohen. and called for the immediate settling of East Jerusalem by as many Jews as possible and for the raising of the Israeli flag on the Temple Mount. The audience welcomed her speech with loud applause. Dudu Elharar spoke to us about his connection to Naomi Shemer and sung from her famous songs. The moved audience sang along. Letters of support by Mk Zeev Elkin and MK Dani Danon were sent to the members of the Committee for a Jewish Shdema. In the letters the two MK's praised the struggle to keep Shdema in Jewish hands and gave chizuk (support) to all those involved in that struggle. The struggle for a Jewish Shdema continues and we call upon all to join our weekly events in Shdema. 
For pictures about the event: Pictures by Gemma Blech
Pictures by Rivka Ryback
Shavua tov, The committee for a Jewish Shdema & Women in Green
Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il
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ARAB LEAGUE: NO 57-STATE SOLUTION TO MIDEAST CONFLICT
Posted by Avodah, May 24, 2009. |
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This is a news item from Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1087547.html |
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A "57-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would see Muslim-majority countries offer Israel full diplomatic recognition in exchange for peace "is not on the table," the head of the Arab League said on Saturday. Speaking to reporters at the end of a meeting of foreign ministers from the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Damascus on Saturday, Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa said media reports suggesting the OIC might offer Israel a joint peace deal were inaccurate. "This is not on the table. All talk of this is inaccurate," Mussa said. Jordan's King Abdullah II, in a May 11 interview with the Times of London, had spoken of a "57-state solution." "We are offering a third of the world to meet (the Israelis) with open arms," King Abdullah said two weeks ago. "The future is not the Jordan River or the Golan Heights or Sinai, the future is Morocco in the Atlantic to Indonesia in the Pacific." "The Jordanian proposal is in accordance with the Arab proposal," Mussa said Saturday. "The conflict would be finished with Israel's withdrawal from all occupied territories and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state." Mussa said that if Arabs and Israelis struck such a deal, other predominantly Muslim countries would likely follow suit. "But we do not see any progress in the current circumstances," he added. "Though there is a lot of clarity in the U.S. position, which can benefit everyone involved." [Editor's Note: as one reader of this item wrote, "If they are not happy with the Third Of The World They Already Have, Why would One More Country Satiate Them?"] Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website:
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IRAN'S GLOBAL REACH
Posted by LEL, May 24, 2009. |
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This was written by Caroline Glick and it appeared in the
May 18, 2009 Jerusalem Post.
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US President Barack Obama underestimates the threat Iran poses to global security. Were this not the case, he would not have sent CIA Director Leon Panetta to Israel ahead of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House. Panetta was reportedly dispatched here to read the government the riot act. Israel, he reportedly told his interlocutors, must not attack Iran without first receiving permission from Washington. Moreover, Israel should keep its mouth shut about attacking Iran. As far as Washington is concerned, Iran's latest threats to destroy Israel were nothing more than payback for statements by Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials regarding Israel's refusal to countenance a nuclear armed Iran. Over the past several weeks, we have learned that the administration has made its peace with Iran's nuclear aspirations. Senior administration officials acknowledge as much in off-record briefings. It is true, they say, that Iran may exploit its future talks with the US to run down the clock before they test a nuclear weapon. But, they add, if that happens, the US will simply have to live with a nuclear-armed mullocracy. The administration's nonchalance about the threat of a nuclear
armed Iran explains why the White House is so up in arms about the
prospect of Israel acting independently to prevent Iran from building
a nuclear arsenal. As far as the administration is concerned, the only
reason Iran would threaten US interests is if Israel provokes it. As
far as the administration is concerned, if Israel could just leave
Iran's nuclear installations alone, Iran would behave itself. But if
Israel preemptively takes out Iran's nuclear capabilities, and Iran in
turn attacks Israeli and US targets in the region, the Obama
administration will hold Israel — not Iran — responsible for whatever
losses the US incurs. That was apparently the message Panetta wanted
to transmit to Jerusalem during his recent visit.
WHILE LARGELY supported by the US media, the administration's view of the Iranian threat is not without its domestic critics. Opponents of the administration's policy of engagement and appeasement have pointed out that a nuclear armed Iran will surely destabilize the Middle East and as a consequence, will harm US national security interests. And this is true enough. Whether by spurring a regional nuclear arms race; destabilizing with the intent of overthrowing Western-aligned regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Morocco; enabling its terror proxies in Hizbullah and Hamas to operate under its nuclear umbrella; or attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, it is clear that the emergence of Iran as a nuclear power will cause tragedy, grief, chronic war and instability throughout the region. And — as the administration's critics make clear — such a state of affairs would be antithetical to US national interests. While correct, these warnings miss the mark. Yes, it is true that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Middle East. But the Obama White House doesn't seem to care about that. What interests the White House apparently, is minimizing Teheran's animosity towards Washington. If it can convince the mullocracy that Washington is not a threat, then — the thinking goes — perhaps, the buck will stop at the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. This bit of wishful thinking is wrong both theoretically and practically. It fails to take into account Iran's stated intentions and the consequences of its likely behavior for the Middle East, and it ignores the fact that Iran's intentions and actions for the past two decades have not been limited to the Middle East. For upwards of 20 years, and at a break-neck pace since 1999, Iran has built up a long strategic arm in America's backyard from which it is fully capable of attacking the US directly with the able and enthusiastic assistance of a network of proxies and allies.
IRAN POSES a direct threat to US national security through its alliances and military, intelligence and terrorist presence in South and Central America. Today Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iran's Hizbullah terror cells, and other Iranian agencies operate in open collaboration with anti-US governments throughout the Western Hemisphere. The South American lynchpin of this new and growing Iranian-centered alliance system is Hugo Chavez's regime in Venezuela. Through Chavez's good offices, Iran has developed a strategic presence in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia and warm ties with Cuba. It is exerting growing influence in El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and among FARC terrorists in Colombia. And it has highly developed and already proven human smuggling routes to the US in Mexico. It is through this alliance structure with anti-American regimes in Latin America and with sub-national Islamic and narco-terrorist networks in failing states that Iran already constitutes a grave threat to US national security. And it is through this rapidly expanding alliance system that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an acute danger to US national security. So far, the Obama administration has dealt with the threat posed by Iran's strategic alliance with Venezuela and Chavez's string of allied regimes in the same fashion as it has contended with Iran itself: It has blamed the situation on the Bush administration. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it last week, the Bush administration's policy of "isolating leaders who have led the opposition to US policies in Central and Latin America has failed and marginalized Washington's interests."
CLINTON'S STATEMENT makes clear the basic and disturbing consistency of the administration's failure to understand that there are regimes that are inherently hostile to the US and will remain irreconcilably hostile to the US regardless of what it does or who sits in the White House. Just as the administration cannot get its arms around the fact that the Iranian regime can only justify its existence by maintaining its hostility towards America, so it cannot countenance the fact that Chavez is only able to justify his existence through his hatred for Uncle Sam. It has no way of explaining for instance the fact that Iran and Venezuela responded to Obama's attempts last month to extend an open hand to both countries by signing a memorandum upgrading their military alliance. Were the administration able to understand the basic fact that some countries simply cannot abide by America, it would realize that the Iranian-Venezuelan military alliance itself is cause for a systematic reassessment of the rationale behind the US's Western Hemispheric strategy. As Italy's La Stampa reported last December, every week a Venezuelan airliner takes off from Teheran. It travels on to Syria's Damascus airport before continuing on to Caracas. These flights have no commercial value, and the passenger manifest is kept secret. But as La Stampa reported and as both US officials and Venezuelan dissidents have testified, these flights are used to transfer prohibited military equipment, including missile parts from Teheran to Syria. Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese-Hizbullah and Palestinian terror personnel then board the plane to its final destination in Caracas. Iranian Revolutionary Guards are sent to Venezuela to among other things train Venezuela's security services in methods for repressing internal dissent. Venezuela's military alliance with Iran places Iranian military personnel and Hizbullah operatives at every level of Venezuela's military, intelligence and law enforcement establishment. For example, as the Washington-based Center for Security Policy's Western Hemispheric Security Project documented in a recent report, Hizbullah agents control Venezuela's passport agency. In 2003, Chavez appointed Tarek el-Aissami, a known Hizbullah member to head the country's passport agency. Last year Aissami was promoted to serve as Minister of Interior and Justice. Then too, last June, the US Department of Treasury designated Ghazi Nasr al Din, a Venezuelan diplomat who served as the deputy ambassador in Damascus and Beirut as a Hizbullah agent. Hizbullah has a large and active presence in Venezuela. It operates openly throughout the country through both Lebanese cells and through native Venezuelan operatives who have converted to Islam. In 2006, a Hizbullah cell comprised of local converts staged an attempted bombing against the US embassy in Caracas. Hizbullah has developed a formidable economic presence in Latin America. Although it has run a web of businesses in the region for decades, since 2005 the economic importance of these businesses has been eclipsed by the terror group's involvement in worldwide cocaine distribution facilitated through its close ties with Chavez and FARC. According to the US military's Southern Command, Hizbullah in Latin America earns between $300-500 million per year. This dwarfs the $200 million a year it receives from Iran. Through Mexico, Hizbullah members and other terror operatives are able to enter the US relatively easily. In 2002 for instance the US arrested a Hizbullah operative in Mexico who admitted that he had facilitated the infiltration of several hundred Hizbullah operatives into the US.
THEN THERE is Nicaragua under the leadership of Chavez's buddy Sandinista chief Daniel Ortega. Since he assumed Nicaragua's presidency in 2007, Ortega has facilitated a massive expansion of Iran's presence in Central America. With more than a hundred accredited diplomats, Iran's embassy in Managua — a massive compound surrounded by four-meter-high concrete walls lined with razor wire — is one of the largest diplomatic compounds in the world. Even more disturbing than Iran's enormous diplomatic presence in Nicaragua are its massive maritime activities and plans. In 2007 Iran and Venezuela announced that they were investing $350 million to build a deep water port at Nicaragua's Monkey Point along the Caribbean Sea. Iran also announced its plans to upgrade Nicaragua's Pacific Port of Corinto. Finally, Teheran announced it would build a dry canal connecting the two ports. Such a building scheme would enable Iran to evade the Panama Canal; to build its own military infrastructure within the ports themselves; and to freely camouflage missile ships as civilian maritime traffic and use them to launch short and medium-range missiles against the US. Moreover, with its massive army of Hizbullah operatives on standby, Iran could launch attacks through its proxies — as it did in its 1992 and 1994 attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires — and so deny it had anything to do with the attacks. None of this should suggest that anyone expects the US to attack Iran's nuclear installations. The administration's policies clearly rule out any such contingency. As for Israel, regardless of what the US does, it should be clear that Jerusalem will not stand by idly and allow existential threats to emerge and grow. What people — and particularly Americans — could have expected is that the administration would take seriously the threat that Iran poses to the US in the Western Hemisphere. Depressingly however, the administration's apparent decision to abdicate America's position and responsibilities as the sole global superpower has led it to also abdicate its position and responsibilities as the most powerful nation in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, what the administration's refusal to acknowledge the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran — rich with proxies and allies at America's doorstep — poses to America demonstrates is that in its haste to blame its predecessor for the fact that the US has real enemies, the administration is abdicating its responsibility to defend America itself. Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com |
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CHRYSLER BANKRUPTCY & THE CHICAGO WAY
Posted by Avodah, May 24, 2009. |
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This was posted by May 5, 2009 by Gadfly and is archived at
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"THE CHICAGO WAY: When crime is a way of life for the authorities, where does justice begin?" Mark Mahon Equity Private of the Finem Respice blog works her day job in the private equity and hedge fund business. Write about finance long enough with the same electronic mail address and a number of interesting anecdotes will flutter your way. Write just a little bit longer and a shocking tale will pass under your eyes once or twice. Stick it out for two and half a hundred weeks and one is like to hear something quite disturbing. Hang in for more than a pair of years and a truly horrifying, bone chilling narrative will eventually confront you. Today, I have the distinctly unpleasant distinction of being on the receiving end of exactly this sort of recollection. That is, a bit of dialogue so genuinely awful that — were it not from a source I consider impeccable, and unimpeachable — I would not dare to credit at all. Unfortunately, I must do precisely this, and personally believe it to be totally, frightfully accurate. I take no pleasure in relaying it, instead hoping that someone more directly in the business of running such matters down and printing them will carefully document it and — if true — expose it, or — if not — discredit it quickly and finally. This (as yet unproven) yarn goes exactly like this: Confronting the head of a non-TARP fund holding Chrysler debt and unwilling to release it for any sum less than that to which it was legally entitled without compelling cause, this country's "Car Czar" [Steven Rattner] berated the manager of said fund with an outburst of prose substantially resembling this: Who the fuck do you think you're dealing with? We'll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with. Faced with these sorts of threats, in this environment, with valued employees in the crosshairs and AIG a fresh, open wound upon the market, the fund folded. It is a tale literally so outlandish and difficult to picture that, in these circumstances and given the source, it rings absolutely true. Consider all this in a larger context where: You see Non-TARP entities claiming that: ...we have been systematically precluded from engaging in direct discussions or negotiations with the government; instead, we have been forced to communicate through an obviously conflicted intermediary: a group of banks that have received billions of TARP funds. Then you have White & Case attorney Tom Lauria, describing the experience of one of his clients, holders of Senior debt in Chrysler, to Frank Beckmann: Lauria: One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House, and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That's how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence. WE SEE THE WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF (whose primary finance and economics qualifications appear to be a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College — apparently appealing because of its strong ballet program — and a Master of the Arts in Speech and Communications) calling the plays over at Treasury for the last several months. To wit: On Jan. 20, Timothy Geithner took control of the Treasury Department, directing the government's response to the financial crisis. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website:
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JUSTICE AND THE LOYALTY OATH
Posted by Paul Eidelberg, May 24, 2009. |
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Socrates visits Israel; indicted for "racism". Avigdor Lieberman has been accused of racism for proposing a loyalty oath for Arab citizens of Israel. I'm no fan of Mr. Lieberman, but this charge of his being a racist is absurd. It has been well established that most Arab citizens of Israel, while enjoying all the rights of this country, nonetheless identify with its enemies. Justice demands that those who enjoy the rights of citizenship fulfill the duties of citizenship. Otherwise, justice would be reduced to indiscriminate egalitarianism — the tendency in an Israel whose ruling elites derive their legitimacy and respectability from Israel's reputation as a "democracy". Justice is the central theme of Plato's greatest dialogue, The Republic. What has this dialogue to do with a loyalty vote for Israeli Arabs? Let us proceed step by step. The key figure of The Republic is, of course, Socrates. Socrates was a poor man. Poor men tend to be partisans of democracy. Why? Because democracies usually equate justice with equality. Democracies therefore give the poor the same rights as the rich. Yet, it was not that Socrates was a partisan of oligarchy, but he saw that democratic equality benefits the ignorant as well as villains. Socrates was a philosopher, a seeker of truth. Hence, he was skeptical about democracy, whose egalitarianism made no distinction between the wise and the unwise, the virtuous and the vicious. Even disloyal individuals may vote in a democracy. Can this be truly just? The answer to this question is so obvious that it is not discussed in The Republic. Even though Athens was a democracy, none of the various definitions of justice discussed in that most subtle and profound dialogue entails the indiscriminate egalitarianism found in contemporary democratic societies, where individuals of hostile beliefs and values enjoy equal political rights. Although members of the Athenian assembly were chosen by lot — seemingly the most democratic of all systems — still, to be eligible for the lot certain qualifications were required. First, one had to be an Athenian, meaning a person more or less identified with Athenian culture. Second, one had to have performed military service or be a taxpayer. In short, one had to be a patriotic or law-abiding citizen, and not mere consumers of rights typical of today's democracies. Now, of the various definitions of justice discussed in The Republic, only one conforms to these rational qualifications; namely, that justice means "giving to each his due." This is a matter of proportionate equality, not of arithmetic (or indiscriminate) equality. The latter results in the democratic principle of one adult-one vote, which renders a person's intellectual and moral character irrelevant. This is why democracies are ruled not by the wise and the virtuous, but by mediocrities, if not worse. Which means that democracy is not the best regime; indeed, it may not even be a truly just regime. (This was also the conclusion of Aristotle.) Justice is truly the most fundamental issue in Israel today. Socrates led Athenian youth to this subversive conclusion. He willingly paid the penalty for undermining their loyalty to Athens in the process of liberating them from their Athenian, i.e., democratic, prejudices. Democratic Athens sentenced him to death. Well, we don't give hemlock to philosophers any more; we ignore them. And no wonder. Philosophy, understood as a passionate love of truth, is dead. Still, what would the "gadfly"of Athens do were he in Israel today? He would surely inquire about justice. Sooner or later, some Israeli would say justice is giving to each his due. Socrates would probably lead him to a more refined definition, perhaps something like the following: Justice is giving equal things (such as rights and honors) to equals, and unequal things to unequals in proportion to their inequality; i.e., in proportion to their merit (as is done in classrooms), or in proportion to their contribution to the common good. Any sensible Israeli would then see that to give Arabs who strive for Israel's demise the equal political rights of Jews, who struggle for Israel's welfare, is not consistent with justice. He would then conclude that if justice is to prevail in Israel, then its Arab inhabitants must either be disenfranchised or undergo a profound political and religious metamorphosis. If Socrates led Israelis to this conclusion, then he would probably be condemned by Israel's political and intellectual elites and indicted for "racism" or `"incitement". True, he might point out, during his trial, that Israeli Arabs do not perform military service; that they engage in massive tax evasion; that they aid terrorists and commit terrorist acts; hence, that it is unjust to endow such disloyal Arabs with the equal rights of Jews. All this would probably be of no avail at Socrates' trial. He would almost certainly be convicted and imprisoned, and any appeal to Israel's egalitarian Supreme Court would be futile. This is quite a commentary on Israel's political and judicial elites, from whose lips the honeyed word "democracy" is ever dripping, but with hardly a word about justice. There is hardly a public figure in Israel that has the courage, as well as the wit, to tell the truth about the manifest injustice (and deadly consequences) of indiscriminately giving the vote to this country's Arab inhabitants. Indeed, it is against the law in Israel to tell the truth about this issue. Now we are prepared to go to the root of things. What needs to be said, and what no one dares say in Israel, is that this country was founded in 1948 on a monumental injustice: giving to Jews and Arabs — to loyal and disloyal inhabitants of Israel — the equal right to vote in this supposed-to-be Jewish State. Not peace, but justice is truly the most fundamental issue in Israel today. In Israel, however, justice has been reduced to a leveling equality, which is why the sense of justice has been murdered in this country. This is why the killers of so many Jews in this country go unpunished. This is why Arabs who have murdered Jews have been released by various Israeli governments. This is why various Israeli politicians have clasped the bloodstained hands of Yasser Arafat or his successor Mahmoud Abbas. You will not go to the root of things by explaining their behavior in terms of their desire for "peace". You will not truly explain their surrender of land for which Jews have so long yearned, fought and bled in terms of "American pressure". No, the suffering and humiliation of Israel today is the inevitable result of the monstrous injustice prescribed in the very Proclamation of the Establishment of the State, that all inhabitants of this State — Jews and Arabs alike — would receive equal political rights. This is not justice, but the negation of justice and even of common sense. This negation has made children of Israel's rulers. It has made fools of Israel's intellectuals. It has driven this country to suicidal madness — the prey of Arabs armed by mindless Israelis posing as men. (All this is described in Isaiah 3:4; 5:20; 28:7, 15-18; 29:9, 14; 44:25.) It was injustice compounded by stupidity that led to the Oslo "peace process". Until this issue is faced — until Jews pursue justice — neither politics nor political analysis will save Israel from recurring disasters. Professor Paul Eidelberg is an internationally known political scientist, author and lecturer. He is the founder and president of The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, a Jerusalem-based think tank for improving Israel's system of governance. He has written on the Arab-Israel conflict and on Judaism. Contact him at list-owner@foundation1.orgThis article is archived at
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THE PURSUIT OF JUSTICE REJECTS A FARCICAL PEACE PROCESS
Posted by Marcia Leal, May 24, 2009. |
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This was written by Matthew Hausman
and it appeared May 7, 2009 on the IsraPundit website
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*"Justice, justice shall you pursue." (Devarim, 16:20) "The three are one and the same: if the law is upheld, there is truth and there is peace." (Jerusalem Talmud, Taanit 4:2) The Torah portion of Shoftim in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) recounts the appointment of judges in ancient Israel, and is often thought to embody the Torah concept of justice. Indeed, its most famous dictum is "tzedek, tzedek, tirdoph," ("justice, justice shall you pursue"), which today is used to rationalize just about any demand made on Israel in the putative name of peace. But what is the Jewish concept of justice? Does it require peace negotiations with sworn enemies? Does it demand unilateral capitulation without assurances or the sacrifice of one's needs in favor of those of one's opponent? The answers to these questions are not simply esoteric exercises in an intellectual vacuum, but rather depend on material facts and circumstances, nuanced moral shadings, and obstreperous political realities. The repetitive construction of the phrase "justice, justice shall you pursue" is not merely a literary device, but rather suggests doctrinal substance. According to Rav Ashi (Sanhedrin 32b), the repetition of the word "Tzedek" implies two kinds of justice; one based on the strict application of the law, and the other predicated on compromise in applying the law. According to Rabbi Bunim of Peshischa, this verse also implies that the process of obtaining justice must itself be just. That is, the ends don't always justify the means, and the results should not be sullied by the methods. But these parallel applications predate the Talmud and the commentaries and hearken back to the Torah itself. The concept of "an eye for an eye" found in the Book of Vayikra (Leviticus), for example, was not literally applied, but rather formed the basis for requiring an exchange of value as restitution for physical harm and personal injury. If one caused another to lose an eye, an ox or a sum of money, he was required to compensate the injured party for the value of his loss. It was this legal construct that took the concept of "justice" beyond its purely punitive and primitive application and gave rise to tort law. What justice was there in blinding or crippling a person who injured another? Torah and Rabbinic law found greater justice in a system that provided compensation for the injured rather than the literal exchange of an eye for an eye. The law also understood that individual results could be shaped by peculiar facts and circumstances. Therefore, according to Rabennu Nissim, the king in ancient Israel had authority to impose sentences outside the boundary of the law when strict adherence would defeat its spirit. After the monarchy was abolished, the courts themselves assumed the authority to craft the sentence to fit the situation if, at the end of their deliberations, the judges determined that justice was not properly served. Thus, there was recognition that strict adherence could sometimes be detrimental, as observed by Rabbi Yochanan who stated that: "Jerusalem was destroyed only because ... they based their judgments [strictly] upon Biblical law, and did not go beyond the letter of the law." (Bava Metzia 30b.) Clearly, the Rabbis acknowledged the value of common sense in seeking justice. These concepts of justice are often cited as the underpinning of western legal thought; and yet they are frequently misunderstood when applied to Israel and the peace process. Whether achieved through strict application of the law or through compromise, justice neither condones nor requires unilateral concessions to the detriment of one party. Moreover, the law forbids engaging in acts that will be injurious to human life. Supposed friends of Israel often argue that she should give up land, acquiesce to the dubious demand for the Arab "right of return" and retreat to indefensible borders, all in the spirit of compromise as articulated in the Talmud. Moreover, progressive groups such as J Street and Israel Policy Forum entertain scenarios of a two-state solution or a bi-national state stripped of its institutional Jewish character. But neither of these "solutions" is sustainable under any formulation of justice, particularly when Israel receives no mutual concessions and the result would likely sacrifice Israeli lives. If Israel were to agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, she would be left with a narrowed geographic waistline and a hostile population on either side that could launch attacks from opposing fronts. Israel has been the target of terrorism and attack since before her rebirth in 1948. More recently she has witnessed the ascendancy of Hamas and suffered an unending storm of missiles since the disengagement from Gaza. Hamas steadfastly refuses to renounce terrorism or recognize Israel's right to exist, while the PA publicly refuses to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state. Thus, in agreeing to a two-state solution, Israel would be acquiescing to the creation of a hostile state where none had ever existed before, and would receive no reliable assurances in return. Such a resolution would only serve to weaken Israel, increase the risk of continued hostilities, and facilitate the ability to inflict Israeli casualties. This would clearly not serve the cause of justice, but rather would trample certain aspects of Jewish law that are supposed to be inviolate. The Rabbis taught that most commandments could be set aside in order to preserve life ("pekuach nefesh"). When the Romans forbade observance of Jewish rituals during the Hadrianic persecutions, for example, passivity could be rationalized in the name of survival. Nevertheless, certain commandments could never be suspended even on pain of death; specifically, the prohibitions against sexual deviancy, bowing to other gods, and murder (including suicide and human sacrifice). Any peace plan that increases the likelihood of loss of life would be incompatible with justice because it would necessarily transgress an inviolate prohibition. Also, inherent in seeking justice by compromise is the need for all parties to give some ground to achieve a fair resolution. Unfortunately, the proposed two-state solution requires only Israel to concede anything of value (i.e., land) for the creation of a state that never existed and a diminution in size that threatens her continued existence. The Arab nations will not concede their ludicrous demand for the "right of return," which is intended to destroy Israel as a Jewish state by displacing Jewish citizens with Arab "returnees." Thus, the two-state solution being pushed by the Obama Administration is actually seen in the Arab world as a two-phased solution. The first phase is the creation of an independent Palestinian state for the first time in world history, while the second phase is the demographic annihilation of Israel as a Jewish state. The only thing Israel would receive in return would be the empty promise of recognition to be bestowed only after the fact. But what good is the promise of recognition when it is coupled with a resolute refusal to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state? Verbal promises of even limited recognition must be measured against the Muslim concept of Taquiya, which mandates the use of trickery and artifice to deceive non-Muslims into lowering their defenses in order to facilitate their defeat and subjugation. In the absence of any sort of theological or intellectual reformation, such verbal promises would be tantamount to no assurances at all. Because the proposed two-state solution would leave Israel with neither bargain nor benefit, it could not be considered "just" under any interpretation. Moreover, the issue of Arab "refugees" and their "right of return" to Israel is not a matter of justice, but rather of subterfuge, which provides insight into their malicious long-term intent. It's no secret that the majority of Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish State, a refusal that was publicly reiterated by the supposedly moderate Mahmoud Abbas a few weeks ago. They refuse to acknowledge Jewish history, the continuous connection of the Jews to Israel and, consequently, the legal basis of the Jewish state. And yet, they demand an acknowledgment that they are refugees entitled to return to a land that they supposedly occupied for generations. As defined by UNRWA, however, "Palestinian refugees" are those individuals and their direct descendants who lived in the Palestine Mandate area for a minimum of only two years preceding the 1948 conflict and who reside in areas where UNRWA services are available. This definition begs the question of why "refugees" are defined based on a minimum two-year residency in the mandate area (i.e., not just the State of Israel) if they claim to be part of a people that continuously inhabited the land for hundreds of generations. Why not simply define them as native born? Why create a definition that clearly applies to immigrants who were born elsewhere? By forcing such an absurd definition of "Palestinian refugees" while simultaneously denying verifiable Jewish history and rejecting Israel's Jewish character, her enemies show that they are not truly interested in achieving justice by compromise. Their transparent goals are to obtain concessions without consideration and to impose a dubious national narrative over objectively verifiable history. This dynamic does not fit the definition of "justice." The Obama Administration is currently pushing its two-state solution based on the Saudi initiative, and groups such as J Street and Israel Policy Forum are complicit in advancing the charade. Even AIPAC recently endorsed a two-state solution at its most recent annual meeting, at which Rahm Emanuel hawked the Administration's agenda while simultaneously warning Israel against confronting the Iranian nuclear threat militarily. The Jewish concept of justice, however, does not condone threats to the personal safety of Israel's citizenry, the risk of national suicide or the surrender of autonomy. Moreover, justice does not require unilateral concessions without mutual exchanges. Those who claim that Torah Justice and Jewish values are conducive to such nonsense either do not know what justice is, or simply don't care. Theoretically, one could make a case for bold concessions if all parties agreed to give up something that put them on an equal footing. But the Administration's current vision requires sacrifices only by Israel, and links the Arab-Israeli situation to unrelated issues, such as the Iran nuclear program. Under pressure from the Clinton Administration, Israel at Camp David offered to give up most of the West Bank, but her offer was rebuffed with an intifada. She then ceded all of Gaza, only to see it become a launching pad for missiles and terror. Given the long history of Arab intransigence, justice does not require that Israel offer any further compromises. Rather, justice requires that there by meaningful concessions from the other side of the table, which are highly unlikely any time soon. The Jerusalem Talmud (Taanit 4:2) states that "... if the law is upheld, there is truth and there is peace." But any attempt to force an unjust solution on Israel is not in accordance with the law, and thus ultimately can provide neither truth nor peace. Contact Marcia Leal at marcia.leal.eejh@gmail.com |
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COMMENTS ON ISRAEL'S CLAIM TO THE SINAI; AND WHAT'S WRONG WITH HAARETZ
Posted by Howard Grief, May 23, 2009. |
| The first letter to the Jerusalem Post refut[es] the false allegation that "the Jewish People have never had a historical or legal claim to the Sinai desert" made by Dr. Hillel Hurwitz, son of Harry Hurwitz, the founder of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. The second letter is to Ha'Aretz |
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Jerusalem Post
To: Letters@jpost.com Dear Sir, With all due respect to Dr. Hillel Hurwitz of Ra'anana, he is grossly misinformed when he states in his letter (March 12, 2009) that "the Jewish People have never had a historical or legal claim to the Sinai desert". The Sinai Peninsula, contrary to what Menachem Begin thought, is indeed a geographical part of the Land of Israel, being the continuation of the Negev. It was part of the land promised to Abraham, the father of the Jewish People (Genesis 15:18). Moreover, Sinai is enshrined for all time in the Torah, the most sacred book of the Jewish People, as the revered site where Moses, after departing Egypt with the Israelites, received the entire Torah on Mount Sinai (Deuteronomy 33:2-4; Mishna, Avot 1:1), including the Ten Commandments (Exodus 19:1; 20:1-14; Deuteronomy 5:1-18). Sinai subsequently formed part of Solomon's kingdom up to Nahal Mitzrayim, the Brook or River of Egypt (I Kings 8:65). There is no comparable Egyptian historical and religious association with Sinai. In modern times, the central region of Sinai was also part of the Independent Sanjak of Jerusalem during Ottoman rule and should have been included in the frontiers of the Jewish National Home, i.e., Palestine, when they were first delineated in 1920, but the British who had ruled Egypt since 1882 preferred to administer Sinai as part of Egypt to protect their hold on the Suez Canal. When Britain granted independence to Egypt in 1922 (not fully realized until 1936), all or most of Sinai lay outside its recognized international border. It was only as a result of the 1979 Peace Treaty, concluded by Israel with Egypt under Begin's direction that all of Sinai first came under the sovereignty of Egypt, when it was illegally ceded by Israel. At the very least, Begin violated halakha in ceding Sinai to Egypt and negated Israel's own right to all or at least a considerable portion of the peninsula. In his famous speech to the Knesset on November 7, 1956, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion emphasized several times that Sinai had never belonged to Egypt proper. He made it clear in another speech the day before at Sharm-e-Sheikh read out to the troops on parade by Moshe Dayan, that he considered Sinai and the adjacent Red Sea islands of Tiran (Yotvat) and Sinafir to be a part of the Third Jewish Commonwealth. Had Sinai remained in Israeli hands, it would not have become the terrorist smuggler's paradise it is today, and the disastrous disengagement from Gaza as well as the recent campaign would never have occurred. Yours truly,
Jerusalem
Herald Tribune — Ha'Aretz
Most of your columnists favour the Arab enemy against Israel. I do not wish to continue reading their one-sided treasonous comments about Israel's so-called "occupation" of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the false accusation of the illegality of Israeli settlements in those regions of the Land of Israel, the alleged "disproportionate" use of force by Israel in Gaza in Operation "Cast Lead", the oft-expressed hope that the Barack Obama Administration will bludgeon Israel into submission to carry out a "two-state solution", etc., etc., etc. You blacken the name and cause of Israel to the outside world. No other country in the world has such a self-hating newspaper as Israel has with Ha'Aretz. The Arab League should award you a prize for doing your utmost from within to destroy the viability of the Jewish State and to add an unnecessary twenty-second Arab state to the map of the Middle East in the heartland of Israel. Ha'Aretz should be investigated for committing the crime of treason, which it does almost daily, and for aiding and abetting Israel's enemies — under the relevant provisions of Israel's Penal Code. You may also print this letter as a Letter to the Editor and bring it to the attention of the publisher. Yours truly,
Contact Howard Grief by email at griefIsrael@yahoo.com |
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MUSLIM ROW
Posted by Ryan Mauro, May 23, 2009. |
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The Bible-belt state of Tennessee is not known to have been targeted by Al-Qaeda or any other radical Islamic terrorist group, but the Volunteer State may be becoming a hotbed for the growth of extremism. Reports from Nashville, Shelbyville, and Dover indicate that Tennessee has gradually become a stronghold for radical Islamic forces that are transforming parts of the state. On May 13, I reported on the discovery of extremism at the Al-Farooq Mosque in Nashville by award-winning counter-terrorism expert Dave Gaubatz, an individual that once held top-secret security clearance as an agent for the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations. The library carried extremist texts and audio tapes by known radicals such as Syed Maududi and Ali Al-Tamimi, who was convicted for his role in terrorism. One calls for the killing of homosexuals, and another describes how Muslims not engaged in taking up an armed jihad must "strengthen the capability of those fighting on the front line." Other texts were found by his fem Most shockingly, one of his researchers recorded a seven-year old girl describing the teachers at the mosque as hitting the children. Although Gaubatz himself did not see such abuse, he described an incident where he heard a teacher scream and an 8-10 year old girl yell. After Gaubatz turned and looked to see what happened, he saw the teacher carrying a stick between 12 and 14 inches long. Although he did not see her get hit, Gaubatz said "from the reactions of the other children, I believe this happened." Gaubatz forwarded the information to the Nashville Police Department and Child Protective Services, each of which declined to launch an investigation saying not enough information was provided. CPS also told Gaubatz that the Nashville P.D. did not inform them of the tip. Gaubatz also says that you can hear the girl mentioning her "husband" on the audio, although Detective Brooks Harris from the department rejected that allegation, saying he and his staff repeatedly listened to the audio and that she was saying the word "aunt" in her native tongue. Gaubatz says that members of the mosque did confirm they practiced polygamy. Al-Farooq Mosque is attended by many Somali immigrants, and Islamic websites say that services are offered in Somali. Nashville alone is home to about 5,000 such immigrants, and their lack of assimilation is becoming a common complaint in Tennessee. The town of Shelbyville is the most dramatic example of this problem. Brian Moseley of the Shelbyville Times-Gazette has written an award-winning series about the impact of these refugees on the town of 17,000. Moseley says that the local authorities described being frequently disrespected by the Somali immigrants, which number between 400 and 1,000, and are noticing that many become involved with gangs. "Firefighters have told me that the Somalis refused to evacuate their apartment complex during a blaze and when they responded to alarm calls, the firemen are told to leave and that they are not welcome there...I have been told off the record that many officers are hesitant to even patrol after dark the apartment complex where the Somalis live," he told Jerry Gordon of the New English Review. He also reports that the school system is having some difficulty in working with them, as they "have difficulties" with females with positions of authorities, and are very demanding that the schools conform to their wishes. They often try to haggle with storeowners, and sometimes refuse to speak to female supervisors at stores, schools and hospitals. The presence of a radical Islamic compound in Dover makes the potential for radicalization among these Somalis much more dangerous. According to unconfirmed reports received by the Christian Action Network, where I serve as a national security researcher, some of these Somalis have moved to this compound, run by a group called Muslims of America, a front for Jamaat ul-Fuqra. The residents here are followers of a radical Muslim cleric named Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, who currently lives in Lahore, Pakistan. Residents near other compounds have reported the sounds of gunfire, and a secret videotape shows Sheikh Gilani engaging in terrorist training and instructing Muslims who wish to receive his training in "advanced Islamic military warfare" to contact his Muslims of America compounds. If these unverified reports are accurate, then Dover may be one of the locations of the Somalis who have gone missing. These issues, of course, do not mean that all Somali immigrants are problems, but it is clear that the government needs to find better ways to assimilate those who travel to the U.S. in large numbers as refugees. As these communities grow, the U.S. may find itself with unassimilated masses asserting themselves as a state-within-a-state and over the long term, dealing with the "No-Go Zones" and their subsequent instability as seen in France. Should this happen, Americans will look to Tennessee as one of the places where it first started. Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and the Assistant-Director of Intelligence at C2I. He's also the National Security Researcher for the Christian Action Network and a published author. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com. This article appeared May 19, 2009 in Frontpage Magazine http://frontpagemagazine.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34916 |
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NETANYAHU'S PEACE PLAN
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 23, 2009. |
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We see a Young ... inexperienced Socialist/Marxist wannabe Politician .... who is/was not known for any outstanding deeds, but solely Being a questionable Community Organizer .... with questionable groups in Chicago.... with very questionable people that are his mentors and friends....... with even more questionable recommendations .... Recommendations.....from whom .... and to what ??? Being strangely glorified and pushed with funds from people like Soros .... to become A TRAINEE and A puppet for most .... for and in the highest office of political power ..... the United States Presidential Office. Dangerous indeed !!!! In short a man being trained on the Job (at the cost of the public) to become the worlds possible most powerful man ..... What is amazing: People would never give a Butcher's shop and turn it over to someone who can only give Rhetoric speeches... but knows nothing about meat..... Neither... go and see a medical doctor ... a Surgeon... who was only trained on the job with NO qualifications ...... why would THEY elect a None-Qualified man to become THEIR president. A man ....who refuses to be transparent.. to disclose his past and refuses to produce his birth certificate for eligibility to the highest office... by using stacks of lawyers and millions to do so ??????????????? ?.... There is a certain odor to this !!!! The column below was written by Caroline Glick and it
appeared yesterday in the Jerusalem Post Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Contact her at caroline@carolineglick.com |
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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with US President Barack Obama at the White House on Monday was a baptism of fire for the new premier. What emerged from the meeting is that Obama's priorities regarding Iran, Israel and the Arab world are diametrically opposed to Israel's priorities. During his ad hoc press conference with Netanyahu, Obama made clear that he will not lift a finger to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And acting as Obama's surrogate, for the past two weeks CIA Director Leon Panetta has made clear that Obama expects Israel to also sit on its thumbs as Iran develops the means to destroy it. Obama showed his hand on Iran in three ways. First, he set a nonbinding timetable of seven months for his policy of appeasement and engagement of the ayatollahs to work. That policy, he explained, will only be implemented after next month's Iranian presidential elections. And those direct US-Iranian talks must be given at least six months to show results before they can be assessed as successful or failed. But Israel's Military Intelligence has assessed that six months may be too long to wait. By the end of the year, Iran's nuclear program may be unstoppable. And Iran's successful test of its solid fuel Sejil-2 missile with a 2,000 kilometer range on Wednesday merely served to show the urgency of the situation. Obviously the mullahs are not waiting for Obama to convince them of the error of their ways. Beyond the fact that Obama's nonbinding timeline is too long, there is his "or else." Obama made clear that in the event that in December or January he concludes that the Iranians are not negotiating in good faith, the most radical step he will be willing to take will be to consider escalating international sanctions against Teheran. I n the meantime, at his urging, Congressman Howard Berman, chairman of the House International Affairs Committee, has set aside a bill requiring sanctions against oil companies that export refined fuel into Iran. Finally there was Obama's contention that the best way for the US to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program is by convincing Israel to give away more land to the Palestinians. As Obama put it, "To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians, between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat." This statement encapsulates the basic lack of seriousness and fundamental mendacity of Obama's approach to "dealing with a potential Iranian threat." Iran has made clear that it wants Israel destroyed. The mullahs don't care how big Israel is. Their missiles are pointing at Tel Aviv, not Beit El. As for the international community, the Russians and Chinese have not been assisting Iran's nuclear and missile programs for the past 15 years because there is no Palestinian state. They have been assisting Iran because they think a strong Iran weakens the US. And they are right. The Arab states, for their part, are already openly siding with Israel against Iran. The establishment of a Palestinian state will not make their support for action to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to dominate the region any more profound. On the face of it, Obama's obsessive push for a Palestinian state makes little sense. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided. It is not simply that Hamas rules the Gaza Strip and Fatah controls Judea and Samaria. Fatah itself is riven by division. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's appointment of the new PA government under Salaam Fayad was overwhelmingly rejected by Fatah leaders. Quite simply, there is no coherent Palestinian leadership that is either willing or capable of reaching an accord with Israel. As for the prospects for peace itself, given that there is little distinction between the anti-Semitic bilge broadcast daily in Gaza by Hamas-controlled media, and the anti-Semitic bilge broadcast daily in Judea and Samaria by the Fatah/Abbas/Fayad-controlled media, those prospects aren't looking particularly attractive. That across-the-board anti-Semitic incitement has engendered the current situation where Hamas and Fatah members and supporters are firmly united in their desire to see Israel destroyed. This was made clear on Thursday morning when a Fatah policeman in Kalkilya used his US-provided rifle to open fire on IDF soldiers engaged in a counterterror operation in the city. Given that the establishment of a Palestinian state will have no impact on Iran's nuclear program, and in light of the fact that under the present circumstances any Palestinian state will be at war with Israel, and assuming that Obama is not completely ignorant of the situation on the ground, there is only one reasonable explanation for his urgent desire to force Israel to support the creation of a Palestinian state and to work for its establishment by expelling hundreds of thousands of Israelis from their homes. Quite simply, it is a way to divert attention away from Obama's acquiescence to Iran's nuclear aspirations.
BY MAKING the achievement of the unachievable goal of making peace between Israel and the Palestinians through the establishment of a Palestinian terror state the centerpiece of his Middle East agenda, Obama is able to cast Israel as the region's villain. This aim is reflected in the administration's intensifying pressure on Israel to destroy Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. In portraying Jews who live in mobile homes on barren hilltops in Judea and Samaria — rather than Iranian mullahs who test ballistic missile while enriching uranium and inciting genocide — as the greatest obstacle to peace, the Obama administration not only seeks to deflect attention away from its refusal to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is also setting Israel up as the fall guy who it will blame after Iran emerges as a nuclear power. Obama's intention to unveil his Middle East peace plan in the course of his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, like his decision to opt out of visiting Israel in favor of visiting a Nazi death camp, make it clear that he does not perceive Israel as a vital ally, or even as a partner in the peace process he wishes to initiate. Israeli officials were not consulted about his plan. Then, too, from the emerging contours of his plan, it is clear that he will be offering something that no Israeli government can accept. According to media reports, Obama's plan will require Israel to withdraw its citizens and its military to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. It will provide for the free immigration of millions of Israel-hating Arabs to the Palestinian state. And it seeks to represent all of this as in accord with Israel's interests by claiming that after Israel renders itself indefensible, all 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (including Iran) will "normalize" their relations with Israel. In short, Obama is using his peace plan to castigate the Netanyahu government as the chief destabilizing force in the region. During his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu succeeded in evading the policy traps Obama set for him. Netanyahu reserved Israel's right to act independently against Iran and he conceded nothing substantive on the Palestinian issue. While itself no small achievement, Netanyahu's successful deflection of Obama's provocations is not a sustainable strategy. Already on Tuesday the administration began coercing Israel to toe its line on Iran and the Palestinians by engaging it in joint "working groups." Then, too, the government's destruction of an outpost community in Judea on Thursday was perceived as Israeli buckling to US pressure. And it doubtlessly raised expectations for further expulsions in the near future.
SO WHAT must Netanyahu do? What would a strategy to contain the Obama administration's pressure and maintain international attention on Iran look like? Under the present circumstances, the Netanyahu government's best bet is to introduce its own peace plan to mitigate the impact of Obama's plan. To blunt the impact of Obama's speech in Cairo, Netanyahu should present his peace plan before June 4. Such a plan should contain three stages. First, in light of the Arab world's apparent willingness to engage with Israel, Netanyahu should call for the opening of direct talks between Israel and the Arab League, or between Israel and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, regarding the immediate normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab-Islamic world. Both Obama and Jordan's King Abdullah claim that such normalization is in the offing. Israel should insist that it begin without delay. This, of course, is necessary for peace to emerge with the Palestinians. As we saw at Camp David in 2000, the only way that Palestinian leaders will feel comfortable making peace with Israel is if the Arab world first demonstrates its acceptance of the Jewish state as a permanent feature on the Middle East's landscape. Claims that such an Israeli demand is a mere tactic to buy time can be easily brushed off. Given Jordanian and American claims that the Arab world is willing to accept Israel, once negotiations begin, this stage could be completed in a matter of months. The second stage of the Israeli peace plan would involve Israel and the Arab world agreeing and beginning to implement a joint program for combating terrorism. This program would involve destroying terror networks, cutting off funding for terror networks and agreeing to arrest terrorists and extradite them to The Hague or the US for trial. It should be abundantly clear to all governments in the region that there can be no long-term regional peace or stability as long as terrorists bent on destroying Israel and overthrowing moderate Arab regimes are allowed to operate. So making the implementation of such a join program a precondition for further progress shouldn't pose an obstacle to peace. Indeed, there is no reason for it to even be perceived as particularly controversial. The final stage of the Israeli peace plan should be the negotiation of a final-status accord with the Palestinians. Only after the Arab world has accepted Israel, and only after it has agreed to join Israel in achieving the common goal of a terror-free Middle East, can there be any chance that the Palestinians will feel comfortable and free to peacefully coexist with Israel. And Israel, of course, will feel much more confident about living at peace with the Palestinians after the Arab world demonstrates its good faith and friendship to the Jewish state and its people. Were Netanyahu to offer this plan in the next two weeks, he would be able to elude Obama's trap on June 4 by proposing to discuss both plans with the Arab League. In so doing, he would be able to continue to make the case that Iran is the gravest danger to the region without being demonized as a destabilizing force and an enemy of peace. Whether Netanyahu advances such a peace plan or not, what became obvious this week is that his greatest challenges in office will be to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons while preventing the Obama administration from blaming Israel for the absence of peace. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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FINALLY!!!! A PERFECT SOLUTION TO THE JERUSALEM ISSUE
Posted by Yid With Lid, May 23, 2009. |
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Jerusalem is arguably the most difficult issue to solve in the ongoing Israel-Palestinian "peace" process. The Palestinians are demanding control of the holy city, the Temple Mount and the Kotel because they claim it is where Mohammad rose to heaven, which makes it the third holiest site in Islam. Of course, this is a very recent claim and there is nothing about Jerusalem in the Koran. Some people claim that the only reason that the Palestinians want Jerusalem is their continued attempt to delegitimize Judaism's historical claim to Israel. For Jews, Jerusalem is the holy city, and the Temple Mount is the holiest site in all of Judaism. Not only did the Mount house the two Temples to God, it is where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac and where Jacob had the dream of the ladder to Heaven. For two thousand years, Jews have prayed for a return to Jerusalem. There are reports that the United States wants Israel to split Jerusalem with the Palestinians and give up sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the UN. This has raised the ire of the Jewish People. Polls have shown that the Israeli people are against dividing the Holy City, the majority of the Knesset is against it, protests and petitions have come from groups such as the OU and the ZOA. Yet, the Palestinians claim that there can be no peace without handing over Jerusalem. What can Binyamin Netanyahu do to satisfy Israel, the Jewish People, and make peace with the terrorists at the same time? Thankfully, I have a solution. Not only will it work, but I got the idea from an Iranian, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Remember last year when he suggested that we move Israel to Alaska? Well, we can do the same thing with Arab East Jerusalem — move it. And I am willing to give the Arabs a lot more options than Ahmadinejad gave the Jews. In fact, I have an entire list of cities that they can pick from to move East Jerusalem to:
I know that there will be protests to any of these solutions. Some may say: "How could you make up reasons to take away a city from a people who have an historic attachment, and give it to people who have no real claim to it?" Well, let me answer those people like this: I agree. Maybe Mr.Bones Creator of Dry Bones put it best: 
This article is archived at
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MAY 25 SACRIFICES & HEZBOLLAH THE DRAGON
Posted by Elias Bejjani, May 23, 2009. |
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My New English editorial below addresses the big lie of Hezbollah's Liberation & Resistance. Believe it or not, on May 25 each year since 2000 Lebanon has been celebrating a so-called "Liberation & Resistance Day." Sadly, this celebration commemorates a bogus event, and a phony heroism that did not actually take place. |
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Believe it or not, on May 25 each year since 2000 Lebanon has been celebrating a so-called "Liberation & Resistance Day." Sadly, this celebration commemorates a bogus event, and a phony heroism that did not actually take place. On May 22, 2000 the Israeli Army unilaterally and for solely Israeli domestic reasons withdrew from the security zone of South Lebanon in accordance with UN Resolution 425. The withdrawal was a fatal Israeli decision that has inspired the Hamas terrorism acts and the on-going havoc in the Palestinian Gaza strip. The unilateral Israeli withdrawal created a security vacuum in south Lebanon. The Syrians who were occupying Lebanon at that time and fully controlling its government, did not allow the Lebanese Army to deploy in the south and fill this vacuum after the Israeli withdrawal. Instead Syria helped the Hezbollah militia to militarily control the whole southern region, and even patrol the Israeli-Lebanese border. It is worth mentioning that the Israeli army's withdrawal was executed without any military battles, or even minor skirmishes with Hezbollah, or the Lebanese and Syrian armies. The Syrian regime, in a bid to justify both its on going occupation of Lebanon and the avoidance of disarming Hezbollah, came up with the "Shabaa Farms occupation big lie" and declared Hezbollah a Liberator, alleging it had forced Israel to withdrawal from South Lebanon. Syria, in the same camouflaging and devious context, dictated to both the Lebanese parliament and government to declare May 25th a National Day under the tag of "Liberation & Reistance Day". In reality Hezbollah did not force the Israeli withdrawal, and did not play any role in the Liberation of the southern Lebanese region. In fact both Hezbollah and Syria deliberately hindered and delayed the Israeli withdrawal for more than 14 years. Every time the Israelis called on the Lebanese government to engage in a joint, serious effort under the United Nations umbrella to ensure a safe and mutually organized withdrawal of its army from South Lebanon, the Lebanese government refused to cooperate, did not agree to deploy its army in the south, and accused the Israelis of plotting to divide and split the Syrian-Lebanese joint track. This approach to the Israeli calls was an official Syrian decision dictated to all the Lebanese puppet governments during the Syrian occupation era. Since then, Hezbollah has been hijacking Lebanon and its people, refusing to disarm and advocating for the annihilation of Israel. This Iranian mullahs' terrorist army stationed in Lebanon, is viciously hiding behind labels of resistance, liberation and religion. Hezbollah has recklessly jeopardized the Lebanese peoples' lives, safety, security and livelihood. It has been growing bolder and bolder in the last four years and mercilessly taking the Lebanese state and the Lebanese people hostage through terrorism, force and organized crime. Sadly, Hezbollah is systematically devouring Lebanon day after day, and piece by piece, while at the same time marginalizing all its governmental institutions in a bid to topple the Lebanese state and erect in its place a Shiite Muslim regime, a replica of the Iranian Shiite mullahs' fundamentalist republic. Meanwhile the free world and Arabic countries are totally silent, indifferent, and idly watching from far away the horrible crime unfolding without taking any practical or tangible measures to put an end to this anti-Lebanese Syria-Iranian scheme that is executed through their spearhead, the Hezbollah armed militia. Who is to be blamed for Hezbollah's current odd and bizarre status? Definitely the Syrians who have occupied Lebanon for more than 28 years (1976-2005). During their bloody and criminal occupation, Syria helped the Iranian Hezbollah militia build a state within Lebanon and fully control the Lebanese Shiite community. But also the majority of the Lebanese politicians, leaders, officials and clergymen share the responsibility because they were subservient and acted in a dire Dhimmitude, selfish and cowardly manner. If these so-called Lebanese leaders had been courageous and patriotic and had not appeased Hezbollah and turned a blind eye to all its vicious and human rights atrocities, intimidation tactics, crimes and expansionism schemes, this Iranian Shiite fundamentalist militia would not have been able to erect its own mini-state in the southern suburb of Beirut, and its numerous mini-cantons in the Bekaa Valley and the South; nor would Hezbollah have been able to build its mighty military power, with 70 thousand militiamen, or stockpile more than 50 thousand missiles and force the Iranian "Wilayat Al-Faqih" religious doctrine on the Lebanese Shiite community and confiscate its decision making process and freedoms. Since Hezbollah's emergence in 1982, these politicians have been serving their own selfish interests and not the interests of the Lebanese people and the nation. They went along with Hezbollah's schemes, deluding themselves that its militia and weaponry would remain in South Lebanon and would not turn against them. This failure to serve the people of Lebanon allowed Hezbollah to make many Lebanese and most of the Arab-Muslim countries through its terrorism propaganda to blindly swallow its big lie of theatrical, faked resistance and Liberation. Hezbollah would not have been able refuse to disarm in 1991, like all the other Lebanese militias in accordance to the "Taef Accord," which called for the disarmament of all militias. Hezbollah would not have become a state inside the Lebanese state, and a world-wide terrorism Iranian-Syrian tool which turned against them all after its war with Israel in year 2006 and after the UN troops were deployed on the Lebanese — Israeli borders in accordance with the UN Resolution 1701. On May 7, 2008 Hezbollah invaded Sunni Western Beirut killing and injuring in cold blood hundreds of its civilian citizens, and attempted to take over by force Mount Lebanon. A few days ago Hezbollah's General Secretary Sheik Hassan Nasrallah called that day (May 7, 2008) a great and glorious victory for his resistance, and threatened the Lebanese that a replicate of that day will take place if they do not succumb and obey his orders. Hezbollah is a deadly dragon that the Lebanese politicians have been allowing him to feed on sacrifices from the southern Lebanese citizens, especially on those who were living in the "Security Zone" and who fled to Israel in May 2000 after the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon. This dragon who enjoyed devouring his southern sacrifices has now turned on all the Lebanese and if they do not stand for their rights and dignity, he will keep on devouring them all one after the other. We call on the Lebanese government, the Lebanese Parliament and on all the free and patriotic Lebanese politicians and leaders to cancel the May 25 National Day, because it is not national at all, and also to stop calling Hezbollah a resistance, put an end for its mini-state, cantons and weaponry, and secure a dignified, honorable and safe return for all the Lebanese citizens who have been taking refuge in Israel since May 2000.
Elias Bejjani is a
Canadian-Lebanese Human Rights activist, journalist and political
commentator. Contact him by
email at phoenicia@hotmail.com
and visit his websites:
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SYRIA BLAMES SWINE FLU ON U.S.; HIZBULLAH MOVES TO TAKE OVER
LEBANON; PRETENDING IRAN IS HARMLESS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 22, 2009. |
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RECOVER HEBREW PAPYRUS 2000 YEARS OLD The Israel Antiquities Authority recovered an improperly held papyrus from the Second Temple Period, in whose Hebrew style it was written. It is a rare find, in that it references an historical event of known date. Thus it referred to the fourth year after the "destruction," meaning the destruction of the Second Temple. It named a woman and her town. Oddly, the news brief did not identify from whom the papyrus was
recovered
SYRIA BLAMES SWINE FLU ON U.S. Syria's government daily attributes the swine flu to U.S. weapons laboratories. It surmises the motive is to distract people or to make them think the economic crisis is worse than it is. Oh, laments the newspaper, how standards have fallen! You can see, asserts the article, that Pres. Obama will not make needed change (http://www.memri.org/ — Middle E. Media Research Inst., 5/6). The Arabs make conspiracy theory look bad. They offer no evidence for their strong accusations. Neither do they offer logic, just non-sequiturs and prejudice. One could be amused, if they didn't have so many guns. HOW MUCH DID NETANYAHU OFFER SYRIA? Former U.S. diplomats, Martin Indyk and Richard Haas claim that in his earlier stint as Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu offered Syria the entire Golan Heights. Netanyahu's former aides, Dore Gold and Shimon Shapira, deny it. Writing to Foreign Affairs vol. 88 No. 2, they adduce evidence to the contrary. First, Netanyahu asked the U.S. Sec. of State for clarification, to make sure that a similar, verbal, but hypothetical statement by his predecessor, PM Rabin, did not bind Israel. Itamar Rabinvich, Rabin's Ambassador to the U.S. confirms Sec. Christopher's affirmation that Israel was not bound. Pres. Ford earlier had written to Rabin that great weight would be given to an Israeli need to retain the Golan. During the 1990s, successive U.S. regimes upheld Ford's commitment. Later, Syrian President Assad repeatedly asked, via intermediaries, how much of the 12-mile wide Golan Netanyahu would retain. Netanyahu was vague. His last answer was, "Miles." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 5/6). National security should not hang on verbal slips by defeatist predecessors and claims by anti-Zionist State Dept. officials. HIZBULLAH MOVES TO TAKE OVER LEBANON Hizbullah was caught attempting to promote terrorist activity in Egypt. Perhaps as a result, less reported is Hizbullah's drive to end Lebanon's system of "confessional" government. That system guaranteed each sect's participation in the government, so no one sect would dominate it. The proposal would enable Hizbullah, a Shiite organization, to take over Lebanon for Iran, and turn Iran into an Islamist state. This is part of international jihad. "The scholarly analyses that define Hizbullah as a Lebanese national movement are baseless. What Lebanese national interests are served by subversive activity in Egypt? What Lebanese interests seek the transfer of Iranian arms from Sudan and Sinai to Gaza? What national Lebanese ideology seeks to subvert the delicate sectarian structure upon which the modern Lebanese state is predicated?" The ties between Hizbullah and Iran are both strategic, i.e.,
political, and religious. Britain misunderstood when it thought it
could differentiate between Hizbullah's military and its political
wing, and deal with the latter. Hizbullah's militia serves its
politics, as when it faced down the Lebanese Army and came to dominate
Lebanon unofficially
Britain, the U.S., and anti-Zionists will make almost any rationalization to enable them to accommodate fascists, whether Nazis, Communists, or Radical Muslims. This ploy is either extremely naïve or extremely cynical and certainly is extremely perilous. It led to WWII, the worst of the Cold War, and current wars of jihad. For more on Hizbullah's imperialist side:
AMNESTY INTL. TREATS TERRORISM INCONSISTENTLY "Taliban insurgents have used health facilities, schools and residential areas to hide and launch attacks from, thus knowingly drawing a military response from the Pakistani military," reports Amnesty International. (Salman Masood, NY Times, 5/16, A7). In other words, the Taliban commit war crimes and they knowingly cause civilian casualties. They use those casualties to arouse people against the government, though the people should be aroused against them. Arab terrorists have committed the same war crimes against Israel. If drawing gunfire into civilian areas is wrong against Pakistan, it is wrong against Israel. However, the so-called international human rights organizations, including the UN, hardly worry about it. Instead, they falsely accuse Israel of committing war crimes. Being hypocritical, how ethical is their indignation against Israel? For more on NGO bias against Israel:
Roger Cohen writes Op.-Eds. for the NY Times. About his trip to Iran, he focused on its culture, making light of its official tyranny, terrorism, antisemitism, and drive for nuclear weapons. He opposes thwarting that drive. He contends that Iran's sophistication outweighs its inflammatory remarks. Iran's Jews periodically face arrest, imprisonment, and execution on false chares of spying for Israel, for practicing Judaism, or for assisting emigration to Israel. Mr. Cohen depicts them as nevertheless content. Thus the antiques dealer who conducts services at an Isfahan synagogue told him that he's not worried about chants of "Death to Israel!" He visits Israeli relatives anyway, "but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian." The former Jewish member of parliament claimed to be more bothered by the double standard of Israel having nuclear weapons, Iran not supposed to. Cohen did not disclose to his readers that these interviews were conducted through a government agent. The Jews knew they'd be reported for anti-regime sentiment. Nevertheless, Cohen treated their expressions of loyalty seriously and as a basis for U.S. policy on Iran. Cohen has admitted praising the regime and quoting "contented Jews" in order to undermine U.S. solidarity with Israel, menaced by Iran and its terrorist proxies. He resents sympathy for Israel. He deems Israel as just as bad as its enemies. He accused the Israelis of wanting to "lord it over" the Arabs. Judge his moral sensitivity by his opposing most measures of Israeli self-defense. One is that invasion to halt missile attacks on Israeli cities. Another is the security fence to block suicide bombers. He opposes the widespread intelligence assessment that Iran is close to having nuclear weapons with which it would protect its terrorist proxies if not destroy Israel. Such intelligence would mar relations with Iran. To Cohen, the problem is U.S. support for Israeli "intransigence toward Hamas and perhaps raiding Iranian nuclear facilities. Cohen writes with an agenda, as an apologist for those who threaten genocide. This is not a novel position for the NY Times (Jonathan S. Tobin, Commentary, 5/2009, p.36). Cohen is among those whose anti-Zionism or illusory expectation of miracles of persuasion by Pres. Obama perverts their journalistic ethics. What kind of a journalist depends on deceiving readers? What kind of a case needs false argument? Cannot make his case on the merits? He can't face the truth; his own bias is too strong. Anybody who knows the Israelis knows that they don't lord it over Arabs, they want peace with them. Unfortunately, Hamas is bigoted and genocidal. Cohen is lying about Hamas and Israel, too, with hypocritical indignation.
Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several
web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on
Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target
overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him
at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website:
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PROSECUTOR: GAZA PROBE GOES ON WITHOUT ISRAELI OK
Posted by Maurice Ostroff, May 22, 2009. | ||
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Contact Maurice Ostroff by email at maurice@trendline.co.il |
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CURTIS LEMAY, THE 20TH CENTURY AND THE AGE OF MASS; A MODEL SUCCESS: THE DEFEAT OF THE TAMILS
Posted by Seth J. Frantzman, May 22, 2009. |
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1) Curtis LeMay, the 20th century and the age of mass: May 16th, 2009 Curtis LeMay was one of the fathers of strategic bombing. He innovated the use of mass bombing during the second world war and used it to terrible affect against Japan. His life and legacy says much about the 20th century and the era of mass destruction. It is in great contrast to the wars of the 21st century. Warren Kozak's recently released LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay reminds not only of one of America's most controversial generals but also of man whose epic use of weapons was emblematic of the 20th century. LeMay lived in the 20th century, he was born in 1906 and died in 1990. He is credited with being the father of Strategic Bombing, was called various "Old Iron Ass' and 'Bombs Away LeMay' and is credited with partially causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians through his the bombers he unleashed against Japan in 1944-1945. LeMay became a pilot in the U.S air force in 1939 and in 1942 he was dispatched to the U.K as part of the U.S commitment to help defend England from a Nazi invasion. Although a high ranking officer he chose to personally lead most of the bombing missions that he dispatched to bomb German cities. It was here between 1942 and 1944 that he first grasped the logic of using total war and strategic bombing to destroy the economy and will of the Germans to fight the War. Transferred to the Japanese theatre in 1944 he became the 'father' of strategic bombing, ordering one bombing of Tokyo that supposedly took 100,000 lives. After the war he was in charge of the Berlin Air Lift and advocated the use of strategic bombing against North Vietnam, a tactic that eventually proved successful when Nixon unleashed it in 1972. For those opposed to his militant policies and total war approach LeMay represented all that was bad about American power and war. But LeMay is emblematic of the 20th century. His approach to war says much about what the 20th century was and what the 21st century is not. The 20th century was a century of mass movements and mass death tolls. It was a century of extremes and social engineering. By contrast the 20th century is one of precision guided weapons, 'small wars' and even smaller death tolls. It is a century of chaotic terror organizations fighting high tech armies and it is a century where the battle of the births is more important than the battle fought with the rifle. Whereas William T. Sherman was one of the American 'fathers' of the use of Total War in 1864 he was not emblematic of the 19th century which was merely a playground of death tolls compared to the 20th. Consider that the 20th century was brought in with the Boers languishing in British concentration camps in South Africa and the German genocide of Africans in Namibia. It ended with the savagery of Rwanda and the Balkan wars. When the century opened many of the world's peoples lived in multi-ethnic empires. When it ended most lived in nation states with porous borders. The great events of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Cold War exist almost in a vacuum, for most of the world's peoples and most of the important events taking place today they have no connection. The rise of Islamism and China, for instance, took place completely outside of the two. Although most Westerners speak of "Nazis" all the time as a point of reference for everything from bad coffee to conflicts in far off places, they have no connection, real or imagined, to the Second World War. It is hard to imagine that LeMay's bombers incinerated from 100,000 people or that he supposedly wounded another 450,000 and left 8 million homeless when he was done with Japan. There are still large death tolls today, such as from the Tsunami in Asia. There are still large population movements, but most of them are scripted and fabricated by a media that thrives on chaos. The supposed "100,000" Pakistani refugees from fighting in the Swat valley are but one example. Compare them to the actual 10 million refugees wandering around Europe in 1945 and the 9 million Americans under arms the same year and the ridiculousness of 'civilians may be harmed in fighting in Sri Lanka, UN warns' is apparent. The even more ridiculous shrill outcries over 8 dead children in Gaza becomes evident. The 20th century witnessed real violence and real mass movements of people. The 21st century is more the century of the whining victim than of the real victim. Whereas in the 21st century people love to speak of diversity the 20th century, when it began, actually had diversity. Consider the cities of Odessa on the Black Sea and Vilna on the Baltic. These were cities teaming with Jews, Greeks, Roma, Tartars, Russians, Lithuanians, Germans and Poles. Today they are urban wastelands filled entirely with Ukrainians on the one hand and Lithuanians on the other. That was the result of the 20th century. We know what befell Vilna. Stalin removed the Poles in 1939. Hitler killed off the Jews. Then Stalin finished the job by removing the remaining Germans. Odessa too was despoiled. The Greeks and Germans were deported by Stalin. Hitler killed the Jews. All that remained were Ukrainians. There are few cities in the world not thus affected. While there is 'diversity' the real remnant of the 20th century is the lack of that value that so many progressives bow down to. What is perhaps more surprising is that LeMay's Toyo bombing raid where 100,000 died probably had less affect historically than the events of Sept. 11. That says much about the 20th century and much about the 21st. 2) A model success: The defeat of the Tamils: May 17, 2009 The defeat of the Tamils and the death of their phenomenal leader is a major event. After 26 years of savage war the Tamil Tigers have been defeated. During the height of their power they controlled a great swath of Sri Lanka and even ruled their own mini-state. But following break down in a ceasefire the government launched a massive offensive in January. For the Hindu minority, who the Tamils represented, it is a tragedy, but their seeming lack of protest in front of the army offensive may show their disillusionment with what seems to have been a short-sighted and immature use of the chance at self government the Tigers once achieved. In a damn the torpedoes approach and with a clenched fist and a determined military the Sri Lankan government has swiftly put an end to 26 years of brutal civil war in defeating the Tamil Tigers. This despite the best efforts of the 'international community' and the BBC to encourage and end to the fighting and a continuation of terrorism and murder. The BBC was disappointed on May 17th, 2009 when it reported that units of the Sri Lankan army had linked up on the dunes in northeast Sri Lanka, destroying the last elements of the Tamil Tiger's army. The headline was 'Pleas ignored: international calls for restraint go unheeded as the war heads to a bloody conclusion.' The UN's Gordon Weiss in Sri Lanka had warned of a "bloodbath" should the army finish the job. Perhaps knowing that the West and its BBC and UN allies would never understand and applaud a military victory over a terrorist militia, Mahinda Rajapakse, the president of Sri Lanka, spoke about his victory at a conference in Jordan, where 39 years ago that country used similar tactics to destroy the Palestinian terrorist forces threatening its existence. The BBC needed to insert its typical shrill statements about "unseen horrors" and "tens of thousands of civilians may be trapped." Then there was the "no way of knowing for" if the army's statement was true. There were "children clinging to rafts" and twenty-five thousand "starving" and "wounded" people who had escaped. There were people who "hadn't eaten for weeks" and children with "limbs blown off". There was a video that the "military claimed" was a rebel training video. There were captured Tamil Tigers, but there was "no way of knowing for sure since independent journalists are barred from the conflict zone." Oddly enough there was footage of them taken by the BBC. The BBC journalist got in one last extremism; "aid agencies have grave concern...tens of thousands are trapped facing an unimaginable hell." This was David Gramaticus's report from Colombo in Sri Lanka. The greatness of the government's victory over the Tamils cannot be overstated. Despite all the typical innuendo about "hell" and "unseen horrors" the government pushed on using its military to its fullest. And it has won and with the victory peace may finally come to Sri Lanka's civilians. Unlike other governments the Sri Lankan government has put its people, the taxpayers and voters, those the state is supposed to protect, above the "unseen horrors" and "unimaginable hells" conjured up by the media and the UN. An analysis of the reporting of this conflict should serve as a model of how the media works to not only create conflict but to blow it out of all reasonable proportion in order to convey a sense of alarm to audiences throughout the world. The BBC which, when shown terrorist training videos and captured enemy fighters can never seem to "confirm" that they are what they are and always attribute them to some sort of innuendo strewn conspiracy with the word "claim" and quotation marks put before every sentence, seems perfectly capable of making the most shocking statements about an "unseen" horrors and "unimaginable" hells. But if they are unseen then how do we know they exist? Why is the hell not merely another "claim"? Why are there no quotes around these accusations. The war against terrorism is not merely a war against the terrorists themselves but against the media and the UN as well. The Gordon Weisses and David Gramaticuses of the world are practitioners of the best art of Stalinistic Pravda and yellow journalism, working hard to inflame public opinion so as to allow terrorists to continue their campaigns. Sri Lanka has won the terror war, hopefully, and it remains to be seen if the world can learn from her actions or if the world will continue to be enslaved by the likes of the BBC and the UN. Sri Lanka's citizens have freed themselves of the shackles of the 'international community'. We too have nothing to lose but our chains.
Seth J. Frantzman is a graduate student in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, living in Jerusalem. Contact him at sfrantzman@hotmail.com and visit his website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com These essays are from Terra Incognita #85. |
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HOW UN REPORTS ON GAZA; ISRAELIS DEVELOP ARMOR FOR U.S. FORCES; JERUSALEM'S NEW MASTER PLAN
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 21, 2009. |
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HOW UN REPORTS ON GAZA A UN report on Gaza accuses Israel of deliberately firing upon UN buildings. Israel noted that the UN's report followed Israel's own investigation that concluded the opposite. The IDF report cited Hamas war crimes that made the incursion necessary; the UN report did not. The IDF attributed firing toward UN buildings to Hamas firing from alongside them; the UN held Hamas blameless [for those war crimes]. The IDF explained the complexities of combat, in which accidents and mistaken information play a role; the UN report did not. The IDF report had exculpatory evidence; the UN report ignored it. Israel provided full cooperation and evidence to the UN; Hamas did not. The UN report used Hamas testimony or testimony from Arabs under the control of Hamas (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/5). The UN is known to prepare reports about Israel before it investigates. It acts politically, ideologically, and for aggressors. That can't make the world secure. For a summary of an IDF investigation, see: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~ y2009m5d14-Did-Israel-harm-civilians-in-Gaza-unnecessarily JORDAN MAKES EXTREMIST DEMANDS OF ISRAEL The King of Jordan told Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu that In order for Israel to get peace, it must: (1) Withdraw from all the territory it acquired in 1967; (2) Let the Arabs in those areas have a sovereign state; (3) End city building in Judea-Samaria; (4) Stop "unilateral" action to change the status quo; (5) Stop archeological excavation and other steps in Jerusalem that threaten Muslim and Christian holy sites or aim to drive Muslim and Christian inhabitants out; and (6) Accept the Arab initiative [which also demands that Israel let in millions of Arabs while Israel must expel hundreds of thousands of Jews] http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis. Those are the same demands made by the PLO and Saudi extremists. Nothing is demanded of the Arabs. The implication is that terrorism is their right. Nor are those demands fair or accurate. "Unilateral" action to change the status quo, that Oslo Accords forbid, refers to legal status changes. Israel doesn't make them. The PLO attempts to elbow its way into Jerusalem affairs, which is such a change. Israel does nothing to endanger other religions or to drive Arabs out, but the Arabs try to drive Jews out and illegally excavate on the Temple Mount, destroying ancient Jewish artifacts. I wouldn't believe King Abdullah. See what the Arabs really want:
LOCAL MUSLIM REACTION TO POPE'S VISIT In Nazareth, Muslims greeted the arriving Pope with posters and
leaflets declaring such sentiments, in non-idiomatic English, as: (1)
Not believing in Islam, he will go to Hell; (2) The only god is Allah,
implying the Pope's does not qualify; and (3) He is not welcome,
because he is friendly with the US and Israel, tries to convert
Muslims, and cursed Muhammad (David Bedein,
I did not find that exposure of ill grace by Nazareth Muslims in
the NY Times. (For more on the Pope's visit:
ISRAELIS DEVELOP ARMOR FOR U.S. FORCES U.S. lives are being saved in Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to armor
developed for its military vehicles by an Israeli company (David
Bedein,
Israel does much for the U.S. military. This assistance gets little coverage. The U.S. treats Israel as an impediment. Muslim Arab slander, that the U.S. fights wars in behalf of Israel, is getting accepted in academic circles. Actually: (1) Israel made no secret that it preferred that the U.S. take down the regime in Iran, rather than in Iraq; (2) Israel spared the U.S. having to go to war to rescue Jordan from Syria, some years ago, by mobilizing against a Syrian invasion of Jordan. (Jordan was plucky about it, too.) OXFAM AND ILLEGAL ARAB BUILDING "Dozens of European Union-based charities, such as Oxfam, routinely violate Israeli law by aiding Palestinian Authority Arabs in building illegal structures. Millions of dollars are poured into construction projects, while no attempt is made to get approval from Israel. Many projects are built on state land or on areas needed for national security." Although the EU-based charities do not have authorization to assist
illegal construction, government officials were ordered not to enforce
the law against them
So there you have it — building on state land or on areas needed for national security. It's land theft and war. But the NY Times reports the excuse that the Arabs are denied building permits by discrimination. Slander in behalf of war. For more on illegal Arab building:
JERUSALEM'S NEW MASTER PLAN Jerusalem Mayor Barkat has completed a 20-year master plan, started by his predecessors. It is the first revision in half a century. It features: "An emphasis on 'greening' the city and green construction Stated goals are to make the city more attractive and affordable for young people, so they don't move out, as they have been doing. The plan envisions a lake, bicycle paths, hiking paths, picnic
areas, buildings with solar panels, water recycling, and green roofs,
new industrial zones and job training
Mostly secular Jews have been moving out. It's curious that they can't afford to live there, but the purportedly poorer Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Arabs can. Arabs have been building illegally in the path of those planned civic amenities. For more on illegal building there:
ISRAEL PRIZE GOES TO SUBVERSIVE The Israel Prize usually is awarded by Far Leftists to subversives. This year it went to Prof. Yehuda Neeman for filmmaking. Prof. Neeman did not study filmmaking. His films reached only what personal audience he could round up. He admitted his filmmaking was a failure. The judges thought they were praising him by calling his films "subversive." His goal is to end Jewish sovereignty. He supports that goal by
advocating an end to the Law of Return for Jews and a "right of
return" for millions of Arabs who hate Jews. He describes Israel as
an apartheid, oppressive state that likes to kill Arabs
indiscriminately. He does not describe the Arabs who do kill Jews
indiscriminately. He'd let them in! He tries to discourage youths
from defending Israel from Arab attacks. He exhibits no compassion
for the many thousands of Israelis under siege by Hamas rockets
(Prof. Steven Plaut, 5/5 from
Has he compassion? He favors the aggressors over his own, victimized people. For more on unqualified leftist academics: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~ y2009m4d28-US-universities-firing-leftist-academic-frauds LIBERAL PAPER BORDERS ON ANTISEMITISM "Israel has been rattled by signs that the Obama administration has sworn off the unstinting support of Israel that was a hallmark of the Bush years..." (Mark Landler, NY Times, 5/15, A8.) It was an editorial statement in a news report. "Unstinting" support? Myths arise even while events remain fresh. People are poorly informed, even in this "information age." The NY Times, enmeshed in the Presidential campaign, made many statements that after the election it reversed, though without acknowledging its original misstatements. I remarked on several. The myth that the US government was very pro-Israel obscured media recognition of Pres. Bush's later, harder line against Israel. When he switched from consulting Vice-Pres. Cheney about foreign policy, to consulting Sec. of State Rice, his anti-Israel stance became patent. What were some of his policy changes? Sometimes he changed emphasis, and sometimes he changed directions. For one thing, he or Rice insistently demanded of Israel that it dismantle roadblocks and checkpoints. Often when Israel accommodated the demands, terrorists got through and murdered Israelis. The Oslo accords permitted Israeli construction in the Territories, though, I forget, perhaps on Israel not to expand beyond community bounds. Bush's Road Map, however, called for not building out from settled areas, though still within community bounds. Bush's regime came to call for not building in empty lots within settled neighborhoods. Increasingly restrictive. Unstinting acceptance was given to illegal Arab building. Double standard! Remember US insistence that Israel not sell AWACS or other weapons to certain countries? Some of those customers would not be expected to threaten US security. However, Israeli arms manufacturing competes with US ones. The US government pretended to be protecting security when it was protecting trade. That puts a moral pretext on superpower pressure. The Bush administration adopted as its foreign policy priority the establishment of another Arab state within the core Jewish homeland. It would deprive Israel of strategic depth, secure borders, and much water, and give terrorists a base. The Road Map expects the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) to eradicate terrorism before getting further Israeli concessions. The Administration reneged on that. Also, it gave funds to the P.A., and trained their troops. The P.A. freed terrorists. The notion that the US gave unstinting support to Israel veers on traditional antisemitism, which holds that the Jews control world policy. Unfortunately, that notion now permeates the foreign policy establishment, of which the NY Times is a pillar. U.S. DEMANDS ISRAEL GIVE UP NUCLEAR WEAPONS The Universal Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty was signed by 189 states. Israel is not among them. Neither were India and Pakistan, now nuclear-armed. On the other hand, as an Israeli official pointed out, Iran, Iraq, and Libya are signatories, and they have or sought nuclear reactors. Therefore, said the official, joining that pact does not end nuclear proliferation. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller nevertheless asked Israel to join the treaty. If it did, it would be asked to give up any nuclear weapons it has (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/6). Pres. Obama is striving for nuclear disarmament. Rogue states, however, sign treaties without complying with them. They have proved they can develop nuclear capability regardless of treaties. At least, the current treaty has such big loopholes, they seem to have been designed by Congressional lobbyists. Considering that the world is in a state of jihad, that even before the rise of Radical Islam, Arab states would gang up on Israel, that Arab states have developed other weapons of mass-destruction, and that US policy would make Israel more vulnerable without bringing Muslim states to tolerance and peace except for a phony treaty, Israel both needs nuclear arms for enemies that it can deter and to destroy the nuclear factories of Iran, which cannot be deterred. MORE ISRAELI DISCRIMINATION AGAINST JEWS Although Israel still demolishes unauthorized Jewish buildings in Judea-Samaria, it has ordered a halt to demolition of unauthorized Arab buildings there. Jewish regional councils there report that Arabs have usurped State lands or "survey lands" that are not privately owned and which the State generally comes to claim. Some of that usurped State land was used for military exercises. Oxfam and dozens of other EU-supported "charities" furnish the farm equipment for the Arab squatters (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/6). This is part of an international effort to wrest the Territories from the Jewish people. KUWAIT GOVERNMENT STYMIED For several years, Kuwait's ruling sheikh and assembly have stalemated. The legislature is controlled by Islamists and tribesmen. They favor welfare legislation and the retention of state-owned firms, which the sheikh wants to reduce, we are told, in order to make the economy more attractive to foreign investors. They want to change the way women are treated (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/6) to mistreatment. PRES. PERES ENDANGERS ISRAEL Shimon Peres fostered the Oslo Accords, a form of appeasement of enemies that resulted predictably in thousands of Israeli victims of terrorism. The Accords did not bring peace. They brought an opportunity for terrorists. Over the years, Peres has worked hard at appeasement. He brought dirty politics into it, when he undermined the first war in Lebanon, because otherwise it would bring political credit to the rival, governing party. He urged concessions to belligerent Syria. Now he told AIPAC that Israel supports US policy of starting negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and Syria. Well he knows that the US also has a policy on how those negotiations should end, and would bend Israel to its wishes. The ending would be further appeasement of the Arabs. Which Arabs? The ones that still hate Israel, don't keep their word, and arm for renewed war. For whom does Peres speak? Under Israeli law, his post is ceremonial, except for the power to pardon. He is not supposed to conduct foreign policy, but he does. I thought it was a grave blunder to let him become President. I suspected that he would act outside the bounds of his office. His subversion knows no bounds. It is disturbing that Prime Minister Netanyahu allows him excessive scope. This implies that Netanyahu is in accord with Peres. Of course, demands by the Arabs can be so truculent, that they would not be accepted even by the passive Israeli public. In those cases, Peres prudently rejects the demands. WHERE DID THE U.S. TROOPS GO? In the first Gulf War, the U.S. put half a million troops on the ground. In the second, it sent fewer than half that many. When the U.S. defeated the Iraqi army, and then turned its own into occupiers instead of finding anti-Saddam Iraqis to run the country, defeated elements of Saddam's army launched an insurgency. So did sectarian Shiites. To quell insurgency, many more troops are needed, because the enemy no longer concentrates its forces. The US did not have more troops. What happened to the other hundreds of thousands we used to have? That is the question apparently not being asked. The answer would affect our preparedness. I bet that one of you knows the answer. Please share it with us. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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OBAMA OKS NUCLEAR DEAL WITH UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Posted by Avodah, May 21, 2009. |
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This is a news item from today's Jerusalem Post
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President Barack Obama agreed Wednesday to share US nuclear power technology with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, giving his consent to a deal signed in the final days of George W. Bush's administration. The pact now goes to Congress, which will have 90 days to amend or reject it. The agreement creates a legal framework for the US to transfer sensitive nuclear items to the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven Middle Eastern states that wants nuclear power to satisfy growing demand for electricity. Although flush with oil, the emirates imports 60 percent of the natural gas they use to generate electricity. The United Arab Emerates wants to break its dependence on outside sources for its energy needs and settled on nuclear power as the best option. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website:
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FROM ISRAEL: THE PROOF IS HERE
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 21, 2009. |
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The proof that the Palestinian Authority is not really working toward a state, that is. I wrote yesterday about Palestinian Arab objections to Obama's plan to give the holy sites of Jerusalem to the UN for supervision. Today there is more. Elements of Obama's plan, which he is going to announce in Cairo next month, have been leaked. PA officials have expressed surprise, as they weren't told anything by the Obama administration. (Abbas is scheduled to meet with Obama soon.) But now that they've seen the plan, they are voicing objections, maintaining that some portions of the proposal are completely unacceptable. Those portions are: resettling Palestinian refugees in Arab countries, swapping lands between the future Palestinian state and Israel (which would allow retention of some settlements in exchange for land elsewhere), creating a demilitarized state, and granting the Old City of Jerusalem the status of an international city. Said one PA official: "The Palestinian position on these issues is very clear. We insist on the right of return for all refugees on the basis of UN resolution 194, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City, as its capital." As to demilitarization and an exchange of land with Israel, these suggestions had previously been rejected. ~~~~~~~~~~ So what we see is a total rigidity. No compromise, no flexibility. This stance — when they know full well that there are elements of their demands that Israel will never accept, such as return for all refugees and relinquishment of the Kotel to Arab control — signals clearly that achievement of a state is not their primary goal. This tells us that, for all the rhetoric, there will be no "two state solution." ~~~~~~~~~~ What I wonder is, how long it will take Obama to realize this. Not that he would publicly admit failure in his efforts, of course. He'll slog on, just as Condoleezza Rice did in her time. But how long will it take him to internalize the fact that the obstacle is the PA, and that he can't fix things. Here's a guy who is willing to play with them, who is viscerally on their side, who called their leader first after being inaugurated. And even for him they are not prepared to bend. Or, put another way, they are not permitted by their ideological stance to bend. Which means their ideology is focused, ultimately, on such matters as an all-Muslim Palestine from river to sea. ~~~~~~~~~~ A quick word about the claim that UN resolution 194 gives all the "refugees" the "right" to return. It does no such thing. For starters, it is a General Assembly resolution, and GA resolutions have no standing in international law — they are only recommendations. There is no "right of return." For a bit more information, see:
~~~~~~~~~~ One other factor should be mentioned here. For a long time we've been hearing with full and distinct clarity what the PA demands are. It's a litany, and we all know it: return of refugees, Jerusalem as a capital, etc. etc. But until now there has been no litany on our side — no delineation of what the red lines are for us. With Olmert all we got was a rush to show the other side, ad nauseum, how much we could bend to please them and thus make "peace" possible. With the Netanyahu government now, I have hope that this is changing. We must be recognized as a Jewish state. We will not divide Jerusalem. We demand parameters that provide for security. Stating these positions for all the world to hear, over and over with consistency, would make a real difference. ~~~~~~~~~~ Pressure is continuing on us to freeze all settlement growth. Clinton, in a statement on Al Jazeeera, has stated unequivocally, "All types of construction must stop." The only construction being done in settlements (I prefer to say communities) in Judea and Samaria now are on the basis of tenders issued late last year. If further permits to build are not issued, construction will halt soon. Netanyahu has not yet committed to a cessation of building, and it is to be hoped that he won't. This is a critically important issue that involves several factors. One is the question of where construction would be done — our government's position being that it should continue in major settlement blocs which we intend to retain. This is what's key: it's a declaration of our intention to not, under any circumstances, move back to pre-'67 lines. Then there is a distinction being made between natural growth — which means additions for growing families, etc., and additional growth, which means construction for new people to move into the communities. In both instances, the borders of the communities would not be extended — growth would be internal. I have it from an impeccably reliable source that certain key members of the Netanyahu government are saying they want to see both sorts of construction sustained. ~~~~~~~~~~ Netanyahu has announced that four working groups with the US have been established: on Iran, strategic issues, diplomatic process and bringing in other Arab countries. The Washington Times, in an exclusive with regard to the group on Iran, said it would provide the "U.S. a clear channel for communicating with the new Israeli government and a vehicle for keeping tabs on any military contingency plans Israel might make if diplomacy fails." This group "would begin to examine contingency plans now in case Iran continues a nuclear weapons program." The Times suggests that this group might be a vehicle for renewing Israeli requests for certain equipment, such as bunker busters, that were left pending at the end of the last administration. Netanyahu has made a statement, not clarified, regarding "strategic agreements" between Israel and the US that have been reapproved by Obama. It is altogether unclear to me at this point whether there will be discussion on settlements within the strategic arrangements group. Work within the groups has already begun. ~~~~~~~~~~ The greatest impediment to government policies with regard to settlements is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who has been carrying on about illegal outposts. Today security forces demolished a small outpost called Maoz Esther outside of Kochav Hashachar in Samaria. A resident of the outpost — which is named for a victim of terror — said 40 people lived there and would begin rebuilding immediately. This is not the first time that this outpost has been taken down by authorities and put up again. More power to those who have the courage and staying power to do this! ~~~~~~~~~~ The thought that immediately occurs, of course, is that this may be a good-cop/bad-cop routine with Barak playing bad-cop within the new government. Perhaps. Today's demolition very much seems a sop of sorts to Clinton's demand. Haaretz certainly thinks this is the case — the price Netanyahu agreed to pay in return for some Obama statements on Iran. But it also is a direct expression of Barak's own ideology. He is mightily frustrated by Netanyahu's refusal to say "two-state solution." And Barak himself has come out with a statement that what he did at Maoz Esther had nothing to do with the US, but was how a nation of law had to function with regard to illegal building. If truth be told, Barak did precisely the same thing before. I've already cited the fact that other members of the government, including one influential minister, are solidly in favor of continuing the building in the settlements. So I don't believe the situation can be summed up simplistically. We need to watch it. Head of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, called Maoz Esther a "puny outpost," and its demolition a "public relations exercise." This tells us something, perhaps. ~~~~~~~~~~ My own ideology would oppose taking down a single building. But — unlike some purists who write to me — I have a pragmatic streak as well, and recognize that we're operating in a tough situation. If taking down a couple of small outposts gives Obama the cover he needs to say that there is "progress," and then we proceed with other actions that protect our larger interest here, or secure statements from Obama that are helpful, this will hardly be an unbearable price to pay. The trick is to avoid that slippery slope, so that we don't end up conceding so much that it becomes an unbearable, or even unacceptable, price. And vigilance is the watchword. ~~~~~~~~~~ Surprisingly, and undoubtedly at Obama's urging, Netanyahu has agreed to begin negotiations with Syria. Cannot say this is a pleasing piece of news. However, he clarified that there would be no conditions going in, and Assad has repeatedly said that he'll negotiate only if we agree in advance to give back the Golan. If this commitment is not made, he may not agree to sit with us in any event. And this exposes Syria's lack of good intent. ~~~~~~~~~~ Good news is that the US will provide the funding for the development and production of the Arrow 3 anti-missile system — which will take on longer range missiles than the Arrow system currently in use here. It will be able to intercept missiles at a higher altitude and greater distance from Israel than the current system. There has been concern here that with the economic crisis in the States, this program would be abandoned. But it has turned out to not be the case. ~~~~~~~~~~ My friends, I dropped the ball yesterday and must issue a correction. I wrote about the many members of Congress who recently supported us by sending Obama a letter that said, "peace cannot come while terrorism continues to wrack Israel." This is true enough, but everything is in the spin. And the spin in the news article from which I drew this blinded me to the larger context. The letter sent to the president was one of the letters endorsing a two state solution that had been actively promoted by AIPAC. The message more broadly was that the two-state solution wouldn't be possible until terrorism stopped. Not good enough. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" At official ceremonies today marking Yom Yerushalayim, Prime Minister Netanyahu said: "Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided." A clear and powerful message. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat then reiterated this: "With the world examining us let it be said here: We will never divide Jerusalem." Amen and Amen. Jerusalem Day celebrations in... Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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MOSHE DAYAN — THE VILLAIN OF JERUSALEM
Posted by Yid with Lid, May 21, 2009. |
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Tonight starts Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. It celebrates the day in 1967 that the IDF returned the Old Jerusalem to Jewish hands. Jews were denied access to the Holy sites in the Old City Jerusalem since 1948, when Jordan took it over during the War of Independence. In the intervening 19 years the Jordanians waged systematic destruction, desecration and looting of Jewish sites. 57 ancient synagogues (the oldest dated to the 13th century), libraries and centers of religious study were ransacked and 12 were totally and deliberately destroyed. Those that remained standing were defaced, used for housing of both people and animals. Judiasm's Holiest site, the Temple Mount, became a slum. Since that day in 1967, the Muslims have been trying to reclaim Jerusalem's Holy Sites, not because of any 'religious ties" but to de-legitimize the Jewish claims to the city. The sad part of today's struggle is there might not have been as fierce an Muslim claim to the city if Moshe Dayan didn't give away the Temple Mount almost 42 years ago. When Israel gained possession of the Temple compound during the Six Day War, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol wanted to create a multi-faith council to run the compound. Dayan thought it should remain in Muslim possession. In his biography Dayan clearly stated that the last thing he wanted was the Beit Hamikdash rebuilt. So Dayan "gave" the Temple Mount back to the Arabs because he wanted to make sure that there wouldn't be a third Temple. There was nothing that Prime Minister Eshkol could do about it, after all Moshe Dayan, was a war hero. It would have so much extra meaning if Israel could celebrate Yom Yerushalayim with a beautiful ceremony where the two Temples stood, on top of the Temple Mount, but that isn't possible because of Dayan. In fact thanks to the General, only Muslims are allowed to pray on top of the Temple mount. The Jewish people have lost possession of the the Temple Mount only three times since King David purchased the site 30 centuries ago. Only once, was the site given away voluntarily. Dayan will go down in history as the man who gave away the Temple Mount and gave the Muslims the opportunity to make Jerusalem an Issue: .........."It's true," Eldad said, "that the original sin was when the Jewish People, immediately after the Six Day War in 1967, ceded its hold on the Temple Mount in an unholy alliance between the Chief Rabbinate and Moshe Dayan — each side for its own reasons — but now the danger is that the Arab sovereignty on the Temple Mount will spill over to the Western Wall plaza, and from there to other places." Then-Defense Minister Dayan, just days after Israel's liberation of the Old City, informed the Muslims running the Temple Mount that they could continue to run the mosques there — and later went further by preventing Jewish prayer all over the Mount. "It was evident that if we did not prevent Jews from praying in what was now a mosque compound," Dayan later wrote, "matters would get out of hand and lead to a religious clash... As an added precaution, I told the chief of staff to order the chief army chaplain to remove the branch office he had established in the building which adjoins the mosque compound."Source Israel National News This comes from the Yid with Lid website:
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ISRAEL SHOULD GO ON THE OFFENSIVE
Posted by Paul Eidelberg, May 21, 2009. |
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Are you sick and tired, as I am, of the world telling Israel what to do and what not to do? Then why not urge Israel's government to go on the offensive? For starters, here is what I would like to see as "breaking news": 1) Israel demands that all Arab and Islamic states be given 30 days to conform to the democratic principles of the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights or be expelled from the world body. 2) Israel demands that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be indicted for violating international law by vowing to "wipe Israel off the map." 3) Israel demands that the PLO-Palestinian Authority be dissolved on the grounds that its constitution calls for the annihilation of Israel, a member of the United Nations. 4) Israel demands that the United States cease violating international law by funding the PLO-Palestinian Authority since the latter is a consortium of terrorist organizations. 5) Israel demands that the United States cease violating international law by training Palestinian terrorists. 6) Israel demands the United States cease violating international law by harboring Hezbollah terrorist cells. 7) Israel demands that the Government of the United States acknowledge the following facts and fulfill their legal obligations: In 1920, after World War I had ended, the Allied Supreme Council assembled at San Remo, Italy and decided, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, to assign the Mandate for the establishment of a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine to Great Britain. This turned the right of the Jewish people over Eretz Israel into a right recognized by international law, recognized by the 52 members of the League of Nations. That right was affirmed by the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine. The Convention was ratified by the United States Senate and subsequently proclaimed by President Calvin Coolidge on December 5, 1925. This treaty remains in force to this day as the supreme law of the land. The letter and spirit of this treaty is violated when American officials insist on the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Land of Israel. Professor Paul Eidelberg is an internationally known political scientist, author and lecturer. He is the founder and president of The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, a Jerusalem-based think tank for improving Israel's system of governance. He has written on the Arab-Israel conflict and on Judaism. Contact him at list-owner@foundation1.org |
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NETANYAHU RETURNS, OUTPOSTS DESTROYED
Posted by Jake Levi, May 21, 2009. |
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This was written by Hillel Fendel, Senior News Editor for Arutz-Sheva (www.Israel National News.com). |
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(IsraelNN.com) For the second time in two months and just a day after Prime Minister Netanyahu heard U.S. President Barack Obama say "no more settlements," police forces have destroyed the start-up community of Maoz Esther. The outpost is located on a hilltop just outside Kochav HaShachar in eastern Binyamin, north of Jerusalem. Authorities say the outpost, encompassed by barren hills to the east and west, and illegal Bedouin squatter encampments encroaching to the north, is "illegal." The several dozen police and Border Guard officers took less than an hour to destroy the five houses and synagogue, reported Israel National News' Yehuda Lev Kay from the site. Their job was somewhat harder this time than two months ago, when they had to destroy only two houses and a synagogue. Then, the residents began rebuilding within hours after the destruction, and plan to do the same again today. The houses were made of wood, concrete and aluminum. The twice-destroyed synagogue was dedicated in memory of Yonadav Chaim Hirschfeld, 19, of Kochav HaShachar, who was murdered in the Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav massacre some 15 months ago. The forces were more considerate of private belongings than they were in the past, removing them from the houses before destroying the structures. One car was taken from the site on a truck. Shame, No Violence "There is no violence, nor does it look like there will be any," Kay reported. "Some people stood on top of the synagogue, but they have been taken down. One woman went up to a policeman with a beard and a hat, and said, 'I assume you have a kippah under that hat.' When he answered in the affirmative, she said, 'Aren't you ashamed of what you're doing?', and he responded, 'You don't know how much,' and walked away." Emunah, one of the young women whose home was destroyed for the second time in two months, said afterwards, "We don't have the luxury of mourning our loss for more than an hour or two. Just like last time, we hope very much to be able to rebuild, with G-d's help. But, just like last time, we also need contributions." Contributions can be sent to "Maoz Esther, Kochav HaShachar, Eastern Binyamin, Israel, 90641". Contact Jake Levi at jlevi_us@yahoo.com |
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NEED TO KNOW
Posted by M.S. Kramer, May 21, 2009. |
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MIDDLE EAST MIRAGE
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 20, 2009. |
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This was written by Tony Blankley and it appeared today in Jewish World Review. |
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Upon hearing of the death of a Turkish ambassador, the serpentine French diplomat Talleyrand was reputed to have responded, "I wonder what he meant by that." With that level of skepticism in mind, all shrewd diplomats and observers of diplomacy look beneath the surface language and actions of diplomacy to the underlying realities that will shape negotiations, because, as professor Angelo Codevilla explains, effective diplomacy is, at its core, a "verbal representation of a persuasive reality. Indubitable reality itself convinces — sometimes even without verbal expression, or through nonverbal expression." As we enter this new round of U.S.-Israeli-Arab negotiations, one needs to keep firmly in mind the political realities that will either undergird or undermine the talks. In the lead-up to the current round of meetings between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, the constantly repeated background theme has been that now is the vital moment to actually bring into being an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. As I discussed in this space last week, President Obama is being put under extraordinary pressure — both by Arab leaders and commentators and by his own White House staff — to be personally responsible for the success or failure of these talks. And in turn, Prime Minister Netanyahu is coming under even greater pressure to comply with the United States' proposed path to a "peace accord," the foundation of which is a two-state solution, that is to say, two sovereign nations side by side: Israel and a Palestinian state. The Arab states never have been more united in preparing the diplomatic groundwork for these talks. In advance of this week's Washington talks, the Arab states have let it be known that they will "reward" Israel with "confidence-building measures" — as Nader Dahabi, Jordan's prime minister, said last weekend at a World Economic Forum in Jordan — should Israel cooperate in the negotiations. But the premise of Arab cooperation includes adherence to the key provisions of the Saudi-sponsored plan: giving Palestinian refugees the right to return to Israel and having the Israeli borders return to how they were before the 1967 war. Now comes reality onto the stage to darken the dreams of would-be peacemakers. As shrewd old Talleyrand also once said, "I know where there is more wisdom than is found in Napoleon, Voltaire, or all the ministers present and to come — in public opinion." So consider this dismal data from the authoritative polling of the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project. The report tabulated the response to this key question: "Which statement comes closest to your opinion? 1) A way can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights and needs of the Palestinian people are taken care of OR, 2) the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists?" The specific percentages are as follows, with the key results being, by 77 to 16 percent, Palestinians don't believe they can live side by side with Israel, while, by 61 to 31 percent, Israelis do believe they can live side by side with a Palestinian state. Note that all the Arab states are very negative and all the Western states (plus Israel) are quite positive for a two-state solution.
Keep in mind, also, that after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a Sinai peace treaty with Israel, in October 1981 he was assassinated during a military parade in Cairo. A fatwa authorizing the assassination had been issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, a cleric later convicted in the U.S. for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It would take an unusually courageous leader to sign a peace treaty and his own death warrant in one document. And lest there be any doubt as to the acceptability of a peace treaty that doesn't include refugees' being given the right to return (which would turn Israel into a Muslim-majority, rather than Jewish-majority, state), consider the writing this week in the Los Angeles Times of Mustafa Barghouthi, a member of the Palestinian Parliament, a candidate for president in 2005, and currently secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative: "Palestinians in the occupied territories have no standing to sign away the rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to get Israel to the negotiating table. To tell the truth, we don't believe that Israel can be a true democracy and an exclusivist Jewish state at the same time." As long as fewer than 2 in 10 Arabs, both Palestinian and all others, believe in Israel's right to exist as a nation with a Jewish majority, there can be no successful peace based on a two-state solution. That is the reality that no diplomacy can change. |
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Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 20, 2009. |
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CAN THE POPE BRING MIDEAST PEACE? Senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, John L. Allen, Jr., suggests how the Pope can bring Palestinian Authority and Israel to peace. He asserted that Ariel Sharon's 2000 visit to Jerusalem's Temple Mount "helped set off the second Intifada." [No. An official of the Palestinian Authority admitted that Arafat had prepared that war months earlier. His agents agitated for violence. The visit was used as a pretext by Muslim inciters, without justification.] Mr. Allen suggests that the Pope "emphasize that the 'two-state solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects a global moral consensus." The Palestinian Arabs have a "natural right to sovereignty." [Palestinian Arabs already have sovereignty in Jordan. The Palestine Mandate recognizes the Jewish right to statehood in their homeland, which includes the Territories. The Palestinian Arabs have been aggressors and bigots, part of Radical Islam's jihad against Christianity and even civilization. They won't make peace; deserve nothing.] For balance, the Pope would "insist that the Palestinians reject extremist elements within their leadership," as part of reforming Islam. [How would he insist?" The PLO already agreed to peace, but constantly make war or prepare for it. The US also "insists," but gives them subsidies without requiring that they keep agreements. Suggesting reform has been mere lip service.] Inter-faith reconciliation produced the Vatican-Arab League pact. [That pact is secret. Is it reconciliation or a temporary coalition against Israel?] Further, the Pope should press Palestinian Muslims to "embrace religious freedom, and Israel's right to exist." [How would he persuade Islamist fanatics, indoctrinated in murderous bigotry against the Pope as well as the Jews?] The Pope should support Christians in the Holy Land, who have fallen from 20% of the Arab population to under 2 percent, "because of tremendous emigration." [The author doesn't explain the emigration. It is due to persecution by Muslims.] "Historically, Arab Christians have promoted a pluralistic version of society, standing between resurgent Islamic fundamentalism and ultranationalist strains in Judaism." [By not identifying "ultranationalist Judaism," he seems to defame. Actually, some Christians were anti-Jewish Arab leaders. Although they presented themselves as Arab nationalists, the Arab Muslims do not spare them.] Benedict can further promote peace "by urging the leaders he meets with to bring Iran on board in all regional discussions." [Unrealistic. The Arabs fear Iran.] Catholicism has a lot in common with the forms of Shiism, such as saintly intercessors, etc.." (NY Times, 5/6, Op.-Ed." Common forms don't stop Muslim enmity. Judaism has more similarities, but that doesn't make Islam tolerant of it. The notion that the Pope can be an impartial mediator overlooks the
fact that the Vatican has religious and territorial interests of its
own, though it fails to champion the persecuted Christians in the
Mideast.
See:
WASHINGTON POST ON HAMAS TRUCE PLAN A Washington Post reporter commented on the truce plan by Hamas chief, Meshaal. Meshaal offered Israel a 10-year truce if Israel made concessions that risked its national security. The comment was that the plan was the same as Arafat's. It was called a peace plan, but really was a war plan (Raleigh Observer, 5/8). Glad to see a liberal newspaper savvy about the traditional Islamic ruse of truces. Israel wouldn't last the 10 years, if it gave up strategic borders and much of its water, and if it admitted millions of hostile Arabs, as Meshaal demanded. PALESTINIAN CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ON DEATH The Palestinian Center For Human Rights protested the death sentence that a military court handed down for a resident of the Palestinian Authority, accused of selling land to a Jew. The protest was over: (1) Having a military court not approved by the legislature; (2) Not allowing for a fair, independent appeal; (3) Not conforming to international human rights agreements; and (4) Capital punishment. The Center clarified — it "Reiterates that abolishing the death
penalty does not imply leniency towards dangerous criminals, who must
be subjected to punishment that acts as a deterrent but also maintains
human dignity."
In other words, it does not object to discrimination against Jews nor find international human rights agreements opposed to such apartheid. In fact, it implies that Arabs who sell land to Jews are "dangerous criminals." So much for the human rights outlook of the Palestinian Center For Human Rights! NY TIMES PRESENTS AIPAC AS PRO-ISRAEL GOVT. "Last year, some prominent American Jews, asserting that Aipac's generally down-the-line support of Israeli policy was neither helpful to Israel nor wise, funded a counter-group called J. Street. "J Street...is vocal about supporting lawmakers who might disagree with some Israeli policies. Aipac officials have treated J Street as if it were lint." Neil A. Lewis, NY Times, 5/5, A10.) The point clearly made is that AIPAC is subservient to Israeli policy. However, AIPAC is promoting the Obama line of extensive territorial concession to the Palestinian Authority now, which PM Netanyahu said he opposes. "MEMORIES" OF ARAB-ISRAEL WAR "On Fiery Birth of Israel, Memories of 2 Sides Speak," reads the NY Times headline. Jews and then Arabs have begun recording testimony from people present when Jewish statehood was reconstituted in Israel. [Unmentioned is already extensive historical and personal record.] An Arab woman claims that her Galilee village's women fled the arrival of Jewish militias. [Where were the men? Probably fighting. Why did the non-combatant women flee? Probably out of fear of punishment for their men's attacks. Israelis did not operate like that. The newspaper account fails to differentiate between justified and unwarranted flight. It unfairly leaves open the possibility that Arab women had something to fear from Jewish victors.] [The article also fails to explain that Jews did have reason to fear Arab victors. The Arab press called for massacre. When the Egyptian army conquered kibbutzim in the Negev, it executed the survivors. The 12,000 Arabs in Safed, Galilee, suddenly besieged the 1,200 peaceful Jews there. They broke down house-after-house, seeking to get at the Jews. Israeli commandos come to a timely rescue, whereupon the whole Arab community fled. That's the way it was: the Arabs started war, later stasted losing, and fled.] The personal narratives were started "As Israel celebrated its Independence Day last month — an event that the Palestinians call the nakba, he catastrophe..." [Did you ever come across such even-handedness in describing a war that: (1) started with one religious group, the Jews, asserting sovereignty over a portion of a non-sovereign territory, assuring the other religious group that it may stay in the new country, and accepting that the other group may become sovereign in the rest of that territory; and (2) The other group, mostly Muslim Arabs, who already had about 15 states, one of them in Palestine, refusing to let the Jews have any sovereignty in their ancient homeland as international law recommended, and were joined by foreign Arabs with the declared purpose of genocide? Attempts at genocide against other than the Jewish people don't get this tender equivalency. [Fortunately, the Arabs lost. What temerity of them to call their failed attempt at genocide a catastrophe! With what reverence the Times uses the Arab term for catastrophe? It doesn't cite the Hebrew term for Israeli independence. Is it giving lessons in Arabic? Times anti-Zionist bias at work.] [Israelis are not accurate in calling it a war for independence. It was a defense against Arab subjugation. The article also uses the inaccurate Israeli term for smuggling immigrants into Mandatory Palestine, "illegal." It was clandestine. The British prohibition of Jewish immigration was illegal; it violated the Mandate. The Times errs in describing the UN resolution as being for the partition of "Palestine." Palestine already had been partitioned; the Arabs got the 79% of it across the Jordan River. If the Times admitted this, fewer would sympathize with the Palestinian Arabs and the claim that they don't have their own state, and who commit aggression against the Jews based on that false pretext.] "Some Palestinians fled, hoping to return once the fighting ended; others were evacuated or saw their villages destroyed by the Israeli forces. The different sides tell vastly different stories..." [Put that way, readers get no sense of proportion of flight and expulsion. Actually, the preponderant majority of refugees fled. If the newspaper explained the true proportion, it would be harder to rouse indignation against Zionism. So it isn't mentioned. That is not honest or informative reporting on an issue affecting the legitimacy of each side's case.] What are the stakes in which side's narrative is believed? An Arab archivist explains that "The question of who is responsible for Palestinian refugees bears directly on the contentious issue of whether they should be allowed to return to within Israel's borders." (5/18, A9.) This is war by propaganda. By equating the unequal side with the ethical side, and by its omissions, the Times takes sides. Nor is the question of who is responsible the whole answer. Other factors are the Arab aggression in 1947; its purpose; the invading generals' order to the Arabs to flee; the voluntary Arab flight before that; the Zionists' civilized behavior in urging Arabs to stay and in peace; the savage Arab behavior, as when the Palestinian Arabs massacred medical personnel; the fact that only a small number of Arabs called refugees actually lived there then; and the Arab states' expulsion of about 900,000 Jews, about double the number of Arab refugees. Most of the expelled Jews immigrated to Israel, where they were welcomed. All that is documented and none of it is in the newspaper account. Another serious omission is an evaluation of the quality of Arab testimony. As a number of my articles have shown, such testimony is tendentious, manipulated, and unverified. The purpose is propaganda, not truth. Examples: (1) Right after that war, Arab leaders and media lamented their people's flight and criticized the Arab generals for prompting most of it. Later, the Arabs switched to accusing Israel of having expelled their Arabs. They expelled only a small proportion, usually for cause. (2) The Deir Yassin incident originally was described by the British and Arab witnesses as a mere battle. However, for partisan advantage, the Haganah rivals of the militias that fought there called it a massacre by those militias. Arabs then took up the cry, in which they and other anti-Zionists persist, even after the Israeli Labor Party admitted the falsity of the original accusation. The Times presents the issue at face value, always making the Jewish side look worse. DO ISRAELIS OR ARABS HAVE BEST HISTORICAL CLAIM? Israel is constructing archeological parks in areas near the Old City of Jerusalem. The government is condemning unauthorized houses built by Arabs on that land. Robert H. Serry, the UN special coordinator for the Mideast, "warned the Isreali authorities 'not to take actions that could pour oil on the fire.'" "At the same time, there is a battle for historical legitimacy. As part of that effort, archeologists are finding indisputable evidence of ancient Jewish life here. Yet Palestinian officials and institutions tend to dismiss the finds as part of a Jewish effort to build a Zionist history here." "Israeli officials point out that when East Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands from 1949 to 1967, dozens of synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed, Jewish graves were desecrated and Jewish authorities were largely denied access to the Western Wall or other shrines. By contrast, in Jerusalem today, Muslim and Christian authorities administer their holy sites in a complex power arrangement under Israeli control (Ethan Bronner & Isabel Kershner, NY Times, 5/10, A1). Apparently the UN, which demands that Israel dismantle unauthorized Jewish housing, demands that Israel not dismantle unauthorized Arab housing. Where is the justice in that double standard? Archeologists have found extensive evidence of ancient Jewish life in Jerusalem and in the rest of Israel, including the Golan. This life preceded the Arab conquest. Please note that the Arab dismissal of the findings as intended to build a Zionist history, does not refute the validity of the findings. The Arabs have two answers to the findings: (1) Demand custody over them, on the basis of ancient "Palestinian" ownership of the land, for which there are no archeological findings, as it is known that the Arabs were centuries away from invading; and (2) Engage in illegal construction on the Temple Mount such that numerous ancient Jewish artifacts are unearthed, taken out of physical context in which found, and dumped or destroyed. The Times rarely brings in the Jordanian seizure of Jerusalem. It mentions Jordanian destruction of synagogues, but fails to make clear that all were destroyed and thousands of Jewish residents were expelled. Jews were not allowed to pray at the Mount. More on Arab land sale to Jews:
TALIBAN DO WAR CRIMES JUST LIKE PALESTINIAN ARABS The Pakistani Army blamed the Taliban "for endangering non-combatants by firing indiscriminately and basing themselves in civilian homes." "The militants are using the civilian population as a human shields, and they have dug trenches in civilian areas." (Andrea Kannapell, NY Times, 5/10, A14.) That is just what Hamas did in Gaza. Let's see whether the world excuses the Taliban the way they excused Hamas. ISRAELI SUES NATO FOR WAR CRIMES, IN RETALIATION A court in Spain accepted a lawsuit against Israel for alleged war crimes in Gaza. In retaliation, the Israel Terror Victims Association is bringing a lawsuit in the same court, if not in the Hague, against NATO for war crimes in Serbia. The suit would implicate Spanish and other NATO commanders. NATO forces bombed Serbia from a high altitude, [at the orders of pres. Clinton] to protect themselves from anti-aircraft fire. But the planes could not see targets. They bombed civilians indiscriminately, killing more than 2,000 that way. The purposes of the Israeli suit are to expose Spanish hypocrisy, based on bigotry, and to get Spain to quash the suits against Israel (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/5). The Israeli suit is based on real war crimes. The suit in Spain is based on prejudice and persecution. OBAMA ON IRAN & ISRAEL The head of Israel's National Union Party, MK Yakov Katz, analyzed Pres. Obama's policy on Iran and Israel, as expressed by his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel told the AIPAC convention that the US effort to end Iran's nuclear weapons program depends on Israeli progress in peace negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs. That claim, not supported by evidence, is a veiled threat against Israel. Katz also noted that the US expresses faith in democracy, but makes demands upon Israel that contradict the expressed view of the Israeli electorate "Progress" to the State Dept. means major concessions to the Arabs. The condition of statehood, alone, would enable the Arabs to fire missiles at those Israeli cities they cannot now reach. The concessions that the State Dept. favors would render Israel vulnerable to conquest by the Arabs. In other words, unless Israel puts the Arabs into position to conquer it, the US would let Iran destroy it. Concessions to Islamists failed again, when Pakistan made concessions to the Taliban, and the Taliban abused them to move nearer to the capital and its nuclear hoard. Katz suggested that Israel expose Rahm's illogical and unfair demands of Israel /http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/5). Rahm and Obama don't make sense. If Israel makes concessions, then the US would raid Iran. The Arabs want that raid. If the US should raid Iran, why make it depend on Israel? I think it is a pretext for wrenching concessions out of Israel. For more on Obama's policy on Iran:
Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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FROM ISRAEL: REJOICE IN JERUSALEM
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 20, 2009. |
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It is 42 two years since Jerusalem was reunited under our sovereignty. Four-two years since we took eastern Jerusalem and the Old City in the Six Day War. Tonight and tomorrow we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim — may she remain united in our hands eternally. Enjoy this one-minute video that celebrates Yerushalayim with scenic and historical views:
And for the most stunning version of Yerushalayim shel zahav (Jerusalem of Gold) sung by the late, magnificent Ofra Haza z"l:
~~~~~~~~~~ Speaking of Jerusalem: Palestinian sources are lamenting that they were promised by the US that in any peace deal Jerusalem would be their capital. But President Obama's peace plan — essentially the Saudi plan with some modifications, which he intends to unveil in Cairo when he gives his much-vaunted talk in early June — envisions things just a bit differently. In this plan the Palestinians would get eastern Jerusalem as their capital, but the holy places would be under the jurisdiction of the UN. I can just imagine him, thinking how sage this is, how fair. That an international agency should supervise these sites, thus preventing Jewish-Arab rivalry for control. For us this is nothing more than a joke. The United Nations controlling the Kotel (Western Wall) and the Temple Mount? Oi! Give me a break! That Obama would think this is OK means he is totally devoid of any sensitivity to how the UN has treated us (does he even know the UN Human Rights Council record?) or how we respond to this agency. Either that, or he just doesn't care, as long as he provides a surface semblance of impartiality. 1 But it seems this plan doesn't suit the Palestinians either. And I love this complication. ~~~~~~~~~~ An even worse hindrance to the "peace plan" is the instability of the Palestinian Authority, with which we would be expected to negotiate, and which would presumably govern an autonomous region or state. Seems a good part of the Fatah party is not happy with the new government that Abbas has put in place. While many Fatah people have become ministers, they have done so as individuals and not as members of the party. Fayyad, it should be noted, is viewed (not without reason) as a puppet of the West. Has Obama figured out precisely whom we are supposed to talk to and who actually can speak for the Palestinian Arab body politic? ~~~~~~~~~~ An issue was raised by a reader today (thanks, Minka) that I've addressed before, but would like to return to here. I refer above to the "Palestinian Arab body politic," but the question is whether there really is one. That is, are the Arabs known as Palestinians truly united in their perceptions of themselves as one people, with a genuine yearning for a state? There is every indication that the answer is no. There are multiple loyalties — to the hamula, which is the all-important clan; to ideologies, including radical Islam and even socialism; to cultural associations linked with Egypt or Jordan; etc. But they don't get their act together as one people. And thus have they failed to develop the infrastructure necessary for building a state. ~~~~~~~~~~ Whatever Obama's intentions towards us, our strongest friends in the US are in Congress. A letter initiated both by members of the Republican and Democratic parties has been sent to President Obama, telling him that "peace cannot come while terrorism continues to wrack Israel." It was signed by over 250 members of Congress, including 76 senators. ~~~~~~~~~~ Prime Minister Netanyahu was pushed with regard to a freeze on settlements while he was in Washington, but he declined to commit to anything, saying that first he wants to see what commitments the PA is honoring. This is his principle of reciprocity. As National Security Advisor Uzi Arad put it, "If this is about give and take, then what is the Palestinian side ready to give? You can't expect Israel alone to answer the Palestinians' demands time and again." Washington leaders were told that we will continue to build in Jerusalem and in our major settlement blocs. ~~~~~~~~~~ Netanyahu arrived back home today and pronounced himself satisfied. It is being reported that in a briefing on the plane coming home, Ron Dermer, one of Netanyahu's closest aides, told the journalists present that "the focus by the media on the concept of solving the Israel-Palestinian issue through a two-state solution is childish and stupid...the fixation with that idea rather than focusing on the fundamental issues." He was careful to say he wasn't describing the concept itself this way, but he was headed in that direction. However, according to YNet, another, unnamed, Netanyahu aide was less circumspect and referred to the concept itself as "juvenile." What we're seeing then is the beginning of a campaign to discredit the Obama approach and deal more realistically with the complexities of the situation. My response: A very cautious, a very tentative Halleluyah! ~~~~~~~~~~ As many of you may know, Iran today announced the test of a Sajjil-2 missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers, which has the capacity to reach not only Israel, but US troops in the region and parts of Europe. This announcement has been confirmed. It is not of immediate concern to Israel, as Iran has older missiles with a range sufficient to reach us, and we have been preparing defense against this via anti-missile systems. But it should be of concern to the Western world more broadly. An unnamed US official cited by Reuters said, that though the United States wants to engage with Teheran, American patience is "not infinite." "Iran just keeps going in the wrong direction. We want them to engage with us, to talk about how we can make the region more stable. This is just a step in the wrong direction," ~~~~~~~~~~ Do the Americans responsible for current policy know how stupid this sounds? It's as if this official is speaking to a recalcitrant child who won't get with the program: "You didn't like it when Bush ostracized you, and we're trying to be nice to you. So why are you making it so hard for us and being so contrary? Naughty, naughty. We can't help you when you act this way." Has it occurred to anyone over there that it is simply not a goal of the Iranian mullahs to make the region more stable? That this is the whole point? ~~~~~~~~~~ Sigh... Then we have the secretary of state, who spoke about Iran at a Senate hearing today. She said that the prospect of a nuclear Iran was an "extraordinary threat", and that the government was working "to persuade the Iranian regime that they will actually be less secure if they proceed with their nuclear weapons program." In my humble opinion, Hillary is not sounding too swift either. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" Today it's political good news. First an announcement from the Foreign Ministry: "Israel will, for the first time, open an embassy in Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan. The decision to open the embassy was reached in view of the development of the good bilateral relationship with Turkmenistan and the new momentum in relations with Central Asian countries.~~~~~~~~~~ Interestingly, in today's Jerusalem Post is an article by the ambassador to Israel from Kazakhstan, another Central Asian nation. He praises the cooperation and positive dynamic between his country and ours, and seeks stronger ties. From the Foreign Ministry announcement: "the new momentum in relations with Central Asian countries." Our future is with these nations and not the nations of western Europe. ~~~~~~~~~~ Kuwait has just held a general election and the results represent a stunning victory for reform and democratization. For the first time ever, women — four of them — were elected to the parliament, while the Muslim Brotherhood lost three of its four seats. ~~~~~~~~~~ Then, as this is Yom Yerushalayim, sharing of a bit of news regarding Mayor Barkat's new master plan for Jerusalem, to be carried out over a period of years: [] A green belt surrounding the city, with picnic areas and hiking trails, a bicycle path and a lake. Let it be! Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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COMMON SENSE REASONS WHY THERE CAN'T BE A PALESTINIAN STATE
Posted by Mr La, May 20, 2009. |
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This was written by Herb Deneberg, a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us. Editor's Note: Someone who read this wrote to say: but what else can group Z (the Palestinian Arabs) do — they own the land and Israel is occupying it and they have Israel's weaponry. I wrote back that (1) Israel owned the land legally by irrevocable trust; (2) and there had never ever been a Palestinian state or country in Mandated Palestine, or for that matter, a Palestinian people, until Yasser Arafat declared the locals a "people" in 1964; and (3) most of the "Palestinians" immigrated into what became Israel and the Territories after 1900; and (4) in 1922, British cut away 78% of what was supposed to become the Jewish homeland. That area is now called Jordan. I suggested he google the articles by Yoram Shifftan and Howard Grief in Think-Israel.org to read the legal aspects. I haven't heard back. |
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Answer these questions and then prepare to learn that logic, reason, decency and rationality has departed from those who now claim to be peacemakers: Should nation A grant statehood to a group (we'll call it group Z) dedicated to the demolition of nation A? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z that will not accept nation A's right to exist? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z whose president glorifies suicide bombers and makes heroes of suicide bombers who are in the business of blowing up babies, women and children in nation A? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z that 16 years ago promised to outlaw terrorism against nation A, to arrest terrorists dedicated to destroying nation A, to end its incitement to hatred and violence against nation A, and despite solemn agreements, simply does not keep these written promises aimed at assuring peace between nation A and group Z? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z whose president proudly displays a map of nation A that omits the name of nation A from the map and instead labels it as the land of group Z? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z when 75 percent of its members reject nation A's right to exist? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z when 64 percent of its members support continued terrorist rocket attacks against civilians in nation A, and by a margin of two to one believe if group Z gets statehood, it would be a terror state? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z whose media regularly promote killing Americans? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z when 65 percent of its members support al-Qaida, the terrorist group? Should nation A grant statehood to group Z whose Parliament speaker has said, "Kill the Americans to the last one." I posed this as a hypothetical to expose how preposterous and unreasonable the proposal is for the two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's easier to see the proposal when stripped to its bare bones. The two-state solution might make sense some day, but now is not the time. When group Z isn't intent on exterminating nation A and are prepared to live in peace, that would be the time. The hypothetical removes some of the miscellaneous baggage from the issue, and makes crystal clear the sheer lunacy of the two-state solution at this time. Israel is nation A, and the Palestinians are group Z. This two-state solution is now the accepted wisdom of the Obama administration, Arab states, the international community and the Palestinian Authority (PA). It is a no-starter on its face. The two-state solution is in fact a no-state solution for Israel. When you consider the facts as catalogued in the questions at the beginning of this column, you have to conclude that a two-state solution now would be nothing but a suicide pact for Israel. In fact, there are other facts not even included in the questions, which make the suicide nature of the two-state solution even more painfully apparent. Here are those other proposals that go along with the two-state solution, which is in fact an Arab initiative that seems to have been adopted by the Obama administration. You would think that Israel would be a party to a parley between the Obama administration and Arab nations that decides the fate of Israel. First, the two-state solution calls for Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 war borders. Those borders are clearly indefensible, and would make Israel vulnerable to any attack and would assure that its defense would be impossible. Second, the two-state solution calls for a "just" solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. Those are code words for letting all of the Palestinian refugees who left during the 1948 conflict, which the surrounding Arab nations started by their unprovoked aggression in violation of the original U.N. determination of a two-state solution. The return of all these refugees would mean that the essential Jewish nature of Israel would be destroyed, and the Jewish minority in Israel would be subjected to the edicts of an unfriendly and even genocidal majority. If the two-state solution sounds as bad as anything can get, there's more. The U.S. and the Arab nations are now trying to tie any united front against Iran, and its development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, with a two-state peace with the Palestinians. The idea is that before anything can be done to Iran, we have to make Israel commit national suicide via the two-state solution. Cutting through the phony rhetoric, giving up Israel to a suicide peace plan is simply an attempt to appease Iran. That appeasement would only be viewed as a sign of weakness by Iran and would make it more intractable. As Investor's Business Daily (May 18, 2009) points out, "As always, appeasement always fans the flames of evil." In other words, the Obama administration and the Arab nations are giving Israel two alternative paths, both of which lead to Israel committing suicide. It can agree to a two-state solution and assure its own destruction, as its borders will be indefensible and as it will be giving citizenship to a demographic group now dedicated to its destruction. Or it can reject suicide via the two-state solution, and instead elect suicide by Iran — with the apparent approval of the U.S. and the Arab nations — and Iran's development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction ... which it has repeatedly announced it will use on Israel. Iran and its genocidal madness should be the top U.S. and world priority, as it is a threat to world safety. It should not be used as a bargaining chip or an appeasement attempt to sell a totally unreasonable Arab peace plan. The U.S., the Arab states and the "international community" are trying to shove the suicidal two-state solution down Israel's throat, as if it is the only way to go. The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he will not even meet with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu until he agrees to pursue Palestinian independence and freeze construction of West Bank settlements. All these demands are premature when the Palestinians will not even stop their terrorism, their suicide bombings, their incitement to violence and hate carried out by their government-controlled media, mosques and schools. They promised to stop all that terrorism in accordance with promises made 16 years ago. How can Israel be expected to make all kinds of concessions in advance and come to the peace table, when the nation is still under siege by endless terrorism and endless incitement to violence and hate? Remember what prior concessions have achieved for Israel — more suicide bombings, rockets aimed at civilians and terrorism. The first step is for the Palestinians to stop their war to destroy Israel. I'll give the world a good alternative to the two-state solution. For starters, end Palestinian terrorism and incitement to hate and violence against Israel. Then peace will be possible in all kinds of variations, including the two-state solution. It continues to get worse. Now meet Vice President Joe Biden, who has an almost perfect record of being wrong on virtually every foreign policy issue during his decades in the Senate. He even opposed the liberation of Kuwait and was willing to cede the Middle East to then dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Now he's telling Israel that any action against Iran would be "ill-advised." Iran is threatening to incinerate Israel with nuclear bombs and missiles and Vice President Biden says self-defensive measures would be ill-advised. Apparently the vice president thinks being subjected to nuclear incineration is the way to go. Yes, poor Vice President Biden can't get anything right, and perhaps Hugh Hewitt, the talk show host, is right when he gave him the nickname Slow Joe. He's not slow. He's intellectually stopped dead in the water. There are other sorry aspects with this peacemaking by President Barack Obama, the Arab nations and the international community. They are willing to impose a peace treaty on Israel. Peace treaties are supposed to be negotiated by the parties to the conflict and not by other nations or international organizations. Also peace treaties have to be negotiated between parties that want peace. How do you negotiate a peace treaty with a group that is dedicated to your destruction? Israel has already discovered what happens when you turn territory over to genocidal, terrorist enemies. They continue to try to destroy Israel. That's what happened when Gaza was turned over to the Palestinians, and that's the history of peacemaking with the Palestinians. And that's all a two-state solution would deliver — a better platform for continuing the Palestinian war against Israel. The Palestinians have a long, unbroken record of rejecting peace and going for violence and terrorism. This all seems quite obvious to anyone who considers it. Yet it has escaped the Obama administration, the Arab nations and the international community. But the agreement by the international community doesn't make it right. There's a battle going on over the imposition of the suicidal two-state solution on Israel. You can join the battle by letting the president know where you stand by calling the White House comment hotline at 202-456-1111 or the White House switchboard at 202-456-1414. You can also reach your congressman by calling members of Congress at 202-226-3121. Be patient when you do, because the White House lines seem to be busy most of the time. You can also try to influence public opinion by calling talk shows and writing letters to the editor. What's most surprising about this is that too many seem to be indifferent to the coming Iranian development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, the danger that creates for the world, and its plan for Holocaust II for Israel, and the same seeming indifference to the imposition of suicide via the two-state solution. The best indictment of the two-state solution comes from the Zionist Organization of America and its president Morton Klein. Mr. Klein has a record of being right on target for many years on issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I credit the ZOA for that and have supported its work. But it will take more than that to stop Iran, whose bombs will be directed at America after they are directed at Israel. And it will take more than that to prevent Holocaust II via Iran or the two-state solution. Does the world really mean "never again?" You decide, and perhaps do something to get the right answer before its too late. Contact the poster at mrla26@aol.com |
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OBAMA IN WONDERLAND
Posted by Kenneth R. Timmerman, May 20, 2009. |
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"Now, understand that part of the reason that it's so important for us to take a diplomatic approach [toward Iran] is that the approach that we've been taking, which is no diplomacy, obviously has not worked. Nobody disagrees with that." Mr. Obama then added a few illustrations to bolster his case: "Hamas and Hezbollah have gotten stronger. Iran has been pursuing its nuclear capabilities undiminished. And so, not talking, that clearly hasn't worked. That's what's been tried. And so what we're going to do is try something which is actually engaging and reaching out to the Iranians." Let's assume for an instant that the people briefing Mr. Obama on Iran haven't read the files that the George W. Bush administration turned over to them about the previous eight years of diplomacy and outreach toward Tehran. But you don't need to have access to classified information to figure this one out: A simple Google search will suffice. U.S. government officials at the ambassador level or above met publicly no fewer than 28 times with their Iranian counterparts during the Bush administration, according to published accounts. So Mr. Obama's briefers either were Internet-challenged, lazy or just out-and-out dishonest. The U.S.-Iran meetings began in November 2001. The last meeting, held in Geneva on July 19, 2008, was conducted by Undersecretary of State William J. Burns, a career bureaucrat who was held over in the same job by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Burns presumably will be involved in the next round of talks. If anyone could have enlightened the president of his error, it was Mr. Burns. The notion that the Bush administration "never talked to Iran" is the founding myth of Mr. Obama's foreign policy. Mr. Obama repeated it at every occasion during the campaign and has repeated it since. It is patently false. Another key myth used by the pro-Iran lobby and the president's supporters is that the Iranian regime offered a "grand bargain" to the United States in May 2003, which Bush administration neoconservatives rejected out of ideological zeal. This myth has been propagated by a former National Security Council analyst, Flynt Leverett, who claims he was personally involved in the exchange. But Mr. Leverett's claims about the authenticity of the Iranian offer were debunked once and for all by then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — whom no one has accused of being a closet neoconservative. In a July 2007 interview with PBS' "Frontline," Mr. Armitage said he was advised by career diplomats in the State Department's Near East bureau that the Swiss ambassador who had conveyed the supposed Iranian offer "had perhaps added a little bit to it, because it wasn't in consonance with the state of our relations." The Swiss ambassador's fax didn't jibe with more detailed negotiating position papers that had been given directly to senior U.S. officials by their Iranian counterparts, Mr. Armitage said. "The Swiss ambassador in Tehran was so intent ... on bettering relations between ... the United States and Iran that we came to have some questions about where the Iranian message ended and the Swiss message may begin," Mr. Armitage said. That is a diplomatic way of saying the purported May 2003 offer by Iran was determined by the State Department Near East bureau to be a forgery. The Obamaland myth of "no diplomacy" with Iran has been debunked by our European allies as well. In 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered a "grand bargain" to Iran in coordination with the three major powers of the European Union — the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The Iranians were to get security guarantees, recognition and renewed trade — including civilian nuclear technology — in exchange for a suspension of their uranium enrichment work. After much stalling, the Iranian regime dismissed the U.S.-European offer as "propaganda." A senior adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a forum at the Brookings Institution just weeks before November's election that the United States would be foolish to continue nuclear talks with Iran. "We've been negotiating with the Iranians since 2003, five years," said Therese Delpech. "We came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but in buying time for their military [nuclear] program." Russian President Vladimir Putin put the most attractive offer before the Islamic Republic's leaders during his October 2007 summit meetings in Tehran. He offered the regime all it apparently wanted — and more. And yet, still it refused, according to Iranian and U.S. government sources. We've repeatedly tried diplomacy with the Islamic Republic of Iran. For reasons that are hard to understand, Mr. Obama does not appear to be aware of this record. By the time he climbs out of the rabbit hole into which he has fallen, Iran very well could become a nuclear weapons state. Kenneth R. Timmerman is President, Middle East Data Project, Inc. He authored "Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran" and is a contributing editor to Newsmax.com His latest non-fiction books is a thriller called Honor Killing, available at www.kentimmerman.com. Contact him by email at timmerman.road@verizon.net This article appeared in the Washington Times
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INFANT IN NEVE YAAKOV WHO NEEDED SURGERY
Posted by Lee Caplan, May 20, 2009. |
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A few weeks ago I wrote about Nadia Linda bas Inbal, a baby born prematurely, who needed surgery to correct a problem in the lungs. Thank G-d the surgery was a success and the baby is able to breathe by herself, for the first time in her one-half year on this planet! Take a look at the baby
Unfortunately Nadia Linda's family is continuing to experience difficulties. Due to expenses surrounding the surgery, and even though both parents work, they have fallen behind in their monthly expenses. To add to their difficulties, their car was stolen three times within the past 18 months. They are a very special, young Israeli family which has done teshuva over the past few years, and the father learns every day and has a strong connection with several rabbeim. The two big boys, ages 10 and 7, are now learning in Cheder, but because the family is behind on payments to the schools, the schools have actually threatened to stop allowing them to attend. I spoke to their rav, who explained that they are alone, without any family or close friends to help them. Therefore providing them with help is not only a mitzvah of tzedaka but also of kiruv, so they feel that they are not alone when Klal Yisrael helps them. If you wish to help, contributions can be sent in Israel to: American Friends of Nimla Tal
in America:
Make mention on the memo line, or in an accompanying note, that the contribution is intended for BABY'S FAMILY FUND HaRav Meir Cirota, Av Beis Din of the Eida Hareidit in Jerusalem, is familiar with the situation and confirms that it is a legitimate cause. May we all share in good news!
Contact Lee Caplan at leescaplan@yahoo.com |
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DC RALLY FOR PM BENJAMIN NETANYAHU AGAINST A "3 STATE DISSOLUTION"
Posted by Evelyn Hayes, May 20, 2009. |
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My trip to Washington to support Prime Minister Netanyahu and the United States of America. I awoke at 5 in the morning, left my house before 6, went to meet a bus to Washington, DC at 7AM. I was part of a massive demonstration in Israel in the summer of 1993 before Gaza and Jericho first. It was a test and everyone knows it didn't work. Gaza imported mercenary PLO from all the Jihad nations, Jericho employed torture against those Arabs who didn't want change. Christians and others in the Palestinian Authority started fleeing, leaving their homes unsold but their limbs and lives intact. It happened before in Iran, Lebanon, Cuba. the free people of these countries suffered "change." I am afraid America is suffering "change",the plague of reverse crusades which is collapsing the banks, the auto industry, retirement plans, the work ethic, stability, mobility, independence, freedom. And the silence is horrendous. William Wordsworth wrote, "The world is with us late and soon; getting and spending, we lay waste our passions," Yes, we were too busy getting and spending. Now, unemployed, it is time to think, to feel the pain, to cry, to stop the "change." I went to Washington to tell Prime Minister Netanyahu to remember Israel has survived all the imperialistic nations, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the British and it will survive this pan-Mohammedan Jihad. I reminded the crowd from Brooklyn, Riverdale, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Detroit that Mohammed a wandering terrorist in the deserts outside Medina, that he asked King Marwan of Medina to change Judaism. Asma bas Marwan, the poetess, was glad her father denied changing Judaism. She warned him against meeting Mohammed to talk peace. The King of Medina went to talk peace with Mohammed and he and his unarmed entourage got their heads chopped off., just like Dan Pearl. Asma bas Marwan pleaded for the majority of the people to be brave and not succumb to Mohammedan terrorism. The Butcher of Baghdad one day asked Mohammed what he could do for him. Mohammed told him to get rid of Asma daughter of Marwan the dead king of Medina. He went to her tent and chopped her to pieces when she was nursing her baby. Are the Marwans of today hidden Jews who survived and are they killing Jews today to not suffer non-comformity again? I went to Washington to remind PM Netanyahu that this roadtrap wasn't for a a two state solution but a THREE STATE DISSOLUTION. Jordan is 78% of the Jewish Mandate for a state in what was the Ottoman Empire, divided by Britain after WWI. Is it blindness or anti-Semitism that fails to recognize that dividing 22% when the British White Paper said it was too small a country to accept the Jews who were blackened to ashes in the incinerators of Hitler, partner of the Mufti Haj al Husseini who masterminded the riots of the 1920s and 1930s? Does the world today believe Israel minimized to 22% can hold 6,000,000 and their descendants as well as all the Arab nations? Is the United Nations formed to prevent ethnic cleansing doing a reality check or is it hoping 6,000,000 Jews will be killed again, nuked, besides being bombed daily? Did I really hear this President of the United States call this tragedy that has killed thousands and where the bombs are rolling in through tunnels nonstop call what the Jews are suffering "mischief?" Were wired bodies in Jenin mischief? Are rocket attacks on Sderot, Ashdod, Ashkelon "mischief"? 
Calling war "mischief" is madness. Calling "hate attacks and murder" MISCHIEF is minimizing and accepting the unacceptable. I went to Washington to speak up for the Jews, Israel and a free-thinking and moral acting America, a proud nation independent of the British, Saudi Arabia, the dictators of the world. I went to Washington to ask the world not to bow to evil, to uphold truth, to keep the world as it was created, GOOD! I went to speak up for the "good ideology' the ideology of one man, Abraham, who walked away from evil, decadence, immorality, destruction and dedicated his life to the Creator. I went to Washington because G-d freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt and because one man gave United Jewry the Torah, the pathway of creation, good, government and life itself. I went to Washington because I am not blind and I want a better world for my children and grandchildren. I went because my ancestors fled Russia Poland and Austria Hungary before the Holocaust because the pogroms were evil not mischief and murdered Jews, babies, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, fathers. 
If the world refuses to see the suicide bombings of the Park Hotel on Pesach and killing Jewish children eating pizza with their families in Sbarro, Israel and that pan Jihad is reaching America; if the world didn't suffer the collapse of the Twin Towers in America, the suicide attacks in London, in Madrid, in Bombay, perhaps they could plead innocence. The silence is deafening and the silent are guilty. The Big Lie of Mohammedan Peace has left a Jewish king dead, no Jews in Saudi Arabia, hidden Jews converted to killing, apartheid in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, Ramallah, Bethlehem, the City of Love. David's Tomb on Mount Zion is scribbled with Arab graffiti. Joseph's Tomb in Schem, bought by Jacob in the Bible was burned and chopped to pieces. As a young woman stood with a sign claiming Israel's apartheid, I spoke of the Arab children, doctors, nurses in Jerusalem hospitals, the Arabs in Hebrew University, the Arab bus drivers, the Arabs guarding the Knesset as well as being Knesset members who meet with the enemies that wish to destroy Israel and kill the Jews. As fraudulant Jews stood with a PLO flag calling Judaism and Zion (G-d) different, I felt pain. Such lies. Were they just stupid? Were they anti-Semites? Whose payroll do they bow to when they are against tthe Jewish state and the miracles that re-made the Jewish state? I am a history major and read Mein Kampf, the most read book in the Palestinian Authority. I see the Big Lie as Black, Red and Green. I see authority as a synonym for dictatorship. Philistines, a synonym for palestinians were invaders and are a dead race. Goliath was killed by Little David. They call Little Israel, surrounded by 22 Arab states, Goliath and the world believes it. Laugh? No, cry! As survivors say Never Again, Zachor, I am here because I don't want again. Murder and hate kill, and, are not "mischief". There is no roadmap accept the Pathways of the Torah which deeded Israel to the Jews since the time of Avraham, — Avraham purchased the city of Hebron, a burial place for Sarah and Isaac and Rivka, Leah and himself, purchased for 1,000,000 shekels not $24, Schem to the Jews and is the burial place of Josef who saved the Jews and the Egyptians, Jerusalem bought by King David and became the just and respected City of Solomon, of shalom, peace and a light unto nations. A divided Jerusalem was a destroyed Jerusalem. It is beautiful again. A further divided Israel would be a fool's hell where plowhsares are turned into bombs as in Jewrid apartheid Gaza. I am here because I know Eretz Hakodesh, the Jewish Holyland undivided means creation, means peace, gardens, medicine, kindness and love for the whole world. I am here to say don't accept the unacceptable. Accepting the unacceptable for Jews lets the unacceptable plague the whole world, victims of pan-Jihad, be acceptable. 
I am here to say no to change that would make more Cubas, Irans, Venezuelas. I am here to say, "Actualize the dreams of the holy couples who served The Creator, who chose to die and not join evil, who are in heaven because they refused to be part of the evil axis. The striving for perfection by each one of us will keep all from being the tools of dictators. The pathways of the Jews has perfected civilization. It has led to The Bill of Equal Rights". I say no to dictatorial roadmaps made by politicians who cannot see the wrong of human mistakes as well as evil intentions. I say yes to creation and life, plowshares not swords and bombs. Am Yisrael Chai.
Evelyn Hayes is author of "The Eleventh Plague, Twins, because
their hearts were softened to accept the unacceptable" and "The
Twelfth Plague, Generations, because the lion wears stripes." Contact
her at rachelschildren@gmail.com
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THE THIRD JIHAD: FILM WARNS OF RISING 'HOMEGROWN JIHAD' THREAT IN U.S.
Posted by Bryna Berchuck, May 19, 2009. |
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This comes from the Islam Daily website
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The face of radical Islam is no longer limited to gun-toting, bomb-strapping, plane-hijacking terrorists. Now it takes on more subtle forms, warns a new documentary. WASHINGTON — The face of radical Islam is no longer limited to gun-toting, bomb-strapping, plane-hijacking terrorists. Now it takes on more subtle forms. It infiltrates the highest echelon of American education; recruits the social rejects in U.S. prisons; and teaches American Muslim children to hate infidels, warns a new documentary that features a devout Muslim American, a former terrorist, and some of the nation's top national security experts. "This is not a film about Islam," clarifies the documentary "The Third Jihad" at the onset of the film. "It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are radicals. This film is about them." Over the course of 72-minutes, the film pulls together TV footage aired on Islamic broadcasting stations, secret documents that shows U.S. Muslim groups' connection to terror organizations, and interviews with former CIA, FBI analysts and radical Islam experts to introduce the concept of "cultural jihad" — a new jihad method that uses the laws and rights of a society to undermine the freedoms it offers and to overthrow its social system. The film focuses on the FBI's discovery in 2003 of a 15-page document believed to be a "Grand Jihad Manifesto" authored by the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. The document outlines goals and strategies on how to infiltrate and dominate America from within. It also identifies Muslim organizations, previously thought to be moderate by the U.S., which it could work with to achieve its goal of weakening western culture and impose sharia (Islamic) law in North America. "There is an ideology we are fighting. You can't say that it is all Al Qaeda," said Dr. M. Zuhidi Jasser, who was the film's narrator, at a press conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. "There is Hamas, Hezbollah, there is Islamic jihad, groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Taliban, the Iranian theocratic movements, and the only thing they share is not the tactic but the goal and the end, which is the establishment of the Islamic state." Jasser is founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), an organization founded to promote the combination of the Muslim faith with American values of democracy, freedom and liberty. He is a devout practicing Muslim American who was a former physician to the U.S. Congress and served in the U.S. Navy. In addition to partnering with "moderate" U.S. Muslim groups, extremists are also carrying out their cultural jihad in America through the U.S. education system, the film asserts. Saudi Arabia has given huge endowments to the Middle East Studies departments at the nation's top universities such as Harvard and Georgetown University, which alone have received $20 million each. The students at these schools will be America's future leaders and diplomats, the film explains, and will make future decisions based on their "slanted and radical" Saudi interpretation of Islam. The form of Islam practiced by Saudi Arabia is Wahhabism, considered the most fundamentalist and extreme out of all the versions. The Saudi legal system based on Wahhabism calls for the hands of thieves to be cut off and for adulterers to be killed. But not only is Saudi Arabia teaching its Islamic worldview at higher education institutions, it is also disseminating its extreme-version of Islam in mosques across the U.S. to impressionable youths. A study by Washington-based Freedom House Center for Religious Freedom in 2005 analyzed Saudi-supplied textbooks given to children at U.S. mosques. The study found that the books contained texts and teachings about non-Muslims that could be considered hate speech. The report maintains that such teaching has the potential to radicalize young Americans Muslims. Besides universities and mosques, U.S. prisons are also proving to be fertile ground to spread radical Islam. Islamic activists, imams, and prison chaplains are reportedly finding success in recruiting inmates by "feeding off the discontent and resentment" these men and women feel toward society. Jasser wants Muslim Americans to speak out and against radical Islam. "I think it's important for American Muslims to lead this effort because if we don't fix our problems from within the faith, this movement to create an Islamic state is going to ultimately affect our way of life," Jasser said at the press conference. "I think the only way to defeat this movement is for Muslims from within to say this is not Islam. This is theocracy." But sadly, instead of joining him many Muslims have labeled him an enemy or remained quiet. "The saddest thing to me is this (the documentary) isn't the project that was done by Muslims period. It should have been done just by Muslims," Jasser said. "They (Muslim Americans) focus on victimology, and I think Americans are tired of hearing about victimology and want to hear solutions." Dr. Emir Caner, a former devout Muslim and now president of the Baptist college Truett-McConnell in Georgia, is doing his part to help promote the film among Christians. He has traveled across the country to screen the documentary to local pastors and talk about how Christians should respond to radical Islam. Caner told The Christian Post after the screening that he hopes thousands of churches will screen the film to their own audience and Christians will be the "salt and light" and "prophetic voice" to alert the nation on the growing threat. He acknowledges that Christians might be labeled Islamaphobes, but says, "We can't coward to that and worry about those nomenclature given to us. We have to stand for what is right." He also joked being called an Islamaphobe is "sort of on a weekly basis for me being a former Muslim." "The Third Jihad" is released by The Clarion Fund, a non-profit organization that was founded in 2006 to educate Americans about issues of national security. In 2006, the organizations released the documentary "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." The name of the film is based on the history of Islamic jihad. The first jihad took place between 622-750 AD (from Arabia to Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, India, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, Portugal and Italy). The second jihad occurred between 1071 to 1683 AD when the Turks invaded the Balkans and all the way to Vienna. And now, the film suggests, the third jihad is the current conflict with radical Islam by America and Western Europe. Read more about The Third Jihad at www.thethirdjihad.com and at www.radicalislam.org |
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WHY WORRY ABOUT ISLAMIC LAW?; U.S. LINKS SUPPORT TO ISRAEL WITH PA STATE;
GOV'T STILL DIVIDING JERUSALEM
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 19, 2009. |
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WHY WORRY ABOUT ISLAMIC LAW? Summary of the problem Radical Muslims seek to institute Islamic Law everywhere, on believers and non-believers alike, with an interpretation of it so strict as to be oppressive, backward, undemocratic, and even barbaric. (4 pages, but with discrete sub-topics.) Radical Muslim goal for Islamic law Radical Islamists promote a rigid form of Islamic law, or Sharia and it rule over autonomous, isolated areas whose. The goal is to undermine Western society from within. Jihad is being waged until the entire world adheres to Sharia. Such a vision would end the state's role as guarantor of individual rights and freedoms. Sharia threatens the Western way of life in its relegation of non-Muslims to second class citizens, sanctioned inequality between men and women, cruel and unusual punishments for crimes, and its restrictive business environment that strangles Western economic freedom and gives financial control to Islamists and Sharia supporters. What is Islamic law? Islamic law "is derived from the Koran, the sayings and conduct of Muhammad, and the consensus and reasoning by analogy of Islamic scholars over the centuries. The body of law is divided into decrees relating to personal acts of worship, commercial dealings, marriage and divorce, and penal laws. Islamic law has five strains. Usually safeguards require evidence, minimizing the frequency of punishment. (But Hamas, PLO, and Taliban do not require proof.) Crime & punishment, under Islamic law 1. Flogging for sexual intercourse by unmarried offenders, for drinking wine, and therefore alcohol in general, and for gambling. [Unofficially, Palestinian Arab families or Hamas executes without holding a trial. They may execute on the basis of mere rumor. Raped women are considered shameful and often either are murdered or work off the family shame by committing suicide bombing. PLO officials invested in a casino, despite Islamic law] 2. Stoning to death for adulterers. [Unmarried Palestinian Arab couples that hold hands may be subject to "honor-killing"] 3. Limb amputation for theft, but execution if highway robber results in a homicide; 4. Execution for homosexuals 5. As the fatwa's calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie and the recent threats against the publishers of the Danish cartoons indicate, death sentences are also prescribed for critics of Muhammad and Islam. 6. Most Muslim states no longer punish apostasy with death. [Arabs not particularly known as Radical have accused of apostasy fellow Muslims who interpret some aspect of Islam differently from themselves.] Effect on non-Muslims In an Islamic state under Sharia, non-Muslims are second class citizens. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians may not bear arms. They pay a special tax that entitles them to government protection from Muslim mobs, though the mobs sometimes break through. People of other non-Muslim faith may not receive even that protection. [But the Muslims have been forcing the Christians out of the Mideast. Radical Muslims have been preaching the extermination of the Jews]. Muslims have referred to Jews and Christians as "apes" and "pigs." They used to force them to wear clothing that identified them as infidels [the way the Nazis made Jews wear stars of David]. Non-Muslim men who marry Muslim women are regarded as adulterers, fit to be stoned to death. Blasphemy against Muslims is severely punished. Defamation of Muslim holy texts, the insulting of Muhammad, and disrespect towards Islam is according to Sharia, punishable by death. [These days, almost any negative or obscure statement thought critical of Islam or of what Muslims do politically, however based on fact, is considered insulting. Hence the Muslim riots over Danish cartoons.] Non-Muslims are prohibited from testifying against Muslims in court. Many Islamists would prohibit music, TV, and movies and enforce traditional prayer attendance and dress. Effect on women Generally, a woman needs the spouse's consent to divorce, but the man does not. Husbands may enforce their authority by beating their wives. A woman's testimony is considered half the value of a man's, and only certain types of testimony by women are acceptable in Islamic courts. Sharia also prescribes a dress code for women requiring them to cover (hijab) all of their bodies except the hands and face. While most Muslim women wear headscarves; in Afghanistan the Taliban forced women to wear the burqa in public where only their eyes could be seen. To enforce hijab, some Islamist groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or supporters of Sharia in Iran — have thrown acid into the faces of non-compliant women. Businesses restricted by Sharia Islamists are trying to get authority to practice Sharia-compliant financing (SCF) and to encourage Western business to practice it with Muslim clients. This would regulate the way American and Western financiers operate and with whom they do business. SCF includes prohibitions against investing in companies engaged in the sale of alcohol, pornography, gambling and pork. Other prohibited industries include interest-bearing loans and investments, media and entertainment companies, and defense companies not involved in the "defense of Islam" or that contribute to the defense of the state of Israel. To participate in the SCF market, investment firms and banks must form "Sharia Advisory Boards," made up of sheikhs and muftis formally trained in Sharia. Companies engaged in SCF also must donate 2.5% to Islamic charities and to "purify" investments that have been "tainted" by forbidden revenue. These contributions are then dispersed to an acceptable charity chosen by the Sharia authorities and are not disclosed to the donating company. Of the eight categories of Sharia approved charities, one includes the funding of those involved in violent jihad ("holy war"), and many of these proceeds have been funneled to terrorist groups. Adherence to such financial conditions allows Islamists to control and collectivize Western free markets, strangling economic freedom under religious pretense. Conclusion The desire to impose Sharia conflicts with Western conceptions of
human rights and the secular, liberal, democratic state. Sharia makes
non-Muslims second class citizens, women are unequal in public life,
cruel punishments are leveled for crimes, and restrictions on
business ensures Islamist control over financial markets and
dispensation of funds. Sharia is currently practiced by Saudi Arabia,
Iran, and Sudan, and before their overthrow in 2002 was enforced by
the Taliban in Afghanistan. Some Islamists in Europe and elsewhere
promote the idea that the Muslim communities should be subject to
Sharia under their own courts separate from the public law governing
the rest of society. This kind of creeping Sharia is a forerunner of
attempts to influence Western society towards Islam
NETANYAHU CHOOSES AMBASSADOR TO U.S. Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu proposes Dr. Michael Oren, senior researcher as the Shalem Institute in Jerusalem to be Ambassador to the U.S.. He has no academic, diplomatic, or government experience. He was a Mossad agent. He seems to be in a string of Israeli politicians sponsored by Henry Kissinger or his Council on Foreign Relations or in any case the US, as future rulers of Israel (Barrychamish@netvision.net.il). Dr. Oren advocates unilateral and almost full Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. He thinks that would reduce tensions with the Arabs. He would wait for the Palestinian Authority to develop a leadership that can make peace. The next generation there is likelier to make peace; it cannot be imposed from above. There was unilateral and full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Hamas turned the area into a rocket launching pad. Wasn't that withdrawal a blunder? Dr. Oren said no. He thinks the mistake was in failing to crack down on Hamas immediately it started firing. This hesitancy appeared to the Arabs as weakness [which emboldens their aggression]. (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/24.) There are no signs of the younger generation of Arabs being less radical, for they are more indoctrinated. Tensions did not decline between the Gaza Arabs and Israel, when the State of Israel forced Jewish residents out. The settlers had not caused tension. Neither did the Israeli Army, so much as prevent terrorism and therefore tension. What does cause tension? Advocacy of intolerance and jihad on Arab TV and in their schools. The notion that territorial withdrawal would reduce tension assumes that the Arab-Israel conflict is over territory. It isn't. It is over religion. The Arabs don't tolerate other religions. They won't be satisfied until Islam triumphs over Israel. That means mass-murder, dispossession, repression. Even that would not satisfy them. They would expand jihad to other areas. WHAT RULE OF LAW IN JUDEA-SAMARIA ("WEST BANK")? The Yesha Civil Rights Organization scorns diplomatic relations with a government that bans the sale of land to Jews. The Organization is referring to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The P.A. exacts a death penalty for it. [Jordan has a similar law, but repealed the capital punishment for violation. Would the Organization reject diplomatic relations with Jordan?] Israel takes the word of Arabs that they did not sell houses to Jews in Hebron. Israel claims to be enforcing the rule of law. What rule of law? The Arabs fear for their lives, when discovered to have sold houses, so they pretend not to have sold (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/23. WITH ISRAEL NEGOTIATING WITH ABBAS Sen. Clinton linked Arab support for Israel over threats from Iran to resumption of Israeli negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/24). Iran is a regional menace. It threatens Arabs states, too, not only Israel. To resist Iran, the Arab states need Israel as much as Israel needs them. The Arab states should not demand more of Israel for their support. In insisting that Israel negotiate with the P.A., the Arab states really want Israel to make concessions that would enable the Arabs to overwhelm Israel. Israel would go down. Then what good to Israel would be Arab help against Iran? ISRAEL LINKS DEALING WITH ABBAS TO CHECKING IRAN Israel links negotiations with Abbas to curbing Iran. The spokesman explained that Israel can't made a deal with the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) that Iran would sabotage (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/24). How could Iran sabotage an agreement between the P.A. and Israel? The obvious way would be by helping Hamas take over the P.A.. Less obvious is that Iran now influences Fatah, too. An implied assumption is that an agreement made with the P.A. would weaken Israeli security — giving up strategic depth against invasion, early warning stations, strategic borders with tank traps, the ability to stop terrorism easily, and a major part of national water supply. The governments of Israel and of the U.S. have a misconception. A pact won't end the conflict, because the Arabs seek religious domination, which means conquest. Israel would be wise to make no concessions to enemies that want to conquer it. Instead, it should strive for victory. That means gradually reclaiming for itself the Territories for the depth, early warning, strategic borders, anti-terrorism, water, and, of course, the heart of the Jewish homeland, which is in Judea-Samaria. Victory strengthens peace. For more on Israel's negotiation position:
SEN CLINTON: NO U.S. AID WOULD REACH HAMAS Sen. Clinton vowed that the State Dept. would keep U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) out of Hamas hands. She elaborated that if the P.A. forms a coalition regime with Hamas, it must promise to "recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by previous agreements." Then she admitted the U.S. would provide taxpayer funds, anyway (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/24). Sounds as if she were contradicting herself. Besides, the State Dept. already gets U.S. funds into Hamas hands. It gives funds to Abbas, head of the P.A.; he turns a portion of the funds over to the Gaza regime, run by Hamas. NETANYAHU REGIME CONTINUES DIVIDING JERUSALEM Under the new Israeli regime of PM Netanyahu, the Defense Ministry is not waiting for all the legal appeals, to finish the expensive security fence in Jerusalem. Despite petitions from Jews who have owned certain acreage for decades, the fence is routed to isolate them on the Arab side. The prior regime of PM Olmert barred them from residing on their land or farming it. PM Netanyahu said he favors the unity of Jerusalem, but he is letting Olmert's Defense Minister, whom he kept on, fence those Jews out. (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/24). Insecurity for his fellow Jews! What a difference between the reputation, statements, and actions by politicians such as Netanyahu and Clinton! NETANYAHU VIEW ON CONSTRUCTION IN TERRITORIES Israel's PM Netanyahu answered Czech Prime Minister Topolanek's question about Israeli construction in Judea-Samaria [a.k.a. "West Bank]. Netanyahu replied that if Israelis can't build houses in Judea-Samaria, neither should Arabs. After all, the Israeli leader said, the Territories are disputed (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/25). He means that since the Arabs do not have title to them, foreigners should not unilaterally accept Arab conditions for their use. HAMAS RESTRUCTURING Hamas is restructuring its command. It will switch from a politburo to a committee equally divided among members from Gaza, from Judea-Samaria, and from abroad. No one faction would dominate the organization. Hamas has been divided by differences between foreign and domestic members. The current head of Hamas, Mash'al, said he expects Hamas members in Israeli prisons to vote for representatives in the new structure (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/24). Israel would be prudent not to cooperate with Hamas' election. Why let terrorist prisoners exchange messages with the outside, and foster terrorism? (For more on terrorist prisoners:
DID IDF FIRE AT UN BUILDINGS IN GAZA? Israeli forces investigated 13 incidents of damage to buildings of the UN or other international organizations. Most incidents were reported by the UN. Hamas knew that the IDF coordinated its assault with international organizations so as to minimize damage to their facilities. Hamas intentionally stored weapons, occupied offices, or fired from alongside international facilities. [Intentionally, so as either to spare Hamas return-fire or in the case of return-fire, to blame Israel for damaging international facilities. Those are war crimes.] Hamas therefore was responsible for the damage, though it accused Israel of intending damage. Hamas falsely claimed that its gunmen killed by return-fire were civilians. In one case, Hamas mortar fire proved effective. The IDF had to fire back. That return-fire was effective, too. Contrary to the subsequent publicity, all the IDF shells landed outside a school, but some civilians did get hurt Israeli shells fired at military targets in the combat zone did fragment and strike UNRWA headquarters, but only because Hamas fought near UNRWA. The IDF did fire upon a school, but only at night, when there were no classes and intelligence reports indicated it a war council was being held. Israel was accused of firing upon an ambulance. The vehicle was in an area that the IDF had informed the international organizations was off-limits to them. Nor was it an ambulance nor innocent civilians. It carried an anti-tank squad. [That duplicity is the war c rime called "treachery."] After unloading the squad, the vehicle moved towards the Israeli troops, who suspected it might be a car bomb. They blew it up. Then the rumor spread that Israel fired upon an ambulance. An Israeli soldier who fired at a UN vehicle, contrary to IDF rules, was disciplined. The IDF coordinated with the UN the movement of 500 trucks and ways to avoid damaging 1,800 sensitive facilities. That there were so few incidents is telling!. One UN truck was unmarked and not coordinated. The IDF fired upon it. Obviously that firing was not intended to damage the UN. Another UN vehicle was being used for terrorist purposes (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/22). Human Rights Watch misrepresented these terrorist rumors as legitimate stories. DID IDF ATTACK CIVILIAN BUILDINGS IN GAZA? "The investigation showed that Hamas based its main line of defense on civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip (i.e. buildings, infrastructure, agricultural lands etc.), and specifically on booby trapped structures (mostly residential), the digging of explosive tunnels and tunnels intended for the moving of people and weaponry. This created an above ground and underground deployment in the Gaza Strip's urban areas by Hamas. During the operation, IDF forces were forced not only to fight the gunmen themselves, but to also deal with the physical terrorist infrastructure prepared by the Hamas and other terrorist organizations in advance. As part of this challenge, the forces demolished structures that threatened the forces and had to be removed — houses which were used by the enemy; other structures used by the enemy for terrorist activity; structures that prevented the forces from moving from one area to another (given that many of the roads were booby trapped); structures that were used to protect Israeli soldiers [I think they mean "protect Hamas soldiers" agricultural elements used as cover for enemy tunnels and infrastructure; and infrastructure next to the security fence used by Hamas for operations against IDF forces or for digging tunnels into Israeli territory." The IDF blew up booby-trapped buildings before Hamas could blow them up with Israeli soldiers in harm's way. High-ranking officers decided which buildings to blow up. All civilians were evacuated from them. Most of the damage was caused by secondary explosions of the weaponry Hamas stored in the buildings. In one instance, a soldier was about to damage a building unnecessarily, but the commander halted him and had him disciplined (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/22). For other reports on battle damage in Gaza, see: DID IDF HARM CIVILIANS IN GAZA UNNECESSARILY? IDF doctrine stresses "purity in arms," i.e., warring responsibly according to international law and stricter standards of ethics. It took seriously accusations of seven incidents of harm to civilians. Harm occurred; intent was absent. A senior Hamas man used his house as a weapons depot. The IDF wanted to destroy that house. First, the IDF telephoned the occupants, warning them to leave before the attack, gave them time to leave, and saw that people did. Then the IDF fired warning shots with light weapons. Concluding that everyone had left the building, the IDF destroyed the building. However, the Hamas leader had kept his family in the building with him. His stored explosives blew up, too. Another house harbored Hamas spotters. The IDF tried to let the civilians out of it, before picking off the Hamas gunmen. Four women were killed with them. The IDF noticed a truck ferrying material between a known Hamas rocket factory and a known Hamas rocket launching site. It carried what appeared to be rockets. The IDF fired upon it, killing four Hamas operatives and four civilians. The truck actually carried oxygen tanks, which resemble rocket tubes; oxygen is used in making rockets. In another case, the IDF meant to fire upon one building, but struck another. It was claimed that the IDF fired upon the Maqadme mosque, injuring civilians. Investigation showed that the mosque was not attacked and that the people named as killed in that attack were Hamas gunmen killed in combat. The supposedly struck Rabat mosque remains standing, unharmed. New claims are coming in and being investigated
The IDF held its forces to a high standard. Its accusers had a criminal standard. Its accusers had a low standard. ABBAS REGIME TO EXECUTE ARAB FOR SELLING TO JEWS A Palestinian Authority (P.A.) military court sentenced an Arab to death for selling land to Jews near Hebron. The charge was treason. Dr. Aaron Lerner, head of IMRA, finds this charge and sentence further proof that the P.A. is not moderate, as it is depicted in the major Western media (4/24). It is up to Pres. Abbas whether to confirm the sentence. The former apartheid regime of S. Africa expelled blacks from white areas. The P.A. and its supporters call Israel an apartheid state. However, Israel does not deport its Arab citizens, whereas the P.A. allows no Jews and it punishes severely Arabs, who sell land to Jews even outside the P.A.. Which would you call apartheid, Israel or the P.A..? An Israeli official pointed out the inconsistency in those who want statehood for the P.A. to be exclusively for Arabs, but do not want Israel exclusively for Jews. SYRIA & TURKEY SIGN MILITARY COOPERATION PACT Syria and Turkey agreed to military and technical cooperation. No details specified. Turkey-Iran trade has grown to $12 billion a year. Five European states together do $15 billion worth of trade with Iran ( 4/28). Iran has overcome much of the sanctions the US imposed and encouraged so as to pressure Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons. It also seems as if Turkey were joining the evil axis. Why else share technical information with a rogue state such as Syria? ABBAS' FORMULA FOR COALITION REGIME WITH HAMAS Palestinian Authority (P.A.) Pres. Abbas has a formula for a coalition regime with Hamas. He said that the regime would promise to abide by prior agreements with Israel, so as to end the boycott of Gaza. He also said about Hamas that "forces" need not abide by prior agreements (4/27). Let's decode that formula. The new P.A. regime, of which Hamas would be a part, would pledge to keep the peace, as per prior agreements. The militia belonging to Hamas, however, could continue the armed struggle. Such a contradiction, based on sophistry in wording, is the way jihadists operate. Since the West just wants to appease the Arabs, Abbas may get away with it. P.A. VS. HAMAS Haaretz had another of those reports periodically praising the P.A. as fighting terrorism. This time it included an IDF compliment, that the P.A. has attained more internal coordination among its forces. Abbas' forces are taking over from Israel the job of rooting out Hamas' false-charity infrastructure and Hizbullah agents. The P.A. has been arresting dozens of Hamas agents. P.A. forces devote much of their effort against foreign agents. One goal is to stop leaks of intelligence to Hamas. After such reports, the IDF usually admits later "that there were very serious problems [with the P.A. program], with the clear implication that the praise had been more to serve an agenda than to report the truth." Dr. Aaron Lerner of IMRA points out that the same P.A. contemplates
integrating its forces with Hamas forces
The P.A. usually does not crack down on terrorist forces, though it may sever some of its financial pipelines. The P.A. tends to release Hamas prisoners after a while. Israel has to raid the P.A. to destroy terrorist forces. Haaretz may get straight what people say, but it often does not get the overall story straight.
ANOTHER OBAMA SNUB OF ISRAEL The Obama administration takes an increasingly frosty tone towards Israel. He reportedly tells foreign diplomats that he will force Israel to come to terms with the Arabs [on Arab terms]. Therefore, Israeli Pres. Peres came to the U.S. to set a friendly tone for PM Netanayahu's visit. Instead, Obama barred the media. Peres was quietly whisked in and out, as if the US government were ashamed of being friendly with Israel (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/11). An earlier Obama snub was:
Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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THE PA ARMY
Posted by Avodah, May 19, 2009. |
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Editor's Note America has been training Palestinian military forces in Jordan at a cost of some 300 million dollars as "security forces." Of course, they woud never use their weapons against Israelis — that would make them terrorists. This below comes from the Joe Settler website
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Lt. General Keith Dayton, US Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Territories plans to add three more battalions to the Palestinian Authority's paramilitary security force. I just want to ask some simple questions. Why do they need AK-47 automatic machine guns? If they are police, give them pistols. Why do they need to wear army fatigues? If they are police, give them blue police uniforms. How much longer until they attack IDF soldiers again? Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website:
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OBAMA'S JEWISH PROBLEMOBAMA'S JEWISH PROBLEM
Posted by Chuck Brooks, May 19, 2009. |
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This was written by Joan Swirsky and it appeared yesterday in Renew America
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/swirsky/090518. Swirsky is a a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com. Visit her website at www.joanswirsky.com. |
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In times past, coalminers working in the depths of the earth took along caged canaries. As long as the canaries warbled, the miners knew they were safe from the methane and carbon monoxide that would kill them in minutes. But when the tiny songbirds stopped singing, the miners knew to run for their lives. Jews have always been the canaries in the coal mines of civilization, serving as a warning of impending doom to those who believed, as Churchill said, that the crocodile — of tyranny — would eat them last. The Jews of Hitler's Germany who listened carefully to the savage dictator's early words, and watched as his promises of hope and change morphed into incremental losses of freedom and ultimately genocide, fled their country and survived, while the six-million who said "it can't happen here" — as well as six-million non-Jews who believed they were immune — perished in the largest mass-murder in history. After Hitler's brutal annihilation of half the Jews on earth, the straggling survivors established the State of Israel, which in less than 50 years became a formidable power, and also a world obsession — admired and respected, but also envied and loathed. Since Israel's founding in 1948, America has been the Jewish state's most steadfast supporter, even when this or that president was not particularly enamored of "the Jews" — with the stark exception of Jimmy Carter who, to this day, oozes Jew-hatred from his aging pores. Why? Because, unlike every state in the Middle East and every anti-freedom regime on earth, Israel embodies all of our country's values — the ideal of democracy, the rule of law, a determination to fight the enemies of Western civilization, and a fidelity to the Judeo-Christian ethics that have made both America and Israel shining lights among freedom-loving nations. Today, with the advent of the Obama administration, Israeli canaries are chirping loudly, warning the entire world, particularly America but also Europe, that if Israel is sacrificed to Obama's far-left anti-Israel and anti-American agenda, then freedom-loving, God-fearing countries around the world will be suffocated and sacrificed to a new American caliphate — to the harsh and inflexible rule of Islamic theology, philosophy, and law. SHARPENING THE MACHETE To prepare for his meeting on May 18 with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama prepared a menu of poison pills — the kind given to people with the same Hobson's Choice that Mafia attorney Tom Hagen gave to the imprisoned and about-to-testify-before-Congress Frankie Pentangeli in "Godfather Two" — either commit suicide or we're going to kill you. Examples abound.
This "genocidal hostility toward Israel," as writer Mona Charen describes it, is Obama & Co.'s way of insuring that they succeed where former administrations have failed in bringing about the ever-elusive "two-state" solution — a "solution" Leftists like Obama have cravenly tried to delude much of the world into believing will magically resolve the world's other conflicts. Anne Bayefsky of www.eyeontheun.org explains Obama's nefarious plans perfectly: "President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn't fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey." The Obama formula, based not on an American or Israeli plan but rather on the "Saudi Peace Initiative," involves:
As King Abdullah of Jordan told journalists after his recent meeting with President Obama — clearly referring to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) — "That is not a two-state solution; it is a 57-state solution." Mmmm...Obama himself said during his campaign that he had visited "all 57" of the United States! And let's not forget that during an interview with George Stephanopoulos, he said ..."in my Muslim faith..." — which he didn't correct but his host rushed to correct. GOING IN FOR THE KILL In spite of more than a half-century of Arab belligerence, war-mongering, suicide bombings, and virulent anti-Israel propaganda blaring from mosques and the media, brainwashing school texts, maps that eliminate the Jewish state, and obdurate resistance to all peace initiatives, Caroline Glick says that "as far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace....the Obama White House's bald attempt to force Israel to take full blame for the Arab world's hostility toward it is not the only way that it is casting Israel as the scapegoat for the region's ills. In their bid to open direct diplomatic ties with Iran, Obama and his advisors are also blaming Israel for Iran's nuclear program." "Even Ethan Bronner of the The New York Times pointed out," Glick continues, "that Obama's Middle East policy is not based on facts. If it were, the so-called 'two state solution,' which has failed repeatedly since 1993, would not be its centerpiece. Obama's Middle East policy is based on ideology, not reality. Consequently, it is immune to rational argument. By blaming Israel for the absence of peace in the Middle East while ignoring the Palestinians' refusal to accept Israel's right to exist; by seeking to build an international coalition with Europe and the Arabs against Israel while glossing over the fact that at least the Arabs share Israel's concerns about Iran; by exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal and pressuring Israel to disarm while in the meantime courting the ayatollahs like an overeager bridegroom, the Obama administration is telling Israel that regardless of what it does, and what objective reality is, as far as the White House is concerned, Israel is to blame." Sound familiar? As I documented in recent articles — "Obama's Revenge" and "The President Who Hates His Country" — Obama and his Leftist cronies revile Western civilization and all those evil white men who established the U.S. Constitution and the most productive, most generous and freest country in world history, as he so amply demonstrated in his recent apologize-for-America trip to Europe. In an article "The United Hates of America," David Solway comments on "...the long and destabilizing campaign of the American Left against the political interests of its own country and its rush to embrace the dictatorial agendas of America's most resolute enemies...'the unholy alliance' between the radical Left and the Islamic Right." Solway also comments on a new book by Jamie Glazov, "United in Hate": "Glazov's "analysis," Solway continues, "seems the only conceivable means of making sense of the leftist orgy of national treason, betrayal of genuine liberal principles, and passionate support of tyrants and demagogues. It also clarifies the bizarre and singular marriage between the Left and Islamism. Glazov writes that the 'common denominator' between two such improbable bedfellows — the one ostensibly promoting gender equality, freedom of speech, and a pluralistic society, and the other predicated on gender apartheid, theocratic coercion, and conformity to Sharia law — is a belief in redemptive violence. This is why so many on the secular Left...exulted in the carnage of 9/11, as did their fundamentalist counterparts in the Islamic world, like the Palestinians who danced in the street and handed out candies to celebrate the great event. For the members of the anti-American Left, their papers and speeches were the candies they distributed to mark this sublime and long-awaited triumph. "Yet another important common denominator, Glazov explains, between the Western Left and Islamism is their shared hatred for the state of Israel, the only true, democratic nation in the Middle East and the West's forward position in the war against an undeviating adversary. The Left abominates Israel as a mini-America, that is, as a colonial occupier of third world innocents, and as a symbol of all the things it loathes: 'modernity, freedom, corporate capitalism and globalization — all things reviled by Muslim fundamentalists. It has thus allied itself with militant Islam on the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend.'" So we know where Obama and his henchmen-and-women stand. And we know that they've read every Jew-hating, Israel-hating word of The Fatah (Palestinian) Constitution and agree with every defamatory, racist, genocidal tenet of this kill-the-Jews-and-destroy-Israel manifesto, which they apparently find less objectionable than the U.S. Constitution. OBAMA'S ANTI-ISRAEL COLLABORATORS Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, has long and deep ties with the enemies of America and Israel. This is what Dick Morris, former advisor to President Clinton, and his wife, Eileen McGann, wrote last year: [Hillary's] relationship with terrorists began in the mid-1980s when she served on the Board of the New World Foundation, which gave funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization [when] the PLO was officially recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. In 1996, the First Lady initiated an outreach program to bring Muslim leaders to the White House. But, as terrorism expert Steve Emerson noted in the Wall Street Journal, 'Curiously, nearly all of the leaders...came from Islamic fundamentalist organizations....Among these radical groups was the American Muslim Alliance (AMA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, both groups that support Hamas...The Palestinian terrorists know that Hillary hears their point of view...Abu Hamed, leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, [said], 'We just hope that she will go until the end and change American policy." Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel. Ed Lasky at TheAmericanThinker.com writes that "Rice was John Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser when he ran for President. One of the major steps Kerry suggested for dealing with the Middle East was to appoint James Baker and Jimmy Carter as negotiators. When furor erupted at the prospect of two of the most ardent foes of Israel being suggested to basically ride "roughshod" over Israel, Kerry backtracked and blamed his staff for the idea. His staff was Susan Rice." Lee Hamilton, as Lasky writes, is a key Obama advisor on Middle Eastern affairs. A former Indiana Representative, Hamilton led the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, which concluded, among other things, that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq should be coordinated with Syria and Iran! And that the U.S. should develop Syrian "goodwill" by pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and leave the West Bank — but not a word about dismantling Hamas or Hezbollah! Hamilton wrote in the NY Times that Hezbollah's "hatred was created by Israel; it wasn't there at the beginning." Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Advisor, has been one of Israel's most consistently hostile critics and one of Hamas's most ardent supporters, as well as a staunch admirer (both in writing and verbally) of Stephen Walt's and John Mearsheimer's virulently anti-Israel book "The Israel Lobby," which, among other things, contends that Jewish pressure, and not shared values, binds America and Israel together. James ("F... the Jews") Baker, among the harshest detractors of Israel, has often engaged in raw anti-Semitic remarks, is known for coddling Middle East dictators (including Syria's Assad), and has been heavily invested (through the Carlyle Group) in the Israel-hating country of Saudi Arabia. In fact, Baker's law firm defended the Saudi Defense Minister who was sued for alleged complicity by the families of the World Trade Center victims. Samantha Power, now on Obama's National Security Council, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and written of her willingness to "alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]...it may more crucially mean sacrificing...billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine." Believe me, the above is the short list. As Glick has written: "In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy makers and opinion shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as qualifying credentials for high position...today in Washington there are powerful circles of political players for whom a person's anti-Israel bona fides are his strongest suit." OBAMA'S COURT JEWS Oh, I can hear the blather as I type: But what about all the Jews who voted for Obama and are in his cabinet and among his advisors? Make no mistake — Obama's Court Jews are identical to those of the past who financed, supported, licked the boots of, and sold out their people in order to gain the personal influence, privileges, wealth, and protection that the "nobles" afforded them. They helped Roman emperors kill Jews. They helped Hitler kill Jews. But after their groveling and traitorous service, they were blamed for economic downturns and used as scapegoats to explain away the failures of the evil regimes and leaders they abetted. Fools and dupes, to a person! Journalist Melanie Phillips writes that "Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus, and he's getting American Jews to do his dirty work for him....none of this, however, should come as the slightest surprise to anyone who paid any attention to Obama's background, associations and friendships before he became President and to the cabal of Israel-bashers, appeasers and Jew-haters he appointed to his administration, with a few useful idiots thrown in for plausible deniability." In an article entitled THE FINAL SOLUTION — What Hitler didn't finish, Obama will, blogger Daniel Greenfield (Sultanknish.blogspot.com) explains: Obama has been clever about putting his Jewish appointees front and center. Like many minorities, some American Jews suffer from self-esteem problems that are soothed when they see a seeming acceptance. Of course what they fail to realize is that exploitation is not acceptance. And that Obama's appointees are creatures of his backers, Nazi collaborators like Soros, who have nothing but contempt for Jews, individually or collectively. But why would people who hate Jews surround themselves with so many of them? As Don Vito Corleone warned his son Michael, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." As much as the enemies of Jews hate them, they also fear them. They can't figure out how a historically besieged people — whose population today is about 14 million, as compared to, say, Muslims, whose population is 1.3 billion — have not only managed to survive the Jew-targeting Inquisition, Crusades, pogroms, concentration camps, and pandemic outbreaks of anti-Semitism, but to flourish and rise to the top echelons of any community they've ever lived in. In short, they want the brains of the Jews and also the ability to blame them when things go wrong. But don't these smart Jews know they're being used? Yes and no. They've studied history, but they think that the passage of time has made them immune from mistakes of the past. Of course they're wrong. Fools and dupes always get fooled and duped. Unfortunately — actually, stupidly — too many Jews, over the ages, have been seduced by the hope-and-change rhetoric of the Left, so yearning are they to be "included" and "accepted" into cultures that have ultimately rejected them. Just who are Obama's Court Jews? Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff and, in my opinion, Chief of Dupes. As writer Judith Apter Klinghoffer reminds us: "By choosing a Jewish chief of staff to do the dirty work, Obama showed himself a 'worthy' successor to LBJ. Arthur Goldberg was LBJ's point man to read the riot act to Israel. It was his Jewish U.N. representative that was charged with berating Israel for daring to retaliate against Palestinian acts of terror in 1966 and to inform Israel that it should not rely on any American assistance against Nasser in May 1967." And now Emanuel is taking the bait, currying favor for his figurative 10-minutes of fame, the better to sell out his Israeli-born father and the land his father heroically fought for in the early years of Israel's existence. David Axelrod, the chief strategist and media advisor for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and now a White House insider, is not front-and-center about his hero's antagonism toward Israel. But as the old chestnut says: Silence is Consent! Robert Malley is another fan of Hamas and Hezbollah. According to Wikipedia, Malley is the son of Simon Malley, an Egyptian-born Jewish journalist, and Barbara Silverstein, a New Yorker who worked for the U.N. delegation of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Both loathed Israel and apparently passed their toxic DNA onto their son. Malley has often called for an end to all aid to Israel. Dennis Ross, Obama's special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, which includes Iran, participated in 12 years of failed Israeli-Palestinian "peace" efforts. In 2001, he suggested that future negotiations ought to be based on "something the parties have put on the table, and not [what] the United States has put on the table." Translated today, that would mean listening to the 22 hostile states that surround Israel and saying "majority rules!" George Soros, the Budapest-born multibillionaire (and Nazi collaborator) has devoted his entire life, as writer Srdja Trifkovic points out, to supporting "increased government spending and tax increases, drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders and immigration, immigrant entitlements, feminism, free abortion-on-demand, affirmative action, and gay rights" and "remains primarily committed to destroying the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith...." He is also devoted to vilifying Israel and funding numerous groups that work unstintingly to bring about its destruction. Again, this is the short list. But the entire list of Obama "advisors" on Middle East affairs is comprised of hard-core Leftists who want nothing more than to see America humiliated and Israel destroyed. As Lasky has said, "This is the company Barack Obama keeps." CONSEQUENCES BE DAMNED Melanie Phillips calls the Obama administration's "malice" toward Israel "incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity": It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn't submit to the Nazis it would stand alone — with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the U.S. will not help protect its security by de-fanging Iran...but in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardizing the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony. Indeed. As DEBKAfile reports:
Amil Taheri points out: "Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran's Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises....Khomeinist propaganda is trying to portray Iran as a rising 'superpower' in the making while the United States is presented as the 'sunset' power. The message is simple: The Americans are going, and we are coming....with pro-American and other democratic groups disheartened by the perceived weakness of the Obama administration, Tehran hopes its allies will win all the elections planned for this year in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories." And writer Tom Gross says that "the threat of a nuclear arsenal in the hands of the only government in the world (Iran) that promotes suicide bombing as a matter of state policy (by its client militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere), and celebrates 'martyrdom of its fellow Muslims' in such attacks, is a threat quite unlike any the world has ever seen. The combination of weapons of mass destruction and jihadist ideology poses a problem of much greater magnitude than that when secular dictatorships and semi-dictatorships, such as Russia, China and North Korea and Pakistan, possess nuclear bombs. In addition to posing an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. Tehran, not Washington would dominate oil in the region." But none of these threats, not only to the Middle East but also to America, are of any import to President Obama. In his single-minded obsession to appease our enemies and get rid of his "Jewish problem," he is willing to sacrifice the safety and security of America, the country he can't stop apologizing for. Or is that he has a Muslim problem, and the Jews and Israel are simply in the way? Contact Chuck Brooks at chetz18@aol.com |
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BIBI: REMIND PRESIDENT OBAMA OF THESE HARD FACTS
Posted by Heather Robinson, May 19, 2009. |
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While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on his way to the White House later today to meet with President Obama, Israel faces a potentially existential threat from Iran, whose leadership has repeatedly stated its intention to destroy the Jewish state.President Obama told Newsweek magazine last week: "I've been very clear that I don't take any options off the table with respect to Iran. I don't take options off the table when it comes to U.S. security, period. What I have said is that we want to offer Iran an opportunity to align itself with international norms and international rules. I think, ultimately, that will be better for the Iranian people." When asked if he expects U.S. ally Israel to refrain from taking military action in the face of existential threat, he said: "No, look, I understand very clearly that Israel considers Iran an existential threat, and given some of the statements that have been made by President Ahmadinejad, you can understand why. So their calculation of costs and benefits are going to be more acute. They're right there in range and I don't think it's my place to determine for the Israelis what their security needs are." To me, the above sounds very reasonable and understanding of Israel's difficult position. While like many security-minded Americans who favor strong alliance with Israel, I have been concerned that President Obama might waver in his commitment to supporting this ally's right to self-defense (and incidentally, front line defense of the free world from Islamist extremism), I see reason to be cautiously optimistic that, as with his positions on U.S. security, President Obama will prove better than his critics' worst fears. In the meantime, let us support him in his efforts to employ diplomacy and sanctions, and hope they work to contain Iran. Israel's supporters do not prefer war. That said, given the likelihood that, in exchange for U.S. support, the Obama administration may press Israel to pursue a peace process that would lead to creation of a Palestinian state in the short term, now is a good time to review what Israel's recent concessions in the name of peace have produced: 1) The Gaza withdrawal: in August, 2005, Israel evacuated Gaza, and instead of moderation, extremism in Gaza spread like a malignancy. Al Qaeda operatives infiltrated Gaza from Egypt, Sudan and Yemen, weapons and cash poured in, and Hamas undertook a years-long campaign of rocket terrorism aimed at civilians in Israel's southern towns. 2) The Lebanon withdrawal: Israel withdrew in May, 2000 from Lebanon, only to see Hezbollah, the terror network that struck the U.S. barracks in 1983, killing 241 Marines, further ensconce itself there as what the Lebanese President Lahoud termed a "legitimate political party." Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers and an Israeli businessman in October 2000, and in 2002 began launching Katyusha missiles into northern Israeli towns, and attacking troops in northern Israel. In 2004, Israel freed over 400 live Arab prisoners in exchange for the businessman and the dead bodies of the soldiers kidnapped in 2000. In July 2006, Hezbollah terrorists infiltrated Israel's northern border, killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two more. Israel launched the second Lebanon War to rescue the soldiers, whose dismembered bodies were eventually returned to Israel in exchange for four live Hezbollah militants, the bodies of 200 more, and convicted PLO child murderer Samir Kuntar. 3) The Oslo Peace Accords: for seven years, Israel returned to the negotiating table, conceding land in the face of continued terrorism. While Israeli leaders prepared their people for peace, Yasir Arafat preached war to his people in Arabic. The process culminated in Arafat's rejection, in 2000, of a Palestinian state that would have consisted of 95 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem. After rejecting the offer, Arafat and the Palestinians resumed of the intifadah, targeting Israelis in suicide bombings. Senator John Kerry recently put it succinctly: "Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, only to face Hezbollah; Israel withdrew from Gaza, only to face Hamas rockets. Israel is not about to let the same thing happen in the West Bank, nor should they." The recent history of U.S. peacemaking efforts in the region is rife with hubris: for decades, U.S. Presidents have flattered themselves they could impose a solution in the region without addressing the core problem: the leadership of Arab countries surrounding Israel poisons its people via propaganda and funds terrorism to keep the essential, destructive dynamic in play. Terror networks, some operating semi-autonomously, find haven in these countries to conduct their attacks. The idea of a Palestinian state is a worthy dream. But unless and until Arab leadership evolves, any Palestinian state created in the near term will almost certainly be a terror state. Let us hope President Obama is realistic enough to grasp this unfortunate reality. Heather Robinson is an independent journalist who specializes in writing about the Middle East, profiling offbeat characters and humanitarians (not always mutually exclusive), and helping readers happily navigate life. |
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THE FRILLY VALENTINE IS NOT FOR FRIENDS
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 19, 2009. |
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This was written by. Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
This aritcle appeared today in the Washington Times
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Benjamin Netanyahu is back in town, and he could make Barack Obama's life easier if he would just go away. The president is trying to concentrate on the frilly Valentine he's taking to the Muslims next month in Cairo, the latest stop on his global blush, bow low and apologize tour. Mr. Netanyahu is an unwelcome reminder of the reality lying in ambush out there, where things go bump not in the night but in midafternoon, and all manner of evil lurks in the hearts of barbarians. Mr. Obama thinks a good shoeshine, a working teleprompter and a pretty speech can transform that ugly reality into something nice that maybe even smells good. Mr. Netanyahu and his countrymen have to deal with an ugly reality that stinks. They understand what Dr. Johnson was talking about with his celebrated observation that "the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully." Survival in the Middle East is a full-time job. The Israeli prime minister, who grew up in America and has been here before as prime minister, arrived in an Obamaworld he couldn't recognize and where he is not particularly welcome. The War on Terror is over, replaced by an "enhanced" unpleasantness in Afghanistan that we're supposed to call an "overseas contingency operation," where terrorists are "improvisational ideologues" and once captured can be politely called "custodial informants." We lost the War on Drugs, and the new drug czar suggests that we not call it a war. "Dialogue with controlled-substance entrepreneurs" would improve the self-esteem of the drug dealers. We don't do deficits any more; they're "inverted surpluses." No one will be killed in Mr. Obama's "augmented" war in Afghanistan; the dead will merely be "reassigned to operations in a command in another realm." Once explained to Mr. Netanyahu, the new enhanced road map to a viable settlement in the Middle East through the peace process (are any cliches missing?) was plain and clear. Concessions are for the Jews to make, as he learned Monday at the White House, and rewards are for the Palestinians. Mr. Obama and his policymakers, not all of whom assign Israeli security a particularly high priority, are determined to impose the Palestinian version of a two-state solution on Israel and freeze expansion of Jewish settlements on territory occupied since the Arabian knights lost the Six-Day War. The Jewish settlers get in the way of the Palestinian gunners firing rockets into villages in northern Israel. Mr. Netanyahu, on the other hand, is more interested in what the West — i.e., Israel and the United States — can do to deter Iran, which is furiously developing nuclear weapons with which to rearrange the topography and demography of Israel. Mr. Obama thinks milk toast and weak tea, which he calls "diplomacy," can make a Christian (so to speak) out of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This in turn will invite normal diplomatic ties between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. Mr. Netanyahu recognizes this as more of Mr. Obama's pie in the sky, which is indigestible when served with milk toast and weak tea. "There is a sense of urgency on our side," Uzi Arad, the prime minister's adviser on national security, told correspondents on the eve of Monday's session at the White House. But the only urgency apparent in Washington is for more talk. Authentic peace in the Middle East, which has never known authentic peace, will continue to be elusive well into the outer eons. President Obama thinks endless negotiations on agreements the Palestinians won't keep will encourage the Arab states to join the "pressure," such as it may be, to persuade Iran to straighten up and fly right. The Israelis see getting tough with Iran as the way to exploit Arab fears of Iran as a rogue power, mistrusted by everyone and emboldened by its nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama may be sincere in his confidence that his soaring oratory can make rough places smooth and hard places plain, even persuade Arabs to like Jews, but talk is cheaper in the Middle East than anywhere else on the planet. In his conversations with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Obama, comfortable in his bubble of mindless worship and wonder, with nothing to lose but his fading reputation as a messiah, is talking to someone with everything to lose. Israel is surrounded by mortal enemies, heavily armed and getting more so. Israel's enemies can continue to lose the wars they start, and live to rearm and make war again. Israel loses once, and it's all over. Like the prospect of the rope, this, too, concentrates the rational mind wonderfully well. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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ABDULLAH OF JORDAN IS A MOOCHER
Posted by Molly, May 19, 2009. |
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Dear Congressman Honda: We are the Secular Christians for Zion and we are counting on you and your colleagues to ensure that our new president is not soiled by "king" Abdullah's rubbish. |
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Adbullah of Jordan is a mooch. How DARE he revise history at israel's expense! Listen to his latest "royal" BS: Abdullah pointed out that today is the anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel, which led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes. "This day, May 15, throughout the world, people commemorate the Nakba, the Catastrophe that began for the Palestinian people 61 years ago," he said. "This history has been a catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but for the entire Middle East — and I would say the entire world. As we join in remembering all that has been lost, as we feel compassion for all who have suffered, let us also commit ourselves to joining the solution as well." __________ Such "chutzpah" from an Islamic who owes his very existence to the generosity of Jews and on whose lands he lives, mooching off the US taxpayer! When the tiny state of Israel was carved out of Jewish Palestine, the father of this Hashemite mooch murdered 10,000 of Arafat's arab followers and the new "king" drove them out of what became the new state of Jordan. Moreover, when Israel was created, the arabs marshaled all their forces and drove over 750,000 JEWS out of their homes and farms that they'd owned for hundreds of years in the arab regions surrounding the new state of Israel and sent them packing to Israel, Canada, Latin America and Europe. How DARE this pompous little man sell this tripe to our president. Mr. Obama, we are NOT buying into these atrocious lies. We know better. Because WE ARE THE SECULAR CHRISTIANS FOR ZION AND WE SUPPORT ISRAEL. We say: Restore Jewish Palestine from the ocean to the sea the way Israel was promised to be before the Brit cheated the Jews out of their heartland. As for these itinerant arabs who swarmed into Israel and its territories: Send them back to where they came from in the surrounding arab regions and if they won't go, then give them the same choice Arafat promised the Israelis: Drive them into the ocean and make the rest of them drink the sea of Galilee! Viva Israel Molly Contact Molly at pelago2000@gmail.com |
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A LETHAL DOUBLE STANDARD
Posted by Barbara Taverna, May 19, 2009. |
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This was written by Melanie Phillips
and it appeared in the Spectator. It is archived at
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Two points arise from the apparent victory by the Sri Lankans against the Tamil Tigers. The first is that this has been achieved by flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that terrorism can never be defeated by military means but only by negotiation, 'peace processes' and compromise. The Sri Lankans tried that some years ago, with the result that the Tigers were enormously strengthened and merely ratcheted up their terrorist attacks. As a result of that experience, the Sri Lankans decided that the only way to defeat the Tigers was to destroy them militarily. Consequently, they have waged a war against them as notable for its ruthlessness as for its strategic and tactical skill. In particular, they ensured that the media was excluded from the theatre of war so that what they were doing was not fully exposed to scrutiny. The lesson to learn from all this would therefore seem to be that terrorist insurgencies can only be defeated by military means — which in turn can only work if such measures are not undermined by the queasy neo-pacifism and defeatism of the west expressed through the surrender monkeys of human rights lawyers, NGOs and the media. In the Times, however, Michael Clarke, Rector of the Royal United Services Institute, warns that it may be premature to arrive at such a conclusion since the refusal of the Sri Lankans to try to win hearts and minds may yet mean that Tamil terrorism returns at a future date. Well, we shall see whether that turns out to be true or not. But what is undeniable is that that war against the Tamil Tigers has exposed the rank hypocrisy and double standards of a western world that demonises and delegitimises Israel, on the basis of a false accusation that it has disproportionately targeted civilians in a theatre of war, while remaining relatively muted in the face of evidence which has emerged — despite the media restrictions — that the suffering of civilians under Sri Lankan bombardment (whether or not the Sri Lankans tried hard enough to minimise their suffering) has vastly exceeded that of the Palestinians. Hospitals have been repeatedly shelled. Thousands of civilians have been trapped and unknown numbers have died. The BBC says more than 70,000 people have been killed in this conflict, while the United Nations says it thinks 265,000 people have been displaced. As even Jonathan Steele writes in today's Guardian: There has to be relief that the worst suffering of the quarter of a million Tamils who were trapped on the island's northern beaches is over. Cowering under government artillery fire, and shot by Tamil Tiger troops if they tried to flee, they have lived for four months in infinitely worse conditions than the people of Gaza during Israel's invasion in December. Palestinians were at least in their own homes, with supplies of food and water, however inadequate. The shelterless masses huddled along the lagoons and sand banks of Sri Lanka's Mullaitivu coastline had nothing except panic, grief and the sight and sound of the dying. The prolonged hell they have been through far outweighs the sudden horror of the tsunami which swept over this same coast four years ago. Sure, there are some protests. But where are the calls by academics or trade unions to boycott Sri Lanka? Where are the denunciations of Sri Lankan 'atrocities' by the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England? Where are the passionate and emotive TV documentaries about the plight of the Tamils, the one-sided grillings of the Sri Lankans on the Today programme, the front page splashes and multi-part newspaper features on the Sri Lankans' supposed breaches of international law, the NGOs' appeals for humanitarian aid for the beseiged Tamils, the attempts by human rights lawyers to prosecute Sri Lanka's military for 'war crimes'? No, all these things are reserved instead for Israel, which has demonstrably gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties as far as humanly possible and yet upon whose imagined crimes against humanity the western intelligentsia — which has barely bestrirred itself over the Tamils — obsessively dwells. Contact Barbara Taverna at bltaverna@yahoo.com |
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ISRAEL TODAY, THE WEST TOMORROW
Posted by Mark Steyn, May 19, 2009. |
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On Holocaust Memorial Day 2008, a group of just under 100 people — Londoners and a few visitors — took a guided tour of the old Jewish East End. They visited, among other sites of interest, the birthplace of my old chum Lionel Bart, the author of Oliver! Three generations of schoolchildren have grown up singing Bart's lyric:
Those few dozen London Jews considered themselves at 'ome. But they weren't. Not any more. The tour was abruptly terminated when the group was pelted with stones, thrown by "youths" — or to be slightly less evasive, in the current euphemism of Fleet Street, "Asian" youths. "If you go any further, you'll die," they shouted, in between the flying rubble. A New Yorker who had just moved to Britain to start a job at the Metropolitan University had her head cut open and had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel, causing her to miss the Holocaust Day "interfaith memorial service" at the East London Central Synagogue. Her friend, Eric Litwack from Canada, was also struck but did not require stitches. But if you hadn't recently landed at Heathrow, it wasn't that big a deal, not these days: Nobody was killed or permanently disfigured. And given the number of Jewish community events that now require security, perhaps Her Majesty's Constabulary was right and these Londoners walking the streets of their own city would have been better advised to do so behind a police escort. _____________ A European Holocaust Memorial Day on which Jews are stoned sounds like a parody of the old joke that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. According to a 2005 poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 percent of Germans "are sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" — which is a cheerfully straightforward way of putting it. Nevertheless, when it comes to "harping on," these days it's the Jews who are mostly on the receiving end. While we're reprising old gags, here's one a reader reminded me of a couple of years ago, during Israel's famously "disproportionate" incursion into Lebanon: One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team. "Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?" "Israel, of course." Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it's the whole loaf. "Israel is unfashionable," a Continental foreign minister said to me a decade back. "But maybe Israel will change, and then fashions will change." Fashions do change. But however Israel changes, this fashion won't. The shift of most (non-American) Western opinion against the Jewish state that began in the 1970s was, as my Continental politician had it, simply a reflection of casting: Israel was no longer the underdog but the overdog, and why would that appeal to a post-war polytechnic Euro Left unburdened by Holocaust guilt? Fair enough. Fashions change. But the new Judenhass is not a fashion, simply a stark reality that will metastasize in the years ahead and leave Israel isolated in the international "community" in ways that will make the first decade of this century seem like the good old days. A few months after the curtailed Holocaust Day tour, I found myself in that particular corner of Tower Hamlets for the first time in years. Specifically, on Cable Street — the scene of a famous battle in 1936, when Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, in a crude exercise of political muscle, determined to march through the heart of Jewish East London. They were turned back by a mob of local Jews, Irish Catholic dockers, and Communist agitators, all standing under the Spanish Civil War slogan: "No Pasaran." They shall not pass. From "No Pasaran" to "If you go any further, you'll die" is a story not primarily of anti-Semitism but of unprecedented demographic transformation. Beyond the fashionable "anti-Zionism" of the Euro Left is a starker reality: The demographic energy not just in Lionel Bart's East End but in almost every Western European country is "Asian." Which is to say, Muslim. A recent government statistical survey reported that the United Kingdom's Muslim population is increasing ten times faster than the general population. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and many other Continental cities from Scandinavia to the Côte d'Azur will reach majority Muslim status in the next few years. Brussels has a Socialist mayor, which isn't that surprising, but he presides over a caucus a majority of whose members are Muslim, which might yet surprise those who think we're dealing with some slow, gradual, way-off-in-the-future process here. But so goes Christendom at the dawn of the third millennium: the ruling party of the capital city of the European Union is mostly Muslim. There are generally two responses to this trend: The first is that it's like a cast change in Cats or, perhaps more precisely, David Merrick's all-black production of Hello, Dolly! Carol Channing and her pasty prancing waiters are replaced by Pearl Bailey and her ebony chorus, but otherwise the show is unchanged. Same set, same words, same arrangements: France will still be France, Germany Germany, Belgium Belgium. The second response is that the Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction — from British banks' abolition of children's "piggy banks" to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Fifty-nine percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — i.e., the "moderate" Arab world — 79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven't re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen. To be sure, there are occasional arcane points of dispute: one recalls, in the wake of the July 7 bombings, the then London Mayor Ken Livingstone's somewhat tortured attempts to explain why blowing up buses in Tel Aviv is entirely legitimate whereas blowing up buses in Bloomsbury is not. Yet these are minimal bumps on a smooth glide path: The more Europe's Muslim population grows, the more restive and disassimilated it becomes, the more enthusiastically the establishment embraces "anti-Zionism," as if the sinister Jewess is the last virgin left to toss in the volcano — which, given the 13-year old "chavs" and "slappers" face down in pools of their own vomit in most British shopping centers of a Friday afternoon, may indeed be the case. For today's Jews, unlike on Cable Street in 1936, there are no Catholic dockworkers or Communist agitators to stand shoulder to shoulder. In post-Christian Europe, there aren't a lot of the former (practicing Catholics or practicing dockers), and as for the intellectual Left, it's more enthusiastic in its support of Hamas than many Gazans. To which there are many Israelis who would brusquely reply: So what? Pity the poor Jew who has ever relied on European "friends." Yet there is a difference of scale between the well-established faculty-lounge disdain for "Israeli apartheid" and a mass psychosis so universal it's part of the air you breathe. For a glimpse of the future, consider the (for the moment) bizarre circumstances of the recent Davis Cup First Round matches in Sweden. They had been scheduled long ago to be played in the Baltiska Hallen stadium in Malmo. Who knew which team the Swedes would draw? Could have been Chile, could have been Serbia. Alas, it was Israel. Malmo is Sweden's most Muslim city, and citing security concerns, the local council ordered the three days of tennis to be played behind closed doors. Imagine being Amir Hadad and Andy Ram, the Israeli doubles players, or Simon Aspelin and Robert Lindstedt, the Swedes. This was supposed to be their big day. But the vast stadium is empty, except for a few sports reporters and team officials. And just outside the perimeter up to 10,000 demonstrators are chanting, "Stop the match!" and maybe, a little deeper into the throng, they're shouting, "We want to kill all Jews worldwide" (as demonstrators in Copenhagen, just across the water, declared just a few weeks earlier). Did Aspelin and Lindstedt wonder why they couldn't have drawn some less controversial team, like Zimbabwe or Sudan? By all accounts, it was a fine match, thrilling and graceful, with good sportsmanship on both sides. Surely, such splendid tennis could have won over the mob, and newspapers would have reported that by the end of the match the Israeli players had the crowd with them all the way. But they shook 'em off at Helsingborg. Do you remember the "road map" summit held in Jordan just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq? It seemed a big deal at the time: The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. president, all the A-list dictators of the Arab League. Inside the swank resort, it was all very collegial, smiles and handshakes. Outside, flags fluttered — Jordan's, America's, Saudi Arabia's, Egypt's, Palestine's. But not Israel's. King Abdullah of Jordan had concluded it would be too provocative to advertise the Zionist Entity's presence on Jordanian soil even at a summit supposedly boasting they were all on the same page. Malmo's tennis match observed the same conventions: I'm sure the Swedish tennis wallahs were very gracious hosts behind the walls of the stockade, and the unmarked car to the airport was top of the line. How smoothly the furtive maneuvers of the Middle East transfer to the wider world. _____________ When Western governments are as reluctant as King Abdullah to fly the Star of David, those among the citizenry who choose to do so have a hard time. In Britain in January, while "pro-Palestinian" demonstrators were permitted to dress up as hook-nosed Jews drinking the blood of Arab babies, the police ordered counter-protesters to put away their Israeli flags. In Alberta, in the heart of Calgary's Jewish neighborhood, the flag of Hizballah (supposedly a proscribed terrorist organization) was proudly waved by demonstrators, but one solitary Israeli flag was deemed a threat to the Queen's peace and officers told the brave fellow holding it to put it away or be arrested for "inciting public disorder." In Germany, a student in Duisburg put the Star of David in the window of an upstairs apartment on the day of a march by the Islamist group Milli Görüs, only to have the cops smash his door down and remove the flag. He's now trying to get the police to pay for a new door. Ah, those Jews. It's always about money, isn't it? Peter, the student in Duisberg, says he likes to display the Israeli flag because anti-Semitism in Europe is worse than at any other time since the Second World War. Which is true. But, if you look at it from the authorities' point of view, it's not about Jew-hatred; it's a simple numbers game. If a statistically insignificant Jewish population gets upset, big deal. If the far larger Muslim population — and, in some French cities, the youth population (i.e., the demographic that riots) is already pushing 50 percent — you have a serious public-order threat on your hands. We're beyond the anti-Semitic and into the ad hoc utilitarian: The King Abdullah approach will seem like the sensible way to avoid trouble. To modify the UN joke: Whom won't we play? Israel, of course. Not in public. One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, a group wearing "BOYCOTT ISRAEL" T-shirts entered a French branch of Carrefour, the world's largest supermarket chain, and announced themselves. They then systematically advanced down every aisle examining every product, seizing all the items made in Israel and piling them into carts to take away and destroy. Judging from the video they made, the protesters were mostly Muslim immigrants and a few French leftists. But more relevant was the passivity of everyone else in the store, both staff and shoppers, all of whom stood idly by as private property was ransacked and smashed, and many of whom when invited to comment expressed support for the destruction. "South Africa started to shake once all countries started to boycott their products," one elderly lady customer said. "So what you're doing, I find it good." Others may find Germany in the '30s the more instructive comparison. "It isn't silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities," the Canadian public intellectual George Jonas recently wrote. "Don't count heads; count decibels. All entities — the United States, the Western world, the Arab street — have prevailing moods, and it's prevailing moods that define aggregates at any given time." Last December, in a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing power and wealth, Pakistani terrorists nevertheless found time to divert one-fifth of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building. If this was a territorial dispute over Kashmir, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Because Pakistani Islam has been in effect Arabized. Demographically, in Europe and elsewhere, Islam has the numbers. But ideologically, radical Islam has the decibels — in Turkey, in the Balkans, in Western Europe. And the prevailing mood in much of the world makes Israel an easy sacrifice. Long before Muslims are a statistical majority, there will be three permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, France, Russia — for whom the accommodation of Islam is a domestic political imperative. _____________ On the heels of his call for the incorporation of Sharia within British law, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interview to the Muslim News praising Islam for making "a very significant contribution to getting a debate about religion into public life." Well, that's one way of putting it. The urge to look on the bright side of its own remorseless cultural retreat will intensify: Once Europeans have accepted a not entirely voluntary biculturalism, they will see no reason why Israel should not do the same, and they will embrace a one-state, one-man, one-vote solution for the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Muslim world has spent decades peddling the notion that the reason a vast oil-rich region stretching thousands of miles is politically deformed and mired in grim psychoses is all because of a tiny strip of turf barely wider than my New Hampshire township. It will make an ever more convenient scapegoat for the problems of a far vaster territory from the mountains of Morne to the Urals. There was a fair bit of this in the days after 9/11. As Richard Ingrams wrote on the following weekend in the London Observer: "Who will dare to damn Israel?" Well, take a number and get in line. The dust had barely settled on the London Tube bombings before a reader named Derrick Green sent me a congratulatory e-mail: "I bet you Jewish supremacists think it is Christmas come early, don't you? Incredibly, you are now going to get your own way even more than you did before, and the British people are going to be dragged into more wars for Israel." So it will go. British, European, and even American troops will withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bomb will go off in Madrid or Hamburg or Manchester, and there will be nothing left to blame except Israeli "disproportion." For the remnants of European Jewry, the already discernible migration of French Jews to Quebec, Florida, and elsewhere will accelerate. There are about 150,000 Jews in London today — it's the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category. By 2025, there will be Jews in Israel, and Jews in America, but not in many other places. Even as the legitimacy of a Jewish state is rejected, the Jewish diaspora — the Jewish presence in the wider world — will shrivel. And then, to modify Richard Ingrams, who will dare not to damn Israel? There'll still be a Holocaust Memorial Day, mainly for the pleasures it affords to chastise the new Nazis. As Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in 2005: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm — tattoo number A-25466 — I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah." Jenin? You can see why they'll keep Holocaust Day on the calendar: In an age when politicians are indifferent or downright hostile to Israel's "right to exist," it's useful to be able to say, "But some of my best photo-ops are Jewish." The joke about Mandatory Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land. But isn't that Europe, too? And perhaps Russia and maybe Canada, a little ways down the line? Two cultures jostling within the same piece of real estate. Not long ago, I found myself watching the video of another "pro-Palestinian" protest in central London with the Metropolitan Police retreating up St. James's Street to Piccadilly in the face of a mob hurling traffic cones and jeering, "Run, run, you cowards!" and "Allahu akbar!" You would think the deluded multi-culti progressives would understand: In the end, this isn't about Gaza, this isn't about the Middle East; it's about them. It may be some consolation to an ever-lonelier Israel that, in one of history's bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews. Mark Steyn is the author of America Alone and a columnist for National Review. His piece on snark ran in our February issue. This is from Commentary Magazine
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STATE DEPARTMENT CONTINUES ISLAMIST OUTREACH
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 19, 2009. |
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With the United States battling Islamist extremists, making America's case to Muslims around the world has never been more of a priority for policymakers. Unfortunately, the State Department continues to take a counterproductive approach: serving as a veritable infomercial promoting Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) while giving the back of the hand to the very anti-jihadist Muslims that Washington should be cultivating. The latest example is a State Department booklet issued in March titled "Being Muslim in America." It is part of an outreach effort that began under President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and is moving forward under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The goal behind publication of the 64-page booklet is laudable: to arm consular officers and diplomats with information they can take to Muslims around the world to rebut slanders about U.S. "persecution" of Muslims. The booklet deluges readers with color pictures, statistical tables and individual profiles in an effort to show the world that American Muslims are a success story, noting that they have become entrepreneurs, professional athletes, entertainers, doctors, soldiers, firefighters, politicians, fashion designers, and pianists. And as we'll show in more detail below, many slanders against the United States come from the same groups that are portrayed favorably in the State Department booklet.The front cover has a picture of two Muslim girls playing basketball at a school near Detroit: One is wearing traditional dress, the other more modern dress. It's no ordinary basketball game, because there's a deeper sociopolitical message that Foggy Bottom wants to send to the world: The girls "compete fiercely on the basketball court in a sport that blends individual skills and team effort. They — along with the other men, women and children in the publication — demonstrate every day what it is like to be Muslim in America." The booklet is replete with dozens of pictures of Muslims playing basketball, praying; talking about "diversity" at a mosque; attending interfaith gatherings "to celebrate diversity and tolerance," and "brainstorm[ing] ways to solve problems in their community." There is even a color-coded state-by-state map showing "Mosque Distribution in the United States." The purpose of publishing "Being Muslim in America" is "to disabuse people of wildly false myths of the United States — that 'Muslims are repressed, marginalized, fill in the blanks,' " according to Michael Friedman, division chief of print publications with the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs, which is overseeing distribution of the publication. Although State doesn't have a specific target number of copies that it is looking to sell or give away, Friedman said a similar 2002 State Department report titled "Muslim Life in America" had 400,000 print copies distributed worldwide and was translated into 28 languages. "It is conceivable that this one could reach that level," he told IPT News. In addition, both "Muslim Life in America" and "Being Muslim in America" are featured on State Department web sites, here and here. Asked whether similar booklets had been produced for other faiths, Friedman said no. With limited funding available, decision was made to produce a publication on American Muslims because "the struggle against Islamic terrorism is a struggle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world," he said. Faulty Examples Showcased Unfortunately, the substance of the booklet is so flawed that it could undermine the struggle against this form of radicalism. It perpetuates the mythology that American Muslims are united in the belief that law enforcement and the public are willing to flout innocent Muslims' civil rights post-September 11, describing American Muslim reactions to the attacks as follows: "A new, truly American Islam is emerging, shaped by American freedoms, but also by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks — planned and executed by non-Americans — [which] raised suspicions among other Americans whose immediate responses, racial profiling among them, triggered in return a measure of Muslim-American alienation." Then: "Sadly, suspicions of this kind are not uncommon — in the United States or in other nations — during wartime or when outside attack is feared. But 2008 is not 2002, when fears and suspicions were at their height. Context is also important: Every significant immigrant group has in the United States faced, and overcame, a degree of discrimination and resentment." This is an extremely tendentious, even intellectually dishonest, description of September 11 and its aftermath. From reading it, one would have no idea that there have been numerous convictions and guilty pleas on terrorism-related charges since September 11 that involved Muslims living in the United States, including terrorist plots to attack the military base at Ft. Dix, N.J., to create a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon and to attack U.S. military and Jewish targets in California. Also omitted from the booklet is the fact that organizations like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) were listed by the government as unindicted co-conspirators in the federal government's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) — in which the Justice Department won convictions of five former HLF officials for providing money to the terrorist organization Hamas. But from reading this passage in "Being Muslim in America," one would get the impression that public concern about Islamist terror has no basis in reality and is merely the result of backward Americans' "discrimination and resentment." One picture on page 15 of the booklet shows people marching under a CAIR banner and has a caption reading: "Muslims march to support volunteerism." The identical picture appeared at the top of CAIR's website when IPT News accessed it May 15. In reality, CAIR was created as a front for Hamas and it has defended radical Islamists since 1994. See the IPT dossier on CAIR here. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad typifies this see-no-evil attitude toward jihadist terror. He has repeatedly defended the HLF. At a May 2003 forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, an audience member commented that the Justice Department has released reams of information showing that the HLF and another charity whose assets were frozen "have direct connections and in fact their leadership was the leadership of al Qaeda and Hamas." Awad replied: "I am sure if we...put under the microscope, every major civic or political organization in this country, including the Red Cross, you will see that some dollars went here and there in some country, but you don't shut down the entire operation of the Red Cross." CAIR officials dismissed the verdict of 12 jurors in HLF's Hamas-financing trial as "based more on fear-mongering than on the facts" and predicted it would be overturned on appeal. Awad has steadfastly defended Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) supporter Sami Al-Arian, despite evidence that Al-Arian served on the PIJ governing board. Al-Arian is fighting a criminal contempt charge, triggered by his refusal to testify before a federal grand jury investigating terror financing in Virginia despite a grant of immunity. He claims his 2006 plea agreement to conspiring to provide goods and services to the PIJ absolved him of any future testimony, be it voluntary or compelled by subpoena. The plea agreement itself contains no such language. U.S. District Judge James S. Moody blasted Al-Arian as a "master manipulator" at his sentencing in the PIJ support case, saying Al-Arian lied to the public about his PIJ support. Yet, during an August 2008 forum on the contempt case, Awad argued it was motivated by bigotry against Muslims: "And I believe he's being punished for this, belonging to a minority — Palestinian, Arab, Muslim in America is not like the best thing to be in America today. So he's being the victim of this malicious misunderstanding in this midst of increased Islamophobia in America." Ignoring Moderate Muslim Viewpoints Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix, Arizona doctor who heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, likened the booklet's depiction of Muslim life in the United States to Cold War-era propaganda falsely portraying Communist dictatorships as "worker's paradises" in which everyone was working toward a common goal and factionalism didn't exist. American Muslims are divided between Islamists seeking to establish a caliphate and non-Islamists who want to live under the American Constitution on equal terms with non-Muslims, Jasser said. And similar divisions exist in the Middle East between non-Islamists and Islamists. "In some ways, it's insulting to Muslims in the Middle East — if we need to portray Muslims as being 'normal' in America," Jasser told IPT News. "It's almost as if we have something to be sorry for in America." Jasser said he would prefer that the State Department not be in the business of distributing a booklet about Islam in this country. "But if they decide to get into it, they need to talk about the ideological differences" among Muslims in the United States, he said. If State fails to do this, Muslims reading this booklet around the world "will wonder why State won't talk about the real schisms in Islam — schisms they see in their own lives." No less disturbing is the fact that time and again, "Being Muslim in America" confers undeserved legitimacy on radical Islamist groups and individuals, while whitewashing radical groups. For example, Muslims pictured under a CAIR banner are described as marching "to support volunteerism." On the same page, Salam Al-Marayati of MPAC is cited as an authority on "the American Muslim identity." NYPD Muslim Chaplain Khalid Latif, who helped quash a debate on a college campus over the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons, is also the subject of a glowing profile. Ingrid Mattson's election as ISNA president in 2006 is included as part of a "Timeline of Key Events" in American Muslim history. No mention is made, however, of questionable statements and activities of Islamist groups and persons receiving favorable treatment in the booklet. CAIR officials' past statements in support of Hamas and CAIR's connections with the Muslim Brotherhood are ignored. Readers are left in the dark about Al-Marayati's statement during a September 11, 2001 appearance on a Loa Angeles radio program, where he suggested that Israel might have been behind the attacks on America earlier in the day: "If we're going to look at suspects, we should look to groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the list because I think this diverts attention from what's happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies." In March 2003 MPAC issued a counterterrorism policy paper advocating the removal of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the U.S. government list of designated terrorist organizations. In a January 19, 2009 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Al-Marayati attacked Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca for supporting Israel's military operation against Hamas' terror infrastructure in Gaza. As American public officials endorse Israel's "disproportionate military attacks against the Palestinians — put alongside images of carnage and destruction in Gaza," Al-Marayati wrote, they create "the best possible propaganda for fueling anti-Americanism in the Muslim world." The MPAC boss whitewashed the fact that Hamas (along with its backers in Tehran and Damascus) bears full moral responsibility for the carnage — first by firing rockets into Israel, second by locating its fighters and weapons inside densely populated civilian areas, effectively turning Palestinian noncombatants into human shields. And nothing was said about Latif's threatening March 2006 letter to NYU President Johan Sexton in which he suggested there would be trouble if the controversial Danish Mohammed cartoons were displayed. ISNA President Mattson's 2007 remarks rationalizing violent extremism as possibly "the only rational choice" to effect change in repressive states also didn't make the cut. The booklet's bibliography is similarly slanted with books like John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed's "Who Speaks For Islam?," as well as "Religion and Immigration: Christian, Jewish and Muslim Experiences in the United States," edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jan I. Smith and John Esposito; and "Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11" by Geneive Abdo, who spoke at a March 2007 CAIR fundraiser in Florida. Esposito can fairly be described as an apologist for radical Islamists, having spoken at CAIR fundraisers, testified as a defense expert in the HLF trial and championed Al-Arian (see page 13 of the link) as "an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice." Non-Islamist Muslim organizations like Jasser's AIFD and Muslims Against Sharia were ignored in the State Department booklet, while Islamist groups and individuals, including organizations like CAIR, MPAC and ISNA, got what amounted to an infomercial. The State Department's Friedman dismissed concerns about the pro-Islamist bias of the material. "The U.S. government is not endorsing any of these people or organizations," he told IPT News. "Our audience is more likely to be an Indonesian schoolchild who is not likely to be Googling the names of the organizations" like CAIR, MPAC or ISNA, Friedman said. The government's intent in publishing the booklet is to help a "young foreign service officer who is going into a room in Indonesia or Nigeria, and those kids are looking at him and saying: 'Don't they hate Muslims in America?' " Given financial constraints facing the State Department, it is essential to get the most "bang for the buck," Friedman added, and the best way to ensure that occurred was to produce a publication emphasizing that Muslims in America participate in "all walks of life" rather than a conversation "at a higher intellectual level" explaining the ideological war within Islam. "Being Muslim in America" is "essentially a picture book intended on disabusing people of the horrible myths of what goes on here. To get into [philosophical debates about the direction of Islam] in the context of a lighter essay detracts from the particular, narrow context of this publication," he said. Non-Islamist Muslims who have read the document strongly disagree. Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia, said the State Department booklet "absolutely" legitimates Muslim Brotherhood-type organizations and undermines non-Islamists like him. "It boggles my mind how people who are supposed to protect us (the government) are advancing our enemies' agenda," he told IPT News. According to AIFD's Jasser, by quoting Islamists like Mattson, the State Department is "reinforcing continued denial from Muslims that we have any role to play in a counter-jihad within Islam." When the State Department gives a platform to members of organizations like CAIR and ISNA (while ignoring the other side), "it sets things back, telling Muslims they don't have to reform their own house," Jasser said. "You tell Muslims these [Islamists] are the people we need to deal with." And "Being Muslim in America" is not the only example of the messages of weakness that the State Department sends to the Muslim world. Elsewhere at www.america.gov, the State Department's Middle East & North Africa section of the site is replete with items like the transcript of a press conference in which Obama and Jordanian King Abdullah suggest that Israel and the Palestinians are equally responsible for the failure to achieve peace; a speech in which Vice President Biden urges Israel to end settlements and back a "two-state solution;" and a January 9, 2009 statement warning Israel of the consequences of misusing U.S-supplied weapons. Rather than telling the truth about the central role of Islamist radicalism in sabotaging peace, the State Department seems to waiver between moral equivalence and blaming Israel. In short, the State Department continues to send foolish — even dangerous — messages to both friends and enemies of freedom in the Muslim world. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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ISRAEL THE BEAUTIFUL: SALT FORMATIONS ON THE SHORELINE OF THE DEAD SEA
Posted by Yehoshua Halevi, May 18, 2009. |
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This is one of Yehoshua Halevi's Golden Light Images. Yehoshua Halevi writes: "HOW I GOT THE SHOT: The Dead Sea is without a doubt one of the strangest places on Earth. Vast and lifeless, its mineral-rich waters offer, paradoxically, life-giving therapy to a variety of human ailments. From a distance, one might imagine he is looking at the Arctic Sea, as iceberg-like salt domes dot the shoreline. And much like ice, they crunch underfoot and change form with time and the action of the water. Walking along the shore one early morning last week, I let my camera hang from my shoulder as I admired the aquamarine colors of the water and an occasional bizarre, salt-encrusted chair or other man-made object, and luxuriated in the cleansing silence. This particular morning, a slight breeze wafted across the water, disturbing the absolute stillness which often creates beautiful symmetry between the odd salt formations and their perfect reflections. As a result, I chose a shot which plays on the relationship between the sky and land. The two sections of cloud are roughly mirrored by the pool and the salt accumulation that make up the photo's foreground. A seascape is entirely flat, so it's difficult to gain an interesting perspective without elevation. I did manage to position my tripod on a salt dome, raising the camera over my head, first calculating the exposure and then composing and focusing without looking through the viewfinder. A few minor corrections and I had the shot I wanted. I hadn't been to the Dead Sea in quite some time and this visit restored my appreciation for this desert jewel and inspired me to return again to the lowest place on earth to record some of the highest natural beauty Israel has to offer.
Contact Yehoshua Halevi by email at smile@goldenlightimages.com
and visit his website:
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IRANIAN HOLOCAUST DENIAL; SHOULD US MAKE DEMANDS ON ISRAEL?; POPE VISITS PA; HUDSON INSTITUTE; POLL RESULLTS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 18, 2009. |
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IRANIAN HOLOCAUST DENIAL The Iran news agency made the following points reported in (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/21), each point followed by my rebuttal. 1. The Holocaust was the chief pretext for Theodore Herzl to justify Zionism. Mr. Herzl died in 1904, decades before the Nazis started the Holocaust. He could not have made a later event the basis for his claim. Iran's account ignores the reasons he and the religious Zionists gave. 2. Palestine had been in possession of the Arabs for more than 4,000 years after the reign of King David King David lived about 962 BCE. When he consolidated the Jewish kingdom, Judea, Arabs were not there. That is less than 3,000 years ago, not more than 4,000. In addition, the Arabs started their conquests less than 1,400 years ago. That is still less than 4,000 years. Furthermore, Turks replaced Arabs as rulers of Judea within a couple of hundred years. Therefore, the Arabs ruled Palestine for only a couple of hundred years. 3. The Zionists fabricated extensive research to verify the non-existent Holocaust. The myth enabled Jews to get billions of dollars in reparations and restitution from Germany. How could outside propaganda convince contemporary Germans that they had murdered millions, if they hadn't? They would not pay for nothing. Actually, the SS left detailed records of their extermination of Jews. Most of the records were retrieved right after the war, leaving no time for a gigantic fabrication industry to make up records. Upon liberating some of the death camps, the US Army witnessed some of the results. (4) Israel shows official visitors its Holocaust memorial just for sympathy, and some European countries ban Holocaust denial so the fraud won't be exposed. Israel wants the martyred Jewish millions not to have died in vain and un-mourned, lest countries such as Iran, which threaten to commit a holocaust, do so, because the world hasn't learned from the first Holocaust or doesn't care. I don't approve of banning Holocaust denial. I do understand the ban. After WWII, people wondered how to prevent a Nazi movement from arising again. Some thought the answer is to ban Nazi movements and propaganda and Holocaust denial. It's a reasonable argument. (5) Zionism displaced millions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland. The Arab population of what became Israel was estimated by the British rulers as 561,000. About 140,000 did not flee. That leaves 421,000 displaced (Battleground by Samuel Katz, 1982, pub. by Steimatzky Shapolsky.) The refugees weren't displaced by Zionism. They and their foreign Arab allies started a war to displace the Zionists in 1947, lost it, and fled. Nor should Israel be considered the homeland of most of them. Most of their families had been recent immigrants from surrounding Arab countries. Let's turn Iran's claim on its head. Radical Islam denies the Holocaust in order to deny sympathy for its Jewish victims, so as to facilitate dismembering their state. IRANIAN HOLOCAUST DENIAL The Iran news agency made the following points reported in (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/21), each point followed by my rebuttal. 1. The Holocaust was the chief pretext for Theodore Herzl to justify Zionism. Mr. Herzl died in 1904, decades before the Nazis started the Holocaust. He could not have made a later event the basis for his claim. Iran's account ignores the reasons he and the religious Zionists gave. 2. Palestine had been in possession of the Arabs for more than 4,000 years after the reign of King David King David lived about 962 BCE. When he consolidated the Jewish kingdom, Judea, Arabs were not there. That is less than 3,000 years ago, not more than 4,000. In addition, the Arabs started their conquests less than 1,400 years ago. That is still less than 4,000 years. Furthermore, Turks replaced Arabs as rulers of Judea within a couple of hundred years. Therefore, the Arabs ruled Palestine for only a couple of hundred years. 3. The Zionists fabricated extensive research to verify the non-existent Holocaust. The myth enabled Jews to get billions of dollars in reparations and restitution from Germany. How could outside propaganda convince contemporary Germans that they had murdered millions, if they hadn't? They would not pay for nothing. Actually, the SS left detailed records of their extermination of Jews. Most of the records were retrieved right after the war, leaving no time for a gigantic fabrication industry to make up records. Upon liberating some of the death camps, the US Army witnessed some of the results. (4) Israel shows official visitors its Holocaust memorial just for sympathy, and some European countries ban Holocaust denial so the fraud won't be exposed. Israel wants the martyred Jewish millions not to have died in vain and un-mourned, lest countries such as Iran, which threaten to commit a holocaust, do so, because the world hasn't learned from the first Holocaust or doesn't care. I don't approve of banning Holocaust denial. I do understand the ban. After WWII, people wondered how to prevent a Nazi movement from arising again. Some thought the answer is to ban Nazi movements and propaganda and Holocaust denial. It's a reasonable argument. (5) Zionism displaced millions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland. The Arab population of what became Israel was estimated by the British rulers as 561,000. About 140,000 did not flee. That leaves 421,000 displaced (Battleground by Samuel Katz, 1982, pub. by Steimatzky Shapolsky.) The refugees weren't displaced by Zionism. They and their foreign Arab allies started a war to displace the Zionists in 1947, lost it, and fled. Nor should Israel be considered the homeland of most of them. Most of their families had been recent immigrants from surrounding Arab countries. Let's turn Iran's claim on its head. Radical Islam denies the Holocaust in order to deny sympathy for its Jewish victims, so as to facilitate dismembering their state. SHOULD U.S. MAKE DEMANDS ON ISRAEL? The NY Times' May 12 editorial urged the US to press Israel for territorial and security concessions to the Palestinian Authority. It did not urge the US to press the Palestinian Authority to cease its advocacy of bigotry and of conquering Israel and to crack down on terrorism. On May 14, four letters to the editor commented, two yea and two nay. None, however, noted the editorial's one-sidedness nor that such one-sidedness is typical of that newspaper. The basic argument for US pressure upon Israel is that the governments both of the US and of Israel promote their own national interest. The writers failed to identify the US interest. I think they assume that the interest is peace, and Israeli concessions would promote peace, because the Arabs say they would. Assumption and argument do not describe the real world. Actually, the Arab Muslim code considers it honorable to deceive infidels, the better to dominate them. In fulfilling that code, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hizbullah, and even Arab states, broke their peace agreements with Israel. Just because they say certain concessions would bring peace does not mean they would. In fact, those concessions would bring war. Why? Because the Arab Muslims have not reformed their religious imperialist code of deceit and of the imperative to conquer infidels. The concessions that they demand — detaching Old Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, the core and the soul of Zionism, removing Israel's secure borders, getting control over much of Israel's water supply, and flooding Israel with hostile Arabs — would make that conquest easy. Such conquest would remove from the US a competent allied army of hundreds of thousands, and would enable Radical Islam to consolidate its hold over the Mideast, uniting it against the US. That is not in the American interest! Solidarity with Israel is in the American interest. Then there might be peace. Why is the US pursuing that scenario? Because the State Dept. does not act that much in the American interest. How so? (1) It has a traditional anti-Zionist bias (and our President is egotistical about his ability to persuade fanatics to mellow). The State Dept. puts its bias before the American interest. (2) The US government would have to know what that interest is. Our State Dept. keeps blundering and our CIA spies like a blind man. Rulers of Israel may have anti-Zionist ideologies, too. Corrupt ones may feel obliged to assist the Attorney-General's anti-Zionist ideology. Some Prime Ministers succumb under pressure to US demands. Can't count on their acting in behalf of their national interest. Politicians can be too clever for their own good. For an example of how the Obama has pressed the fabled Israel lobby
into promoting what he wants, see:
POPE'S VISIT TO PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY Pope Benedict XVI identified with "all the homeless Palestinians who long to be able to return to their birthplace, or live permanently in a homeland of their own." "...after decades of suffering, they had a right to a sovereign homeland 'in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders.'" The Pope "sought to express sympathy with victims on both sides of the intractable conflict." He urged youths to "have the courage to resist any temptation you may feel to resort to acts of violence or terrorism." The NY Times report referred to Israel's security barrier as something that the Arabs loathe "but which Israel says is key to its security..." Several Palestinian Authority officials referred to the war for Israeli independence as a "catastrophe" for them. Some Israeli officials considered the Pope's remarks one-sided. The Pope's visit to the Holy Land led to questions about his wartime years in the Hitler Youth and German Army. The article ended by observing that the proportion of Christians in the Holy Land, where their faith originated, has declined sharply in recent years, from about 20% to 2%, and in the Mideast as a whole, to about 5% (Rachel Donadia & Sharon Otterman, 5/14, A12). I think that criticism of the Pope for his wartime membership is unfair and simplistic. Forced membership in a totalitarian state does not indicate concord with it. There is no record of wrongful acts or leadership by him in those roles. By contrast, a former Secretary-General of the UN, Kurt Waldheim, had been an officer in the German Army, helping to direct extermination of Jews in the Balkans. He was a war criminal. That was fair to object to. It is not my place to put anything into this column about what the Vicar of Christ and the Holy Father to a billion Catholics hands down about religion. On the other hand, when he speaks as ruler of a country or on political matters, and proposes policies that I foresee leading to the slaughter of millions, I find him misled. Consider his sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs he visited as victims of war, wanting to return to their "birthplace" from outside a sovereign homeland. This is 60 years after that war. For the great majority of the people addressed, Israel is not their place of birth! As for the others, it was not the homeland of many. Most were of recent immigrant stock. They had no notion of homeland, just of village and religion, later feeling they were southern Syrians, but only recently taking up a nationalist position for propaganda. They don't want to get into Israel for peace, but for conquest. Nor would that conquest bring peace over the bodies of dead Jews. The Radical Muslim leaders want to further the international jihad taking place, including the conquest of Europe, in which the Vatican sits like a ripe plum. Somebody should inform the Pope that there is a sovereign Arab state comprising most of Palestine, called Jordan. The Arabs whom the Pope treated as victims, really were among the victimizers. They started a civil war in 1947, instead of a new state. The stated goal was to murder the Jews. Not having a state is their own fault! They soon were supported by invading Arab armies. Most of the Arabs in the new state of Israel fled at the command of those armies. The command was, get out of our way, then return in a couple of weeks and loot to your heart's content. Their attempted genocide fell short. They killed only 60,000 Jews. Why does the Pope sympathize with people who attempted genocide? Notice the cute, seemingly neutral way that the reporters describe the security barrier. They write that the Arabs loath it but Israel says it is needed for security. Is it needed for security? If the Arabs left, it would not be needed. However, where erected, terrorism fell greatly. The utility of the fence was demonstrated, not a matter of opinion. The purpose of the fence, however, is mixed, because the government uses it to fence out a number of Jews, in anticipation of giving up territory. The Times gave the same figures about the declining proportion of Christians, without proper explanation. The paper does not make it clear from what era it traces the decline. Actually, before the Muslim conquest, the proportion of Christians in the Mideastern provinces of Rome was much higher. The Muslims have been squeezing the Christians out of the region for centuries. The Muslim bigotry, murder, rape, robbery, forced conversion, and lesser rights should be a major human rights issue. On that, the Pope failed to speak out. For more on the Pope's visit:
INTRODUCING THE HUDSON INSTITUTE While Geneva hosted the predictable Durban II conference, the Hudson Institute in New York hosted an unconventional panel on April 23, comprising an eminent group of Muslim scholars from Egypt, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. All disparaged the Durban II Conference for ignoring "...one of the leading sources of intolerance in the world today — namely, bigotry and xenophobia in the name of religion itself and Islam in particular." [Caution: they are saying this bigotry is in the name of Islam, they are not saying it is Islamic.] "The conference reaffirms the perception that Islam has been hijacked by a dominant minority of thugs, extremists and anti-Semites who claim that they are speaking on behalf of a majority of Muslims. 'Ahmadinejad and his likes should be the last to talk about racism, human rights and tolerance' said Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli-Arab journalist and filmmaker." My comment: bolstering reformist Muslim voices may be the way to avoid the clash of civilizations. The federal government should include this approach in its strategy, if it has one. UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL MAKEUP & COST The UN Human Rights Council, composed of such human rights violators as Belarus, China, Cuba, N. Korea and Zimbabwe, had the responsibility for planning Durban II. The Council elected twenty countries to help prepare for the conference. Libya is chairman and Iran, vice-chairman of the committee, with Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and South Africa included amongst the nineteen vice-chairmen. April 20, the day that Durban II opened in Geneva for a week of hate-filled, anti-Israel, anti-American vitriol, fittingly happens to be Hitler's birthday. It's an appropriate time for the violators of human rights throughout the world to gather together under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council, to confirm the virulently anti-Israel resolutions of Durban I, created in 2001 in Durban, South Africa. Unbeknownst to most of America's taxpayers, they will pay 22% of the cost of this hate fest (from an open letter by Helen Freedman). U.S. annual dues to the UN are 22% of the official UN budget. Is it worth it? PALESTINIAN ARABS WANT IT ALL AWRAD polled 600 Palestinian Arabs for OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine following the elections in Israel in February 2009. It confirms prior polls. What they want would leave Israel non-viable. By these percentages, they found the following "essential":
By these percentages, they found the following "unacceptable":
OBJECTIVITY, VIEWS, DISPOSSESSION A friend relayed to me several widely held points that I think do unfair damage, so here they are with my retort: Objectivity 1. I can't be objective on Israel, because I'm Jewish and have ties with Israelis So ethnicity disqualifies most Jews from reporting on Israel and qualifies gentiles? Be careful, that notion, itself, approaches being prejudiced. Ties to Israelis? Many gentiles have them. Does that disqualify them? On the other hand, many gentiles have held anti-Jewish prejudices, over the centuries. I think the answer depends on the individual's integrity, ideology, and knowledge. "Objective" means that one's view is fact-based rather than prejudiced. I think I qualify. I seek knowledge and pursue the facts. My ideology and reason serve to make sense of the facts. My integrity rejects invalid arguments that favor my inclinations. My writing attempts to explain what the major media ignore and to correct misimpressions they foster. Views 2. The pro-Israeli view drowns out other views on TV and in major newspapers What is a pro-Israeli view? We Jews know that there are more than two sides to many stories — we are notorious for having several, ourselves. The Establishment view purports to be pro-Israel, but I dispute that it is. Embracing appeasement of the Arab Muslims, it is based on ignorance of jihad and human nature. My ideology is Zionist: claiming the homeland, opposing jihad, and knowing enough about human nature to distrust agreements made with fanatics who believe in breaking agreements with infidels. Experience has vindicated this outlook. This Jewish national view rarely appears on TV and in major newspapers. Instead, we mostly hear Arab claims and non-Arab exhortation to accede to many of them. Dispossession 3. Newcomer Jews replaced and rule over indigenous Arabs in Israel, like the Europeans did to the American Indians. The aboriginal inhabitants of the Land of Israel still extant are the Jews, some of whom never left the homeland. When the Arabs invaded it, Jews comprised a major segment of the population. As Muslim rule turned oppressive, it squeezed the Jews out, just as the Muslims have been squeezing out the former Christian majority of the Mideast. Muslim rule, mostly Turkish, ruined the area and mostly depopulated it. The Turkish Sultans repeatedly restocked the area with Muslims from the Caucasus. The idea was to fill the empty space. When modern Zionism launched a return to the homeland, soon recognized by the Balfour Declaration and in the Palestine Mandate as rectifying the historic injustice of dispossession of most native Jews, the country was called "empty." That's a figurative term signifying that the population has shrunk to insignificance and still was dwindling. How did the Zionists acquire land? By paying top dollar! Didn't kill the Arabs off or pen them onto Indian reservations, to seize their land. In fact, The Zionists also paid of Arab tenant farmers, too. With help from the Mandatory government, the Zionists drained the swamps, cleared the low jungle, and developed agriculture and other industry. To share in the economic growth, Arabs immigrated in large numbers. About three-fourths of the Arab families there now are of relatively recent immigrant families. From the 1920s, they organized terrorism to consolidate their hegemony over their own people and to drive out the Jews. By pogrom condoned by the British Mandatory authorities, Arabs expelled the Jews from Hebron. By invasion led by British officers, Arabs expelled the Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem. Now that Israel won jurisdiction over both areas, in self-defense against still more aggression, and Jews try to recover their family's land, the Israeli government blocks their efforts. Hence I find the Establishment appeasement-minded, unfair, anti-Zionist, and not pro-Israel. By contrast, the Zionists tried to live in peace with the Muslims. Despite a Palestinian Arab attempt at genocide, in the 1940s, the new state of Israel urged the Arabs to stay. Most fled, some stayed, and only a few, from the most warlike villages in strategic hills and border zones, were expelled. The analogy with American Indians does not fit. Israel is in the front lines of an international jihad against civilization, itself, including the many Muslim victims of the Radical Muslims. An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! An Excellent Credit Score is 750. An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! Dell Mini Netbooks: Great deals starting at $299 after instant savings! Dell Mini Netbooks: Great deals starting at $299 after instant savings! Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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REDUX: LIEBERMAN'S BIG MISTAKE
Posted by Molly, May 18, 2009. |
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We say "no" to a new state for the so-called "palestinians" if the Arabs want to plant it in or anywhere near Israel. We say plant it in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, or next to Yemen. In other words, "yes" OK arabs, you can have your new state just so long as it's planted away from Israel and on the Arabian Peninsula. It would be so lovely to see what the Saudis would do if it should happen to be widely reported that the Saudis have magnanimously offered a chunk of the Arabian Peninsula to the itinerant arabs whom Peres calls "Palestinians" (Being Polish, and wishing to be known as still Euroid at heart, the old geezer never quite grasped that "Palestine" always and invariably referred to the Jewish Homeland.) Voluminous praise of the Saudi magnanimity should follow in the media, coupled to expressions of thanks and gratitude and joy — reported here, there, and everywhere and the Saudi "royals" should be given high praise for their sagacious resolution to the "Palestine Problem". (Protests and disavowals will must assuredly come flying ... ignore them. Simply repeat the report: Gush about Saudi magnanimity and this time delineate on map where Saudis will establish the "new state." Next, produce reports of arabs flocking to the region for their new state and their hasty abandonment of the Gaza region and the West Bank. Media reports will follow that the Gaza Strip will become the New Homeland for the Old Jews (Old Palestine) and the West Bank to be the homeland for the secular Jews (or vice versa) and all three regions of Israel will be henceforth known as the United States of Israel ... and all three states will apply for membership in the UN. Who knows where something like this will lead? It's certainly an improvement over Peres' perpetual face-licking while bleaping about piecing away Israel and giving it to his arab darlings. Viva Israel. We are the NON-evangelical — that is, secular — Christians for Zion: Molly Contact Molly at pelago2000@gmail.com |
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FROM ISRAEL: HE DIDN'T CAVE!
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 18, 2009. |
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The meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama is over. The two leaders first met privately, with their discussions going beyond scheduled time. They were then joined by advisors — Netanyahu by top aide Ron Dermer and National Security Advisor Uzi Arad. Obama by US National Security Advisor James Jones. Much has been made of the need for positive personal chemistry to be established between the two, as the human relationship is said to be important in greasing the wheels of diplomacy. (As press here has put it, inexplicably to me, trust has to be established. ) I don't know to what degree the chemistry was positive — and undoubtedly more will follow on this. At a press conference after the meeting, the two declared that they would work together to meet the challenges of the Middle East, including Iran. But what is clear is that there was no meeting of the minds. Obama reiterated his two previously stated positions: That the dialogue with Iran should have no artificial time limit put on it and will be open-ended, although he would like to see progress by the end of the year and will consider other options such as sanctions in due course if necessary (no mention of a military option). And that his goal is two states living side by side in peace, which he hopes to achieve before the end of his term. Netanyahu, for his part, repeated his previous position: that he would like to see the Palestinians govern themselves. But he has in mind some sort of autonomy, less than a full state. He referred to economic development and other assistance for the Palestinian Authority, but — Baruch Hashem! — he did not speak either of a Palestinian state or a two-state solution. His emphasis, we were told before the meeting, was to be on Iran and the need for strong action. As would be expected, whatever was determined in terms of US sanction of/or refusal to sanction Israeli military action against Iran is not being shared. Interestingly, Netanyahu seemed to turn the Obama claim about the need to solve the Palestinian conflict first on its head, saying that more Arab nations need to get involved because of the instability generated by Iran. Undoubtedly more news — major analysis — on the meeting will be forthcoming in the days ahead. ~~~~~~~~~~ There's a tough time ahead for us (see below), whatever may have been said in private or established today in terms of personal relationship between the two leaders. And, just as I suggested that we ask Netanyahu to stay strong before his meeting with Obama, I would like to suggest that now we applaud his strength, let him know we're behind him, and ask him to retain his resolve. Fax: 02-670-5369 (From the US: 011-972-2-670-5369)
~~~~~~~~~~ UN-related issues that require our attention: Anne Bayefsky, of Eye on the UN, has written a piece called "Obama's UN Mistake," in which she describes the move Obama has made to further empower the UN.
The Security Council, Bayefsky tells us, just a little over a week ago, adopted what is called a "presidential statement." This one says: "The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009." This statement, while it has no legal status, does require a unanimous vote. This means Obama could have vetoed it, but chose not to. You'll note that the statement alludes to consultation with "the parties." Israel has been working to convince Russia not to hold such a conference this year — and our government is not pleased. Bayefsky sees the 22 nations of the Arab League as being among "the parties" — which squeezes Israel badly. Israeli UN ambassador Gabriella Shalev issued a statement putting forth Israel's position: "Israel does not believe that the involvement of the Security Council contributes to the political process in the Middle East. This process should be bilateral and left to the parties themselves." What is more, Shalev expressed dissatisfaction with the timing of this, when she had shared with the Security Council the fact that Netanyahu, in preparation for his meeting with Obama, was working on his approach to dealing with the Palestinians. ~~~~~~~~~~ The American UN ambassador, Susan Rice, took a very different approach, when she announced to the Security Council that "we intend to integrate the Arab Peace Initiative into our own approach." To reporters she said: "We welcome Foreign Minister Lavrov's initiative to convene the Council, and we're very pleased with the constructive and comprehensive statement that will be issued by the president of the Council on the Council's behalf. This was a product of really collaborative, good-faith efforts by all members of the Council, and we're pleased with the outcome." And worst of all: "The United States cannot be left to do all the heavy lifting by itself, and other countries... must do all that they can to shore up our common efforts." This positively screams a warning. Obama has set up a situation in which he doesn't have to put the screws to Netanyahu himself, he can get the international community to help. Bayefsky believes Obama has set this up as a "good-cop/bad cop" routine, so that he can rescue Israel, for a price. It's possible. It's also possible that he hopes he won't have as much to answer for with his pro-Israel constituents, if the UN is doing the dirty work. ~~~~~~~~~~ And we're not done. This past week the US formally joined the UN Human Rights Council. This anti-democratic group is virulently anti-Israel. It has adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than condemning all of the 191 other UN members combined; has held ten regular sessions on human rights, and five special sessions to condemn only Israel; and has insisted on an investigator with an open-ended mandate to condemn Israel, while all other investigators must be regularly renewed. What is more, the US, along with the four other Western nations sitting on the Council, can expect to be outvoted by nations from other geographic areas, including Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Djibouti, Bahrain, Qatar, Russia, and China. Actually, the balance of power lies with the Organization of the Islamic States, which has members on the Council from both the African and Asian groupings. This means the influence the US can have on Council decisions is minimal if not non-existent. Great situation, is it not? ~~~~~~~~~ In the course of the research I'm doing on UNRWA, I came across the following information, which I believe it is valuable to share. It provides a more accurate perspective in the face of the "awfulizing" that is routinely done regarding the situation of the Arabs in Gaza. This comes from an article by Justus Weiner, an international lawyer with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. "...Gaza's offshore gas deposits are worth an estimated $4 billion. This natural resource could be accessed to improve the lives of residents of Gaza once the anarchy and violence of Hamas is curtailed. Second, the population of Gaza is comparatively healthy and well educated. Life expectancy in the Gaza Strip is more than 72 years, which is higher than in Russia, the Bahamas, India, Ukraine and Glasgow East (Scotland). Surprised? Save this and refer to it as necessary. ~~~~~~~~~~ According to Fox News, American intelligence sources are saying that a secret commando unit under the Joint Special Operations Command is prepared to infiltrate Pakistan and secure its mobile arsenal of nuclear weaponry if it appears that the country is about to fall to the Taliban or Al Qaida. This is significant because Islamic forces have taken territory not far from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. This is good news. It indicates a readiness to deal with an emergency realistically, and not with pie-in-the-sky approaches. ~~~~~~~~~~ MK Alex Miller (Yisrael Beiteinu) has submitted a bill that would make it illegal to celebrate the Nakba, which means "catastrophe" in Arabic, and is how the Arabs refer to the founding of Israel. It is unlikely to pass, as it infringes on freedom of speech and right of protest. But none-the-less, this highlights a serious problem in this country. As Miller put it in a statement to the Post: From my perspective, it very much harms me, as a citizen, when citizens... mourn the establishment of the State of Israel when they themselves have equal rights in this country. "If we really want to achieve coexistence, the time has come that we stop this absurd theater." ~~~~~~~~~~ A new settlement is scheduled to be built in the Jordan Valley, for the first time in 26 years. To be called Maskiot, it will be established on the ruins of a settlement abandoned years ago. At the same time we are seeing this: Four years ago, as part of the expulsion from Gush Katif, there were four communities in northern Samaria that were demolished as well. One of those was Homesh. Last week, in a demonstration approved by the IDF, 1,500 people returned to the site of Homesh; they are working towards the re-building of the community. Those rallying carried letters of support from members of the current government written for the event: "I want to bless the participants and support them in the realization of the Zionist way," wrote Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon (Likud). Minister of Information and Diaspora Yuli Edelstein (Likud), said, "I have the utmost respect for the (former) Homesh settlers and all those who work to resettle the community as part of the settlement enterprise in the Land of Israel." Fantastic! This brings hope. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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THE PEACE PROCESS INDUSTRY'S GOING TO GET YOU
Posted by Barry Rubin, May 18, 2009. |
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From ghoulies and ghosties
Putting your hard-earned political capital into the peace process industry is like investing with Bernie Madoff. It may look like a good prospect on the surface but any serious examination shows it's a highway to bankruptcy. Of course, as with Madoff, many choose not to look too closely. Among them is U.S. National Security Advisor James Jones who says: "There are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution." Yes it would be better to have peace, no question. But would that diminish the existential threat given the existing realities? Let's look at the list: We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says Iran. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says Syria, even though it will pretend otherwise to fool the gullible. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says Hamas. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says Hizballah. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says al-Qaida. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says the Muslim Brotherhoods. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. We intend to destroy Israel and we are against peace, says Sudan, Libya, and assorted others. If Israel makes concessions, we will use them as a more effective means to wipe it off the map. And we will also take revenge on anyone who makes peace with Israel. So far, it doesn't look like making peace will diminish that existential threat. Nor does it mean that a "two-state solution" will end the conflict either. We'd like to make peace with Israel but if we do Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and some of our followers will kill us, say the Lebanese moderates. And any way we'll probably be out of power soon. We don't dare do anything. We're really eager to make peace with Israel, says the Palestinian Authority. It just doesn't want to make peace with us. Our regime is too weak to make peace and any way much of the leadership is pretty hardline. The difference between Fatah and Hamas is not so much one of moderation versus radicalism (yes, there are differences on that point also) but rather whether Palestine will be nationalist or Islamist. Of course, our idea of peace is not only the 1967 borders but also we won't end the conflict. In addition, we demand that any Palestinian who lived in what's now Israel before 1948 or has any ancestor who did can go live in Israel. What follows is: Step 1: Massive internal violence. In other words, peace on the Palestinian Authority's terms or on those of Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, or the Muslim Brotherhood is an even bigger existential threat to Israel than Iran having nuclear weapons. Iran might not use its nuclear weapons on Israel. But Iran and these other forces will use every weapon they have. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. If you don't understand that, not big deal but please don't become a foreign policymaker, diplomat, journalist covering international affairs, think tank analyst, or have anything to do with the Middle East in political terms. Also don't get a degree in "conflict management," but that's a given. If you want to understand what it is like to be Israel and hear people talk like this, imagine a pedestrian trying to cross a street facing dozens of people in big cars who think that it makes real good sense to drink about three bottles of bourbon before getting behind the wheel. But, you might ask, don't Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, along with some other Arab states want peace? Yes they do but: A. They don't pose existential threats. — Having Israel as an enemy makes for good propaganda. — Making peace with Israel or at least implementing that peace more fully exposes them to great risks from radical regimes and movements, at home and abroad. — They don't need peace with Israel. — They can just sit back and demand that the West do all the work and Israel makes all the concessions. Finally, what is most amazing is that when I and other people explain these facts of Middle East life to people over and over again, they look rather startled as if they have never heard any of this before. They provide no serious rebuttals. And the next day they are back to the same mischief, having learned nothing and remembered even less. There's no way better to put it than the great line from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made" Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go tohttp://www.gloria-center.org This article is archived at
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RALLY IN WASHINGTON WHILE PM NETANYAHU AND OBAMA HOLD WHITE HOUSE MEETING
Posted by Jerome Gordon, May 18, 2009. |
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Hundreds from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Balitmore and the greater Washington area are gathering in Lafayette Park across from the White House, today, to Rally in Support of Israel, The Rally, sponsored by AMCHA, It will be held while Israeli PM Netanyahu Meets with President Obama in the White House Oval Office. Netanyahu's schedule for today includes his 90 minute meeting with Obama starting at 10:30AM. Following lunch, he will be meeting with Madame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and NSC chief, Gen. James Jones. Separately, he will be meeting with key Congressional leaders. Netanyahu will focus on the Iran Nuclear Threat, while Obama will endeavor to link that to progress in a possible Middle East peace process. 
A brief press conference could be held before lunch at the White House West Portico, assuming there are no major differences betwwen Obama and Bibi at this first meeting. Meir Holtzberg, brother of slain Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg of the Mumbai Chabad House, who was murdered along with his wife Rivka in November 2008, will address Americans from across the country. 
The message is clear: The Jewish State of Israel will not surrender to terrorism and will not give up land that is rightfully hers! Israel left Gaza for Peace...... Hamas responded with Qassams. We ask President Obama: "Would you tolerate Qassams falling on DC? Would you "make peace" with a partner who doesn't recognize your right to exist? The answer to both of these questions is NO. Supporters of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, will be out in numbers to remind President Obama not to pressure his strongest ally into concessions that would compromise the security of Israel. Israel has a sovereign right to exist with secure borders and an
undivided capital, Jerusalem. We stand across from the White
House to make that message heard!
Contact Jerry Gordon at jerry_gordon38@yahoo.com
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40 PERCENT OF ISRAEL'S ARAB CITIZENS DENY HOLOCAUST
Posted by Gil Ronen, May 18, 2009. |
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Two out of every five Arab citizens of Israel, or 40.5 percent, say that the Shoah, or Holocaust, never happened. This figure is up from 28 percent who denied the Holocaust in a similar survey three years ago. Only 41 percent of the Arab citizens of Israel recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, down from 65.6 percent who did so in 2003. A mere 53.7 percent recognize Israel's right to exist as an independent state at all, compared with 81.1 percent in 2003. The statistics appear in the annual "Jewish Arab Relations Meter" published by Prof. Sami Samocha of Haifa University. The full content of the survey will be released Monday. The survey encompasses numbering 700 Arab men and women, who are a representative sample of Israel's Arab population, including Bedouin and Druze. According to Samocha, Holocaust denial is common, not just among the less educated Arabs. A full 37 percent of Arabs who possess an education level above high school deny that the Holocaust happened. Fifty-six percent of Arabs think that the "Right of Return" of Arab "refugees" should not include an influx into Israel's pre-1967 territory, as opposed to 72.2 percent who thought so six years ago. 12.6 percent support armed struggle 41.4 percent said that they had participated in "protest actions" over the course of the last year, compared with 28.7 percent who said so in 2003. 12.6 percent support using "all means, including weapons" in the struggle to "improve their situation." This figure is up from 5.4 percent in 2003. 53.8 percent said that it is okay for Arab children to study in a Jewish school — down from 70.5 percent in 2003. 47.3 percent do not want a Jew as their neighbor — up from 27.2 percent six years ago. Despite the statistics, Prof. Samocha claims that Arabs' positions have not undergone serious radicalization in the past three decades and that they seek equality and peace. Gil Ronen is a writer for Arutz-7 (www.IsraelNationalNews.com), where this article appeared today. |
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WHY BE JEWISH?
Posted by Miki and Herb Sunshine, May 18, 2009. |
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These are excerpts on Intermarriage, Assimilation, And Alienation from an article written by Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1977. It is distributed by Barbara Ginsberg, who writes: "Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at: barhow@netvision.net.il " Previously e-mailed Rav
Kahane writings are available at |
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Once there was a television program which centered on the theme of intermarriage. The heroes of the piece were named Bernie and Bridget. The American Jewish Establishment put great pressure on the network that televised the series and the program was ultimately dropped. Bernie and Bridget were no longer. They had been cancelled. How relatively simple it was to cancel Bernie and Bridget on television and how much more difficult to struggle against the intermarriage and assimilation that exist in real American Jewish life. What makes Bernie run? What makes him run after Bridget? What makes Bernie run away from Judaism and cut the chain of generations? What makes Bernie run away from the Judaism that his grandfather clutched, at the risk of loss of happiness of material wealth, and, often, of life? What makes Bernie run? It is clear that the future bodes, only more intermarriage. Freedom and equality have brought the Jew the right to do everything that Bridget's father does, and to marry his daughter, too. Jews have broken out of the ghetto with a vengeance and mix with the Gentiles in every sphere. Witness the tremendous percentage of Jewish youth who attend college and university — the most powerful force for intermarriage possible. There the young Jew is at the mercy of a scholastic atmosphere which is unfavorable to religious and all "parochial" trends and which radicalizes him into questioning the importance of a heritage he knows about only on a Bar Mitzvah child's level. He meets Gentiles who are his peers and finds them remarkably similar (there are, he discovers, quite a number of bright Gentiles), and he shares a major part of his life with them for at least four years. In a study prepared for the American Jewish congress by Capolvitz and Levy (Interreligious dating among college students, 1965) it was seen that: The transition from high school to college represents for most young people a lessening of the influence of their family and an increase in the influence of their peers and professors who hold out to them a world of secular knowledge and liberalism. Religion and other traditional beliefs reinforced by the family of origin are apt to become weakened in the college setting. What happens when a child is born free and unencumbered with memories? And what happens when a young Jew is raised in an environment where, for the time being, history has allowed him never to know any meaningful anti-Semitism? What happens when he roams campuses filled with (pretty and handsome) Gentiles, freedom-filled neighborhoods and workplaces, a world of his own that is apparently uninhabited by hatred of the Jew? What happens when a whole generation grows up that does not know the goy? What happiness? Why, the obvious. Not being forced to be a Jew he does not remain one; not consciously, not actively, not caring. What happens? "Death to Bernie as a Jew". Now, Bernie, you know the tragedy, the bankruptcy of the false "Judaism" you were fed. You know it without having to open this book and read these pages. You lived it, and, I say with a sad heart, you have been twisted and crippled by it. You were robbed by all the good people who gave you everything in life except the most important things — truth, meaning, identity. But never think that what you have seen is the real Judaism. Far from it. The Judaism that you never saw, and never were given to properly understand exists and awaits you. Stop for a moment and consider it. Forget about trying to escape from your people, your heritage, and your destiny. Forget all the nonsense that poses as "Judaism" — the mausoleums that pass for temples; the rabbis who preach salvation for all causes except the Jewish one; the people who created G-d in their own image, making Him emerge in the form of a UJA Israel Bond, Bar Mitzvah caterer and bagels and lox. Let me help you understand who you are, who your people are, what the times we live in mean for you for them, what the future holds for you, your people, and Israel. Forget the tragedy and consider the glory What a pity that the vast majority of Jews do not understand who they are and why they are! What a pity that they have fallen victim to ignorance and to ignorant shepherds. What a pity that they understand neither the Chosenness of the Jew nor the sublime magnificence of the total Torah way of life. In their abysmal lack of knowledge and superficial gleanings they see and hear of commandments and rituals and find them inexplicable or ludicrous. Being told that the Sabbath forbids "work" they cannot grasp why switching on a light is forbidden. Having heard that kashrut is a hygienic thing, they cannot see why government-controlled and well-cooked pork is forbidden. They suffer from the problems of the three blind men who wished to know what an elephant was, with each one touching a different part. The one who touched the tail tusk "understood" that the elephant was a rope; the one who touched the tusk "learned" that an elephant was spear; and the one who touched the leg "realized" that the elephant was a pillar. One cannot understand Torah and the true path of Judaism without seeing the entire purpose and architectural blueprint, without knowing what the structure is supposed to look like. For the commandments are but bricks in a structure and only when seeing the planned totality can one understand why each brick serves a logical purpose. There are Jews who never learned anything of their faith and others who learned a dangerous little. Both can never say: I do not believe in Judaism for one who has never learned it deeply, does not know what not to believe. One must study Judaism at the feet of those who believe and know it. Not for nothing did the rabbis say: "Great is study because [only] it leads to doing." Only the one who has studied Torah can understand it fully, and the ignorant one can never become G-d fearing. So let us learn together. "The world and all within it were created only for the sake of Torah." Torah, the Jewish code of law, the life-style and life of the Jew. His map, his guide, his existence. The Jewish G-d of creation created the world for the sake of Torah, in order that its principles and truths might be translated into practice and life. And the Jewish people was chosen by G-d as the vehicle for living and teaching His Torah. That and that alone is the Jewish is the reason for creation. And so it was that on a day unlike any other in the annals of this world an entire people stood at the foot of a burning mountain upon whose peak the L-rd had descended in a fire, "and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the [shofar] horn waxed louder and louder, Moses spoke, and G-d answered" in a voice that shattered the atmosphere and thrust itself into the souls of the people who stood by, as it called out: "I am the L-rd thy G-d, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20). Only by being set apart, only by being separated and different can the Jew learn how to be His, can the Jew avoid being dragged down by the environment and influences of a culture that degrades and desecrates, that profanes man and turns his life into the animal. Holiness can only be achieved by living a certain kind of life, and when that life is attacked and challenged and threatened by alien and contradictory forces every day and in every way — there can be no holiness, there can be no purpose to Chosenness. How do we know that a man should not say I cannot abide pork. but should rather say: I can eat the pork but what can I do if my father in Heaven has decreed otherwise? It is said: "And I have separated you from the nations that you should be Mine," that you should be separated from them for My name's sake and accept the yoke of heaven. The Jew became a nation, but more — much more. He became a religio-nation. At the moment of Revelation he was also commanded a Torah — the Divinely created and revealed laws that where to be his "life and length of his days." It was a treaty, a covenant between Israel and its Maker. The Jew from that moment the chosen one. He was sanctified; hallowed, and set apart from all the nations. Study; learn Torah, for only Torah and Torah knowledge can make you the kind of Jew you must be. Young Jew, Baruch, [Hebrew for Bernie] who I have never met, come home. Return to your people and destiny. It is beautiful You are young and for you return is simple. And you know that you life can be lived in only one place. Home. The Land of Israel. Herb Sunshine is a lawyer, qualified to practice in U.S.A. and Israel. He and his wife Miki live in Jerusalem. Contact them by email at sunshine.h@012.net.il |
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NETANYAHU & "PEACE PROCESS"; DURBAN 2: PHONY REACTION; PRISONERS RUN TERROR OPS; IRAN INFILTRATES LATIN AMERICA; TORTURE
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 17, 2009. |
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TORTURE: SHOULD AMERICANS OPPOSE IT? Americans disapprove of torture more than of wars of self-defense, though wars maim more people than does torture. Why this sentiment? Torture is more intimate. People can imagine themselves in a captive's shoes. They shudder at the image of it in their minds. The power to torture is corrupting. [I think the author means that it tempts captors to resort to it unnecessarily.] People also object to it as impractical. They think that it provides scanty or false intelligence. It fails to counteract the ideology of Radical Islam, which produces terrorists. By raising indignation against us, it helps terrorists recruit (Scott Shane, NY Times, 4/19, Wk1). The Bush administration wrote instructions for what harsh methods are legal up to what point. They set that point quite far out. Their effort seemed more a rationalization than an honest attempt to set reasonable standards. They were trying to see how much they could get away with. They abused prisoners. Combine that effort to see how much they could get away with, with the Administration's great secrecy about its standards! Add into the mixture the Administration's holding prisoners without habeas corpus and its excessive spying on people. That is, the Administration turned out mistakenly to have incarcerated innocent people for months, without having given those people an opportunity to explain to a judicial body why their captivity was a mistake. The Administration secretly exceeded its legal powers to eavesdrop on people. Seen as a whole, a more serious picture presents itself (NY Times, 4/19, Ed.). As a whole, the government was getting inured to violating civil liberties and human rights. It hosted a sadistic environment. Let us not emulate those cultures whose government officials torture people as punishment, to extort money from them (as the Palestinian authority does), or for perverted recreation. Government endangers liberty when it overrides individual rights. Defenders of the Administration's methods bring up the scenario of capturing a terrorist who may know of a plot. They argue that it is justified to torture him to prevent terrorists from murdering innocent people. That is a difficult argument to refute. However, most of the people captured were not in such a position. As we pointed out, many were captured in error. As more Bush memos emerge, and Congress investigates, the question may be settled whether torture produced results that enhanced national security. I wonder whether reliance upon torture replaces clever traditional interrogation. UNIVERSITIES FIRING LEFTIST ACADEMIC FRAUDS Universities in the U.S. and Canada are firing crackpot leftist professors who lack academic credentials, flout the rules, neglect their subjects, and use their classrooms to promote their ideology. Recently, Denis Rancourt was fired from the U. of Ottawa for insubordination. He violated University policies, as on grades. Having denied entry to his class to a mother, he also was accused of age discrimination. A third of his fellow professor petitioned for his dismissal. He was not fired for antisemitism. However, he used to invite Holocaust-denier Michel Chossudovsky to lecture to his classes. Self-described as an anarchist, he turned his classroom into an indoctrination center against the Zionist lobby, the U.S., and capitalism. He claimed that the U.S. or "the Jews" caused 9/11. The Left protests his firing as an assault on academic freedom. They blame the firing on the Jews. Another pseudo-academic, Norman Finkelstein, also a Holocaust-denier, was fired from DePaul U., for failing to meet academic requirements. He, too, blamed the Zionist lobby for getting him fired, but "Finkelstein had never published a single bona fide academic journal article." (Prof. Steven Plaut of Haifa U., 4/18.) When professors fail to teach their subjects, fail to qualify to teach their subjects, and abuse their power to indoctrinate students, they are cheating them of their education. Remarking about an earlier article on unqualified leftist professors, someone complained that I didn't offer facts. I hope this suffices. The point of the other article was the arguments used, rather than the professors' lack of qualifications. Therefore I discussed the logic of their arguments. In still other articles, I focused on the facts. Can't repeat all the facts from earlier articles in all newer ones. PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU ON PEACE PROCESS Israel's Prime Min. Netanyahu said that the world demands Israeli establishment of another Arab state, without demanding that the Arabs recognize the Jewish state. Failure to recognize Israel as such portends failure to reconcile with it. Denying them sovereignty, he said, "We want for them to rule themselves, except for those powers that could threaten our security and our existence." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/20). NY Times Report Pres. Ahmadinejad of Iran upset the Durban II Conference on discrimination by accusing Israel, and only Israel, of being repressive, cruel, and racist. He also accused Israel of military aggression, rendering the whole Palestinian nation homeless "under the pretext of Jewish suffering." [Implication: there was no Holocaust, but Jews pretended that there was, so the world would sympathize with their desire to enter Palestine.] On hearing that, most of the European delegates walked out, joining those who had boycotted the Conference. How Israel treats Palestinian Arabs is not pertinent to a conference on discrimination. Some of the conference planners had toned down the agenda's wording, to avoid appearing to make Israel a scapegoat and censoring truthful criticism of Islamic behavior. That attempt was too thinly veiled to cajole those who noticed that the agenda nevertheless endorsed Durban I, which did single out Israel and did neglect worldwide discrimination. Barbara Lee of the Congressional Black Caucus complained that Ahmadinmejad obscured "the only international forum to address racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia." Ahmadinejad complicates Western overtures to Iran. Secretary-General Ban rebuked hiom. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, "...made a no-so-subtle dig at Iran's treatment of its own minorities..." She said, "'This is what I would have expected the president of Iran to come and tell us: how he is addressing racial discrimination and intolerance in his country'...." Pakistan's UN ambassador defended Ahmadinejad's right to speak his mind (Neil MacFarquhar, NY Times, 4/21, A4). NY Times Editorial The Times editorial described the speech as predictably divisive. It concluded that the UN cannot maintain credibility so long as it singles out Israel It added "There are legitimate questions to be raised about Israel's handling of the Golan war, which had a disturbingly high number of civilian casualties." The editors suggested an "independent inquiry" about that and about Hamas liquidation of political opponents (4/21). Evaluating The Criticism (The term, "racist," is used too loosely for discrimination and bigotry.) The hint about Iranian discrimination omitted substance. It should at least have mentioned arbitrary capital punishment for the Bahai faithful and for Jews and Iranian support for bigoted terrorists. The hint was too ladylike! At a Conference called against bigotry, why miss that opportunity to specify Iran's sins? The critics failed to point out that Ahmadinejad's accusations were unsubstantiated and insubstantial. They did not expose his lies as such and as part of Islamic bigotry against the Jewish people. They let him get away with the very type of slander that the Conference was billed as opposing. Where is their courage? What kind of ethical standard have they? Ahmadinejad's defamation of the Jewish people and state demonstrates the bigotry behind the jihad against Israel. Contrary to his supposition, Jewish sovereignty was programmed into the Palestine Mandate well before the Holocaust. (I have a copy of the Mandate, and it makes such intent clear.) Yes, the horror of the Holocaust gained sympathy for Jewish sovereignty. However, masses of Zionists prepared to settle in the Jewish homeland were cut to a trickle by the Holocaust (and the Communist counter-revolution in Russia). Holocaust denial is not an intellectual matter to debate, but a psychosis to treat and a war tactic in jihad. It attempts to remove sympathy for the oppressed Jewish people, and to pretend that they took something that belongs to the Arabs. First the Muslim world exerted pressure upon Britain to keep the Jews out of Palestine and bottled up in Europe, where the Nazis liquidated millions of them. Now many Muslim leaders deny those deaths in which their parents were complicit and in which two Bosnian Muslim SS divisions played a role. The claim that Israel committed military aggression against the Arabs is false and ludicrous. The Arabs started both a civil war and foreign wars against Israel. Israeli defense started out with far fewer troops and materiel than the Arabs had. Arab leaders declared intent to exterminate, just as the Nazis did. Most of the western Palestinian Arabs fled from war zones in advance, or as a result of Arab terrorism, or out of fear of defeat, or at the orders of the invading Arab generals. Others stayed. To claim that Israel made them all homeless is untrue. It was the Arabs' own fault for starting the wars. Neither is it true that there was or is a Palestinian nation. At the time, the population that now pretends there is had denied there was a Palestinian nation. They described themselves as Muslims, Arabs, and sometimes as southern Syrians. The Zionists were called "Palestinians," though their nationality is Jewish. Decades later, the Arabs fabricated a Palestinian nationality for purposes of propaganda. They are good at propaganda. In a way, the Times editors bolstered Ahmadinejad's stance. It gratuitously raised an irrelevant issue, Israel's military tactics. They just couldn't restrain themselves from bashing Israel. That out-of-place criticism reflects either: (a) A bending-over-backwards attempt to present themselves as fair; or (b) Their own bias against Zionism. The editorial did not disclose that the Times has been anti-Zionist since at least the 1920s, when the publisher formed an anti-Zionist organization called the American Council for Judaism. Did you notice that the editorial suggested an inquiry into Israel's military conduct but not into Hamas'? Hamas made war by means of attacking civilians and used its own civilians as human shields and as cover for arms caches that sometimes exploded and killed civilians. Hamas and not Israel therefore is responsible physically and legally for the Arab civilian casualties. The Pakistani Ambassador diverted attention, by mis-characterizing the problem as Ahmadinejad's freedom of speech. The problem was his abuse of the opportunity to speak. I suspect that the Ambassador agrees with Ahmadinejad. After all, Iran's President was cheered at the Conference. Generally, the Islamic governments there have a similar opinion, though some to a less extreme degree. They don't worry about being truthful, however, for jihad utilizes whatever means works. Conclusion I think that the critics are hypocrites. Their concern was that Iran spoiled a meeting in which they could self-righteously denounce various kinds of discrimination, without dealing with the Islamist religious aggression taking place all over the world. They knew that much of the denunciation would be calumny against Israel. I think they were prepared to accept that, for that is how the UN usually operates. As the Times admitted, the UN cannot maintain credibility so long as it picks on Israel. The UN has been doing that from the outset. When will the Times draw the proper conclusion about the UN, now a major font of bigotry? (For my earlier piece on Durban II, see:
U.S. INTERVENING IN EXPULSIONS OF JERUSALEM ARABS The U.S. and other foreign governments have asked Israel not to permit execution of a civil court order to expel some Arab families from their house in eastern Jerusalem. One family was expelled some months ago, against U.S. protest. The State Dept. warns that Sec. Clinton is monitoring this situation. The Sephardic Association claims ownership. Jews have been moving in (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/19). Why is the U.S. interfering in internal Israeli affairs, and taking the Arab side, as it usually does? Has anybody heard of the US demanding that the Palestinian Authority stop punishing Arabs who sell land to Jews? TALIBAN NEARING PAKISTAN'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS "Since the Taliban took control of Swat in February, executions, public floggings and bombings of girls' schools, restaurants, video and music stores have become routine occurrences." "And with just 60 miles now separating the Taliban from the capital city of Islamabad, the Taliban are well positioned to continue their march across the country. Indeed, the Taliban appear unstoppable." Wall Street Journal.: "...Taliban fighters are flooding the Swat Valley with thousands of veteran fighters from Afghanistan and Kashmir and setting up training camps throughout the areas. Moreover, they are recruiting — both through intimidation and persuasion — still more thousands of locals to join their lines." The Taliban unified their commands in Pakistan and Afghanistan and re-allied themselves with al-Qaeda. That makes the US war in Afghanistan harder. The U.S. finds the Taliban an existential danger to Pakistan. Pakistan could fall within the year. The nuclear weapons would become the terrorists'. Pres. Obama is finding himself stuck in defending against jihad just as Pres. Bush did. They see Afghanistan and Pakistan the same way. What is the U.S. to do? (1) Seize Pakistan's nuclear arsenal?
Difficult. (2) Destroy it? With what effect on the program and on
nuclear fallout? (3) Let India destroy it, since it would be the
first victim of irresponsible control over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
But the U.S. might turn around and impose sanctions against India.
The U.S. has told Israel not to destroy Iran's nuclear development
facilities
ISRAEL'S PM NETANYAHU CLARIFIES STANCE Israel's Prime Minister reportedly said that he would not negotiate with the Palestinian Authority unless it recognized Israel as a Jewish state. He now denies making recognition a precondition but asserts that such recognition is necessary for advancing the diplomatic process and reach a peace settlement. He would start negotiating without that recognition (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/20). It the diplomatic process could not be advanced without that recognition, why start the process? Sounds more like a self-contradiction made after having been criticized, than a clarification. In any case, he is continuing Israel's mistake of negotiating without the Arab side showing good faith. The U.S. is liable to accuse Israel of blocking an agreement, however poor it be for Israel. The Palestinian Arabs keep making and breaking new agreements in return for Israeli concessions, without honoring their own commitments in prior agreements. HOW NATO DEALS WITH SOMALI PIRATES NATO forces prevented Somali pirates from seizing a Norwegian tanker and they freed the captives from another ship. In both instances, NATO captured the pirates, only to release them. Sec. Clinton would rather the pirates be brought to justice, rather be released them. She wants them held accountable (NY Times, 4/21, A8). No penalty, no disincentive. Unless the pirates are wiped out, they won't desist. Indeed, terrorists may take up that kind of piracy, if it can be done with impunity. The report did not include NATO's reason for releasing the pirates Perhaps NATO fears that the pirates would take vengeance upon other kidnapped sailors. EGYPT ACCUSES IRAN, SYRIA, QATAR OF SUBVERSION Egypt government, having arrested a terrorist cell, accused Iran, Syria, and Qatar of plotting the government's overthrow. The terrorist cell was set up to incite rebellion by the Bedouin of Sinai. Syria harbored Hamas leaders, Qatar publicized their ideology on al-Jazeera TV, and Iran armed Hamas. The Hamas attack on Israel was meant to make Egypt look as if it were cooperating with Israel, said Egypt's official daily. The newspaper called Israel brutal in its self-defense (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/18). IMPRISONMENT DOESN'T END TERRORISM IN ISRAEL Israel's chief intelligence officer in the prison system, Dr. Zvi Sela, a psychologist, held meetings with imprisoned terrorist leaders. He found them reasonable. Dr. Aaron Lerner, head of the Independent Media Research & Analysis (IMRA), thinks Israeli officials lost their judgment upon meeting with leading terrorists. It would be like the feeling decent Americans sometimes get when socializing in a nightclub with the underworld. Those terrorists keep informed sufficiently to run their terrorist operations from prison (http://www.imra.org.il/, 4/19). Israeli high security prisons let terrorists have sufficient outside contact to direct terrorism. If the wardens kept terrorists from physical contact with visitors, the country would become much safer. Elementary! CYBER-TERRORISM Hackers cost the US, alone, some hundreds of million dollars a year. The government is advertising for hackers to help them protect sensitive files (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, (4/19). HAMAS CLERIC PROFESSES AMITY, SPEWS BIGOTRY Ziad Abu Alhaj is a Muslim clergyman in Gaza. He participated in the 2006 Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace. The delegates pledged to "'condemn any negative representation' of each other's religions." In his April 3 sermon on Hamas TV, however, he advocated extermination of the Jewish people. He bases his view on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and on the Islamist interpretation of Islam that the Jewish people is genetically disposed to seek hegemony and murder. His bigotry is racist (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/19 from http://www.pmw.org.il — Palestinian Media Watch). Mr. Alhaj is one of many Radical Muslims who deceive Westerners. To lull Western suspicion and defense, they pose in the West as tolerant. Speaking to their own people in their own language, however, they incite to hatred based on false history and false genetics, as did the Nazis. By their sermons, those Radical Muslims seeking hegemony and murder, just what they accuse the Jews of seeking. Western clergy, officials, and journalists must overcome their naivete, or be overcome by jihad. NARCOTICS & TERRORISM Most of the half-billion dollars worth of heroin bought by Israeli addicts comes from Lebanon's Beqaa Valley. It is grown by Shiite villagers and passed through Israeli Arab crime families. Hizbullah takes a cut, to finance terrorism. The drug smugglers spy in Israel (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/19).
INTRODUCING STANDWITHUS StandWithUs is an activist educational organization having a dozen chapters and offices worldwide, including a strong presence in New York City. It seeks to correct misimpressions about Israel, and to give Israel's case a fairer hearing. Here is how it dealt with the UN Human Rights Commission's second conference, Durban II: It got protestors to the conference site at Geneva. Some stood with tape over their mouths. This symbolized the UN silence about genuine human rights oppression, as of Darfur blacks, women, gays, and of hate-indoctrinated children. [Those abuses all are perpetrated by Radical Muslims, but not only by them.] As a service to unaffiliated protestors, StandWithUs provided large placards. When Iran's Pres. Ahmadinejad rose to speak, members of the French Union of Jewish Students, rose in clowns' costume, to ridicule his message. They were escorted outside, as many European conference delegates walked out. Outside were hundreds of students and other protestors, including from StandWithUs, chanting "Shame on the United Nations" and "We want human rights." Indeed, the UN was shamed by the combination of walkout, boycott, and protest, receiving adverse publicity for obviously neglecting human rights issues in favor of defaming Israel, itself a victim of human rights violations by terrorists. For more about the organization, see: http://www.standwithus.com/ HAMAS PREPARING ANOTHER WAR Hamas has dug wider tunnels. It smuggled in heavy weapons and armed vehicles. It plans reliance on anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, rather than on bombs, booby-trapped buildings, and civvies (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/22).
TERRORISM INCREASING IN JUDEA-SAMARIA The P.A. in Judea-Samaria is not conducting much terrorism. Its president, Abbas, declares that terrorism is not worthwhile, for now. However, his fellow leaders of the Fatah faction there call for more terrorism. Unaffiliated individuals oblige. Noticeably more of them have been attacking or attempting to attack Israelis there, recently. Hamas, which never stopped calling for more terrorism, has been gaining popularity at Fatah's expense (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7). Indoctrinated by the P.A. in its ideology of intolerance and violence, the Palestinian Arabs there insist on more terrorism more than their regime would like for the time being. The regime thinks it can gain more by negotiating concessions, then by extorting more concessions, then by all-out war. IRAN INFILTRATES LATIN AMERICA An Israeli intelligence study finds Iran using the anti-Western leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, as entrée to Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. All their regimes share dislike for the U.S. Iran hopes to entrench itself in Latin America. It uses money and operatives, to promote its anti-Western ideology and to gain allies against sanctions on Iran. Hizbullah raises funds in joint operations with S. American crime syndicates. It spreads propaganda and makes converts. Iran has succeeded in spoiling relations between Israel and some countries there (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7). This is serious. Iran was much less entrenched in Latin America, years ago, when Hizbullah blew up a Jewish center in Argentina. Note, the victims were local Jews, not Israelis. Sometimes Radical Muslims claim they are not religiously biased, just interested in helping Palestinian Arabs, but they attack Jews whether Israelis or not. Why? (1) Their ideology supersedes notions of nationality; religion to them is paramount; and (2) They imagine Jews are a race, and that consequently all Jews have the same motives. Radical Islam's racist notion about Jews is not only false. It reflects ignorance of heredity. Cultural traits are not genetic, not inherited. In modern society, a given culture does not pass its values thoroughly to all its members. If Radical Muslims were interested in ascertaining the facts, they would find that Judaism and Jews estranged from Judaism generally value saving lives, not, as accused, taking lives. Unfortunately, Radical Muslims don't deal in facts. ISLAMIC REFORMATION COMING? Radical Muslim oppression of Muslims mars the reputation of Islam much more than Danish cartoons do. "But there is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world, and one window into this opening was an international conference this week at the University of Notre Dame on the latest scholarship about the Koran." The new scholarship analyzes the holy text within its historical and linguistic context. This method is comparable with the study of the Bible that found different styles within what was supposed to be one person's gospel. Analysis of the Koran provides evidence that previous text was deleted and later ones were interpolated. Some Islamic scholars conclude that the Koran favored more social justice and women's rights than current orthodoxy supposes. Islamic scholars in the Middle Ages were more flexible and open-minded about the meaning of the Koran than contemporary ones, except, surprisingly, in Iran. In the year 1,000, scholars contended that the Koran need not be taken literally. If this reform movement takes hold, it "will be the best weapon yet against extremism (Nicholas D. Kristof, NY Times, 4/23, Op.-Ed). Problem is, Iran is only months away from possessing nuclear weapons, and the Taliban are perhaps months away from seizing Pakistan's. An Islamic Reformation is not likely to mature in time to de-legitimize and defeat the Radical Muslim extremists. The newspaper article gave more examples of the new scholarship. I omitted them, because it is up to Islamic scholars to judge their significance. Pint is, questions are being asked, now. Significant to Western society is whether the reformation develops into tolerance. Tolerance would make a basis for peace. DOES TORTURE WORK? An FBI interrogator of suspected terrorists, Ali Soufan, disputes assertions that torture provides useful and otherwise unavailable information. He claims that the traditional methods of interrogation elicit more useful information than torture does, and without violating human rights. He wants U.S. torture exposed more, but officials not punished, just given new rules. He thinks that the officials didn't use torture much, but that private contractors did. He contends that the secrecy involved re-instituted non-cooperation between the FBI and CIA, that let the 9/11 terrorists slip in (NY Times, 4/23, Op.Ed.). Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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CIA ANALYST: THE FUTURE IN AFGHANISTAN, AND THE US
Posted by Marion DS Dreyfus, May 17, 2009. |
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According to a meeting in mid-March with a top CIA asset, Gary Berntsen, President Obama will be in Afghanistan for "a looong time, maybe 10 years. Or more." A decorated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) career officer, Berntsen served in the Directorate of Operations, October 1982 to June 2005. At the CIA, he was CIA Station Chief three separate times, and spearheaded some of the CIA's most prominent counterterrorism deployments, which included the US response to the East Africa Embassy dramatic timed bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 9/11 attacks. In 2000 he was recipient of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and this was followed in 2004 by the Intelligence Star. He returned to Afghanistan as civilian advisor for Regional Command East on IED networks within the division of NATO acronymically tagged ISAF. Berntsen is responding, says this great author and rapid-fire talker, to reports that we need to quell Afghanistan because — aside from other obvious reasons — it is incendiary and next to Pakistan, with its nuclear devices and its 175 mm people (imagine — this populous and religiously fermenting place, nearly under the sway of the relentlessly immoderate, fiercely murderous Taliban...the mind reels). One glimmer of light: While we fear that this newbie Prez has an agenda that tilts rather precipitously toward our erstwhile brethren from long ago, my feeling is that BHO shall — willy nilly — need Israel, because he will be in a passel of over-commitment to forces and troubled real estate that will be, frankly, unavoidable. The intel maven, author of JAWBREAKER, Quds Force (fiction, August 2008) and Human Intelligence, Counterterrorism, and National Leadership: A Practical Guide (November 2008) wrote his latest opus for the incoming head of state. HICNL includes detailed policy references, prescriptions and recommendations. He says that this new prez has assembled a "pretty good team" for the prosecution of the coming operations. But, Berntsen warns, the question is how he will deploy them. How will he manage the counter-insurgency? This, he stresses, is always the key to calm. The goal for them, he repeats, is not democracy, which will not fly in these untrammeled, wild, unsettled, rocky, primitive, largely uncontemporary regions. The goal is, instead, stability. With a strongman head honcho, either local, or (preferably) American at the top. The Afghanis have humbled powerful countries before this, and we have only 17,000 guys on the hook to go there with marching porders in the next year, when the number needed to quell the mess is, Berntsen says, at least triple that. As an optimistic coda, he also maintains we will get UBL sooner or later. He was famously near to killing him at Tora Bora, and that but for a garbled and, yes, bad decision by the former White House, undersourcing and consequent undersupply (now that we are incredulous at the hash being made by the new one, the ''cool" one, the one who's joined at the lip to the Teleprompter, goes on late-night TV and writes out basketball futures), that one we are clearly missing long about now, we would have gotten him. "Bush made many good moves," he avers, and was "pretty good in decision-making" in general, along with some of the generals, Cheney and so on, but that the missed opportunity was ''heartbreaking'' for being so close, but so wrong when they needed to act on their own. General Petraeus is fixing the fence, he notes. Spectacularly, he allows. Fascinating tales of stealthy night raids and teen-aged guides, the sons of warlords and various local tribes, sects. A small, deft, silken-masterful cadre taking on hundreds. With few casualties. Fabulous: We are in our Tom Clancy modes, great. Even unheralded, we are better than the US public gets to hear. The CIA man with a tight, sturdy, almost bullet-like frame says "they like us," even though the Taliban don't, can't. They just "like to kill things." Why do they do it? Not a simplistic single answer. But not the obvious — wrong — one, either. It is not poverty or resentment. It is not the slogans and the low-hanging fruit, elusive earnest explanations that don't take enough into account, either. The French are doing a good job, he says — better than we hear. The French Foreign Legion model works for this part of the globe. I've been to the rock and sand spit where the French Foreign Legion, the last hope for despairing and reckless men with nothing to lose, go to have a portion of derring do. Or Three. The Comorros, the Lesser and Greater Comorros. Dusty, burning sand, Nothing on the roads but road. The Poles and Canadians and Brits, too, are doing well. For the rest, they are Katzenjammer Kids — specifically, he says, to laughter, the Germans. Mostly known for being not on the field. Proper counter-insurgency is the trick. And since 2/3 of the 'police forces' there, "after 11 whole days of training," are completely illiterate and have zero experience of the world outside their humble villages, they cannot be a force to reckon with. They cannot even speak Dari, their national tongue. Instead, they speak Pashto, their dialect, but cannot read/write a word, so their empathy is decidedly opaque. They need to be taught to read/write to become proper restraining forces and military worthy of their salt. The One has bitten off rather more than he can comfortably chew, and one wonders why, with his anti-military stance — exceedingly clear to a blind man — he adopted this as his pet project, maybe as the way to patronize and convince the armed services that he does not in fact loathe them. Every president has his special project, the way every First Lady becomes identified with Reading or Special Needs Children, Beautification or the like. This novitiate will be adopting Afghanistan as his class assignment. That initiative in mid-March was a strange and unprecedented one: have soldiers pay for their own meds and healthcare...! Such a thing has never been proposed, even in the bleakest and blackest humor since the starving forces of the Civil War were rag-tagging it back to their one-time hearths. Even then, after a bruising war, the union was a wreck and there was no money left in the treasury. At least Obama retracted that bizarre notion, getting a taste of veteran outrage. Otherwise, the country has always stood by its soldiery — to do otherwise is to posit an oxymoronic stance v. the country he supposedly loves. I have never heard of such a vile suggestion. Even Stalin — if he had the resources — repaired his military once they were injured. The Obama seems to be scraping the bottom. And this is only his 2nd month. Marion DS Dreyfus is a British-born journalist, author and travelor, with interests in Middle East politics, medicine and emerging technology. Contact her at mdsdm@rcn.com |
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THE LATE GREAT STATE OF ISRAEL
Posted by Barbara Taverna, May 17, 2009. |
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This is a book review by Lori Lowenthal Marcus
and it appeared today in the American Thinker
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The Late Great State of Israel: How enemies within and without
threaten the Jewish nation's survival
Aaron Klein, the intrepid Middle East bureau reporter for World Net Daily, hopes that his new book, The Late Great State of Israel, will blast open the tightly shut eyelids of most of the Western world in time to prevent the demise of the Jewish State. The most striking way he does that is by revealing that all of us — the Bush and the Obama administrations and the rest of the world — have been hoodwinked into actively participating in the Final Solution proudly and publicly trumpeted by the, at least thus far, "organizationa non grata" Islamic terrorist group Hamas. For the past four years Aaron Klein has been reporting from Israel, covering every major event in the news vortex of the Middle East. There are many differences between Klein and nearly all the other Middle East journalists: he actually interviews the Arab Palestinian terrorist leaders and asks them about their plans to annihilate Israel, the extent of their military build-up, and the degree to which weaponry provided by the West to support Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party has been acquired by Hamas. The terrorists answer Klein honestly and unequivocally. Read this book and find out what they say. Klein knows that merely exposing the unabashed genocidal agendas of the Muslim world's terrorist leadership will not, because thus far it has not, motivate any organized efforts to thwart them. He knows that because, despite the reports he files directly quoting those terrorist leaders' statements of their intention to annihilate the Jews, no outcry has been heard to permanently deprogram the terrorists, let alone any efforts to actually eliminate them. That is, unless you consider the modern version of torture known as dialoguing terrorists to death. So what information does Klein provide to start the revolution? Klein spells out in elaborate, substantiated detail the extent to which Hamas has infiltrated Fatah. In those situations most relevant to US and world aid to and support of Fatah, Fatah is Hamas. Trying to hold hands with one but not the other is impossible. But wait! Aren't Fatah and Hamas locked in a death struggle, the winner of which gets to be the official terrorist group of the Arab Palestinians? How could they be the same? There are two answers to that, an obvious one nicely wrapped in a maxim, and one that Klein has mined from his exhaustive investigative reporting. Both Fatah and Hamas define themselves almost exclusively as genocide-seeking enemies of Israel; they are aligned in hatred against their common enemy — the Jewish State. So, as the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That's the obvious one. Now let's turn to the more significant factor. This one completely spins the aforementioned maxim on its head: sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy — especially when those enemies are not just similar in principle, but are actually the same. Here's an example which Klein documents in detail: Just before Hamas routed Fatah in Gaza, Israeli security officials "warned that all major intelligence and security organizations associated with Fatah were in a state of 'deep infiltration" by Hamas." In fact, in one of the interviews that makes this account so valuable, Klein learns from a Fatah intelligence official that after the Hamas Gaza takeover, "Fatah officials found Hamas had penetrated their security organizations at the very highest levels." But we do not have to rely on anonymous quotes from Fatah officials, as Klein further explains: On July 27, 2007, Abbas released a 200 page report of an investigation into the conduct of Fatah fighters in Gaza. The goal of the report was to uncover the reasons why Fatah's control of Gaza crumbled so quickly and completely to Hamas. Nabil Amr, a senior Abbas aide who served on the investigative committee, stated on the record that it was because "Fatah security forces were in a state of infiltration by Hamas." And here's the biggest jaw-dropper: while intending to support and bolster Fatah to defeat Hamas, the United States may actually have been helping Hamas defeat Fatah. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator in the region, birthed the eponymous US strategy. The Dayton Plan was for the US to strengthen Fatah's security forces so that Fatah would defeat Hamas, a scourge both to Fatah and the US. Yet Klein shows that, by coordinating strategy with a Hamas spy, it appears that the US actually helped Hamas bring down Fatah. Klein outs the Hamas mole and explains how the evidence, including admissions by Fatah leaders, fits together. Dayton has a lead role in another, painful episode in Klein's book. Klein reveals how the US-trained Palestinian troops turned tail and scattered every time they were charged with confronting Hamas terrorists, even on their own turf. In a repeated Twilight-Zone like scenario, the Israeli Defense Forces had to step in and defend its sworn enemy, Fatah, from its other sworn enemy, Hamas. In April, Lt. Gen. Dayton addressed a US newly-trained Palestinian battalion: "As I look at you, I couldn't be more proud of the fact that you stepped up to be the founders of a Palestinian state." The greatest irony, of course, is that in order to support the charade of a finely-trained Fatah militia, the Israeli military seems well on its way to being pretzel-twisted into stepping up as the actual "founders of a Palestinian state." The Late Great State of Israel is a lament from a very
well-informed insider who fears it will be too late before the world
awakens to the endgame taking place in the Middle East. He provides
example after well-researched, documented example of the almost total
inversion of reality to reportage on the Arab-Israeli conflict. If
just one of his other chapters, each of which is devoted to another
inverted reality, shakes up readers, Klein's gloom may lift. But if
even the chapter about the Hamas-Fatah convergence doesn't cause an
avalanche of reality-realignments, Klein's despair will be entirely
justified.
Contact Barbara Taverna at bltaverna@yahoo.com
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WHAT'S THE IOI — "IF ONLY ISRAEL" — SYNDROME?
Posted by GWY, May 17, 2009. |
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This was written by David Harris, Executive Director,
American Jewish Committee (AJC)
and it appeared in the Jerusalem Post
This is as clear and simple a case as can be made about the ioi syndrome. As jeffrey goldberg says in today's Times, israel fears amalek's arsenal. Shimon Peres has admitted he was dead wrong in supporting the gaza withdrawal. No more foolish mistakes — the stakes are life and death.
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It's the misguided notion, peddled in the name of Israel's best interests by some in the diplomatic, academic, and media worlds, that if only Israel did this or that, peace with its neighbors would be at hand. But since it doesn't, then Israel constitutes the principal, perhaps only, real obstacle to a new day in the Middle East. Striking, isn't it? Poor Israel. If only it had the visual acuity of these "enlightened" souls, then all would be hunky-dory. After all, according to them, Israel holds all the cards, yet refuses to play them. The thinking goes: Why can't those shortsighted Israelis figure out what needs to be done — it's so obvious to us, isn't it? — so the conflict can be brought to a screeching halt? It's the misguided notion, peddled in the name of Israel's best interests by some in the diplomatic, academic, and media worlds, that if only Israel did this or that, peace with its neighbors would be at hand. But since it doesn't, then Israel constitutes the principal, perhaps only, real obstacle to a new day in the Middle East. Striking, isn't it? Poor Israel. If only it had the visual acuity of these "enlightened" souls, then all would be hunky-dory. After all, according to them, Israel holds all the cards, yet refuses to play them. The thinking goes: Why can't those shortsighted Israelis figure out what needs to be done — it's so obvious to us, isn't it? — so the conflict can be brought to a screeching halt? Thus, if only Israel froze settlements. If only Israel removed checkpoints. If only Israel recognized the Hamas government in Gaza. If only Israel stopped assuming the worst about Iran's "pragmatic" leadership, which just wants a nuclear weapon for defensive purposes. If only Israel got beyond its Holocaust trauma. If only Israel ______ well, you can fill in the blank. The point is that, for sufferers of IOI, it essentially all comes down to Israel. And the IOI syndrome has only been strengthened by the advent of the new Israeli government, of course. After all, media outlets from the Associated Press to CBS News to Der Spiegel have already branded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "hardline" from the get-go. Their word choice simply reinforces the notion that the conflict is all about alleged Israeli intransigence. At moments like this, it's important to underscore a few basic points too often lost in the din. First, the Netanyahu government follows on the heels of three successive Israeli governments that sought to achieve peace based on a two-state settlement with the Palestinians — and failed. Each of those governments went far in attempting to strike a deal, but ultimately to no avail. Prime Minister Ehud Barak, joined by President Bill Clinton, tried mightily to reach an agreement with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. The answer was a thunderous rejection, accompanied by the launching of a new wave of terror attacks on Israel. And, not to be forgotten, a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon also took place during the Barak era. It was met by the entrenchment of Hizbullah, committed to Israel's destruction, in the emptied space. No good deed goes unpunished! Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defied his own Likud Party — indeed, he left it to create a new political bloc — and faced down thousands of settlers and their supporters to leave Gaza entirely. It was the first chance ever for Gaza's Arab residents to govern themselves. Had Gazans seized the opportunity in a responsible manner, they could have created unstoppable momentum for a second phase of withdrawal from the West Bank. Instead, Gaza quickly turned itself into a terrorist redoubt, realizing Israelis' worst fears. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, joined by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and urged on by Washington, pressed hard for a deal with the Palestinians on the West Bank. According to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the most recent Israeli offer "talked about Jerusalem and almost 100 percent of the West Bank." Not only was the offer not accepted, but there was not even a counteroffer from the Palestinian side. Prime Minister Netanyahu inherits a situation in which (a) Hamas holds the reins of power in Gaza and a growing arsenal; (b) Hizbullah is continuing to gain strength in Lebanon; (c) the Palestinian Authority failed to take Olmert's outstretched hand and make a deal; (d) indirect talks between Israel and Syria, brokered by Turkey, did not produce an accord on Olmert's watch; and (e) Iran continues its march toward nuclear weapons capability, while trumpeting its support for Syria, Hamas, and Hizbullah. So before Prime Minister Netanyahu gets further lectures on what needs to be done from New York Times or Financial Times editorial writers or columnists, or from American Jewish groups who profess to love Israel more than Israel loves itself, or from some European leaders eager for a deal at practically any cost, perhaps we should take some stock of what's transpired — and why. There have been three successive and bold Israeli efforts to create a breakthrough — and three successive failures. The vast majority of Israelis are desperately hungry for peace and understand the considerable price the country will have to pay in territory and displaced population. Poll after poll proves their readiness, but only if they are assured that lasting peace will be the outcome. Israelis don't have to be pushed, prodded, nudged, cajoled, or pressured to seek a comprehensive peace beyond its current treaties with Egypt and Jordan. They have lived with the absence of peace for 61 years, and know better than anyone else the jarring physical and psychological toll it has inflicted on the nation. Rather, they have to be convinced that the tangible rewards justify the immense risks for a small state in a tough area. Those rewards begin with its neighbors' acceptance of Israel's rightful place in the region as a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders. And that, far more than settlements, checkpoints, or any of the other items on the IOI bill of particulars, gets to the essence of the conflict. The Gaza disengagement demonstrated that settlements and checkpoints can be removed when the time comes. But unless and until Israel's neighbors recognize its inherent legitimacy, and stop viewing it as a temporary interloper that can be defeated militarily or swamped by Palestinian "refugees," then whatever the IOI crowd insists upon will be a secondary issue in the real world. Unless and until this recognition is reflected in Palestinian and other Arab textbooks, where children have been taught for generations that Israelis are modern-day Crusaders to be driven out, then what hope is there for the future? Unless and until the Palestinian Authority succeeds in building a serious governing structure, including an enhanced capacity and political will to combat Palestinian terrorism, then Israel will have no choice but to operate in the West Bank to prevent attacks against its civilians. And unless and until the forces seeking Israels annihilation — from Iran's current regime to Hamas to Hizbullah — are marginalized or replaced by those committed to coexistence, then there will always be a long shadow cast over the road to peace. Some would argue that this view gives the spoilers too much power over the process. I believe it simply acknowledges the inescapable and ominous reality that Israel faces. As Prime Minister Netanyahu makes his first visit to Washington since his election earlier this year, and as the IOI chorus once again raises the decibel level, let's hope that cooler heads prevail. Israel doesn't need sanctimonious lectures on peace. It needs genuine partners for peace. Without them, peace remains elusive. With them, peace becomes inevitable. Contact GWY at gwy123@aol.com |
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FROM ISRAEL: HEARING IT STRAIGHT
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 17, 2009. |
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Now, as we approach the meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu — who does not utter that phrase "two-state solution" — and President Obama — who has committed himself to formation of a Palestinian state. Now, is the time to hear this and share this. MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, follows what Arabs are saying in Arabic to other Arabs — in TV interviews, speeches, editorials and more — and provides translations. These are the words that provide the surest key to what the Arabs intend. Yet these are the words most often ignored by politicians (decision-makers) and media. Which means that decision makers and media — afloat in an aura of wishful thinking — are often lost with regard to those intentions. ~~~~~~~~~~ On May 7, Abbas Zaki, who is PLO Ambassador to Lebanon, gave an interview on ANB TV (Lebanon). It's time, he said, to stop fooling around with half-way measures in dealing with Israel, and to come to a final agreement. Everyone talks about a two-state solution: "With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made — just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward." Can it get any clearer than this? (Thanks! Cheryl H.) The clip (in Arabic with translation) can be seen at:
The transcript of the (translated) interview is at:
~~~~~~~~~~ I will suggest to my American readers that this quote and the URLs for the clip and transcript be sent to President Obama immediately. Ask him if he knows what he's pushing.
Send this material as well to your elected representatives and senators: To locate your representatives:
To locate your senators:
~~~~~~~~~~ A note of explanation here. Zaki speaks in his interview of how they shouldn't give Israel a hudna anymore, as this allows Israel to strengthen. I found this amusing. A hudna is an Islamic term, not a Western or Israeli one, and it reflects an Islamic concept of warfare. While the word is often translated as "truce," what it more accurately means is an agreed upon temporary cessation of hostilities that allows Muslim forces to strengthen towards the day when hostilities will be initiated again. This is what Hamas aims for when it seeks a ceasefire with us. Zaki was a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and has served as head of Fatah operations; he is presently a PLO Central Committee member. ~~~~~~~~~~ There is considerable press being dedicated to that meeting between Netanyahu and Obama tomorrow, with various predictions as to how hard Obama will lean on Netanyahu and how likely it is that Netanyahu will cave (and finally utter that "two state" phrase). We must hope (and pray) that Netanyahu has gotten the message here: We don't want him to shift his current position. The feeling is so strong that I believe he will risk his coalition if he agrees to start negotiations on a Palestinian state. Most of the Likud faction is opposed to his doing this — in particular influential ministers such as Moshe Yaalon, Benny Begin and Yisrael Katz — and there is even talk of a rebellion within the party should Netanyahu give way. Likud MK Danny Danon wrote a letter to the prime minister last week urging him to stay strong; Danon reports that Netanyahu assured him not to worry. Other right wing factions within the coalition are equally concerned, while residents of Judea and Samaria have demonstrated outside of Netanyahu's residence, urging him to stay strong. Likud MK Ofir Akonis says that "The vast majority of Israelis, including representatives of the Opposition in Knesset, reject this formula" — two-states, which would (as the Palestinians intend it) ultimately be for one people. He believes that Netanyahu, who understands the situation, will not commit to establishment of a Palestinian state while in Washington. Only Barak and his Labor associates are pushing for negotiations for two states. ~~~~~~~~~~ There is the possibility, as well, that Obama is not even planning on lowering the boom on our prime minister on their very first meeting. According to unnamed senior White House officials cited by YNet, Obama will not be advancing a new plan for Middle East peace now, but will be pushing for compliance on both sides with regard to Road Map stipulations. While Obama has already met with Jordan's King Abdullah, he is scheduled to meet with Egypt's President Mubarak and PA President Abbas only after meeting with Netanyahu. He may yet be in relationship-building and fact-finding mode with respect to the various Middle East leaders he will be speaking with. ~~~~~~~~~~ We must remember, as well, that while Netanyahu has said he would be going to Washington with a plan for dealing with the Palestinians based on a fresh analysis of the situation, his primary concern is Iran. On this issue, as well, there is no meeting of the minds between Israeli and US officials, so that the possibility of conflict presents itself. But here, too, I am seeing what seems to me a subtle shift in tone from Obama. He is certainly not withdrawing his intention to pursue dialogue with Iran, but he made some statements that surprised me in an interview with Newsweek that is currently on its website. "I understand very clearly that Israel considers Iran an existential threat, and given some of the statements that have been made by President Ahmadinejad, you can understand why." This doesn't mean he thinks Iran represents an existential threat, but he's coming part way. In fact, said the president, since Israel is "right there in the range [of Iranian missiles], their calculation of costs and benefits are (sic) going to be more acute." Thus he didn't see it as his place to "determine for the Israelis what their security needs are." Really? ~~~~~~~~~~ Why is it then, that, according to the Post, CIA director Leon Panetta, during his trip here three weeks ago urged our leaders to "tone down" our pronouncements with regard to attacks on Iran? This is being seen as counterproductive to the US policy of reaching out a hand of peace to the Iranians — offering them inclusion in the international community in return for abandoning their nuclear development. While Netanyahu refused to take the possibility of our attacking Iran off the table, promises were made to Panetta that "there will be no surprises": the US will be informed if we move to attack. It is not clear to me if this means notice would be considerably in advance of an attack, or very briefly before ("we're going into the air in an hour") to preclude US moves to stop us. ~~~~~~~~~~ There are mixed messages being delivered as to how the US will handle itself when dialogue with Iran fails. In that interview alluded to above, Obama said: "...the approach we are taking is one that has to be given a chance and offers the prospect of security, not just for the United States but also for Israel, that is superior to some of the other alternatives." However, he explained, he wasn't naive, and "I've been very clear that I don't take any options off the table with respect to Iran..." (Have some of his aides injected a note of realism into his thinking?) This delivers a different message than the one coming from US officials concerned about Israel sounding too bellicose. They, according to the Post, acknowledge that Obama's efforts may fail, but they say that in this case it may be necessary for the US and its allies to live with a nuclear Iran. (So say they.) And — the most disgusting part of this entire scenario — either way there should be no threats. Talk about an appeasing attitude. ~~~~~~~~~~ The budget has passed in the Cabinet and is expected to also pass in the Knesset. I'm particularly glad for this now, as internal struggling in the face of all we have to contend with on the outside would weaken us. ~~~~~~~~~~ Pope Benedict is back at the Vatican, which is just fine with most of us. I observed that he said what his hosts of the moment wanted to hear, so that, for example, he lamented with the Palestinians regarding the suffering they endure because of the imposition of the security fence: "In a world where more and more borders are being opened up — to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges — it is tragic to see walls still being erected." But when he was with Peres he addressed the unfortunate need to put up such a barrier against terrorism. A pointless exercise, finally. But in the end what raised my hackles the most was his statement to Abbas: "Mr. President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers." Excuse me? This land is our homeland, the land of our forefathers. ~~~~~~~~~~ The new PA government, which was supposed to have been sworn in by now, is being delayed because of internal Fatah tensions regarding its composition. ~~~~~~~~~~ I am currently in the midst of a major report on UNRWA, which has particular significance because of Hamas connections to this agency and international intentions of using it as a conduit of fund for reconstruction in Gaza. And so, please, bear with me, my friends, if I am slow in answering communication. I will try not to skip posting on any day on which there are significant happenings. There are, actually, several other issues regarding the UN that I want to look at, as well, in my postings. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" Prof. Abraham Katzir of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy has developed a technique for identifying contaminated water, even though it looks clear to the naked eye, by use of the infrared spectrum, which is not visible to humans. Using a specially designed infrared spectrometer that is connected by fibers to the water source, this system is able to detect contamination as soon as it enters a reservoir or pipeline and notify authorities immediately. It can detect poison in amounts well below the thresholds set by the World Health Organization, and may be the first real-time monitor to protect against chemical attack. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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THIS IS WHY I LOVE BEING A JEW
Posted by Shaul and Aviva Ceder, May 17, 2009. |
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This comes from Daddy Day and is archived at
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Our condition, in Israel, has never been better than it is now! Only the television and the media make people think that the end of the world is near. Only 65 years ago, Jews were brought to death like sheep to slaughter. NO country, NO army. Only 60 years ago, seven Arab countries declared war on little Israel, the Jewish State, just a few hours after it was established. We were 650,000 Jews against the rest of the Arab world. No IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) or Air Force. We were only a small group of stubborn people with nowhere to go. Remember: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordn, Egypt, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, they all attacked at once. The state that the United Nations "gave" us was 65% desert. We started it from zero. Only 41 years ago, we fought three of the strongest countries in the Middle East, and we crushed them in the Six Day War. Over the years we fought different coalitions of Arab countries with modern armies and with huge amounts of Russian-Soviet ammunition, and we still won. Today we have a beautiful country, a powerful Army, a strong Air Force, an adequate Navy and a thriving high teach industry. Intel, Microsoft, and IBM have all developed their businesses here. Our doctors have won important prizes in the medical development field. We turned the desert into a prosperous land We sell oranges, flowers, and vegetables around the world We launched our own satellite! Three satellites at once! We are in good company; together with the USA (280 million residents), Russia (220 million residents), China (1.3 billion residents) and Europe ( France, England and Germany 350 million residents), we are one of the only countries in the world that have launched something into space! Israel today is among the few powerful countries that have nuclear technology & capabilities. (We will never admit it, but everyone knows.) To think that only 65 years ago we were disgraced and hopeless. We crawled out from the burning crematoriums of Europe. We won in all our wars. With a little bit of nothing we built an empire. Who are Khaled Mashal (leader of Hamas) or Hassan Nasrallah (leader of Hezbollah) trying to frighten us? They are amusing us. As we celebrate Independence Day, let's not forget what this holy day is all about; we overcame everything. We overcame the Greeks; We overcame the Romans; We overcame the Spanish Inquisition; We overcame the Russians pogrom; We overcame Hitler, we overcame Germany and overcame the Holocaust; We overcame the armies of seven countries. Relax chevray (friends), we will overcome our current enemies. Never mind where you look in human history. Think about it, the Jewish nation, our condition has never been better than now. So let's lift our heads up and remember: Never mind which country or culture tries to harm us or erase us from the world. We will still exist and persevere. Egypt ? Anyone know where the Egyptian empire disappeared to? The Greeks? Alexander Macedon? The Romans? Is anyone speaking Latin today? The Third Reich? Did anyone hear news from them lately? And look at us, the Bible nation! From slavery in Egypt, we are still here, still speaking the same language. Exactly here, exactly now. Maybe The Arabs don't know it yet, but we are an eternal nation. All the time that we keep our identity, we will stay eternal. We are not worrying, complaining, crying, or fearing! Business here is beseder (fine). It can definitely be much better, but it is still fine. Don't pay attention to the nonsense in the media, they will not tell you about our festivals here in Israel or about the people that continue living, going out, meeting friends. Yes, sometimes morale is down, so what? This is only because we are mourning the dead while they are celebrating spilled blood. And this is the reason we will survive after all. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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ANALYSIS: IRAN-SYRIA ALLIANCE IN HARMONY
Posted by Jonathan Spyer, May 17, 2009. |
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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Bashar Assad of Syria reconfirmed the close alliance between their two countries during the Iranian president's visit to Damascus this week. Ahmadinejad's visit came on the eve of the return of two senior US officials, Jeffrey Feltman and Daniel Shapiro, to Damascus. Their visit is part of ongoing US efforts at engagement with Syria. The tone struck by Ahmadinejad and Assad this week, however, did not suggest a mood for compromise. Syrian President Bashar Assad, in his address to the joint press conference held by the two presidents after their meeting, accurately summed up the Iranian-Syrian alliance as based upon both "principles and interests." It is sometimes suggested that the Syrian-Iranian alliance is a marriage of convenience between two essentially incompatible regimes. This view is incorrect. The alliance is of long standing, is rooted in shared interests and expresses itself in a shared ideological conception — that of the idea of muqawama (resistance) to the supposed ambitions of the West and Israel in the region. Ahmadinejad's and Assad's statements following their meeting offer evidence of the depth and nature of the alliance. The Iranian president mocked US attempts at engagement, saying "We don't want honey from bees that sting us. Efforts must be made to rid the region of the presence of foreigners." He went on to demand US withdrawal from "Afghanistan and the borders of Pakistan." Ahmadinejad's speech radiated the sense that Iranian defiance was bringing results. The Iranian president noted that those who once sought to put pressure on Syria and Iran were now obliged to seek the assistance of these countries. "Harmony and steadfastness," he said, "are the secret of victory." He went on to demand reform of the United Nations, reiterating a claim he made in his recent Geneva speech that the international body failed to reflect a world in which the balance of forces was changing. The Syrian president struck a similar tone. Assad said that Ahmadinejad's visit confirmed once more the "strategic relationship" between the two countries. He expressed the support of Syria and Iran for Palestinian "resistance." Assad then detailed Syria and Iran's common satisfaction regarding current developments in Iraq, and noted Syria's support for the Iranian nuclear program. He also cast an eye over the history of the relationship between the two countries. He noted that Syria had supported Iran at the time of the Islamic Revolution and in the subsequent Iran-Iraq War, and that Damascus had in return benefited from Iranian support when under pressure in recent years. The words of the two presidents, for those listening closely, are instructive in grasping both the principles and the interests underlying the Syrian-Iranian alliance. Regarding principles — the two speeches reflect the joint adoption of a secular language of nationalist, anti-Western assertion which is reminiscent of earlier times. These ideas may have faded from view in the West in recent years, but they retain popularity among broad populations in the Arab world. The Iranians — non-Sunnis and non-Arabs — want to enlist this appeal to their own banner, presenting themselves as the natural representative of all those countries and forces opposing the West in the region. Syria, meanwhile, has long been the chief guardian among the Arabs of the archaic slogans of third-worldism and defiance. Iranian rhetoric of this kind sits well with the Syrians. The Assad regime, of course, is committed ultimately to its own survival, and not to any ideological path. But there is no sense that an alliance based on an appeal of this kind is in any way unnatural or uncomfortable for the Syrians. On the contrary, it fits perfectly the defiant stance that has enabled the Syrian Ba'athists to punch above their weight in the region for a generation. Regarding interests, Assad's whistle-stop tour through the history of the relationship reminds us of its longevity. The mullahs in Teheran and the Ba'athist family dictatorship in Damascus have stuck together for a long time. The Syrian dictator's expressions of quiet satisfaction at the current turn of events in Iraq, and Ahmadinejad's characteristic tone of triumphalism confirm that the partnership continues to bear fruit. The next arena for the meeting point of Syrian and Iranian principles and interests is Lebanon, which may shortly be added to the regional alliance headed by these countries. Next month's Lebanese elections formed the backdrop to Ahmadinejad's visit, and perhaps explain the hurried return of Feltman and Shapiro. No doubt the two US officials will reassert the need for noninterference in the upcoming polls, which the Hizbullah-led alliance is favored to win. Lebanon has long been the ideal arena for the meeting of Iranian and Syrian principles and interests. It is worth remembering that as far back as 1982, it was Syrian facilitation of the entry of 1,500 Iranian Revolutionary Guards into the Lebanese Bekaa which made possible the subsequent foundation of Hizbullah. This long investment may be about to pay off. In any case, the general direction of events in the region appears to the liking of the two good friends from Damascus and Teheran — offering the prospect of many good years of friendship to come. Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the (GLORIA) Global
Research in International Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary
Center, Herzliya. Contact Gloria by email at info@gloria-center.org
This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post on the 6/5/2009 and
is archived at
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DEFEATING POLITICAL ISLAM: THE NEW COLD WAR
Posted by Paul Eidelberg, May 16, 2009. |
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Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War
Defeating Political Islam is the title of a book written by American nuclear physicist Moorthy S. Muthuswamy, who was born in India. It is the one book Netanyahu should read before he meets Obama. The book has been applauded by experts such as Steven Emerson, Executive Director of Investigative Project on Terrorism, Robert Spencer, Andrew G. Bostom, Bill Warner, Director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, as well as by Geert Wilders, Member of the Dutch Parliament. This is by far the best book I have read on Islam — and I have read the most eminent authors in the United States, England, and France. It took great courage to write this book, because Dr. Muthuswamy is calling for a refutation of Islam as a religion. This is the key to overcoming Islamic imperialism and defending civilization from its most dangerous enemy. This unique book combines scholarship and practical wisdom — a wisdom sadly lacking among the political and intellectual leaders of the free world. Consider the present article a mere preface to what I hope will soon follow. In Muthuswamy's book we can learn why peace-making with the Arab Muslims now occupying Jewish land is virtually impossible. The impossibility is inherent in the very nature of Islam, or what Dr. Muthuswamy prefers to call "political Islam." He begins on the surface and argues that jihadic organizations like Fatah and Hamas have no vision of [economic and social] development — due to the focus on medieval sharia and jihad as the instruments of [their] internal and external policy framework ... Iran is another example of a country in which Islamists gained power through the ballot box and then pursued jihad-spreading policies.... Due to their control of the military and the mosques, the two strong institutions that would be capable of challenging them, the radicals can maintain control over the reigns of power. (pp. 40-41). This applies to the Arab Muslims occupying Gaza as well as to those inhabiting Judea and Samaria, the so-called West Bank. It follows from Dr. Muthuswamy's analysis that these Arab Muslims are not fit for, or worthy of, independent statehood, and it would be sheer folly and cowardice if Israel's government were to succumb to the mindless "two state solution" insisted by the Obama administration. Even a leftist like former MK Yossi Sarid admitted that the Arabs in question do not merit statehood. Sarid had extensive experience on the Knesset Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs. When Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, Sarid was taken aback when Yasser Arafat, along with Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, supported the rape of Kuwait. He was all the more discomfited when Israel's own Arab citizens applauded the Iraqi dictator. In view of these embarrassing developments, he felt compelled to "reassess" his position. This he did on August 17, 1990, in an article published in Ha'aretz, Israel's elite intellectual newspaper: The endorsement of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait by the PLO, by supposedly moderate Palestinians not affiliated with the PLO, and even by many Arabs who live inside Israel and hold Israeli citizenship has put a knife in the back of the peace process.... The PLO has dedicated the past two years to convincing Israelis and others that it has changed, that it has reconciled itself to the existence of the State of Israel and has abandoned terrorism. The PLO has kicked the bucket over. Sarid proceeded to kick the bucket of sanity over and went on to advocate a Palestinian state! Is this not also the case of the present Netanyahu government, except that Netanyahu, unlike Sarid, has had sixteen years of post-Oslo experience, during which the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza have murdered some 1,700 Jews while wounding 8,000 more. The leaders of these Arabs — contrary to Netanyahu's wealth-making approach to peace, are not primarily concerned about building the economic and social infrastructure of a Palestinian state. No, they are indoctrinating and training their children to become jihadists, as Dr. Muthuswamy indicates. And their murderous agenda has the support of an overwhelming majority of the Palestinians. He estimates that more than 50% of Islam's 1.5 billion adherents support jihad! There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that the Palestinians will metamorphose in bourgeois democrats and live in genuine and abiding peace with Israel. I will go further. No less than Middle East expert Daniel Pipes regards the Israel-Egypt peace treaty a failure — which scotches the fancy of those who suggest that Israel now has an opportunity to forge a (reliable) alliance with Egypt vis-à-vis Iran. In his November 21, 2006 article in the New York Sun, Pipes points out that 92% percent of respondents in a poll of one thousand Egyptians over 18 years of age called Israel an enemy state. Moreover, Egypt's leading democracy movement, Kifaya, recently launched an initiative to collect a million signatures on a petition demanding the annulment of the March 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. So what can Prime Minister Netanyahu expect from Egypt's creation, the PLO, now called the Palestinian Authority? He should seek the advice of Dr. Muthuswamy.
Professor Paul Eidelberg is
an internationally known political scientist,
author and lecturer. He is the founder and president of The Foundation
for Constitutional Democracy, a Jerusalem-based think tank for
improving Israel's system of governance. He has written on the
Arab-Israel conflict and on Judaism. Contact him at
list-owner@foundation1.org
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EUROPEAN MUSLIMS A 5TH COLUMN; SAUDI EXTREMISM CONTINUES; OBAMA
STRATEGICALLY IMPERILING THE WORLD; DEALING WITH IRAN
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 16, 2009. |
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ADMIT EUROPEAN MUSLIMS A FIFTH COLUMN Two Muslim writers in the Gulf press criticized Muslim groups in Europe for harming the West while at the same time enjoying Western freedoms and services. These are their points, boiled down. Thousands of Muslims who fled their own, oppressive countries to the West receive asylum, work, shelter, health insurance and citizenship. The West treated the immigrants with "amazing kindness." In return, some of their sheikhs urge destruction of their new countries. Followers commit terrorism there. RADICAL ISLAM CONTROLS THE MUSLIM COMMUNITIES The problem is that Radical Islam has "taken over the political, religious, social, and cultural life inside and outside Islamic and Arab countries and attempt to do the same with Western Muslim populations. The Radicals have been "imposing restrictions on the first generation [of immigrants], on brainwashing the second generation, and on excommunicating unions, organizations, and mosques" The ideology of Radical Muslims, "With their books, films, and extreme separatist ideas, they have paved the way for the proliferation of different forms of extremism, and hence to overt terrorism." "The unceasing attacks on Western civilization, on man-made laws, and on Oriental studies, as well as on [what they regarded as] the cultural invasion and Western conspiracies — have made it difficult for [Muslims] to integrate into the new environment to which they migrated while hating it. [However, his integration] as far as his material interests or the aims of his party were concerned [was never impeded]." THEY DON'T STUDY, RESPECT, OR BUILD WESTERN SOCIETY The Muslims have "failed to see a positive side to Western society or to study Western literature, art, and culture so that it could create a model of modern culture, literature and art that combines Western and Islamic [elements]. Even the Muslim Brotherhood leaders, along with others who are proud of the Islamic civilization and profess to be heirs to the Baghdad and Andalusian civilizations — [even they], during the half century [of their sojourn] in Paris, London, or Germany, have not produced a new idea, art or culture worthy of notice..." "True, they have established publishing houses to circulate their parties' books and publications; they never let up in improving their media weaponry, such as the press, television, and other [media outlets]; they developed their own financial institutions and banks [and called them] 'Islamic: no interest'; they established private schools, which only further isolated Muslim boys and girls from their European environment and thus enhanced the Islamic parties' control of their [lives] — and this is only a partial list. But what they have failed to do is to act as a bridge between East and West, as have, say, the poets of the [Muslim] diaspora. They also never helped plant seeds of modernization, democracy, and creativity — cultural, artistic, and literary — in the Arab and the Islamic worlds." "The Islamist literature, publications, and sermons, even in the heart of Europe, have essentially retained the conceptual structure of ancient [Muslim] writings, in that they continue to treat any input from civilization as refuse, all the amazing technological innovations as purely material development, and the life and values of the West as decadence and degradation." THE MUSLIMS DID NOT LEARN WESTERN TOLERANCE The Western Muslims do not "acknowledge that religious choice is a personal matter." "...they became increasingly offensive, since they perceived that the West was conceding to their demands and treating them with tolerance." The Radical Muslim groups took Muslim ideology, including ones about the value of citizenship and man-made laws, and gave them more extreme and violent interpretations. They call modern times the "pre-Islamic era of idol worship." They say that "Human achievement and beliefs, people's traditions and customs, their traditional sources, their arts and literature, their laws and regulations, and even most of what we regard as aspects of the Islamic culture, Islamic authorities, and Islamic thought and philosophy — all these are products of idol worship." Radical Muslim "...books are brainwashing thousands of youths in the Muslim world, and drawing [many of them] towards extremist terrorist organizations."
FORD FOUNDATION REORGANIZING The Ford Foundation's new manager, Luis A. Ubinas, is revamping it for efficiency (Stephanie Strom, NY Times, 4/14, A12). However efficiently it may distribute funds, it wastes much of them on counter-productive projects. As http://www.ngomonitor.org/ explains, Ford donates to many Palestinian Authority and leftist Israeli NGOs that cloak themselves as human rights organizations, but wage a fraudulent political and propaganda war on Israel. The Israeli NGOs seek to subvert Israeli defense against jihad. Most of those organizations do not uphold human rights, and work with oppressors. NGO Monitor complained to the Foundation, which promised to reform. However, the Foundation soon reverted to its biased practice. The NY Times article did not mention this serious criticism of the Ford Foundation. HIZBULLAH ADMITS OPERATING IN EGYPT Egypt uncovered a Hizbullah group in Sinai. Sheikh Nasrallah, head of Hizbullah admitted dispatching it. He claimed that they were there to assist Hamas. He accused Egypt of "collaboration" with Israel against Hamas. Egypt does not want to become embattled, like Lebanon, nor even be a staging area for a terrorist organization. It is concerned about Iran's long reach. Israel hopes that Egypt's conflict with Iran and Hizbullah would prompt it to cooperate against arms smuggling into Gaza (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/12). I find that Muslim leaders readily accuse each other. "Collaboration" is a term they may use simply to damn somebody in fellow Muslims' eyes. In this case, it means that Egypt does not cooperate fully with Hamas. It cooperates to the extent of opposing Israeli control of Israel's side of the Gaza border, without controlling Egypt's side sufficiently to block arms smuggling. Egypt also works against Israel in many other ways. SAUDI CLERIC TEACHES CHILDREN TO HATE JEWS Saudi Cleric Khaled Al-Khlewi narrated ancient tales about alleged treachery of Jewish tribes against Muhammad, as if all Jews of all times are bad. He blames Communism on the Jews, because Karl Marx was born one. He teaches students that Jews kill Muslims, and Allah wants them to kill Jews (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/12 from memri@memri.org. — Middle East Media Research Institute). Saudi extremism! U.S.A. NO LONGER WORLD'S PROTECTOR "Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world's policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama's presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week." "Somewhere between apologizing for American history — both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US's nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America's missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, "Don't worry, be happy," as he leaves them to Moscow's tender mercies; humiliating Iraq's leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world's aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future." "Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington." ANTI-U.S. LEFT & MEDIA PLEASED "This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama's supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn't be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN's former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, "America's... superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy." "Indeed, the media's enthusiasm for Obama appeared to grow with each presidential statement of contrition for America's past uses of force, each savage attack he leveled against his predecessor George W. Bush, each swipe he took at Israel, and each statement of gratitude for the blessings of Islam he uttered." "But while the media couldn't get enough of the new US leader, America's most stable allies worldwide began a desperate search for a reset button that would cause the administration to take back its abandonment of America's role as the protector of the free world." U.S. ALLIES DISMAYED BY OBAMA BETRAYAL "Tokyo was distraught by the administration's reaction to North Korea's three-stage ballistic missile test. Japan recognized the betrayal inherent in Defense Secretary Robert Gates's announcement ahead of Pyongyang's newest provocation that the US would only shoot the missile down if it targeted US territory. In one sentence, uttered not in secret consultations, but declared to the world on CNN, Gates abrogated America's strategic commitment to Japan's defense." "India, for its part, is concerned by Obama's repeated assertions that its refusal to transfer control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir provinces to Pakistan inspires Pakistani terror against India. It is equally distressed at the Obama administration's refusal to make ending Pakistan's support for jihadist terror groups attacking India a central component of its strategy for contending with Pakistan and Afghanistan. In general, Indian officials have expressed deep concern over the Obama administration's apparent lack of regard for India as an ally and a significant strategic counterweight to China." "Then there is Iraq. During his brief visit to Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon, Obama didn't even pretend that he would ensure that Iraqi democracy and freedom are secured before US forces are withdrawn next year." " Hearing Obama's statements, and watching him and his advisers make daily declarations of friendship to Iran's mullahs, Iraqi leaders are considering their options for surviving the rapidly approaching storm." "The Czech, Polish, Georgian and Ukrainian governments were quick to recognize that Obama's strong desire to curry favor with the Kremlin and weaken his own country will imperil their ability to withstand Russian aggression." "It is not a coincidence, for instance, that the day Obama returned to Washington, Georgia's Moscow-sponsored opposition announced its plan to launch massive protests in Tblisi to force the ouster of pro-Western, anti-Russian Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili." "And as for Russia, like Iran, which responded to Obama's latest ode to the mullahs by opening a nuclear fuel plant and announcing it has 7,000 advanced centrifuges in operation, so Moscow reacted to Obama's fig leaf with a machine gun, announcing its refusal to support sanctions against North Korea and repeating its false claim that Iran's nuclear program is non-aggressive." "Finally there is Israel. If Obama's assertions that Israel must support the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, his declarations of support for the so-called Saudi "peace plan," which requires Israel to commit national suicide in exchange for "peace" with the Arab world, and his continuous and increasingly frantic appeals for Iran to "engage" his administration weren't enough to show Israel that Obama is sacrificing the US's alliance with the Jewish state in a bid to appease the Arabs and Iran, on Tuesday Vice President Joseph Biden made this policy explicit." "When Biden told CNN that Israel would be "ill-advised" to attack Iran's nuclear installations, he made clear that from the administration's perspective, an Israeli strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, the Obama administration prefers to see Iran become a nuclear power than to see Israel secure its very existence." "AMERICA'S BETRAYAL of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies — enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease. And as the US strengthens their adversaries at their expense, these spurned democracies must consider their options for surviving as free societies in this new, threatening, post-American environment." U.S. ALLIES CAN'T DEFEND THEMSELVES ALONE "For the most part, America's scorned allies lack the ability to defeat their enemies on their own. India cannot easily defeat nuclear-armed Pakistan, which itself is fragmenting into disparate anti-Indian nuclear-wielding Islamist and Islamist-supporting factions." "Japan today cannot face North Korea — which acts as a Chinese proxy — on its own without risking a confrontation with China." "Russia's invasion of Georgia last August showed clearly that its former republics and satellites have no way of escaping Moscow's grip alone." "This week's Arab League conference at Doha demonstrated to Iraq's leaders that their Arab brethren are incapable and unwilling to confront Iran." "And the Obama administration's intense efforts to woo Iran coupled with its plan to slash the US's missile defense programs — including those in which Israel participates — and reportedly pressure Israel to dismantle its own purported nuclear arsenal — make clear that Israel today stands alone against Iran." U.S. ALLIES NEED TO COALESCE STRATEGICALLY "But viable opportunities for survival do exist, and Israel can and must play a central role in developing them. Specifically, Israel must move swiftly to develop active strategic alliances with Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic and it must expand its alliance with India. With Israel's technological capabilities, its intelligence and military expertise, it can play a vital role in shoring up these countries' capacities to contain the rogue states that threaten them. And by containing the likes of Russia, North Korea and Pakistan, they will make it easier for Israel to contain Iran even in the face of US support for the mullahs." "The possibilities for strategic cooperation between and among all of these states and Israel run the gamut from intelligence sharing to military training, to missile defense, naval development, satellite collaboration, to nuclear cooperation. In addition, of course, expanded economic ties between and among these states can aid each of them in the struggle to stay afloat during the current global economic crisis." "Although far from risk free, these opportunities are realistic because they are founded on stable, shared interests. This is the case despite the fact that none of these potential alliances will likely amount to increased support for Israel in international forums. Dependent as they are on Arab oil, these potential allies cannot be expected to vote with Israel in the UN General Assembly. But this should not concern Jerusalem." ISRAEL'S POLITICAL STRATEGY NOW SEEN AS FAILED "The only thing that should concern Jerusalem today is how to weaken Iran
both directly by attacking its nuclear installations, and indirectly by weakening its international partners in Moscow, Pyongyang, Islamabad and beyond in the absence of US support. If Japan is able to contain North Korea and so limit Pyongyang's freedom to proliferate its nuclear weapons and missiles to Iran and Syria and beyond, Israel is better off. So, too, Israel is better off if Russia is contained by democratic governments in Eastern and Central Europe. These nations in turn are better off if Iran is contained and prevented from threatening them both directly and indirectly through its strategic partners in North Korea, Syria and Russia, and its terror affiliates in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan."
"For the past 16 years, successive Israeli governments have wrongly believed
that politics trump strategic interests. The notion that informed Israel's decision-makers — not unlike the notion that now informs the Obama administration — was that Israel's strategic interests would be secured as a consequence of its efforts to appease its enemies by weakening itself. Appreciative of Israel's sacrifices for peace, the nations of the world — and particularly the US, the Arabs and Europe — would come to Israel's defense in its hour of need. Now that the hour of need has arrived, Israel's political strategy for securing itself has been exposed as a complete fiasco."
WILL U.S. MAKE A COMEBACK IN TIME?
"The good news is that no doubt sooner rather than later, Obama's similarly
disastrous bid to denude the US of its military power under the naive
assumption that it will be able to use its new stature as a morally pure strategic weakling to win its enemies over to its side will fail spectacularly and America's foreign policy will revert to strategic rationality."
"But to survive the current period of American strategic madness,
Israel and the US's other unwanted allies must build alliances with
one another — covertly if need be — to contain their adversaries in the
absence of America. If they do so successfully, then the damage to
global security induced by Obama's emasculation of his country will be
limited. If on the other hand, they fail, then America's eventual
return to its senses will likely come too late for its allies — if not
for America itself." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media
Research & Analysis, 4/11, from caroline@carolineglick.com, editor of
Jerusalem Post.)
MY COMMENTS
It is as if Obama has joined the evil axis.
Although the U.S. no longer demands much from its enemies, it continues to demand sacrifice from Israel in behalf of Israel's jihadist enemies in the Palestinian Authority. Those enemies are anti-American, though they accept U.S. aid. Put another way, the US has backed off from pressuring enemies, but not from pressuring friends.
However, it also is true that the U.S. has squandered much of the resources with which to play as major a role as it once did. Some of its allies failed to contribute sufficient resources on their own. They exploited U.S. generosity and initiative. In letting the US get exhausted, they outsmarted themselves. They failed to see that the growth in the world's resources meant that the US retains a smaller proportion of world power.
ISRAELI PROFESSOR HELPS IRAN
Holocaust-denier Neve Gordon heads the political science department at Ben-Gurion U., in Israel. He has become an Israel-bashing columnist for the Tehran Times in Holocaust-denying Iran. Iran, you know, threatens to incinerate Israel [presumably when it gets the nuclear weapons it claims to be developing for peaceful use] (Prof. Steven Plaut, 4/8).
Most Americans do not realize how unpatriotic many of Israel's social studies professors are.
JUDEA-SAMARIA GETTING LESS SECURE
As Israel removes checkpoints in Judea-Samaria, at U.S. request, terrorists get through to where they can attack Israelis. [This happens in cycles: (1) Remove checkpoint, terrorists attack Jews near there, restore checkpoint; (2) Remove same checkpoint, terrorists attack Jews near there, restore checkpoint.]
The Israeli Army plans to withdraw guards, leaving many settlements insecure (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/17).
Israeli security forces also disarmed many settlers and armed P.A. troops, who often commit terrorism. Is this a deliberate form of pressure on Jews to leave the Territories, so the government can give the land to the Arabs?
DEALING WITH IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS
In response to Roger Cohen's NY Times Op.Ed., one letter to the editor asserted that if the existing nuclear powers destroyed their nuclear weapons, Iran would no longer need to keep up with them by developing its own nuclear weapons.
Another letter pointed out that Iran threatens to annihilate Israel, and nuclear weapons would help it do so. Nevertheless, Mr. Cohen urges Pres. Obama to "get tough" on Israel. This would blame the victim of an existential threat (4/17).
The notion that Iran wants nuclear weapons only for parity and self-defense has no facts to back it up. None ever are cited, just the theory is asserted. National security policy should not be based on assertion alone. I think this theory is childish. It fails to take into account Iran's vicious use of terrorist proxy armies to destabilize the region in favor of jihad.
Getting tough on Israel may be easy to do. Unfortunately, it builds false expectations of solving the problem, while exacerbating it. It is a form of the old and failed policy of appeasement that led us to WWII and the Cold War.
ISRAEL NEEDS A NEW POLICY
Israel's Foreign Minister Lieberman told U.S. envoy George Mitchell that Israel needs a new policy towards the Arabs. "'Previous Israeli leaders have been willing to make major concessions to the PA, but have received nothing in return,' he said. 'The concessions Israel has made unilaterally, such as giving up Gaza, have not improved Israel's security,' he added, 'but instead have led to conflicts such as the Cast Lead counterterrorism operation there'" (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/17).
Factually correct, Lieberman makes sense, based on the historical context. Did his good sense impress the envoy of the U.S., whose policy, not based on the historical context, has failed for years? That context is jihad.
SEC. CLINTON IMPRESSES FOREIGN LEADERS
Sec. Clinton has impressed foreign leaders favorably by echoing Pres. Obama's humble apologies to them for our foreign policy failures. Some of these policies, such as the ones on Cuba, originated before the Bush administrations, but she criticized just those policies that Pres. Bush started.
She said that ostracizing Iran's government did not persuade it to cease unclear weapons ambitions (Mark Landler, NY Times, 4/18, A4).
Clinton's analysis of Iran policy is too sweeping. She stated it in a way that implies that coercion does not work. As I see it, there wasn't much coercion. Iran was not ostracized. The US and a few other countries boycotted it. Other countries, however, invested in it. A boycott must be almost universal, to work.
Military force was not tried at all. Also, Congress appropriated funds for backing anti-government Iranian groups, but the State Dept. sat on the funds. It might have been possible to have changed the regime. Changing the regime might not have curbed Iranian nuclear development. However, it could have left a responsible government in charge of the weapons.
FOREIGN SOVEREIGNTY
Raul Castro said that he'd reform relations with the U.S. "...without the slightest shadow cast on our sovereignty and without the slightest violation of the Cuban people's right to self-determination" (Sheryl Gay Stolberg & Alexi Barrionnuevo, NY Times, 4/18, A8).
As with the Arab states, the Cuban people don't have self-determination, their dictator does, when he doesn't subordinate his country to Russia.
ISRAEL SEEN PREPARING TO RAID IRAN
Israel apparently is preparing to raid Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Israel acquired necessary aircraft. It practiced long-range missions by destroying a Hamas arms smuggling caravan in Sudan. It held military and big civil defense exercises. It will test whether the Arrow anti-missile defense could intercept retaliatory missiles from Iran.
Israel has not done this secretly. Its officials leak the news, to warn Iran [in the unstated hope that Iran would stand down, making an actual raid unnecessary].
In order to reach Iran, Israeli planes would have to fly through Iraq. The US controls Iraqi skies, and officially disapproves, though the source suggests that unofficially it approves. US officials think that a raid would just delay Iran for 2-3 years (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/18).
The Obama administration probably disapproves. It is withdrawing from the role of world policeman and resuming the role of appeasing Islamist imperialists.
If a raid were good for only 2-3 years, perhaps the answer is to raid every 2-3 years, until the regime changes.
The advantage to Israel of its revelations is to accustom the world to the prospect of a raid. The disadvantage is to alert Iran to raise its guard.
ARAB-ISRAEL NEGOTIATIONS: SET PRECONDITIONS?
Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu set a precondition for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority (P.A.): P.A. recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
The State Dept. calls that precondition "unacceptable."
The State Dept. imposes on Israel as if it were a colony. Considering that US foreign policy is in a critical mess, the State Dept. should reform itself, not prescribe to others. Nor is the State Dept. a fair or even neutral observer. The P.A. has set preconditions, too, but the State Dept. did not reject them.
The Arabs often demand substantive preconditions. That is how they bargain, but such demands should be left to negotiations. What Netanyahu asks is to test whether the Arabs want peace, for Arab acceptance of the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty indicates whether any peace agreement would be final. It would be fair of Netanyahu to defer new negotiations until the Arabs honor past ones. After all, the P.A. has violated all its peace agreements for 15 years.
DEFENSE SEC. GATES ON IRAN
Sec. Gates warned that a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would not cripple them for long. It would unite Iranians against whoever struck its facilities. He said that the only way for Iran's nuclear weapons program to end is by their own hands, upon finding it is too costly (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/2).
Then they are not going to end it. They spent much on it already. They didn't care how much it hurt their economy. Part of their motive may have been national pride, but most is to back up their imperialist foreign policy. Now they are just months away from completing the program. Those religious fanatics surely won't stop now and lose face over it, because of the small remaining cost for completion. Gates' rationale is illogical.
Sec. Gates is too casual about this. If Iran were a normal country, its possession of nuclear weapons would add to mankind's risk of annihilation by accident but not by design. But Iran is not normal. It is jihadist. It seeks hegemony for its extremist faith. Those weapons are a danger for the US and many other countries. The US should destroy those facilities as often as necessary. Instead, the US government talks about reducing its own arsenal significantly. The amount of reduction is unstated. It should leave us with sufficient force.
LAND, IDEOLOGICAL, RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AT BAT AYIN
Arabs mount a hill in an undeveloped part of Bat Ayin, a Jewish owned community in Judea-Samaria, in order to spy on the Jews there. It is where an Arab murdered a Jew. To preempt Arab surveillance, residents started building a synagogue on the hill. The IDF responded by calling the hill a "closed military area," barred the owners, and tore down the construction more than once.
About 200 Arabs from the murderer's village threw rocks at 15 Jewish residents. Saying they feared for their lives, two residents opened fire on the Arabs. The pair and two other Jews were arrested. The Israeli media reported the gunshots but not the rock throwing (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/3).
Notice the one-sided, pro-Arab reporting? Notice the IDF barring Jews but not Arabs? Notice the security forces accepting Arab criminal complaints but not Jewish ones? That anti-Zionism is what the Jews of Judea-Samaria confront, along with Arab violence. I believe the residents' explanation, because Arab mobs advance on a small number of Jews to tear them apart, unless stopped. When stopped, the Arabs complain to police that the few Jews attacked them, and police act on the Arab complaint, not that the Arabs have a record of veracity. To the contrary, their complaints usually fall apart.
OBAMA HERDS JEWS INTO ANTI-ZIONIST COALITION
The Obama pressure cooker is gearing up to full capacity. One of
the first acts of the Obama regime has been formation of a broad
coalition of forces, including American Jewish leaders, to pressure
the State of Israel into abandoning and relinquishing land to the
Arabs.
Obama's early success can be exemplified by a headline in the
daily Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, from May 4, 2009:
AIPAC delegates to lobby for two-state solution. The article explains:
"participants at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy
Conference will this week be urging their elected representatives to
press President Barack Obama for precisely that. (a Palestinian
state)... AIPAC thousands will be asking their congressmen to sign on to
a letter addressed to Obama that explicitly posits the need for a
"viable Palestinian state."
Obama also successfully manipulated other Jews and even Israelis to
participate in his anti-Israel coalition. Speaking at the same 2009
convention, former Israeli Foreign minister Tzippi Livni stated: " we
need to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel. This is not a technical
matter, it is a matter of our survival. And in the choice between
giving up our values, the raison d'etre of Israel, and giving up part
of the land — I choose the land. It is for this reason that I believe
that embracing the vision of two states for two peoples — a vision
that was recognized by the UN in 1947, and embraced by the United
States — is not an Israeli concession but an Israeli interest. This is
the only way to end the conflict."
The article goes on to document AIPAC's record of having supported the Israeli government when it sought to cede land to the Arab enemy, and now it collaborates with anti-Zionist forces against that government. AIPAC barred Natan Sharansky, who would have urged the delegates to oppose territorial cession.
Ceding territory to enemies who have not given up hope of conquering Israel would facilitate that conquest, not end conflict (David Wilder, representing the Jewish community of Hebron, Hebron@Hebron.com, 5/5).
Livni was not manipulated; she is a willing collaborator. As Foreign Minister, she helped arrange a ceasefire that halted Israeli destruction of Hizbullah. The ceasefire arrangement enabled Hizbullah triple its rockets arsenal and dominate Lebanon. She is a defeatist, but rationalizes with high-sounding themes.
It is frightening how Pres. Obama is able to cajole Jews into such defeatism.
UNITY REGIME TO COMBINE ABBAS AND HAMAS FORCES
Palestinian Authority (P.A.) head Abbas said that if unity talks with Hamas succeed, he would combine P.A. forces with Hamas forces (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 5/2).
Hamas forces overthrew Fatah forces in Gaza, because Hamas forces were better trained, disciplined, motivated, and coordinated. Fatah was divided by uncooperative factions. P.A. police did not assist them.
Is Abbas setting up his part of the P.A. for another Hamas coup? If he combines Hamas forces with P.A. forces outside of Gaza, Hamas may well overthrow the others. Hamas would get the arms and training the US gave the P.A..
ISRAELI BREAK-THRU IN SOLAR POWER
The Israeli Zenith Solar company has developed solar panels and a system for positioning them to get the most rays. The new system captures 50% of the energy that shines on the panels, compared with the existing systems' 10%. This may reduce dependency upon oil states that finance terrorism (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/30).
Will Israel's vital development break through into the columns of the NY Times? The Times favors environmental progress but misses good news from Israel.
PAKISTAN STUBBORNNESS
A U.S. diplomat observed about Pakistan's weak resistance to the Taliban, "The worse things get, the more strongly they hew to the line, 'Don't worry, we've got it under control.'" (David S. Sanger, NY Times, 5/4, A9.)
Brilliant observation! True everywhere. Let the State Dept. look in that mirror when pressing Israel for more appeasement of the Arabs!
RESULT OF ISLAMIST SCHOOLS IN PAKISTAN
Pakistani madrassas feed impoverished boys and lead them to become unemployed men. That's the jist of Sabrina Tavernise's analysis of a totally religion-by-rote "education" in a country lacking public schools.
What effect do these Radical Muslim schools have upon the children? "Even if the madrassas do not make militants [that's media euphemism for terrorists], they create a worldview that makes militancy possible." (NY Times, 5/4, A8.) Some Arab countries have regular education, but no use to put it to.
Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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THE TERRIFYING BRILLIANCE OF ISLAM
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 16, 2009. |
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Shavua tov! Have you seen this website? It's called Citizen Warrior and its banner reads: IN THE WAR WITH ISLAMIC SUPREMACISM, EVERY CITIZEN IN THE FREE WORLD IS ON THE FRONT LINES. He has written an excellent article below on Islam and it's
dangers to all of us. This should be given to all who are Jews and
Christians so we can reach those who are neither (Non-Muslims.) This
is an excellent teaching tool and should be used to reach out to
others and inform them. Most people have no idea of the dangers
presented within this article. It is incumbent upon us all to learn,
be informed and help educate others to these dangers.
This article is archived at
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THE TERRIFYING BRILLIANCE OF THE ISLAMIC MEMEPLEX
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED why millions of Muslim men are dedicated to killing Americans? Or why so many are willing to blow themselves up to kill Israelis? Or why they are so committed to blowing up random people in Bali, London, Madrid, etc.? Islamic supremacists are doing this all over the world, attacking westerners and their own fellow Muslims alike. Why? Because of memes. A meme is anything that can be copied from one mind to another. The custom of shaking hands, for example, is a meme. A melody is a meme. A recipe for lemonade is a meme. Even the word "meme" is a meme, which has just made a copy of itself in your mind. Read more about memes here: What is a Meme? One of the characteristics of memes is they can evolve because some memes are better at making copies of themselves than other memes. They get more copies of themselves into other minds. So memes compete with each other and evolve. Part of the way they become better at making copies is to join together with other memes in a mutually-supporting group. A combination of memes (known as a "memeplex") is often able to get itself into more minds than single memes. From a memetics standpoint, a religion is a memeplex — collection of memes. One of the memes might be, for example, "This is a holy book." And the holy book itself is, of course, a collection of memes. Let's look at how religious memeplexes evolve and compete. To begin with, let's assume we already have a religion established. It already has a holy book and millions of people already have a copy of the memeplex in their minds. And then there is a slight variation. The original memeplex had a "live and let live" attitude, and never tried to encourage its followers to get converts. But then someone comes up with the idea that if you can persuade a non-believer to become a believer, you earn some sort of spiritual merit. You are saving souls, and your chances of getting into heaven are better. Okay, now you have two variations on the same memeplex: One says "live and let live." The other motivates people to spread the memeplex to others. After a thousand years, which of the two variations will have more copies in the minds of people? I'm betting on the motivated-to-spread-it version. Let's assume the motivated memeplex is more successful. Does that mean it makes people happier? Or more successful in life? Or have healthier children? No. Just because a memeplex is successful doesn't mean it benefits any of the people holding the memeplex. The same is true in genetics. Contrary to common sense, a successful gene doesn't necessarily benefit the organism. It is "successful" in the sense that it has made lots of copies of itself and is found in many organisms. But it may actually be harmful for the organism. For example, if there is a gene for alcoholism, and if drinking causes someone to have more children (or start having children younger) than someone who doesn't drink, over thousands of years, the alcoholism gene would be more successful than the non-alcoholism gene even though it is bad for each individual person carrying the gene. In the same way, the success of a meme doesn't necessarily mean it's good for the person holding that meme. If a memeplex says it is wrong to use contraception and wrong to masturbate, that memeplex would get itself copied into more minds than an identical memeplex without these two added memes (assuming offspring would be taught the memeplex too). So the hapless believer, trying to follow the rules and be a good person by avoiding the evils of contraception and masturbation, would have more children than he might want or could afford, causing him to work overtime to support them — working two jobs if he must. It sends him to an early grave, but puts more copies of that memeplex into the minds of future generations than someone without those two memes. So the memeplex has used the man for its own purposes, or at least that's one legitimate way to look at it. And it's a way that sheds new light on Islamic terrorism, which is why I've spent so much time explaining this idea. The three elements that make for a successful meme are fecundity, fidelity, and longevity. In other words, if a meme makes lots of copies of itself, copies itself accurately, and lasts long enough to make copies into other minds, it is a successful meme. All else being equal, the meme that makes more copies, or copies with more fidelity, or lasts longer in the mind, will always out-compete a meme that does any of these less effectively. Now, with that understanding, here's my point: If you were going to deliberately design a combination of memes with the purpose of making a memeplex that could eventually dominate the world — one that would eventually out-compete every other memeplex — you would be hard-pressed to do better than Islam.
Let's look at some of the individual memes within the Islamic memeplex: 1. A standardized version of the memeplex is written down, which makes for perfect replication fidelity. This is something basic to several religions and isn't an Islamic invention, but it is an important factor in the success of Islam. Something only transmitted orally can change over time, but something written will be identical a thousand years from now, and with modern printing presses, can be reproduced in the millions, giving it enormous fecundity and fidelity. 2. The Koran includes instructions for its own spread. It tells believers they must spread Islam. It is their holy duty to bring Mohammad's warnings and Islamic law to every corner of the world. 3. The memeplex includes instructions for its own preservation, protection, and replication fidelity. The Koran, the most important of the Islamic holy books, directly tells its followers that they can never change or modify or "modernize" any of the teachings within the memeplex. It is a capital sin to try to do so. The memeplex ensures its own preservation this way. These first three memes are pretty standard for several successful religions. But now it gets interesting... 4. Islam commands its followers to create a government that supports it. This may be one of the most brilliant innovations in Islam. Islam is the only religion that uses it. Other groups of religious people have had political aspirations, but no other major religious group orders its followers — as a religious duty — to create a government that follows its own system of law. Islam has a system of law, called Shari'a, and all Muslims are obligated to continually work toward making their government — wherever they are — follow it. Because of some of the other memes added to Islam, you will see that this political addition to the memeplex has significant consequences. I think this is Islam's most brilliant innovation, and also the most terrifying to non-Muslims. 5. Permission to spread the memeplex by war. This is another brilliant innovation. Although some other religions have spread themselves using force, they had very little justification from their own religious doctrines. Not so with Islam. Expanding by conquest is very much accepted and encouraged by the memeplex. The poor non-Muslims not living in an Islamic state need to be saved from the sin of following laws other than Allah's. If they won't voluntarily change their laws to Shari'a, then it is the duty of Muslim warriors to insist. The world cannot be at peace until every government on earth follows the laws of Allah. Mohammad's own experience showed the example — an example, says the Koran, that every Muslim should follow. For ten years Mohammad tried to spread Islam by peaceful means. After ten years he had a paltry 150 converts. But he changed tactics and started using warfare, slaughter, executions, and assassination, and in a relatively short time, he converted tens of thousands, and after his followers died, they used the same tactics and converted millions. The use of warfare combines powerfully with the instruction to create an Islamic state. So Islam spread quickly as their armies got bigger. They conquered and set up Islamic states, most of which have lasted to this day, and as you'll see, the laws within an Islamic state make it very advantageous to convert to Islam. This is one of the most effective methods ever invented for getting a memeplex into huge numbers of minds. It's a method of control and indoctrination similar to those used successfully in communist and totalitarian states. But as you discover below, Islam makes unique use of the power of the law to enforce complete conversion to the memeplex. 6. Lands must be conquered. Lands that Islam has lost must be reconquered, like Spain and Israel, for example. The Islamic empire must continually expand. Contraction is bad, expansion is good. So if a land was once Islamic and now it is not, that is contraction, and must be remedied. According to this meme, the earth is Allah's. If there are parts of the earth not following Islamic law, it is the duty of the faithful to gain control of that land and establish Shari'a. It is a sin to let it be. 7. The memeplex provides for new soldiers by allowing polygamy. A Muslim man can marry up to four wives, and he can have sex with as many slave girls as he wishes. The Koran especially encourages men to marry widows. This is an important meme to add if you are going to be losing a lot of soldiers in war. You need some way of replenishing your army. You don't want the memeplex to die out from a lack of offspring. 8. It is a punishable offense to criticize Islam. You can see why this one is a good supporting meme for the memeplex. It helps curb any memes that would reduce the authority of Islamic memes. This one, like many of the others, is good for the memeplex, but bad for people. This one limits freedom of speech. 9. You can't leave Islam once you're in. This is an interesting one. It is actually illegal in Islamic states to convert out of Islam. This is a critical part of Shari'a law. Someone who has rejected Islam who was once a Muslim is an "apostate." This is a crime and a sin, and the punishment for it is death (and eternal damnation in hell thereafter). Obviously, you can see why this meme has been included in the memeplex, but this one has actually caused Islam a problem because those who are following Islam to the letter consider more "moderate" Muslims (those who want to ignore or alter the more violent passages of the Koran) to be apostates. Since the punishment for apostates is death, fundamentalist Muslims are fighting modernizing Muslims all over the world, and keeping many rebellious, modernizing Muslims from speaking up for fear of death. Every time a group of Muslims decides that maybe Islam should be updated for the 21st century and maybe women should have some rights or maybe the government should be more democratic, the devout Muslims call them apostates and try to kill them. The memeplex is protecting its own fidelity (the original memeplex cannot be altered). This is not good for the organisms (the Muslim human beings), but it's great for the memeplex. Another meme in Shari'a law says it's against the law for anyone to try to convert a Muslim to another religion. Again, this is a meme to help protect the fidelity of the memeplex. 10. Islam must be your first allegiance. This is a great meme to add if the goal is world domination. You are a Muslim first, before any allegiance you give to your family, your tribe, or your country. This does two things: It causes a unity of people across borders, and it allows the group to grow bigger than any other entity. In other words, the "Nation of Islam" can grow bigger than any country, no matter how large (which gives the group a massive numerical advantage). 11. The only guarantee of a man getting into heaven is if he dies fighting for Islam. This is a great meme for creating fearless, enthusiastic warriors, especially given the vivid description of the sensuous delights of heaven. A Muslim man has a chance of getting to heaven if he is a good Muslim, but it is not guaranteed. However, if he dies while fighting for Islam, he is guaranteed to get in, and that's the only thing he can do to guarantee it. 12. You must read the Koran in Arabic. This unites believers by language, and language is a very powerful unifying phenomenon. For added incentive to learn Arabic, another meme says you can't go to heaven unless you pray in Arabic. So all Muslims all over the world share a language. This makes it easier to coordinate far-reaching campaigns of protest, political pressure, and war. I doubt if Mohammad foresaw this possibility, but this meme is brilliant, even if it was an accident. 13. You must pray five times a day. This is one of the five "pillars" — that is, one of the five central practices of a Muslim. Within an Islamic state, it is enforced by law. Every Muslim must pray five times a day. The practice helps the memeplex dominate a Muslim's life, infusing his daily rhythm with Islam. It would be impossible to forget anything you deliberately do so often. Five times a day, every day, a Muslim must bow down and pray to Allah. Research has shown the more effort a person expends for a cause, the more he believes in it. So this is a good way to eventually make believers out of people who became Muslims through coercion. Islam completely takes over every aspect of Muslims' lives. Not only are they required to pray five times a day, they have to go through a washing ritual beforehand. Islam dictates the laws, and the laws cover many public and private behaviors. In an Islamic state, it is impossible to be a casual Muslim. 14. The prayers involve moving together in time. When Muslims pray, they all face the same direction, they bow down, get on their hands and knees, and put their face on the mat, all in unison, and then rise back up. Again and again. When people move together in time, whether dancing or marching or praying, it creates a physical and emotional bond between them. That's why all military training involves close-order drill (marching in unison), even though it has been a long time since military groups have actually marched into combat. There is no longer a need for the skill, but all military training has retained this method because it is so effective at creating a strong feeling of unity between soldiers. The same is true of any physical movements people make in unison. 15. A woman is in a thoroughly subordinate position. This meme really helps support the war meme. If women had too much influence, they'd try to curb the fighting. Women in general don't like to send their husbands and sons off to war. But if women have no say, then the rest of the memes can express themselves without interference. By subordinating women, the memeplex prevents their effective vote against war, violence, and conquest. The rules and laws (memes) within Islam that keep women subordinate are numerous. For example, she is not allowed to leave her house unless she is accompanied by a male relative. Under Islamic law, a woman is forbidden to be a head of state or a judge. She can only inherit half of what a man can inherit. In court, her testimony is only worth half of a man's. She is not allowed to choose where she will live or who she will marry. She is not allowed to marry a non-Muslim or divorce her husband. Her husband, however, can divorce her with a wave of his hand. And according to Shari'a, he can (and should) beat her if she disobeys him. All of these rules keep her subordinate, which helps keep the war machine going unimpeded by domestic conflict. 16. The only way a woman can get into heaven for sure is if her husband is happy with her when she dies. When I read about this one, I thought, "Mohammad, you are a crafty one." This meme obviously helps with the subjugation of women. It motivates her to subjugate herself. It gives her a strong motivation to subordinate her wishes to her husband's, because while she might have a chance to get into heaven if she's a good Muslim, the only way she can guarantee she will go to heaven (and avoid eternal suffering in hell) is to make sure her husband is happy with her when she dies. 17. Allah gives Himself permission to edit his own work. This is an interesting one. The Koran was written in sections (Mohammad's revelations) over a period of 23 years. The circumstances of Mohammad's life and his religion changed quite a bit over those 23 years. It says in the Koran that if a passage written later contradicts an earlier passage, then the later one is the better one. One of the memes in the Koran is "this is the word of Allah." People had already memorized his earlier revelations, so Mohammad couldn't just change his revelations. It would look a little strange to go change anything that Allah already said. But with this new meme — that later revelations abrogated or nullified any earlier revelations it contradicted — Allah's methods could change as Mohammad found more effective ideas. In his first ten years of peacefully preaching, Mohammad only managed to win 150 followers. But as a military leader and violent conqueror, he was able to convert all of Arabia. The peaceful ways were too slow. Conversion by conquering and establishing Shari'a was much faster and more efficient. So later violent, intolerant verses abrogated (nullified) the earlier peaceful, tolerant passages. 18. The Koran uses the carrot and stick to reinforce behavior. Throughout the book are vivid descriptions of hell, where sinners and non-Muslims will have to drink boiling, stinking water, will be thrown face down into a raging fire, and will be there for eternity, suffering endless torments in agony. There are also vivid descriptions of heaven. In heaven you'll wear green silk robes and recline on plush couches. Trees will shade you, fruit will dangle nearby. You'll have tasty food and refreshing drinks served in silver goblets. To have a chance of achieving this, you must be a devout Muslim. To guarantee it, you must die in jihad (for men) or make sure your husband is always happy with you (for women). 19. It provides a huge and inspiring goal. Leaders of countries or companies or religions have all discovered that you can get the most motivation and enthusiasm from your followers if you provide them with an expansive vision. An enormous goal. In the Islamic memeplex, the goal calls for a continuous effort to expand the domain of Islamic law until all the world has submitted to Islam. Many religions have the goal of converting everyone, but Islam has a method available nobody else has: To expand by seizing and converting governments to Shari'a. Once the whole world is Islamic, peace will reign. That's why even terrorists can say with complete sincerity, "Islam is a religion of peace." The Koran says it is best if non-believers accept Islam and become Muslims without force. But if they refuse, then you must fight them and conquer them and save their poor souls by insisting they live by the laws of Allah. Once all countries are conquered, the world will be at peace. Therefore, Islam is a religion of peace. It is an enormous and inspiring goal, and a strongly unifying purpose. It creates motivated, enthusiastic followers. 20. Non-Muslims must pay a large tax. Once Muslims conquer a country and convert the government to Islamic law, any non-Muslims have the choice between becoming Muslim or becoming a dhimmi. Dhimmis are allowed to practice their non-Muslim religion if they pay the jizya (a tax). If they convert to Islam, they no longer have to pay a tax, so there is a practical incentive to convert. But another aspect of this makes it a brilliant meme. The tax takes money away from the non-Muslims and their competing memeplexes and gives that money to support Islam. This is pure genius! The income from these taxes (usually a 25% income tax) helped fund the Islamic conquests during the first two major jihads. They conquered vast lands, most of them already filled with Christians and Jews, many of whom did not convert at first, and their jizya poured huge sums of money into the Islamic war machine. Eventually, the numbers of Christians and Jews dwindled down as they converted or escaped, until now, in most Islamic countries, Jews and Christians are very small minorities. The tax-the-non-Muslims meme helps the Islamic memeplex make more copies of itself by suppressing competing religious memeplexes and financially supporting the Islamic memeplex. Several memes within Shari'a law extend this effect. Non-Muslims are not allowed to build any new houses of worship. They're not even allowed to repair already-existing churches or synagogues. This puts the houses of worship of any competing memeplex in a state of permanent decline. Brilliant. Also, non-Islamic prayers cannot be spoken within earshot of a Muslim — again, preventing Muslims from being infected by a competing memeplex. No public displays of any symbols of another faith may be shown either. All of this prevents the spread of any competing memeplex, and makes competing religions die out over time. That's why today there are so many "Muslim countries." Almost every other country in the world is made up of many different religions. One added meme makes it that much easier for Muslims to dominate non-Muslims within an Islamic state: Non-Muslims are not allowed to own weapons of any kind. To subjugate a people, all dictatorial rulers in the history of the world have done the same thing: Disarm the subjugated people. They are much easier to manage, less dangerous, and less capable of upending the status quo. 21. A Muslim is forbidden to make friends with an infidel. A Muslim is allowed to pretend to be a friend, but in his heart he must never actually be a friend to a non-Muslim. This is one of the best protections Islam has against Muslims leaving the faith. In any other religion (except Islam) conversions to a new religion are made because a friend introduced it. This rule effectively prevents that. This meme effectively prevents competition from other memeplexes. 22. The Koran counsels the use of deceit when dealing with infidels. Mohammad instructed one of his followers to lie if he had to (in order to assassinate one of Mohammad's enemies). The principle was clear: If it helps Islam, it's okay to deceive non-Muslims. This principle has served Islamic goals very well through history. And it serves those goals today. You can watch on the DVD, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, real-life examples of Islamic leaders saying one thing in English for the western press, and saying something entirely different to their own followers in Arabic a few days later. Deceiving the enemy is always useful in war, and Islam is at war with the non-Islamic world until the whole world follows Shari'a law. All non-Muslims living in non-Islamic states are enemies. So deceiving westerners is acceptable. Even encouraged if it can forward the goals of the spread of Islam. And so we have the strange phenomenon covered by Steven Emerson in Terrorists Among Us, where organizations in America were ostensibly raising money for orphans, but really giving the money to terrorists. They deceived good-hearted western infidels into giving money to organizations that were actively killing western infidels. As it says in the Koran, "War is deceit." This meme gives Islam a tremendous advantage over memeplexes that encourage indiscriminate truthfulness. 23. Islam must always be defended. This meme is a primary linchpin that gives justification for war with almost anybody, as you'll see in the meme below. After the enemy is defeated, of course, Muslims are required to establish an Islamic state. 24. The memeplex instructs on the use of pretext to start wars. The Koran devotes a lot of time complaining about people who did not support Mohammad when he first started his religion, with Allah often condemning them to torment in hell in the hereafter. Mohammad was rather pushy and insistent with his religion, and when others felt intruded upon and protested, Mohammad took that to mean they were trying to stop Allah's holy prophet from bringing the revealed word of Allah to the world, so he was justified to fight them and destroy them as Allah's enemies. This is a demonstration of the principle of pretext. Non-Muslims of the world need urgently to become aware of this principle. Of all the memes in the memeplex, this is the most dangerous to the West because it removes our natural self-preserving defenses. The use of pretext tends to make the West defenseless against the Islamic invasion now underway. Muslim terrorists are not naive people. They are smart, educated, well-funded, and being used by a very clever memeplex. The invasion of the West is underway, and it is being done so cleverly, most westerners don't even know it is happening. (Read more about their 20-year plan to overthrow the government of the United States. Also, read about the Shariatization of Europe.) Pretext means you need only the barest excuse to begin hostilities. It means you're actually looking for an excuse, and even trying to provoke others into striking the first blow — of "starting" the hostilities. If the only way to get to heaven is dying while fighting for Islam, you need war. And if it is your holy duty to make all governments use Shari'a law, you need to conquer those governments. But you don't really want to look like the aggressor. Appearances count. All throughout the Koran, Mohammad tries to justify his aggression as defending Islam. The Koran repeats over seventy times that followers of Islam should use Mohammad as a model and imitate him. So Muslims the world over try to find or create grievances, so they can get a holy war started, so they can fight and die in Allah's cause and help make the world ruled by Allah's laws. And because of the rise of multiculturalism (respect for all other cultures) in the West, the use of pretext convinces people in the West who are unfamiliar with Islam. Many people think al Qaeda is angry at the West for having troops in Saudi Arabia. That's merely a pretext. They want all non-Muslims out of the Middle East. Then they say they will cease hostilities. It is a ridiculous and impossible goal, so they are justified in permanent war against the West. And it's surprising that so many westerners are fooled by this one because it flies in the face of a fundamental western principle: Equality. What Osama bin Laden is saying is infidels are so undeserving, their very presence defiles their holy places. Wow. What does that say about the filthy infidel? Why doesn't this kind of racism or prejudice or infidelphobia (or whatever you want to call it) outrage more westerners? Instead, many think we ought to pull out of the Middle East so these poor offended terrorists aren't so angry with us any more! The principle of pretext is to provoke a hostile reaction and then use the hostile reaction as a reason to escalate hostilities. It's the same method schoolyard bullies have used for probably thousands of years: "What are you looking at? Hey, you bumped into me! Now you're going to pay! Nobody disrespects me!" 25. The explicit use of double standards. Islam has one standard for Muslims, and a different standard for non-Muslims, which always gives the advantage to Muslims and provides incentives to convert. For example, Islam must be spread by its believers, wherever they are. But when other religions try to spread their own memeplex, Muslims are supposed to see it as an aggression against Islam — an act of aggression that must be "defended." Remember, Islam must always be defended. Another example of how the double standard meme gives the memeplex an advantage: When Islam is defamed in any way, Muslims should violently defend it. Even in a cartoon. But Muslims can and should defame Jews and Christians in Muslim newspapers and television, and they should defame any infidel or enemy, as they defame the U.S. today. Here's another example: The Islamic fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia are pouring money into building mosques all over the free world. But according to Shari'a law (Islamic law), which is the law in Saudi Arabia, no non-Muslim religious structures are allowed to be built. However, Muslims all over the world protest loudly and violently when anyone in Europe or America resists the building of more mosques in their countries. They don't see the irony in it. They don't feel strange having such an obvious double standard. They are, after all, Allah's followers and everyone else is deluded. Fairness and equality with such unworthy infidels would seem very out of place. A double standard seems completely appropriate from that perspective. The double standard principle is part of the memeplex, and it has been a great advantage to the spread of Islam (and the suppression of competing memeplexes).
26. It is forbidden to kill a Muslim (except for a just cause). It is not forbidden to kill an infidel. This causes a bond between Muslims, fear in non-Muslims, and motivation to become Muslim. This is also another example of an explicit Islamic double standard.
WE CAN ADMIRE the brilliance of the Islamic memeplex in an abstract, intellectual sort of way, but it is terrifyingly real. Millions of people try to follow these memes to the letter. And their belief in the memeplex is strongly supported by the side-effects of Shari'a law. By making the government and laws ruled by Islam, the memeplex applies two powerful principles of influence: social proof, and authority. Everyone practices the religion in an Islamic state (or they are flogged, taxed, or killed) and no one can criticize it, not friend-to-friend, and not through any media. The psychological impact of this is enormous. Three generations later, it would be almost impossible for any Muslim living in that state to think outside of Islam. The authority and social proof would be overwhelming. If you were trying to come up with a memeplex to take over the world, I don't know if you could do better than Islam. Of course, just because I admire the genius of the memeplex doesn't mean I'm in favor of it. As a non-Muslim, I am wholeheartedly against it. Remember, the success of a meme has nothing to do with making people happy or healthy. Memetic success only means it propagates well. The same is true for genes. A successful gene is one that gets the most copies of itself into future generations. The genes making up a deadly virus may kill millions of people and cause untold misery, but from a genetics point of view, the virus is genetically successful. Genes don't care about people. They don't try to make us happy. They are cold and indifferent to our plight. Same with memes. A memeplex will use up and spit out human lives in the service of its propagation, indifferent to the pain, misery, or death it causes. A memeplex, well-drilled into someone's head and reinforced by the powerful authority and social proof of his whole society, can cause him to blow himself up just to kill others for the fulfillment of a fantasy goal of ultimately attaining world peace and the triumph of Allah (and a harem of 72 dark-eyed voluptuous beauties devoted to his every wish). The Islamic memeplex is formidable. It is a force to be reckoned with and we ignore it at our peril. It has already consumed the minds of one and a half billion people, and it is the youngest of the major religions. And it is growing. And yet, I don't think the situation is hopeless. Many Muslims now living in Islamic states are trapped and would defect from the memeplex if it were safe to do so. And even those who like being Muslims can be released from the hold the memeplex has on their minds. Like suddenly "coming to" when you're being hypnotized, I think an understanding of memetics itself can help undermine the hypnotic effect of the religious beliefs. And the first thing we in the multicultural and tolerant West need to be aware of is the formidable memeplex threatening to overtake us. The memeplex takes advantage of our tolerance and our freedom so as to ultimately eliminate it. This is an ideological war, so the ideas in the heads of your fellow westerners makes all the difference. And you can help turn the tide. Find ways to introduce these ideas to your fellow westerners. Here are a few ideas to help you. And we can help Muslims trapped in Islamic countries find their way to snapping out of their trance. Muslims have submitted to Islam, many of them because they felt they had no choice (or their parents or grandparents felt they had no choice). They are being used by the memeplex. Individual Muslims can free themselves from Islam, and many have, thanks to the web sites like FaithFreedom.org, and books like Leaving Islam. I would suggest we not judge Muslims too harshly. Many of them are in some way rebelling against some of the memes, but out of custom, guilt, or because their Islamic government violently enforces the rules, they practice the rest of the religion. "Muslims are the first victims of Islam," wrote E. Renan. "Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient, that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him." Fortunately, Muslims the world over have rebelled against this rigid and restricting memeplex, and that's the only reason Islam has not already taken over the world: Good people, coerced for generations to be Muslims, have slowed its spread by ignoring (probably with some guilt) the worst parts of the Koran. It would be nice if we didn't have such a memeplex to deal with. It would be nice if we could all just get along. But sometimes things like this just have to be faced and handled, regardless of what we might rather be doing. If you are a non-Muslim and you want to get started helping to curb the spread of the Islamic memeplex and the terrorism it produces, the best thing you can do is learn more about Islam and then speak up to your fellow westerners. You will be shocked at how little most people know about Islam. And they will be shocked to find out. And when enough westerners know about it, Islamic tactics like pretext and deceit will be seen for what they are, and will no longer make us defenseless. When we know more about the founder (the one all Muslims should imitate) and the goals of the memeplex, our collective actions can effectively thwart their plans. Our collective grasp of the real situation will bring more rational changes to our laws and policies (such as our current immigration policies). The key is what happens in one-on-one conversations throughout the West. When you hear people saying things like, "We should pull out of Iraq," or "We're just in it for the oil," or "Islam is a religion of peace," that is a time to speak up, calmly and simply. Tell them about the Islamic memeplex. Tell them what they don't know. Help them update their understanding of the situation. Do this wherever you go, and start now. The situation is urgent. Many of the memes that help Islam spread are in your head and in the heads of your fellow westerners. That's the first place to start to fight against the viral spread of this clever memeplex. The memes in your head (such as a blind faith in multiculturalism) are not the kind that will convert you into a Muslim, but they help the spread of Islam by taking down your defenses, and even encourages you to spread information that makes the West easier to defeat. You can play an important role in curbing the spread of the Islamic memeplex by speaking up within your own sphere of influence. How? When you hear a meme, stop it from spreading. For example, "Actually, what they mean by 'Islam is a religion of peace' is that their mission is to make the whole world submit to the law of Allah (Shari'a), and once that is accomplished, there will be peace in the world. Therefore, Islam is a religion of peace. That's not really peace as we know it." But to do this kind of innoculation, you have to have a pretty good handle on the memeplex itself. That will require some study. I know you have other things to do, and you can't make this a full-time occupation, but I also know how serious this is, so it will require some sacrifice on your part. I have created a curriculum of sorts. I tried to figure out what would be the material you could study that would give you the most critical knowledge with the smallest investment of time. Here is my curriculum: Books to read: Islam and Terrorism
Audiobook to listen to in your car:
If you listen to this program six times over the next year, you will have a grasp of the whole scope of the most important parts of the Islamic memeplex. If you only do one of the things I recommend here, this is the one you should do. DVDs to watch: Islam: What The West Needs To Know
These DVDs are not only good for your own education, they are an excellent way to introduce the ideas to your fellow westerners. After you've watched them a couple of times, start loaning them out to friends. Keep them in circulation. Buy several copies if you need to. You can stop the spread of the memes that make the West defenseless only by having a sufficient amount of knowledge. When you hear someone imply that the United States brought the terrorists into existence with their bad foreign policy, how will you answer? One possible way to bring the whole thing into perspective is to give a brief history of jihad. During the last great jihad, Islamic forces conquered Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, and they were at the Gates of Vienna in Austria in 1683, when their forces were finally defeated. In other words, they were violently attacking and defeating westerners (non-Muslims) before the United States had even been created. This is not to say some of the United States foreign policies have left much to be desired. But the Islamic memeplex has a longer history and has merely used political mistakes as a pretext to engage in warfare, as they have since the beginning. If you don't know any of this, it would be easy to see things as the terrorists want you to see them, and in fact, many westerners have bought the pretexts hook, line, and sinker. Study that material, and start right away. The Islamic memeplex is out to take away freedoms and human rights. After millions of people have fought against tyranny and died to gain the rights and freedoms we enjoy today, here comes a pernicious memepex to take them away. And the Islamic memeplex could realistically succeed with terrifying brilliance. Take action today. With every new understanding you have, and with every new certainty and clarity you gain, you will feel more bold in speaking up, and speaking up is exactly what you must do to fight a war of memes.
Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His
articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the
Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For
Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm).
Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org
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AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ISRAEL POLICY FORUM AD IN NY TIMES
Posted by Jerry Gordon, May 16, 2009. | |
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If you hadn't seen the New Duranty Times yesterday with the ad on P. A-13 supporting the Obama initiatives against Israel and PM Netanyahu, this letter to the useless idiots at the Israel Policy Forum is a spot on rebuttal. For those of you in the greater Washington, DC area watch for an ad by the ZOA in Sunday's Washington Times taking AIPAC to task for its mindless support of the 'two state solution'. Also more news about Monday's vigil rally in Lafayette Park across from The White House will be out in a news release on Sunday. Jerry Gordon
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"Israel's Govt. Has Not Endorsed Creating Palestinian State" Fmr. IDF Chief Yaalon: "Palestinian state will lead to war." The ZOA has expressed deep concern that the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a leading pro-Israel lobby, has endorsed establishing a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel's longest border on the assumption that such a state will produce peace. In this year's lobbying effort by AIPAC, AIPAC activists were instructed to ask their congressmen to sign on to letters addressed to Obama that explicitly promotes the need for a "viable Palestinian state." ZOA is mystified that AIPAC is supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state despite the fact that Mahmoud Abbas refuses to accept Israel as a Jewish state and other PA leaders refuse to accept Israel at all. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, last week displaying a map of all of Israel labeled as "Palestine". Notice at top of map the word "Palestine" in English. AIPAC has always said that it supports the policies of the Israeli government, but it now supports a Palestinian state while the Netanyahu government has taken no such position. On other occasions, it is also true that AIPAC has not supported Israel's policies. For example, when Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir asked AIPAC to support the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria, AIPAC refused. In May 2002, Binyamin Netanyahu, in a major speech, clearly spelt out the dangers of a Palestinian Arab state and the reasons its creation under existing conditions had to be opposed: "The biggest mistake that can be made is to promise [to the Palestinians] the establishment of their own independent state ... it will demand all the powers of a state, such as controlling borders, bringing in weapons, control of airspace and the ability to knock down any Israeli plane that enters its area, the ability to sign peace treaties and military alliances with other countries. Once you give them a state, you give them all these things, even if there is an agreement to the contrary, for within a short time they will demand all these things, and they will assume these powers, and the world will stand by and do nothing — but it will stop us from trying to stop them ... We will thus have created with our own hands a threat to our very existence. On the day that we sign an agreement for a state with limited authorities, what will happen if the Palestinians do what the Germans did after World War I, when they nullified the demilitarized zone? The world did nothing then, and the world will do nothing now as well. Even now, the Palestinians are removing all the restrictions to which they agreed in Oslo — they are smuggling in arms, polluting the water sources, building an army, making military deals with Iran and others, and more... But when we try to take action against this, the world opposes us — and not them... Arafat said it best when talking to reporters the day he signed the Oslo Accords: 'Since we can't defeat Israel in war, we must do it in stages, we must take whatever area of Palestine we can get, establish sovereignty there, and then at the right time, we will have to convince the Arab nations to join us in dealing the final blow to Israel.' Self-rule, yes. But a state with which to destroy the State of Israel — no ... We are told that the idea of a Palestinian state is just a vision for the future, not for right now. Well, our nation, too, has a vision for the future: 'The wolf shall lie down with the lamb.' When this vision is fulfilled in the Middle East, then we'll convene this Committee again and re-consider the issue ... On matters vital to our existence, we always took clear action, even if others didn't agree with us. Because the bottom line is that saying 'Yes' to a Palestinian state means 'No' to a Jewish State, and vice-versa" (Hillel Fendel, 'Netanyahu: Why We Must Oppose a Palestinian State,' Israel National News, April 30, 2009) However, today, AIPAC is supporting a Palestinian Arab state even though the Netanyahu government has not done so. The letters being circulated to law makers on Capitol Hill are especially troubling in that they promote Palestinian statehood while Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah (strongly supported by Palestinian opinion) refuse to accept Israel or even to depict the country on PA maps, atlases and the Fatah emblem; continue to permit incitement to hatred and murder against Jews and Israel in the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps; do not arrest and jail terrorists or outlaw terrorist groups; retain the Fatah Constitution with its calls for terrorism and Israel's destruction; and honors terrorists like George Habash and Samir Kuntar. Negotiating the creation of any Palestinian Arab state should be conditional on ending all these things and transforming Palestinian society. In the absence of this, ZOA has argued that this is no time to be endorsing or promoting the creation of a Palestinian state. ZOA
criticism is therefore two-fold: it opposes this move by AIPAC because
supporting or promoting a Palestinian Arab state under prevailing
conditions is seriously mistaken and because AIPAC is thereby
supporting a major policy affecting Israel's vital interests despite
the fact that the Israeli government has not supported such a policy.
As the Jerusalem Post report, "While Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to explicitly endorse a two-state
solution to resolve the Palestinian conflict, participants at the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference will this
week be urging their elected representatives to press President Barack
Obama for precisely that" (Hilary Leila Krieger, 'AIPAC delegates to lobby for two-state solution,' Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2009).
POLLS OF BOTH AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAELIS SHOW LESS THAN MAJORITY SUPPORT FOR ESTABLISHING A PALESTINIAN STATE: American Jews: § The 2007 American Jewish Committee poll showed that 55% of American Jews don't believe that current negotiations can lead to peace, while only 36% were hopeful that it would; 58% of American Jews reject Israeli concessions on Jerusalem, even in context of permanent peace, with only 36% supporting the idea. It showed 81% of American Jews agree that "The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel." Also, less than half (46%) support the creation of a Palestinian state. § A March 2007 McLaughlin & Associates poll shows that non-Jewish Americans as well, by a margin of 5 to 1, oppose Israel land concession to the Palestinian Arabs and by 2 to 1, believe that a Palestinian state will be a terrorist state, not a peaceful democracy. Israelis: § February 2009: Israelis oppose 51 percent — 31 percent the creation of a Palestinian state, as opposed to merely 31 percent that favor its establishment; Israelis believe 52 percent — 22 percent that the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria will lead to rocket fire on Jerusalem, Kfar Sava and other cities in central Israel. ('Poll: Israelis oppose Palestinian State 51%:32% — 31% of Kadima voters would drop support if thought Kadima supports Pal State,' Independent Media Review & Analysis, February 9, 2009). § July 2008: Jerusalem's residents (including Israeli Arabs) oppose the division of the city with physical barriers 73 percent — 27 percent, ('Polls: 73%:27% Jerusalem residents oppose physical separation in city in wake of attacks,' Independent Media Review & Analysis, July 24, 2008). § An October 2007 Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and the Evens Program in Mediation and Conflict Resolution of Tel Aviv University poll has shown that a clear majority of Jewish Israelis — 59% to 33% — oppose, even in return for a peace agreement, Israel handing over to the PA various Arab neighborhoods in the eastern half of Jerusalem. Moreover, the Palestinian leadership of Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas does not accept Israel's existence, let alone as a Jewish state: § Mahmoud Abbas, PA president and Fatah chairman: "Alluding to the dispute over whether the Palestinian government should recognize Israel and abide by past Palestinian agreements, Abbas noted that 'forces don't need to accept what the government accepts, and we say that the government has to accept the international legitimacy.'" ('Abbas calls for all-inclusive unity government,' Ma'an News [Palestinian wire service], April 27, 2009); "I say this clearly: I do not accept the Jewish State, call it what you will." A smiling Abbas held up a large framed map of 'Palestine' covering the entire area of Israel, which was featured on the front page of both PA daily newspaper, with 'Palestine' printed in English (Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, 'Mahmoud Abbas: "I do not accept the Jewish State, call it what you will," Palestinian Media Watch, April 28, 2009). § Abbas: "The Palestinians do not accept the formula that the state of Israel is a Jewish state." (David Bedein, 'Olmert reports to Israel Cabinet Meeting,' Bulletin [Philadelphia], December 3, 2007). § Abbas: "Hamas is not required, Hamas is not required to recognize Israel... It is not required of Hamas, or of Fatah, or of the Popular Front to recognize Israel, all right? The PLO, in 1993, recognized Israel ... But the government which will be formed, and which will function opposite the Israelis on a daily basis ... every hour and perhaps every second, there will be contact between Palestinian ministers and Israeli ministers ... [Abbas then gives an example of 500 million dollars in taxes intended for the Palestinians, but put on hold by Israelis. The Palestinian finance minister has to come to an agreement with the Israeli finance minister regarding the transfer of that money.] So how can he make an agreement with him if he does not recognize him? So I do not demand of Hamas nor any other [organizations] to recognize Israel. But from the government that works with Israelis in day to day life, yes" (Al-Arabiya [Dubai] and PA TV, October 3, 2006, Itamar Marcus & Barbara Crook, 'Abbas dupes US: "Recognition" is functional, not inherent,' Palestinian Media Watch, October 5, 2006). § Senior Fatah commander, Muhammad Dahlan, former commander of Fatah forces in Gaza: "[Hamas says] that the Fatah movement wants Hamas to recognize Israel. This is a gross deception. And I want to say for the thousandth time, in my own name and in the name of all of my fellow members of the Fatah movement: We do not demand that the Hamas movement recognize Israel. On the contrary, we demand of the Hamas movement not to recognize Israel, because the Fatah movement does not recognize Israel, even today ... We of the Fatah do not recognize Israel; we recognized [corrects himself] recognize that which the PLO recognized, but that does not obligate us as a Palestinian resistance faction. It is not being demanded of Hamas that it recognize Israel ... The entire Palestinian economy is dependent on Israel. The government's role is to manage the day-to-day life of the Palestinian people. I cannot force my thinking and my position [non-recognition of Israel] on the government, and then [were I to do so] — should the Palestinian people pay the price for this position? ... It's not the political parties [that must recognize]; it's required of the government and not of the parties. It's required of the government but not of Hamas; it's required of the government but not of the Fatah" (Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, 'Western funders misled: Fatah still refuses to recognize Israel, PA's "recognition" only to receive international aid,' Palestinian Media Watch, March 17, 2009) § Abu Ahmed, Fatah commander: '"The base of our Fatah movement keeps dreaming of Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa and Acco. ...There is no change in our official position. Fatah as a movement never recognized Israel," the terrorist, calling himself Abu Ahmed, explained. He went on to say that the Al-Aksa Brigades is 'one and the same' with the Fatah party.' (David Bedein, 'The American Sanitizing of a Terrorist Group,' Israel National News, October 5, 2006). Palestinian society opposes Israel's existence and supports terrorism against Israel: January 2009 poll: Jerusalem Media & Communications Center poll that found that 55.4 percent of Palestinians support continued suicide bombings against Israel, as against 37.6 percent who oppose it. (Jerusalem Media & Communications Center, Poll No. 67, January 2009). March 2008 Poll: 83.5% of Palestinians approve of the March 6 terrorist attack on the Mercaz Harav seminary in Jerusalem in which 8 people, mainly teenagers, were murdered and a further 40 wounded; 63.6% support rocket attacks on Israeli towns, as against 32.6% who oppose it. (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll, March 2008). § February 2007 Poll: 75% of Palestinian Arabs do not think that Israel has a right to exist; 70% of Palestinian Arabs support a one-state solution in which Jews would be a minority, not a two-state solution with a Palestinian Arab state living peacefully alongside Israel (Near East Consulting (NEC) poll, February 12-15, 2007, 'NEC 12-15 February Poll: 75% of Palestinians do not think that Israel has the right to exist,' Independent Media Review Analysis, February 16, 2007). § September 2006 Poll: 57% of Palestinian Arabs support terrorist attacks upon Israeli civilians; 75% support the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers in a bid to obtain the release of jailed Palestinians terrorists; 63% are inspired by the Lebanese Islamist terror group Hizballah and seek to emulate it (Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll, September 2006). ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, National Chairman of the Board Dr. Michael Goldblatt, Executive Committee Chairman Dr. Alan Mazurek and Treasurer Henry Schwartz said, "We are perplexed and critical of the fact that a major pro-Israel organization like AIPAC has taken this step. It constitutes a major reward for Palestinian terrorism and non-acceptance of Israel when we should only be rewarding moderation and acceptance and fulfillment of written agreements of Oslo, Wye and the Roadmap. By doing this, AIPAC is sending a message to Palestinians that they need to do nothing but accept unilateral Israeli concessions, rather than extirpate their armed extremists and reform their society for peace with and acceptance of Israel. Contact Jerry Gordon at jerry_gordon38@yahoo.com |
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THE PLAGUE OF REFUGEES; BEGGING FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION
Posted by Seth J Frantzman, May 15, 2009. |
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THE PLAGUE OF REFUGEES Seth J. Frantzman
The plague of refugees: The idea of refugees is one that floods our modern discourse. We accept the fact that they have always existed and will always exist and that we must have sympathy for them. But to what extent are they fabricated and to what extent is their existence an accident of modernity? Refugees are a plague and a scam. They always seem to appear whenever there is conflict and they always conveniently appear whenever there is a terrorist group amidst them. In recent years the presence of refugees has time and again thwarted governments from dismantling terrorist organizations. However governments that refrain from ignoring the presence of refugees in order to complete the job of stopping pernicious terrorist organizations are not doing their duty to their people and are in fact violating the rights of the citizenry by not protecting it from enemies at home and abroad. Not all people become refugees at the same rate. Some communities become refugees very easily. >From the Albanians to Palestinians and Afghans there are communities that seem to have refugeedom as their natural second trait. It is not clear why but some people leave their homes at the slightest provocation. Others have to first be massacred and slaughtered to make them leave. Whatever the case refugees are a menace and they are a menace that the media loves to photograph. Why do refugees exist? They didn't always exist. They are primarily a modern invention. There were always people that fled conflict ever since man engaged in conflict. But in the old days when people fled conflict this was seen as a logical by-product of conflict. When armies are bludgeoning eachother to death in some place the people leave that place or risk death. This was a logical choice. Communities nearby frequently provided some aid or assistance to these people. When the war was over the people returned or if they were unable to they simply moved somewhere else. Great movements of peoples are part of history. From the Barbarian invasions of Europe to the Mongol and Arab conquests there were times in history when massive numbers of people were on the move. When tribes expanded in some places neighboring people became displaced and moved on. Such was the Mfecane or "crushing" that the Zulus unleashed on neighboring peoples, driving the Ndebele into Zimbabwe and the Sotho and Swazi into the mountain strongholds they still live in. The Boer trek, also in Southern Africa, is another example of the movement of people. In the old days people moved about, this was what they did and it was, for some peoples, especially semi-nomadic ones, their singular characteristic. Some peoples stayed put, inhabiting the same place for generations. But even they were not immune to the results of war, famine and social upheaval. Sometimes peoples were moved about by nations, such as the Circassians who were exiled by the Russians, the Chechans who were exiled by Stalin, the Volga and Baltic-Prussian Germans, who were destroyed by Stalin and the Pontic Greeks, Armenians and others who were destroyed by the Turkish regime. All these events may be tragic or happenstance, but they were, until recently, seen as a part of human history, if a sometimes particularly sad part. Then suddenly the term "refugee" was invented. It is derived from the Latin, refugium and comes from the French refugie. Its first use in English dates from 1685. The first use in international law was in 1921 when the League of Nations established a High Commissioner for Refugees. Since that point the world has transformed the refugee from a standard part of history, a natural human occurrence, to something that must be looked after, coddled, cared for and become something that must be "solved". It is a little like the concept of poverty. People will always be poor but once poverty was transformed into a "poverty line" we suddenly became aware that we must "solve poverty" without the slightest realization that once people are pulled up out of "poverty" the very notion of poverty must be re-defined since there will always be "poor" people. Thus since the 1920s the world has become increasingly shackled to the nation of "refugees" to the extent that we now live under a sort of refugee dictatorship. Today the UN and various states define 'refugees' and 'asylum seekers differently leading to some confusion. For instance the UN High Commissioner of Refugees believes there are 8 million official "refugees" while the U.S claims there are some 62 million. Then there are the special refugees, the Palestinian refugees who unlike other "refugees" will always be refugees under a special UN law that allows them to pass their refugee status from generation to generation. We thus live in a world of refugees. The claim that there are endangered refugees is used as a tool to undermine states and support terrorist refuges. Thus when Sri Lanka is on the verge of defeating the Tamil Tigers, who have killed tens of thousands over the years, the world suddenly expresses concern that there are "refugees" in danger because of the army's offensive against the Tamils. So there is now a safe zone in Sri Lanka for refugees where the army is not allowed to shell and where the Tamil fighters can thus re-arm and train and rest while fighting their terror war. Now with the Pakistani army trying to deal with the Taliban threat to that country the Red Cross has claimed that the army must refrain from attacking the Swat valley, the heart of the Taliban in Pakistan, because of the presence of refugees. The concept of a refugee and his supposedly being threatened while he chooses to flee and live amongst terrorists is predicated on the idea that people take no personal responsibility for their actions. A refugee is robbed of his agency when he is defined as being 'in danger' merely because artillery shells and bombs might be falling around him. The refugee should learn from his surroundings, the way refugees used to, and flee the area of fighting. But refugees have a unique ability to somehow always congregate where the fighting is worst, all seemingly fleeing to the area wherever the army offensive is taking place. How did all these refugees end up in a "safe zone" in northern Sri Lanka that happens to also be in the midst of the last strip of land controlled by the Tamil Tigers? How did all the refugees end up fleeing to the Swat valley where the Taliban is based? Why don't they flee away from the terrorist centers? Why aren't the "safe zones" established in safe areas, rather than in the midst of the war zone. During the First World War there were millions of refugees displaced by the Western Front which cut across the French countryside and was dozens of miles from side t side, encompassing trenches, rear areas and secondary lines of defense. Yet, oddly, refugees weren't settled in "safe zones" in the midst of Verdun, the bloodiest stretch of land on the Western Front, they managed to somehow find their way to Paris and elsewhere. How is that possible? Why did the refugees of 1916 end up hundreds of miles away from the front line and the refugees today always seem to be right at the front, in the way of the shelling and the artillery? Is it because war takes place faster and over greater distances these days? Perhaps that is part of the answer but the overall answer is that the kind of people who become refugees these days tend to be dumb, they tend to want to be victims, they tend to have a media, UN and Red Cross presence that sets up camps and hospitals for them and "safe zones" in the midst of the war zone and they tend to be used by terrorists as shields. In fact many times the refugees are part and parcel of the terrorist effort which undermines the state through the refugees. Refugee camps are nefarious centers of violence and terror. From Jordan in 1970, when they sheltered the Palestinians who tried to overthrow Jordan, to Lebanon and the Congo where they are used at places where the terrorists train and arm, they are a threat to the security of the world. There should not be refugees. There should certainly not be refugees who never stop being refugees. It is unfortunate that wars go on and on but it is the responsibility of people to either join the war or leave the area. The fact that international bodies need refugees in order to operate, the fact that there is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the Red Cross and the UNHCR in a sense that in order for them to stay in business they need refugees and human suffering conspires with the media leads to the perpetuation of the idea that there are refugees. In fact there are not. There are no refugees in Sri Lanka living in a "safe zone" or in the swat valley. The people there are enemies and they are destabilizing the state. Those sad people who actually fled the fighting and have gotten out of the line of fire are "refugees". So long as people remain in war zones there should be no sympathy for them. As Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven when he is accused of shooting an unarmed man; "well he should have armed himself." The "refugees" should either arm themselves and take part in the fight or get out of the way. BEGGING FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION Seth J. Frantzman
Begging for Internationalization: The ever-present calls from within Israeli society for 'greater international involvement and pressure' on Israel is emblematic of a contempt for Israeli democracy. It is not only in Israel that those voices that speak so fondly of 'democracy' are the first to declare their state a 'dictatorship' or a 'fascist' country when the electorate does not vote the way they want to. Every democracy suffers from the existence of un-democratic elements. There are those on the right, those on the left and those that simply condemn the country for being undemocratic when the countries majority is not in line with their minority extremism. The ever-present calls from within Israeli society for 'greater international involvement and pressure' on Israel is emblematic of a contempt for Israeli democracy. Some on the intellectual left in Israel tend to want to see themselves as canaries in a coal mine, warning the state of its coming destruction, much like the Prophets of old did. They like to imagine themselves in the role of someone like Claus von Stauffenberg, attempted assassin of Hitler, or Stefan Zweig, an Austrian pacifist writer of the 1930s, fighting and warning the world of modern day proto-nazi regimes. One corollary of this endless prophesying of doom and struggling to be the 'lone voice of reason' is the tendency to insist on greater international pressure on Israel. Usually it takes the form of the April 2003 'Urgent Appeal for International involvement: save Palestine and Israel' signed by some 200 Israeli intellectuals and faculty members. It stated that "a violent apocalyptic driving out of the entire Palestinian population is explicitly advocated by the rightmost circles." Sometimes the interest in international or American pressure can be downright crude, as when Haaretz editor David Landau told Condolezza Rice in September of 2007 that he believed the U.S needed to 'rape' Israel. According to reports he "referred to Israel as a 'failed state' politically, one in need of a U.S.-imposed settlement." The belief that international pressure is a godsend for Israel is quite widespread. A February 2009 petition signed by five Israeli academics, including Prof. Rachel Giora and Eva Yablonka of Tel Aviv University, in support of a recent anti-Israel motion at Manchester University noted that; "We strongly believe that without some pressure from outside Israel and without concrete support for Palestinians nothing will change in our part of the world." Another archetype of the feelings of this minority is Gideon Levy who noted in a November 2008 article entitled 'let's hope Obama won't be a friend of Israel' that "changing the Middle East was in the power of each and every U.S. president, who could have pressured Israel and put an end to the occupation. Most of them kept their hands off as if it were a hot potato...So bring us an American president who is not another dreadful 'friend of Israel,' an Obama who won't blindly follow the positions of the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government." In a similar vein on April 3, 2009 Naomi Chazan wrote in the Upfront weekend edition of the Jerusalem Post that "a much more assertive international involvement is therefore necessary...the threat of isolation verging on ostracism may be precisely the kind of jolt that has been needed for some time...[furthermore] long-overdue internationalization may center initially on brokering a series of localized understandings...such an externally driven impetus can also revitalize domestic politics." The insistence on the overbearing involvement of the international community, and the trust and reliance on its decisions, is indicative of a severe distrust of Israeli democracy. Those on the Left who call for this have declared that while they acknowledge the failure of their political parties at the polls in 2009 they must need foreigners to impose a solution on Israel. This has long been typical of fringe groups such as Yesh Gvul which try to get Israelis indicted abroad for 'war crimes' because courts in Israel will not do their bidding. The apparent reason for the need for international intervention is the feeling that the Leftist parties have failed. Zeev Sternhell, Israel prize winner and controversial professor, has said that Labor has lost its purpose. Describing the disillusionment with Labour he notes "The real problem is that the Israeli left is an artificial, even a false, left. It lacks every one of the instinctive responses that are identified with the natural left — standing with the weak, the oppressed and the working poor against the strong, and against the state itself." For him "the natural left is always suspicious of the government." The left is on a "suicidal path." For Israel Harel, another columnist, the left failed because of its inability to achieve peace when given the chance and its "over-identification of this public with Arab-Palestinian nationalism." It's no surprise therefore that Zahava Gal-On, formerly a Meretz MK, has been described by Haaretz as the "last leftist" among a left with "no clear message...no edge." In turning to outsiders these voices pretend they are canaries in a mine shaft but instead they are anti-democrats. It is interesting that some of Israel's elite would trust the same nations who perpetrated the Holocaust to be fair arbitrators of the current conflict. They are continually embarrassed of their countrymen, most recently the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. This is a mistake. The Israeli voter casts his vote for Lieberman for a reason, primarily because the Left is seen as out of touch, elitist and as incapable of solving the intractable situation. Gal-On admitted as much in an April 3rd interview when she noted that Mizrahim, Jews from the Middle East are "not the classic faces of Meretz." (neither are the very Ashkenazi Heredim and Meretz has recently joined a protest movement in Ramat Aviv to keep the "black hatters" out of 'their' neighbourhood) Rather than courting that voter with reasonable solutions some on the Left would simply ignore him and ask foreigners to do the job. This is not a positive development in Israeli politics. It is the same narrow minded distrust of the voter that led radical movements, such as the Bolsheviks, to seize power from elected moderate governments. Seth J. Frantzman is a graduate student in Islamic and Middle Eastern
Studies, living in Jerusalem. Contact him at sfrantzman@hotmail.com
and visit his website:
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OBAMA'S U.N. MISTAKE: AMERICA IS NOW ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH ISRAEL
Posted by Anne Bayefsky, May 15, 2009. |
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In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn't fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey. It began this past Monday with the adoption of a so-called presidential statement by the U.N. Security Council. Such statements are not law, but they must be adopted unanimously — meaning that U.S. approval was essential and at any time Obama could have stopped its adoption. Instead, he agreed to this: "The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009." This move is several steps beyond what the Bush administration did in approving Security Council resolutions in December and January — which said only that "The Security Council welcomes the Quartet's consideration, in consultation with the parties, of an international meeting in Moscow in 2009." Apparently Obama prefers a playing field with 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League — most of whom don't recognize the right of Israel to exist — and one Jewish state. A great idea — if the purpose is to ensure Israel comes begging for American protection. The U.N. presidential statement also makes laudatory references to another third-party venture, the 2002 Arab "Peace" Initiative. That's a Saudi plan to force Israel to retreat to indefensible borders in advance of what most Arab states still believe will be a final putsch down the road. America's U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, announced to the Security Council that "we intend to integrate the Arab Peace Initiative into our own approach." Make no mistake: This U.N. move, made with U.S. approval, sets America on a well-calculated collision course with Israel. U.S. collusion on this presidential statement was directly at odds with Israel's wishes and well-founded concerns about the U.N.'s bona fides on anything related to Israel. Israeli U.N. ambassador Gabriella Shalev issued a statement of Israel's position: "Israel does not believe that the involvement of the Security Council contributes to the political process in the Middle East. This process should be bilateral and left to the parties themselves. Furthermore, the timing of this Security Council meeting is inappropriate as the Israeli government is in the midst of conducting a policy review, prior to next week's visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the United States... Israel shared its position with members of the Security Council." By contrast, Rice told reporters: "We had a very useful and constructive meeting thus far of the Council. We welcome Foreign Minister Lavrov's initiative to convene the Council, and we're very pleased with the constructive and comprehensive statement that will be issued by the president of the Council on the Council's behalf. This was a product of really collaborative, good-faith efforts by all members of the Council, and we're pleased with the outcome." The Obama administration's total disregard of Israel's obvious interest in keeping the U.N. on the sidelines was striking. Instead of reiterating the obvious — that peace will not come if bigots and autocrats are permitted to ram an international "solution" down the throat of the only democracy at the table — Rice told the Council: "The United States cannot be left to do all the heavy lifting by itself, and other countries . . . must do all that they can to shore up our common efforts." In a break with decades of U.S. policy, the Obama strategy is to energize a U.N. bad cop so that the U.S. might assume the role of good cop — for a price. On Tuesday the Obama administration did it again: It ran for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. As expected, the administration won election to represent the Council's Western European and Others Group — it was a three-state contest for three spaces. The Council is most famous, not for protecting human rights, but for its obsession with Israel. In its three-year history it has: adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than condemning the 191 other U.N. members combined; Moreover, every morning before the Human Rights Council starts, all states — and even observers like the Palestinians — get together in their regional blocs for an hour to negotiate, share information, and determine positions. All, that is, except Israel. The Western European and Others Group refuses to give Israel full membership. Now the U.S. will be complicit in this injustice. Joining the Council has one immediate effect on U.S.-Israel relations: It gives the Obama administration a new stick to use against Israel. Having legitimized the forum through its membership and participation, the U.S. can now attempt to extract concessions from Israel in return for American objections to the Council's constant anti-Israel barrage. Obama administration officials may believe they can put the lid back on Pandora's box after having invited the U.N., Russia, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to jump into the process of manufacturing a Palestinian state while Israel is literally under fire. They have badly miscalculated. By making his bed with countries that have no serious interest in democratic values, the president has made our world a much more dangerous place. "Anne Bayefsky is editor of EYEontheUN. Contact them at info@EYEonthe UN.org She is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College. This article, by Anne Bayefsky, originally appeared in National Review Online.
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ISRAEL & AMERICA'S BUS BOY; NETANYAHU'S PRINCIPLES; ROCKET WARFARE ECONOMICS; P.A. CLAIMS JEWISH ARTIFACTS; MODERATES?
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 15, 2009. |
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STRATEGIC DEPTH AGAINST FOREIGN ATTACK The Israeli government recently held exercises practicing for an emergency relocation of thousands of Jews from the densely settled center of Israel to lightly settled Samaria. Samaria affords Israelis strategic depth against major or even non-conventional attack, say, by Iran. The Samaria Regional Council suggests that relocation and new construction in Samaria start now for Israelis, before an attack. By spreading out the Jewish population, Iran would become less able to kill half the Israelis in one little basket
ISRAEL SUSPECTS OBAMA BACKING AWAY FROM IT According to an intelligence report, Israel suspects that Pres. Obama is backing away from Israel. The President considers U.S. cooperation with Israel an obstacle to making friends with Iran and other Radical Muslim states. The new Administration is continuing its predecessor's policy of denying Israel the technical means for raiding Iran's nuclear facilities. The U.S. would reject Israeli intelligence reports about enemies of the U.S.. Obama is acting on the assumption that appeasing Iran and Syria would get them to let the US withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/27). It is nothing new for the US to ignore Israeli intelligence reports. Sometimes those reports show flaws in U.S. policies and assumptions. Can't admit that. Under too narrow a perception of jihad does Obama suppose that Iran and Syria would be grateful to the Great Satan for betraying its ally, Israel, and the Afghanis. Iran will have been allowed to acquire nuclear weapons in defiance of the U.S. and the UN. Now in a stronger position, Radical Islamists would feel heady with success. They would claim to have faced the U.S. down. On with jihad, they would cry! U.S. appeasement would encourage them. Nor would it stop the Pakistani madrassas from brainwashing boys into terrorists. Obama doesn't realize that jihad is global, run by relentless and deceitful fanatics. WASHINGTON PLOTS AGAINST ISRAEL, OVER DECADES "Washington's Elders of Anti-Zion," Lenny Ben-David, The Jerusalem Post, 5/5/09, www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710872891&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull Ben-David details 35 years of observation of US leaders' machinations against Zionism, culminating in the current Administration. Too long for my format. WHAT PRINCIPLES HAS NETANYAHU? People ask what one may expect from Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu. PM Netanyahu prides himself on being a pragmatist. Unbound by ideology, he is willing to review all policies. He would calculate policies' cost and benefit. He also wrote to the International Israel Allies Caucus dinner participants that Jerusalem is the "eternal and undivided capital of the State of Israel." He praised them, because their "moral clarity is not clouded by the winds of political correctness; friends, whose principled defense of a Jewish and democratic state in a hostile region is not merely part of a strategic calculus of cost and benefit, but springs from a deep devotion to faith, an intense dedication to freedom and a firm belief in our shared values." "...we will never compromise our security and never compromise our identity. Israel was founded as a Jewish state and it will forever remain a Jewish state." His sentiment reeks of principles and ideology, such as devotion to faith." He reminds his audience that Israel was founded as a Jewish state. Then why does he propose building up a Palestinian Arab state in the core area of Jewish civilization, Judea? He is a mass of self-contradictions. Let us evaluate his political integrity: (1)Presented as a nationalist, what they call right-wing, his Wye accord ceded to the Palestinian Authority the hills around Hebron, despite warnings that Arab snipers there would shoot down into the Jewish community. And they did. Conclusion: The media presents politicians as it misconceives of them or as it wants audiences to perceive of them for its own agenda. Candidates utter platitudes they don't honor. Netanyahu is one such. He buckles under pressure. TERRORISM CONFRONTING EGYPT & PAKISTAN Egypt has expressed concern about Iran mobilizing its Hamas proxy to smuggle in arms and attack Egypt. The Taliban have made alliances with other Radical Muslim groups in the Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province. The Taliban thereby are advancing in that province (NY Times, 414, A1, A10). Muslim countries not controlled by Radical Islam are starting to pay for their having condoned terrorism before, when they thought it would be directed beyond the Muslim world. Egypt hardly tried to halt the smuggling of arms into Gaza, when used for fighting Israel. Now terrorism is directed at Egypt, too. Can the two countries still contain Radical Islalm? Will they join against what Pres. Bush called the evil axis, whose underlying unity eludes Pres. Obama? JUDGE CONDEMNS ISRAELI POLICE OPPRESSION A few dozen Israeli youth expressed intent to march from Siderot, Israel, to the former Jewish towns demolished in Gaza. They wish to protest the demolition and evacuation. Police arrested them on apparently spurious charges of making trouble in Siderot. The magistrate before whom they were hailed chastised the police for oppressing freedom of expression (http://www.imra.org.il/, Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/13). If they attempted to cross into Gaza, forbidden because it is terrorist country, police could arrest them. Israeli police arrest right-wingers for expressing their patriotic views. The police usually do not arrest left-wingers who advocate or practice sedition. Leftists bribe people to dodge the draft. They use public universities to exhort the Arabs to commit terrorism. They attack Israeli troops at the security fence. They lead Arabs to destroy crops of Jews in Judea-Samaria. WHAT SYRIA EXPECTS OF U.S. ON PEACE Noting that Pres. Obama favors statehood for the Palestinian Authority, Syrian Foreign Min. al-Moallem said he expects that the U.S. would pressure Israel to acquiesce in this ((http://www.imra.org.il/, Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/10). The aggressors demand pressure upon the victims! Why can't the Palestinian Authority negotiate peace on it own? Why should the US do the Arabs' dirty work? What has statehood to do with making peace/ ROCKET WARFARE ECONOMICS Earlier reports indicate that most Hamas rockets are relatively cheap, at under $1,000. The current report indicates that the Iron Dome interceptor Israel expects to be ready next year, costs $50,000. The designers explain that its radar fires only at rockets headed for populated areas of Israel. One fourth of Hamas rockets successfully head that way. [Don't be where the other three-fourths land.] The developers admit that their defense would cost Israel tens of millions of dollars. They think that it is worth it (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/10). If Hamas has 8,000 rockets, then it has 2,000 that would be on a trajectory toward populated areas. At a cost of $50,000 to shoot each of the 2,000 down, the total cost of defense would be $100,000,000. That is, until Iran ships more. At $1,000 for Iran to send Hamas each of the 8,000 offensive rockets, Iran would be spending $8,000,000 to Israel's $100,000,000. Seems like a way of bankrupting Israel. The tendency is for Iran to send rockets that are more accurate, of longer range, and of greater explosive power. That costs more. However, if many of them were fired at once, they might overwhelm the capacity of the Iron Dome to deal with them. Some would get through to the cities. Suppose Israel invests in this new method of defense, and Iran devises a missile that can evade it? I think that Israel would have been wiser to have eradicated Hamas during the Gaza combat. RUSSIA TO BUY ISRAELI DRONES Russia realized from its Georgia war how much more effectively it could have fought, if it had unmanned aerial vehicles, i.e., drones. It therefore is buying a range of Israeli ones, but not many within each range. It admits that it wants to study them, so it can make them, itself (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/10). That won't be very profitable for Israel. Besides, that rogue state, Russia, will commit further aggression more capably and will make money selling drones to Radical Muslim aggressors. It doesn't take long for aggressors to buy military technology developed by more advanced countries. FLAW IN OBAMA STRATEGY AGAINST JIHAD Pres. Bush's strategy originally was to confront jihad widely, but explain that he opposed only Radical Islam. Pres. Obama is confronting jihad narrowly and putting a friendlier face on relations with Islam. He is trying to substitute negotiation for combat. That can work with ordinary foes, not with rogue states. As we've discussed, negotiation with rogue states, without issuing them an ultimatum, is that it gives them time to develop weapons of mass-destruction past the point of no return. Then we would be at their mercy, but they have none. It seems wise to try to calm down the general Muslim population. But are friendly relations possible? When the US was allied with some Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, against others, the native people did not see much justice in our self-defense. They just see infidels killing Muslims. When those same Muslims kill fellow Muslims, the general Muslim population objects much less. Al-Qaeda had to practice excessive brutality, before the Iraqis rejected them. PAKISTAN TOO SLOW TO COMBAT TALIBAN The Taliban have steadily been marching towards Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, without encountering professional Army opposition, until April 29. The Army finally moved a modest number of well-armed, trained troops from the border with India to the front with the Taliban. The NY Times wonders at Pakistan's delay. Yet it admits now that in reaction to the Mumbai bombing administered via Pakistan security forces, India mobilized on the border with Pakistan. No wonder Pakistan is distracted from the Taliban! India needs to reassure Pakistan, so Pakistan would fight to keep its a-bombs from the Taliban hands, liable to launch them against India! But there are other reasons for Pakistan's dilatory response to the Taliban. Governments get set in their ways. Ashamed to admit policy failure, they stubbornly persist in it. Unpopular regimes fail to adjust to loss of popularity. Enemies take them by surprise. This happened to the Chinese Nationalists, somewhat to the Vietnamese anti-Communists, to Pres. Marcos of the Philippines, and to the Bush administration. For more on Pakistan Vs. Taliban:
TORTURE During the Presidential campaign, people suggested that Pres. Bush be tried as a war criminal for torture. I disagreed, thinking there was not enough evidence. Now that key memoranda have been released, I see sufficient evidence for it. PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY CLAIMS JEWISH ARTIFACTS The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. That preceded Israeli independence. The Rockefeller Museum in eastern Jerusalem held onto the Scrolls until 1967, when the Jewish people regained control of that part of Jerusalem. The Museum gave the Scrolls to the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Scrolls will be exhibited "...at the Royal Ontario Museum from June 27, 2009 to January 3, 2010. Scrolls to be displayed will include passages from Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah, the War Scroll, the Community Rule and the Messianic Apocalypse." The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) objects. It demands custody over the Scrolls, alleging that they were discovered in "the Palestinian territories." The P.A. claims that displaying the Scrolls would violate four international conventions. The Canadian museum director notes that the Scrolls were displayed
many times abroad, but this is the first objection. He denies any
merit to the P.A. claim for custody
Their claim is odd. The P.A. is not a sovereign state. The Scrolls were found before the P.A. was given autonomy over part of the Territories. The discovery was made even before the western Palestinian Arabs fabricated a claim of being a separate nationality from the Arab nation. The PLO Covenant belies that claim by admitting their Arabs are part of the Arab nation. The subjects of the Scrolls all relate to Jewish history that occurred centuries before a Muslim Arab army, with Jewish help, conquered Judea from the Byzantines. You may wonder why an Arab entity is interested in controlling Jewish artifacts. Judge by the Muslim Waqf that funs the Temple Mount, illegally excavating and destroying ancient Jewish artifacts, then trying to bolster their political claim to Jerusalem and Israel by denying the earlier centuries of Jewish civilization there. OBAMA DROPS KEY DEMAND OF IRAN Pres. Obama has dropped the long standing U.S. demand that during negotiations, Iran discontinue enriching uranium into weapons grade material (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/14). If negotiations take a few months, then Iran would be sure to complete some nuclear weapons. While Obama talks, New York may be destroyed. It is like the Japanese-U.S. negotiations before WWII. Japan sent diplomats to lull the US into complacency, then withdrew them just as Japan was about to sneak into Pearl Harbor. MODERATE" PALESTINIAN ARAB? Palestinian Authority (P.A.) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad deplored Israelis' murder of the martyrs, Mohamed Al-Noire and Rabah Al-JHijazi Sidr. Fact is, Mohamed Al-Noire was slain while throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli homes in Beit El. Rabah Al-Hijazi Sidr ihad sneaked into the Jewish community of Beit Hagai and tried stabling Jews there. "He was shot to death shortly after lightly injuring one of them in the leg." Fayyad described Jerusalem as "an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories in 1967, in accordance with international law and resolutions of international legitimacy" He accused Israel of putting Jerusalem's Arabism and prestige and the lives and the future of their children in a real danger." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/19) When the UN recommended that the area west of the Jordan River be partitioned into a Jewish and an Arab state, it suggested that Jerusalem be an international city. Contrary to what Fayyad implied, the UN did not suggest that Jerusalem be part of an Arab territory. Neither did it set official boundaries for the proposed states. The Arabs rejected the proposed states and tried to drive the Jews out. That made the UN proposal moot. The war left Israel with the New City part of Jerusalem, and the invading Jordanian army with the Old City part. The local Arabs did not control it. When the Arabs made war on Israel again, in 1967, Israel regained the Old City, Judaism's holiest city, for the Jewish people. Israel annexed the Old City and environs. Legally and morally, that supersedes any Arab claim to it. What does Fayyad mean about Jerusalem being in the "occupied Palestinian territories" "in accordance with international law" and having an Arab character? One cannot "occupy" a country that never existed — there never was a Palestinian Arab state there. Arab character? No, Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority for at least 150 years. Fayyad made a serious charge, that Israel put the "lives and future of Arab children in real danger? How so? He cites no measures to back up his claim. Israel does not harm Arab children. His claim is defamatory and incendiary. The murderers are not the Israelis who defended themselves. The murderous ones are the Arab infiltrators who wantonly tried to murder strangers because they are Jews. Unjustifiably, Fayyad is called moderate. However, Fayyad, who calls Muslim murderers martyrs, and martyred Jews murderers, who slanders Israel as endangering Arab children, and who distorts international law and history, is no moderate. Then why does the West label him as moderate? Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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PA REP, ABBS ZAKI, SAYS 2-STATE SOLUTION WILL KILL ISRAEL
Posted by Alexander Dymshits, May 15, 2009. |
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Yelena Faykina This article below is by Hillel Fendel and it appeared May
9, 2009 in Arutz-7
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(IsraelNN.com) Palestinian Authority representative in Lebanon Abbas Zaki says the two-state solution is his preferred approach, as it will lead to Israel's collapse. Speaking with Lebanese ANB Television on May 7, Zaki said that any ceasefire, or hudna, deal with Israel is not desirable. Instead, the long-time PLO member said, "we must go towards the two-state solution, a solution that even [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmedinajad supports." "In my opinion," Zaki explained, "with such a solution, Israel will collapse. Because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will be left of all their [the Jews'] talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen Nation? What will be with all the sacrifices they gave and then they are told to leave?" The two-state solution, supported by the United States and most of the world, calls for a Palestinian Authority state in Judea and Samaria, leaving Israel barely 11 miles wide in some areas. Zaki said that Jews and Israelis "perceive of Jerusalem as having a spiritual status. They relate to Judea and Samaria as a historic dream. If the Jews leave these places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse of itself — and then we will move forward." The interview was brought to the Western eye by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Zaki has made similar points before. In 2008, the former Palestinian Legislative Council member for Hevron, former Fatah operations head, and current PLO Central Council member said, "When the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine." Zaki also headed the PLO Lebanon Committee and the Palestine National Liberation Army's political commissariat. Asked then if he believes in weapons or negotiations, Zaki replied, "The use of weapons alone will not bring results, and the use of politics without weapons will not bring results. We act on the basis of our extensive experience. We analyze our situation carefully. We know what climate leads to victory and what climate leads to suicide. We talk politics, but our principles are clear. It was our pioneering leader, Yasser Arafat, who persevered with this revolution, when empires collapsed." Contact Alexander Dymshits at alex8well@yahoo.com |
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WE NEED MORE JEWS
Posted by Michael Freund, May 15, 2009. |
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In northeastern India, there are 7,232 Bnei Menashe waiting anxiously to rejoin the Jewish people and make aliyah. Unfortunately, there are those here who prefer to slam the door in their faces, and turn away our lost brethren, rather than embrace them and welcome them back into the fold. Some, such as Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum, argue that we should focus on quality, rather than quantity. But it does not have to be one or the other — we can and should strive to have both. A tiny and shrinking Jewish people, consisting only of a small core of committed members, will hardly be able to meet the challenges and threats to our survival, be they physical or spiritual. The bottom line is that we need more Jews. Comments and feedback may be sent to: letters@jpost.com or to me directly at msfreund@netvision.net.il |
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A little over a week ago, I attended the consecration of a new synagogue dedicated to the memory of a European Jew who was murdered by the Germans in the Holocaust. Hundreds of people took part in the moving and tearful ceremony, which recalled the suffering that was so brutally inflicted on us less than seven decades ago. The Nahalat Yitzhak (legacy of Isaac) synagogue was named for Isaac Kottler, a relative of mine who was taken from his home in Paris, never to return. The Nazis confiscated his vast library, which included a family tree that was said to have dated back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and sent him to Auschwitz. My relative left behind no survivors, so I asked the congregants to devote the prayers they would say, and the Torah they would learn, to his memory. That would be Isaac Kottler's eternal legacy, I told them, and no evil in the world could ever take that away. 
Afterward, the traditional affixing of the mezuza at the synagogue's entrance took place, and it was followed by the festive accompaniment of the Torah scroll to the Holy Ark and the recitation of the evening prayers. It was a typically Jewish event, I thought to myself — one that combines a solemn commemoration of the pain of our past together with a bright and even brimming optimism regarding the future. But what made this experience so special was that it did not occur in New York, London or even Tel Aviv, but rather in the village of Keithalmanbi in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, not far from the Burmese border. Those in attendance were members of the Bnei Menashe, a group descended from a lost tribe of Israel. Despite being cut off from the rest of the Jewish people for more than 27 centuries, they clung to their heritage and traditions, and are now seeking to come home to Zion. Over the past decade, more than 1,500 Bnei Menashe have made aliya. Four young men from the community have already received rabbinical ordination, and dozens of others have served in frontline IDF combat units. But another 7,232 members of the community are still stuck in India, waiting for the Israeli government to grant them permission to return. Unfortunately, there are those here who prefer to slam the door in their faces, and turn away our lost brethren, rather than embrace them and welcome them back into the fold.
MOST OF THOSE opposed to their aliya have never studied the issue in depth, examined its merits, learned about the community's history or traditions, or even bothered to meet a single Bnei Menashe. But that doesn't seem to stop them from summarily issuing a verdict regarding the fate of thousands of people. My usually thoughtful colleague Jonathan Rosenblum did just that in his "Size is not the issue" (May 8). Harnessing an unbefitting tone of scorn, he decries what he describes as the practice of "tracking down every obscure tribe in the world that has an oral tradition that it is one of the Ten Lost Tribes, which is Freund's own pet hobbyhorse." He further goes on to downplay the importance of the size of the Jewish people, asserting that quality, not quantity, is all that really matters. Rosenblum couldn't possibly have gotten it more wrong. To begin with, the Bnei Menashe are not an "obscure tribe," however exotic and colorful that phrase may sound, nor did anyone "track them down." Quite the opposite is true. It is they who have reached out to us. Ever since the days of Golda Meir, the Bnei Menashe have been writing letters and sending missives to prime ministers and decision-makers, pleading to reconnect with Israel and the Jewish people. They have built dozens of synagogues over the past few decades — "Nahalat Yitzhak" in Keithalmanbi is the 26th to be erected in Manipur — and they live a fully Jewish life, which includes observing Shabbat, keeping kosher and following the laws of family purity. Indeed, five years ago, I approached Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and asked him to issue a halachic ruling regarding the status of the Bnei Menashe. In March 2005, after carefully studying the issue, he declared them to be "descendants of Israel" and agreed to facilitate their return through conversion and aliya. I have no doubt that soon enough, all the remaining members of the community will be able to come here, and that is as it should be. The aliya of the Bnei Menashe strengthens Israel and the Jewish people, both numerically and spiritually. It will boost our numbers and inject us with a healthy new dose of passionate and committed Zionists and observant Jews. What could possibly be wrong with that?
ROSENBLUM, HOWEVER, insists that numbers are unimportant. In his article, he cites just one source to back his claim, noting that the Torah says, "Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did God desire you and choose you, for you are the least numerous of all the peoples" (Deuteronomy 7:7). But what he failed to mention is how the commentators elucidate this verse. From the explanation offered by Nachmanides, the great medieval scholar, it is clear that this passage is descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature Moreover, it should be obvious that numbers do have meaning in Judaism. After all, G-d did not choose a family or a small tribe to serve His purposes in this world. He chose an entire nation, the people of Israel. Obviously, then, a critical mass is essential to carry out our sacred mission, for if it were not, then G-d could easily have placed the responsibility on just a handful of shoulders. To be sure, Rosenblum is correct in asserting that quantity without quality is of little value in ensuring the Jewish future. But what he and others like him fail to realize is that the opposite is equally true. A tiny and shrinking Jewish people, consisting only of a small core of committed members, will hardly be able to meet the challenges and threats to our survival, be they physical or spiritual. Perhaps that is why G-d promised the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that the Jewish people would one day be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the sand by the sea. Only then can we possibly fulfill our role. Yes, we must redouble our efforts to keep Jews Jewish, but we must also open the doors and pave the way for groups such as the Bnei Menashe to return. The fact is that we need more Jews in the world, not less. Our vitality, and our future, depend on it.
The writer serves as chairman of Shavei Israel (www.shavei.org), a Jerusalem-based group that assists "lost Jews" seeking to reconnect with Israel and the Jewish people.
This article appeared today in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
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WHAT THE POPE TAUGHT THE WORLD
Posted by Naomi Ragen, May 14, 2009. |
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The Pope's recent visit to Bethlehem was one of the most blatant displays of capitulation to terrorism that has been seen in recent years. How well I remember the way Christians were treated by Arafat's henchmen, including Mahmoud Abbas his right hand man, during the Intifada. The Christian community was decimated, and is now only twenty percent of the population, when it was once the majority. Christian girls were kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. Christians were kicked out of their homes by gunmen, who used Christian neighborhoods to set up sniper nests from which they shot into Jewish homes in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood, and passing cars on the road (Dr. Shmuel Gillis, on whom I patterned the hero of my book, The Covenant, was killed on his way home from treating cancer patients at Hadassah Hospital by such a sniper.) And then there was the siege of the Church of the Nativity. The priests and children held hostage by Arafat's gunmen. The church desecrated. Priests holding up signs at the windows to Israeli soldiers "Please help us!" The Pope, standing side by side with Abbas, chose to forget these things. His words: "Mr. President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders." This is the voice of a religious leader, a moral force in the world? For choosing to forget all that happened to Christians in one of Christianity's holiest sites, he has chosen the way of appeasement, not peace. Of cowardly acquiescence to evil, instead of forthright defense of the helpless. He has nothing to teach us Jews. Indeed, he has nothing to teach Catholics. The only people who may learn from him are Muslim terrorists. And the lesson is clear. The leader of the Catholic world — once again — in the face of evil, has decided to side with the oppressors against the oppressed. One would think a German Pope would have something wiser to impart. Below, an excellent article by Aaron Klein at WorldNetDaily Every blessing,
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During Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Bethlehem today, the pontiff did not address rampant Muslim persecution of Christians and stood by as Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas lied about the real reason behind local Christians fleeing. In a major address, the pontiff strongly supported a Palestinian state. Perhaps he does not realize recent history demonstrates such a state may lead to increased persecution and endangerment of Palestinian Christians. "Mr. President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders," Benedict said upon his arrival in Bethlehem, standing alongside Abbas. In Bethlehem, where the Christian population has dropped from a majority to less than 20 percent, Benedict delivered a special message of solidarity to the 1.4 million Palestinians isolated in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. "My heart goes out to the pilgrims from war-torn Gaza: I ask you to bring back to your families and your communities my warm embrace, and my sorrow for the loss, the hardship and the suffering you have had to endure," the pope said in his address at an open-air Mass in Manger Square. By referencing the "war-torn Gaza" and necessary "rebuilding," the pope was apparently fingering Israel's recent 22-day confrontation with Hamas as the cause for "the suffering" Gazans "had to endure." He said nothing, however, of the suffering of Gaza's 3,000 Christians since Hamas took over that territory in 2007. Benedict might well have decried the many bombings, shootings and other Islamist attacks against Gazan Christian establishments, the brutal murder of the territory's only Bible-store owner, or the regular intimidation and persecution of Christians there. His solidarity with Gazan Christians might have given them some much-needed strength. Benedict, speaking from Bethlehem — the site of rampant Muslim persecution of Christians — did not once renounce the Islamic violence there, either. Instead, the pope stood beside Abbas as the Palestinian leader deceptively pointed to a concrete separation barrier in Bethlehem and blamed that barrier, as well as Israeli "occupation," for the plight of Christians. "In this Holy Land, the occupation still continues building separation walls," Abbas said. "Instead of building the bridge that can link us, they are using the force of occupation to force Muslims and Christians to emigrate." It should be respectfully pointed out to the pope that Abbas was dangerously fabricating history. Actually, it was Abbas' own Fatah party that is causing Christians to flee. First, about the "wall." Bethlehem is not surrounded by any wall. Israel built a fence, in 2002, in the area where northern Bethlehem interfaces with Jerusalem. A tiny segment of that barrier, facing a major Israeli roadway, is a concrete wall that Israel says is meant to prevent gunmen from shooting at Israeli motorists. The fence was constructed after the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, or terror war, launched after the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat turned down an Israeli offer of a Palestinian state, instead returning to the Middle East to liberate Palestine with violence. Scores of deadly suicide bombings and shooting attacks against Israelis were planned in Bethlehem and carried out by Bethlehem-area terrorists, including Abbas' Fatah organization. At one point during the period of just 30 days in 2002, at least 14 shootings were perpetuated by Bethlehem cells of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorists, killing two Israelis and wounding six. Many times Muslim gunmen in the Bethlehem area reportedly took positions in civilian homes in the hilltops of Christian Beit Jala, which straddles Bethlehem. Beit Jala afforded the terrorists a clear firing line at southern sections of Jerusalem and at a major Israeli highway down below, drawing Israeli military raids and the eventual building of the security barrier there. Is this barrier causing Bethlehem's Christians to flee, as Abbas claimed today? Simple demographic facts will answer this question. Israel built the barrier five years ago. But Bethlehem's Christian population started to drastically decline in 1995, the very year Arafat's Palestinian Authority took over the holy Christian city in line with the U.S.-backed Oslo Accords. Bethlehem consisted of upwards of 80 percent Christians when Israel was founded in 1948, but since Arafat got his hands on it, the city's Christian population dove to its current 23 percent. And that statistic is considered generous since it includes the satellite towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Some estimates place Bethlehem's actual Christian population as low as 12 percent, with hundreds of Christians leaving every year. As soon as he took over Bethlehem, Arafat unilaterally fired the city's Christian politicians and replaced them with Muslim cronies. He appointed a Muslim governor, Muhammed Rashad A-Jabar and unilaterally disbanded Bethlehem's city council, which had nine Christians and two Muslims, reducing the number of Christians councilors to a 50-50 split. Arafat then converted a Greek Orthodox monastery next to the Church of Nativity, the believed birthplace of Jesus, into his official Bethlehem residence. Suddenly, after the Palestinians gained the territory, reports of Christian intimidation by Muslims began to surface, reports the pope would do well to note since they may foreshadow what is to come under a Palestinian state. Christian leaders and residents in Bethlehem told me they face an atmosphere of regular hostility. They said Palestinian armed groups stir tension by holding militant demonstrations and marches in the streets. They spoke of instances in which Christian shopkeepers' stores were ransacked and Christian homes attacked. In the past, they said, Palestinian gunmen fired at Israelis from Christian hilltop communities, drawing Israeli anti-terror raids to their towns. In 2002, dozens of terrorists holed up inside the Church of the Nativity for 39 days while fleeing a massive Israeli anti-terror operation. Israel surrounded the church area, but refused to storm the structure. Gunmen inside included wanted senior Hamas, Tanzim and Brigades terrorists reportedly involved in suicide bombings and shooting attacks. More than 200 nuns and priests were trapped in the church after Israeli hostage negotiators failed to secure their release. Some Christian leaders said one of the most significant problems facing
Christians in Bethlehem is the rampant confiscation of land by Muslim gangs.
"THERE ARE MANY CASES WHERE CHRISTIANS HAVE THEIR LAND STOLEN by the [Muslim] mafia," said Samir Qumsiyeh, a Bethlehem Christian leader and owner of the Beit Sahour-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station. "It is a regular phenomenon in Bethlehem. They go to a poor Christian person with a forged power of attorney document, then they say we have papers proving you're living on our land. If you confront them, many times the Christian is beaten. You can't do anything about it. The Christian loses, and he runs away," Qumsiyeh told me, speaking from his hilltop television station during an interview last year. Qumsiyeh himself said he was targeted by Islamic gangs, his home firebombed after he returned from a trip abroad during which he gave public speeches outlining the plight of Bethlehem's Christian population. One Christian Bethlehem resident told me her friend recently fled Bethlehem after being accused by Muslims of selling property to Jews, a crime punishable by death in some Palestinian cities. A good deal of the intimidation, she added, comes from gunmen associated with PA President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization. A February Jerusalem Post article cited the case of Faud and Georgette Lama, Christian residents of Bethlehem who said their land was stolen by local Muslims, but that when they tried to do something about it, Faud was beaten by gunmen. One religious novelty-store owner I met recently told me Muslim gangs regularly deface Christian property. "We are harassed, but you wouldn't know the truth. No one says anything publicly about the Muslims. This is why Christians are running away." Meanwhile, Benedict's call for a Palestinian state would bring complete PA control over more territory in which Christians reside. Thus, his call, if implemented, may well result in even more Christian deaths, persecution and intimidation. Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist and journalist who lives in Jerusalem. She can be contacted at www.naomiragen.com, where you can subscribe to her newsletter. |
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ISRAEL'S AUDACITY
Posted by Jack Engelhard, May 14, 2009. |
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"Why are the nations in an uproar?" King David — writing 3,000 years ago, but always as current as today and as prophetic as tomorrow — begins his second Psalm like this: "Why are the nations in an uproar [against Israel]?" Again, as before, Israel is to be faulted for everything. There is no end to this rhetorical question. Here's a headline from today's Philadelphia Inquirer: "International Community Alarmed Over Israel's Settlement Expansion." (Alarmed!) This, from the Associated Press: "UN Report Faults Israel Over Gaza." In its Sunday edition, the New York Times offers this quote from a UN official: "Everything Israel does now will be highly contentious." (This is news?) The backdrop — the back story — is this administration's Nuremberg Approach toward Israel. The Nuremberg Laws' sole purpose was to deprive the Jews of their rights as citizens, eventually to disown them, displace them and prepare them for annihilation. A third of all Jews thus perished. Again, as before, Israel is to be faulted for everything, even Iran's Islamic Bomb. This, then, is not a new policy. It is an old policy refreshed and on steroids. Speaking at an Irvine synagogue, professor and best-selling author Sam Harris told a Jewish gathering that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish nation. We do not know if this intellectual objects to Poland being Polish, China being Chinese, and so forth on to the other 191 members that make up the United Nations. We can guess that Mr. Harris is comfortable with the world as it is, except for Israel. The enlightened California Jewish congregation agreed with Harris and gave him a standing ovation. Why are the nations in an uproar? No such uproar, however, for the news from Sri Lanka, where 378 civilians were killed and more than 1,100 wounded in clashes between the military and the Tamil Tigers. The uproar is reserved for Israel. Pharaoh said it first: "This people, they grow too numerous. Come, let us deal treacherously with them." Springtime for Pharaoh (and all the other Pharaohs who knew not Joseph) ended in 1948, when the Jews rekindled the Land of Israel. Suddenly, the nations could not toy with them as they had for the past 2,000 years. The Jews had always been so pliable, so convenient, such patsies, always vulnerable to snubs, insults, derision, hoots, whistles, slings, arrows, roundups, pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, slavery, Holocausts. Today, the universe is out of sync. The Jews have a home, an army, a navy, an air force. Attacked, they fight back. How dare they! What happened to the good old days when the Jews were so handy for sport? Exiled, scattered, the Jews were property. How pleasant it was when the Jews were so easily maneuvered and persecuted. We want them back, say the nations. We want them bowed and cowed. President Shimon Peres has already been shown the door. He entered and departed the White House through the kitchen. He was taught a lesson. In Toulouse, once a year the grand rabbi had to get himself to the cathedral for a ceremonial slap across the face. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been ordered to headquarters. He has already been told to bring along a suicide note. He's been told that virtually all the nations of the world are lined up against Israel. (The vultures are gathering. They hunger for the carcass and squabble for the leftovers.) Israel must concede, retreat, disperse and surrender in favor of a 23rd Arab nation. Israel must give up, give in, to live in "peace and security" under the lordship of the same people whose gift to the world was the suicide bomber. Israel must pay for its audacity of hope. After all, this people, they grow too numerous. Perhaps, as before, say the nations, the Jews can be placed in cattle cars and be "relocated." King David goes on to say, "Now, therefore, O ye kings, be wise. Be admonished, ye judges of the Earth.... Beware the day of His wrath." Jack Engelhard is the author of "The Bathsheba Deadline" and "Indecent Proposal", as well as the award-winning memoir of his experiences as a Jewish refugee from Europe, "Escape From Mount Moriah". His latest novel, "The Girls of Cincinnati," is available on Amazon. He can be reached at his website www. jackengelhard. com This article appeared May 11, 2009 in Arutz-7 and is archived http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/8773 |
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READ THIS BIBI!: JUST SAY NO!!
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 14, 2009. |
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This excellent essay came in from many sources today. It should be read by all. A coincidence: We used the same title when Bibi was at the Wye River Conference October 19, 1998: "Your People Are Bleeding, Bibi! JUST SAY NO! And Go Home". At that time over 300 Israelis had been murdered by Palestinian Arab Muslim Terrorists since September 9, 1993 when Arafat supposedly renounced terrorism against Jews. Oslo has only meant death to Israelis. Several thousand had already been wounded by then, some maimed for life. I will search for that article and resend it to you. It is still true. BIBI! JUST SAY NO AND GO HOME!! It was written by Irwin N. Graulich, a motivational speaker on morality, ethics, Judaism and politics. He is also President and CEO of a marketing, branding and communications company in New York City. He can be reached at irwin.graulich@verizon.net |
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Monday, May 18th, 2009...a day that will live in infamy. How do you tell President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Special Envoy Mitchell that a Palestinian State simply will not work? How does Benjamin Netanyahu explain to the American Liberal that compromise for the creation of a 59th Muslim nation is the kiss of death? Remember this Bibi. There is really not much that Obama can do, if you say "No" to giving back any land. Do not be afraid. Will he give you a good "potch in tuchess," or withhold some military armaments? So what? Congress will not allow him to do anything harmful. Thank you Founding Fathers. The Ivy League educated liberal mind of today has been brainwashed through higher education to believe that sophisticated negotiations and discussions amongst suits, ties and business attire will solve all the world's problems. Tell that to Chamberlain and Hitler, or to Japan's Emperor Hirohito. Unfortunately, the only way to stop evil in most cases is through force, and yes...bombs, when absolutely necessary. The overwhelmingly Ivy educated Obama Administration does not remember its history very well. Just Google "1948 and the UN partition plan," which suggested giving the Arab population much more than it even wants today. But no deal was acceptable to any Muslim nation in the Middle East because Jews were involved. Hey, when you turn down a deal, you cannot ask for it back again. How about pre 6 day war 1967, when all of Gaza, the entire West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem belonged to Egypt and Jordan. Why was that period the most dangerous time for little old Israel's existence? Did anyone in the world or at the UN ever question why Jordan made the holiest Jewish site, The Western Wall, into a giant urinal? Not one complaint from any UN member. When honest, decent, caring people in America and Israel confront these issues seriously, they should arrive at the only possible realistic solution. Peace for peace with every Arab and Muslim nation, and no separate state for a made up group of Arabs who stole a Jewish surname called Palestine, giving them some fraudulent historical credibility. So why has the world and the United Nations become obsessed with this tiny, tiny Jewish state, and the biblical backyard it occupies — actually the size of New Jersey. No oil, no gas, no minerals; just mud from the Dead Sea which sells in malls for $5.00 a bottle. Not exactly a multi-billion dollar industry. Yet Israel is the only country in the world where its citizens are not permitted to travel to 18 nations. Prime Minister Netanyahu must learn the valuable lesson needed to deal with Americans, in order to change their minds. To explain your position, one must speak our special lingo and think like an American — something no foreigner can do, even with perfect English like Bibi. The meeting in the Oval Office should be no more than a schoolyard-type discussion, which most American students learn to navigate by the 6th grade. "Hey listen Barack, it's my ball; Hillary, they stole our bats; George, your mother is calling you to go home for dinner." So before we solve the more difficult problems relating to stickball in the schoolyard, here is a much easier dilemma — solving the Arab-Israeli-Muslim Dispute — and Prime Minister Netanyahu should read precisely from this script. Bibi, begin here: "Listen boys and girls in the Oval Office, here is the problem in a nutshell. The Arab and Muslim world is extremely sensitive to any critical or embarrassing depiction of their culture, no matter how carefully these matters are portrayed. So they will get violently angry or simply lie to protect their honor. Remember the Danish cartoons. Try calling the 9/11 hijackers Islamic or Muslim terrorists." Stand up Bibi: "There is a museum in Cairo dedicated to the Arab victories over Israel and the Jews in the '67 and '73 wars. Hezb'Allah still says it won the war in Lebanon, even though Beirut looked worse than Dresden. Hamas, Syria and Iran recently announced and celebrated a great victory after Operation Cast Lead where Israel literally devastated Gaza. In other words, do not believe your own eyes or the TV cameras, just believe our Arab propaganda." Look Obama in the eye Bibi: "And the world almost always falls for such nonsense by offering to donate money and rebuild everything for a population that elected a Nazi-like government, whose entire 'raison d'etre' is to destroy Israel. So my dear schoolyard buddies, Barack, Hillary and George, let's learn a lesson from all this fighting. My weak, pathetic fellow Jews in Israel will never, ever be forgiven for defeating and devastating the big macho Arab/Muslim armies in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and 2009. Israel is the common enemy and necessary for the survival of the bizarre dictatorial governments throughout the Arab and Muslim world." Raise your voice Bibi: "Even worse, how dare those Jews build a successful democratic society in our midst, that is a model for technology, medicine and scientific discoveries, while all the oil rich nations can do is hire outsiders to design and build palaces for their powerful, dictatorial leaders. Talk about embarrassing — the Prophet Mohammed is probably spinning in his grave." Use your hands Bibi: "Arab and Muslim leadership understands that Israel must always retain its status as the common enemy that binds their populations together — just like Hitler used Germany to galvanize its own nationalism. Even the Saudi Peace Plan is a sham because it is just a typical example of Arab souk/market negotiations which offer results for impossible criteria. [And let's remember that of the 19 plane hijacking suicide bombers, 15 were Saudis and 4 were Egyptians.] Put your glasses on Bibi: "Right of Return" itself is a fraudulent negotiating request, because it shows quite clearly that the Arab and Muslim world has a particular talent for aggrandizing their own historical interpretations, by referencing a myth that has present day implications, and of course ignoring a truth that they do not wish to confront. How about "Right of Return" for hundreds of thousands of Jews who were absolutely thrown out of Arab countries against their will, had their homes, businesses and valuables confiscated, all for no reason. Virtually every Arab who left Israel in 1948 did so under their own free will, because they were promised by Arab leaders that they would return after the war to much more land and golden Jewish spoils." Hands in pocket Bibi: "How about the so called "occupation," another fraudulent term commonly used. First it was the French occupiers, then the British, and now the Israelis and the Americans — all "occupiers." I mean, America gets rid of an Iraqi dictator who has tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents, and they call you an occupier instead of a savior. Talk about ingratitude." Put your hand on Hillary's shoulder (lightly) Bibi: "While the US and Israel constantly criticize our respective leaderships and societies, similar faultfinding is almost never seen throughout the Arab and Muslim world today. And even when there is some criticism, it is usually couched in terms of Muslim condemnation of their acceptance of some horrible Western Judeo-Christian value." Stand right next to George Mitchell, Bibi: "Hey Obama, you think Fatah is moderate? Pick up any newspaper or watch their TV on any given day. The hatred for Israel is incredible. Just recently, the PA passed a law that anyone who sells land to a Jew will be executed. Where have we heard that before?" Sit on the corner of Obama's desk Bibi: "Two months ago, the so called moderate Palestinian Authority closed and disbanded a Palestinian Youth Orchestra and arrested its founder because they played music for Holocaust survivors. PA television just released a full length special devoted to the glorification of the 1978 roadside massacre where Palestinian terrorists commandeered some Egged buses carrying families going to a company picnic, killing 38 men, women and children and wounding 73 Israelis. [April 8th during school vacation for Pesach] a Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank used an axe to murder a 13 year old Jewish boy [in Bat Ayin, a peaceful settlement in Gush Etzion.]" Look at all 3 Bibi: "And would you like to hear what is currently being written about Jews in Palestinian elementary school textbooks? Please, I need an air sickness bag with this Roadmap nonsense. And by the way, you'll never guess what Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority chose to write about in his lengthy doctoral thesis and had it published. Ready — how's this for a title? "Relations Between Zionism and Nazism," subtitled, "The secret connection between the Nazis and the leaders of the Zionist movement." Yet Abbas refers to the Likud party and the new Israeli prime minister as radical extremists. I mean are you kidding me Hillary baby? Remember when you blamed your husband's zipper problems on conservatives? Well, don't do it again with the Israeli government." (end it here Bibi.) That's the type of rhetoric that Prime Minister Netanyahu must use. Otherwise, Israel is dead!!!! Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org |
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COMPETING CLAIMS TO ISRAEL; ISRAEL CONDITIONALLY ACCEPTED ROAD MAP;
STRAIGHT STORY?; FICKLE ARABS; WHITEHOUSE SEDER
Posted by Richard Shulman, May 14, 2009. |
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COMPETING CLAIMS TO ISRAEL Consider the competing Jewish and Arab claims to Israel. The Jews' basic claim is that they ruled it about 1,900 years ago. The Arabs' basic claim is that they ruled it about 1,000 years ago. They assert that their claim, being more recent, is more valid. Does more recent sovereignty determine the validity of territorial claim? Really? Well, the Jewish people rule Israel now. Then the Jewish claim is more valid. The notion of Palestinian Arab entitlement is even weaker. There is no historical Palestinian people, just some Arabs who identified themselves geographically as "Palestinian" and for propaganda. As such, they never ruled anything before Israel gave them autonomy. There never was a Palestinian Arab state [until Jordan obtained sovereignty in 1946.] One might say that sovereignty belongs to the majority. The Jews have a majority in Israel, with or without the Territories. Another Arab pitch for entitlement is that most of the Jewish families in Israel are of relatively recent immigrant origin. Unfortunately for that Arab argument, so are most of the Arab families on both sides of the Jordan River. If immigrant families must move out, what chaos that would bring to the U.S. and most of the rest of the world! Certainly the Arabs, most of whom live in countries they conquered during their great wave of imperialism, would have to return to the Arabian Peninsula. Cram in another 200,000,000 Arabs, and what shortages they would suffer, except for sand! By that logic, the Palestinian Arabs would have to relinquish Israel, the Territories, and Jordan to their original owners, that is, the most aboriginal extant, the Jewish people (Prof. Steven Plaut, 4/7). There is another consideration. The Arab states expelled their Jews. They are attempting genocide against the Jews and to establish global Islamic rule. The Palestinian Arabs invented or at least popularized skyjacking and suicide bombing. I think that empowering them with more territory is dangerous to civilization, and they don't deserve concession or consideration. ATTACK HA'ARETZ FOR SLANDER 46 reservists petitioned Israel's Attorney-General. They want him to prosecute Ha'aretz for slandering the IDF over its behavior in Gaza. Without checking, the paper accepted hearsay that proved defamatory. [They get away with that a lot.] (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/, Arutz-7, 4/7). ISRAEL'S CONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE OF ROAD MAP PM Sharon accepted the Road Map, with 14 reservations, especially: 1..."The Palestinians will dismantle the existing security organizations and implement security reforms during the course of which new organizations will be formed and act to combat terror, violence and incitement (incitement must cease immediately and the Palestinian Authority [P.A.]must educate for peace). These organizations will engage in genuine prevention of terror and violence through arrests, interrogations, prevention and the enforcement of the legal groundwork for investigations, prosecution and punishment. In the first phase of the plan and as a condition for progress to the second phase, the Palestinians will complete the dismantling of terrorist organizations (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front Al-Aqsa Brigades and other apparatuses) and their infrastructure, collection of all illegal weapons and their transfer to a third party for the sake of being removed from the area and destroyed, cessation of weapons smuggling and weapons production inside the Palestinian Authority, activation of the full prevention apparatus and cessation of incitement. There will be no progress to the second phase without the fulfillment of all above-mentioned conditions relating to the war against terror." Ending all claims must have been inserted to prevent the Arabs from bringing up claims in order to prolong the conflict. The P.A. claims to have accepted the Road Map. It does not mention Israel's official reservations. Then the P.A. must have waived its demand for Arab entry into Israel and should stop refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Having violated the agreement, because it failed to eradicate terrorism, stop inciting to violence, and to educate for peace, the P.A. cannot expect Israel to abide by the Road Map. DIFFICULTY GETTING STORY STRAIGHT Here is a story from a fairly reliable source. It shows the one-sidedness of international journalism. It also shows their difficulty in getting the story straight, even if they wanted to, without having journalists on the spot. About two hundred neighbors of a Jewish boy who was murdered in Bat Ayin by an axe-wielding Arab, participated in a "blessing of the sun" ceremony, then used that axe to lay the cornerstone of a synagogue, in the boy's memory. It was on land purchased by Jews in the 1930s. The Army escorted them. Dozens of Arabs came and threw rocks at the Jews. The Army did not intervene. Then the Arabs called on a loudspeaker for reinforcements. The Jews threw rocks back. When the loudspeaker took up the old Muslim cry, "Death to the Jews!," and the Arab crowd approached the Jews, the Army shot and wounded one Arab and threw tear gas at the rest. The Arabs claimed that the Jewish villagers had smashed the car windows and houses in a nearby Arab village. Bat Ayin Rabbi Greenberg called those claims complete lies. What did Reuters report? It reported the Arab claim that dozens of Israelis went on a rampage in the Arab village, and not the Jewish denial. It did not offer pictures or other evidence (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/, Arutz-7, 4/8) such as reporting having seen the damage. The Arutz-7 story did not indicate whether Reuters reported the Arab riot against the Jewish villagers nor whether the Arabs claimed that those were the Israelis who allegedly rampaged. What happened there? How does one decide, on the basis of those reports? Was it reported fairly? How should I relate it to you? One can conclude at least that Reuters, which I have found to slant its news against Israel, was unfair in this case, too. It reported one side's claims. European media usually inflames its readers against Israelis. Jews can be loyal, disloyal, or neutral towards fellow Jews. I am pro-Zionist, but am faithful to the truth, first. I admit it when my side does something wrong, and do not accept poor arguments in behalf of Zionism. I believe the rabbi for several reasons. (1) Israeli troops were present. They do not knowingly let Jews attack Arabs. They more than bend over backwards to protect Arabs. Note that they let the Arabs stone the Jews until it promised to become a pogrom. (2) The Arabs have an historical record of lying, as about land claims, and the Jews do not. Islam encourages deceit against infidels. Muslim Arabs are easily incited to violence, then find excuses, to avoid shame. OBAMA PREPARING TO CONFRONT ISRAEL Usually, Congress is more sympathetic to Israel than is the President [who is influenced by the traditionally anti-Zionist State Dept.]. Pres. Obama is briefing senior Democratic leaders of Congress on his policy towards Israel. His policy makes unilateral demands upon Israel in behalf of the Muslims. During his foreign trip, Obama emphasized friendship with Islam and did not speak of its need for tolerance of Israel (http://www.imra.org.il/, 4/6). US Presidents have expressed friendship for Israel, but I consider their statements a public relations smokescreen to cover their anti-Zionist policy. RUSSIA TO ARM THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY (P..A.)? "Moscow has promised to supply the P.A. security forces in the West Bank with new weapons, including two helicopters. The Russians have also agreed to supply the PA with more than 5,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 300 armored vehicles, 100 pistols and large quantities of ammunition, a senior PA official in Ramallah told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday." (http://www.imra.org.il/, 4/9). Much of the news about the P.A. relationship with Russia or Israel comes from P.A. officials. The news often is alarming. In this case, Russia is up to its old trick of arming rogue powers for aggressive warfare. In other cases, the P.A. boasts of secret Israeli concessions that would undermine Israeli strategically. The reports usually pan out. Israel should not let helicopters and armored vehicles into the P.A.. Trained as P.A. forces are by the U.S. in advanced intelligence, such weaponry could inflict considerable damage in a surprise assault in concert with foreign invasion. Remember, the P.A. does not use its forces to eradicate terrorism, but its forces commit terrorism. QATAR FREEZES COMMERCIAL RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL Qatar said it won't resume commercial relations with Israel until
Israel shows it is "serious" about making peace with the P.A.
Israel did make peace. The P.A. signed peace agreements, but refuses to negotiate their finality. Instead, the P.A. keeps attacking Israelis or inciting its people to attack them. It refuses to recognize Jewish sovereignty anywhere. Therefore, what Qatar intends is to hold relations with Israel hostage until Israel agrees to Arab surrender terms. Where, now, are the boasts that Israel was gaining recognition from Arab states? The Muslims keep rescinding it. IRAN PRESIDENT TO ATTEND DURBAN II Iran's President said he would attend the Durban II "anti-racism" conference. "Durban II is billed by the UN as an occasion to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. But Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, has advocated genocide and openly seeks the annihilation of the state of Israel. In providing a hatemonger with a global platform — under the banner of an anti-racism conference — the United Nations has become an enabler of genocide." "Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN urged: 'It is time for every decent self-respecting democratic state to withdraw immediately from Durban II — the platform for genocide.'" "Human Rights Council elected Iran as a Vice-Chair of the Preparatory Committee of Durban II. Iran has been the single most active participant in this week's preparatory sessions going on in Geneva." "At yesterday's negotiating sessions for a final document to be adopted formally at Durban II, the Iranian representative proposed sweeping limitations on freedom of expression and protection for "cultural diversity" as a vehicle for justifying Iranian laws that permit the stoning of women, the murder of homosexuals, and the torture of dissidents." The last time Ahmadinejad spoke at the UN, his antisemitic speech received loud applause (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Review & Analysis, 4/9, from EYEontheUN). The problem is not Iran's presence, but that antisemites devised the virulently and almost exclusively anti-Zionist agenda. Some civilized states lack the courage to boycott the conference and the UN Human Rights Council. They hang on in the UN, itself, without particularly condemning its failures. In some of the science fiction dramas and books I enjoy, mankind has matured enough not to need a United Nations to resolve international conflict, not that the present UN does it well. The fictional, sentient species of different planets, however, struggle towards an inter-galactic council to resolve conflicts. I'm looking forward to the 25th century. TERROR VICTIMS SUE N. KOREA Thirty Israeli victims of rockets fired at them from Gaza sued in U.S. court for damages not only Hamas, but also N. Korea. N. Korea furnished many of those rockets (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/10). This is a novel approach. Beware, Israel, lest biased foreign judiciaries be used to sue suppliers of Israeli weaponry! WHITE HOUSE SEDER — commentary President Obama held the first Passover seder in the White House. "National Jewish Democratic Council deputy executive president Alexis C. Rice praised Obama lavishly in response to the news he would hold a Seder, saying it proved 'Obama is a true friend of the Jewish community.'" "William Daroff, head of the Washington office of the United Jewish Communities organization, said the move 'speaks to the inclusiveness of today's America and of President Obama. This night is indeed different from all other nights.'" "Various media also viewed the celebration as a sign that the new president would invest much in a close relationship with his Jewish supporters." (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/10). Meanwhile, Obama is preparing a harder line against Israel than Bush had, not that Bush was pro-Israel, and a softer line against terrorism than Bush had. Therefore, holding a seder in the White House doesn't prove much. It may simply be good politics. Obama wants all groups to support him. It doesn't mean he supports them. My fellow Jews remain as credulous as their parents were during the Holocaust. For example, The Avengers, by Rich Cohen, 2000, explains that as the Nazis decimated the ghettoes of Europe, most of the Jews believed that the evacuees were being sent to work camps, not death camps. They fell for Nazi excuses. In the U.S., most Jews admired Pres. Roosevelt, and did not realize that he did nothing until the end of the Holocaust to save the victims. He even took steps to prevent rescue, such as not fill even the small quotas for refugees and to hold international refugee conferences as if interested in Jewish refugees but which he restrained from advocating for them. POLES WITHDRAWING FROM UNIFIL Poland announced intent to withdraw its 500 troops from the UNIFIL force patrolling in Lebanon. It seeks to put all its international military effort into NATO and the EU, i.e., Afghanistan. This withdrawal could be followed by Italy but probably not by France, which has the biggest contingent in UNIFIL. France is concerned with maintaining its historic ties with the region (http://www.imra.org.il/, Independent Media Research & Analysis,4/12). The UN is not reliable. It did no good in Lebanon, acting as a cover for a Hizbullah build-up and control of the border. If UNIFIL withdraws, at least it would no longer block Israeli forces from raiding Hizbullah. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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JOIN US IN D.C. MONDAY TO SUPPORT BIBI AND ISRAEL
Posted by Buddy Macy, May 14, 2009. |
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This Monday, May 18th: Rally for a Proud & Undivided Israel!!! Please join us in D.C. to rally in support of Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu, rain or shine, at: Lafayette Park (across from the White House)
Round trip transportation is available from New York and Riverdale. Charter buses will depart from: 79th and West End Avenue
and The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale
Departing: 6 a.m. prompt
If you would like to book a seat on a bus, and for all other inquiries, please contact: Hillary Markowitz, AMCHA
Monday, May 18, PM Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington DC and will be under immense pressure to create an Arab State in the Land of Israel. Aside from violating "The Statute and eternal covenant" (See Divrei Hayamim 1: 16:15-18), an agreement would also create a terrible situation in the Land of Israel. How so? The result will be: 1. The expulsion of nearly 300,000 Jews. The lives of 300,000 Jews will be ruined, as will yeshivot, shuls and kollelim, and the beautiful communities will be handed over to the enemy. As a former IDF combat soldier and as one who is making Aliyah in the next several months, I am pleading with you to act! The "Disengagement" was only 4 years ago! Have we already forgotten how 10,000 Jews were thrown out from their homes, shuls, schools, yeshivahs, kollelim, mikvaot and hothouses? Have we already forgotten how those areas, which were full of life and Torah, were converted into terror training centers? Have we already forgotten how Sderot was turned into a ghost town due to the non-stop rockets, that were a direct result of the "Disengagement"? Have we already forgotten how most of world Jewry stood in dead silence as all this occurred? PLEASE HEED THIS WARNING BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!! If you or your school, shul, church or other organization is organizing a bus, please let us know, at: eyisrael1@gmail.com. Updates will be posted on: http://eretzy.blogspot.com. If you cannot organize a bus to Washington DC, then please make a rally in your town or city! I hope you make it on Monday! Yosef Rabin
If you have not as yet signed our petition to say "No to an Arab State in the Land of Israel," please click: http://www.petitiononline.com/1eys/ PLEASE WRITE/ CALL CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEES THAT OVERSEE AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST POLICY, IN OPPOSITION TO A PLO STATE, BEFORE THE BIBI/OBAMA MEETING NEXT WEEK AND DURING AND AFTER: This is where to write to: 1. The Near East Subcommittee of the US Senate
And 2. The Middle Ease Subcommittee of the US House
If enough reasonable people contact Senator Casey and Rep. Ackerman, that will cause them to question Obama's policy. Keep writing. Get your friends to write. Your letters count. Contact Buddy Macy by email at vegibud@gmail.com |
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ARABS: WE FOOLED YOU,WE INTEND TO DESTROY YOU. SO NOW WHAT WILL YOU GIVE US?
Posted by Barry Rubin, May 14, 2009. |
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When talking among themselves and in Arabic, Middle East radicals often "let their hair down," to use the English-language idiom, meaning talk frankly about how they are fooling the dumb rubes in the West and what their real goals are. I often come upon this-except, of course, in the Western media. But the latest example, translated by MEMRI is irresistible. The speaker in this case is Fatah's leader in Lebanon, Sultan Abu al-Einen, speaking on al-Quds television, April 6, 2009. Very few people realize that during the Oslo peace process era, from 1994 to 2000, Israel admitted more than 200,000 Palestinians to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This includes Palestinian Authority (PA) personnel and their families and many others. This was an extraordinary humanitarian gesture and confidence-building measure for peace. Unfortunately, such actions weren't reciprocated. And many of these people were no doubt involved in trying to murder Israelis-directly or indirectly-in the ensuing years. Abu al-Einen, who put the number at 250,000 which is somewhat exaggerated but not that far off, is bragging. He has been asked by the interviewer what can be said that was good in the Oslo accords. He doesn't say that it brought the Palestinians closer to a compromise peace or a state, proved that Israel was a partner for peace or reduced bloodshed, or anything like that. His big example is that the Palestinians got a quarter of a million people back onto the battleground while giving nothing in return. His second example of what was good about the Oslo accords is even more disconcerting. Israel allowed the Palestinians to bring in, or even gave them, guns which, according to Abu al-Einen totaled 40,000. Ha-ha! He says. Israel might have let these weapons be handed over, under the urgings of the United States and Europe, to maintain order in the Palestinian-governed areas and to prevent terrorism. But the ruling Fatah movement saw the weapons as a way to promote terrorism and kill Israelis. Or in Abu al-Einen's words, "The weapons that were used against the Israeli enemy in Gaza and elsewhere — the Palestinian Authority takes pride in...weapons that were brought in as part of the agreement. These weapons were used in various times and places, and some people who returned from exile and bore these arms were martyred." And this brought back to my mind one of the most vivid events that shows why the peace process failed and how the Palestinian leadership wasn't, and isn't, ready for peace. In the summer of 1994, Yasir Arafat made a telephone call to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with a special request. After months of tortuous secret negotiations that came close to collapse on many occasions, the two leaders had finally signed the detailed deal on how they would implement the peace process. Arafat was about to return to his ancestral homeland to rule the Gaza Strip and Jericho, starting a transition period that-if all went well-would produce an independent Palestinian state in five years. First, though, Arafat wanted to request another concession from Israel. In addition to thousands of PLO officials and soldiers about to move from various Arab states to Gaza, he had a special list of "old friends" he wanted to bring with him. Rabin knew Arafat was talking about individuals personally involved in many terrorist acts against Israel over the years. When Arafat's list arrived, Rabin sent it to Yakov Peri, head of the Shin Bet, Israeli's secret service, asking him to recommend that all but the very worst offenders be allowed into Gaza. Peri reported that indeed these were people involved in attacks on Israelis and reluctantly agreed to admit all but those responsible for the bloodiest ones. When Rabin told him of this decision, however, Arafat was not satisfied. He asked the prime minister to let in even more of those who had carried out such operations. Rabin returned to Peri and emphasized the political importance of showing that Israel was being generous with Arafat. So Peri agreed that all but a handful of specific individuals who had committed the worst crimes could come with Arafat. Rabin passed the good news to Arafat. Among the few banned from admission were: Marduch Nowfel, planner of a 1974 attack on a Ma'alot high school in which 21 Israeli teenagers were killed; Nihad Jayousi, a key organizer of the 1972 attack on the Olympic games; Mustafa Liftawi, the main organizer of terrorist attacks for Fatah's Western Sector department; and Jihad Amareen, a Western Sector official who also headed a Fatah-controlled Islamist terrorist group. On the morning of July 1, 1994, Arafat's motorcade crossed from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers at the border were under strict instructions not to touch Arafat's Mercedes or the accompanying cars, which then drove past the Mediterranean coast's sand dunes to Gaza City. At 5 PM, Arafat ascended a podium at the Square of the Unknown Soldier amid tens of thousands of people, the biggest crowd ever assembled in Gaza. Millions more watched on television around the world. One of them was Rabin. But his viewing was interrupted by an urgent phone call from Peri who insisted that this matter couldn't wait. Peri had just one thing to tell Rabin: "The bastard brought them in the trunk of his Mercedes." Even after Israel accepted the return of most of those on Arafat's list, he had still smuggled in Nowfel, Jayousi, Liftawi, and Amareen as well. An angry Rabin demanded his aides get Arafat on the phone as soon as possible after the Gaza rally ended. When Rabin finally reached him, Arafat denied the charge and insisted that Israel's intelligence was wrong. Rabin warned, "Mr. Chairman, if you don't take them out, I will give the order to close the borders." No more PLO officials or police would then be allowed into Gaza. For the next few days Arafat continued to insist the men were not there. But Israeli officials were sure they were right. In addition, as Deputy Defense Minister Mordechai Gur put it, "There is no doubt that Yasir Arafat himself was totally involved in this." Once Rabin told Arafat that their presence was confirmed, Arafat said that while he had heard rumors that perhaps the men were in Gaza, he couldn't find them. Rabin now had to decide whether this issue was important enough to jeopardize the entire peace process. Finally, under serious Israeli pressure, Arafat sent the men back to Egypt. Rabin remarked optimistically. "They have to learn a lesson that they cannot cheat but rather, they should adhere to their commitments." Several weeks later, though, Israeli security learned that Arafat had the four men smuggled back into Gaza. And there they stayed. This small incident was a metaphor for everything that happened later. Arafat had shown that his word could not be trusted. Time after time, he begged and demanded concessions from others without ever really giving any himself. Yet a belief repeatedly prevailed that the next time he would do better or that once the two sides made a comprehensive deal everything would change.Arafat, Abu al Arafat, Abu al-Einen tells the interviewer, "was a man of contradictions. He could declare one thing, issue a contradictory order, and do something to the contrary at the same time....Yasser Arafat would condemn and criticize martyrdom operations...but at the same time, the martyr Yasser Arafat used to finance these military operations." We shouldn't forget that except for the fact that Arafat himself is dead, the leadership of Fatah and the PA today is exactly the same as it was in the 1990s. Hamas is worse. When someone who is trying to fool you now brags about how they did so in the past, attention must be paid. From Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go tohttp://www.gloria-center.org |
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PLAYING WITH MARBLES
Posted by Fred Reifenberg, May 14, 2009. |
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Playing with marbles 
Marblelous cactus blossom Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il Go to
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THE REAL LESSON OF THIS HISTORY
Posted by Barbara Taverna, May 14, 2009. |
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This was written by Melanie Phillips and it appeared in The Spectator
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British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says that Obama's Middle East 'peace' initiative offers the best prospect for peace in the region since... Jimmy Carter at Camp David. Jimmy Carter, eh? How instructive. Carter, whose profound and disturbing animus against Israel has been revealed in all its ugly reality in recent years, was a disastrous President whose serial misjudgments paved the way for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the baleful consequences of which are now reaching crisis point. During his term of office he consistently acted against Israel's interests and in favour of its Arab enemies. What Miliband is referring to is the historic agreement over which Carter presided in 1978 at Camp David between Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat. This was truly a monumental milestone and the one event which has been held to redeem Carter's disastrous presidency in the eyes of the world. But as this Wall Street Journal article records, it was a milestone reached not because of Carter but despite him: The truth is that Mr. Carter never wanted an Egyptian-Israeli agreement, fought hard against it, and only agreed to go along with the process when it became clear that the rest of his foreign policy was in a shambles and he desperately needed to log a success... Mr. Carter and his advisers all assumed that the key to peace in the region was to make Israel pull back to its pre-1967 borders and accept the principle of Palestinian self-determination in exchange for a guarantee of Israel's security. Sound familiar? After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sadat decided that Egypt needed to start from scratch in its relationship with Israel. Sadat found natural allies in Nixon and Mr. Kissinger after throwing out his Soviet patrons in 1972. With American support, he came to a disengagement agreement with Israel in 1973, and again in 1975. The culmination of this process was Sadat's historic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, where he discussed a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, and forestalled Mr. Carter's plan for a Geneva peace conference. It was this trip — not Camp David — that marked the true seismic shift in Middle East relations since Israel's founding. It came as an unwelcome surprise to the Carter foreign policy team, who still wanted their grandiose Geneva conference. In fact, for the better part of 1977, as Israel and Egypt negotiated, the White House persisted in acting as if nothing had happened. Even after Sadat's trip to Jerusalem, Mr. Carter announced that 'a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.' But by the autumn of 1978, the rest of Mr. Carter's foreign policy had crumbled. He had pushed through an unpopular giveaway of the Panama Canal, allowed the Sandinistas to take power in Nicaragua as proxies of Cuba, and stood by while chaos grew in the Shah's Iran. Desperate for some kind of foreign policy success in order to bolster his chances for re-election in 1980, Mr. Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David. The rest of the story is now the stuff of legend: For 13 days Mr. Carter acted as the go-between for the two leaders. Yet for all their bluster and intransigence in public, Begin and Sadat were more than ready for a deal once they understood that the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to stop the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, such as the PLO, from derailing a peace. An agreement was hammered out for an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, coupled with vague language about Palestinian 'autonomy.' The item Mr. Carter had really wanted on the agenda — a Palestinian state — was kept at arm's length. In other words, this historic peace treaty occurred only because 1) Carter was sidelined and 2) the issue of a Palestinian state was kept out of it because it was irrelevant to peace between Israel and the Egyptians. And that's the point — the absolutely key, all-important point — that Miliband, the British Foreign Office and the Obama administration cannot and will not grasp. As the Times reported: [Miliband] said the most significant aspect of Mr Obama's initiative was that he was the first US president to accept it was in America's national interest to back Palestinian statehood. 'Palestinian statelessness is the biggest recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world,' said Mr Miliband. Ah yes — Palestinian statelessness was obviously uppermost in the minds of the Islamists who blew up Mumbai; it was obviously the reason they bombed Spain to help along the restoration of the caliphate and tried to do the same to France, that legendary ally of Israel; it's obviously the driving passion of the Chechen Islamist separatists; it's obviously the rallying cry of the Islamists in Indonesia who intend to Islamise southern Asia; it's obviously the reason Islamists are persecuting, murdering and driving out Christians across the Third World from Sudan and Nigeria to Bethlehem and Gaza. For various reasons, however, this idiotic but deeply ideological analysis is now accepted by many non-ideological folk as axiomatic. They are all fixated by the delusion that a Palestine state is the key to peace between Israel and the Arabs. It is not. The briefest knowledge of history tells us that it is not — for the simple reason that it has been on offer repeatedly for seven (some would say nine) decades, with the Jews in agreement — indeed, with the Israelis in recent years offering the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of the disputed territories — and yet the only response from the Arabs has been war. The requirement by the Arab side is not for a Palestine state. It is for the end of the Jewish state. It is not just Hamas that declares this over and over again. It is also the supposedly 'moderate' Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, who say repeatedly that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these facts are simply ignored as if they don't exist. Now, King Abdullah of Jordan claims to be offering Israel the 'prize' of recognition by the Arab and Muslim world. Oh please. We've all been here before so many times. 'Recognition' is a weasel word which the Arabs use to mean simply recognising the literal fact of Israel's existence rather than accepting its right to exist — a very different matter. If the Arab rejectionist states were to say that they accepted Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and to live in peace alongside them — and show they mean it — there would be peace tomorrow. But King Abdullah is talking about the deeply manipulative Saudi peace initiative — appeasement for dummies — which, through its giveaway demand for unlimited immigration of Arabs into Israel, would mean the end of the Jewish state. Despite the the Times's kid-glove treatment of King Abdullah, as its own headline made clear he was in effect threatening Israel: 'surrender now, or war later'. Commit national suicide — or face Iran alone. That's some choice. And that's the choice Obama too is giving Israel — and who can be surprised that Miliband is so enthusiastic, since as we also learn from King Abdullah, Britain is playing a very vital pro-active role in the Obama Middle East initiative. What is even more remarkable is that these twin icons of progressive politics, Obama and Miliband, are actually pushing the cause of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing. For the proposed Palestine state is to have not one Jew living inside its borders. So Obama and Miliband say the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East can only be served by the creation of a racist, exclusionary state — while beating up on Israel, which actually gives full civil rights to its Arab and Muslim citizens. The key to the ending of the war between the Arabs and Israel is that the Arabs and the wider Muslim world have to grasp that it is in their interests to accept Israel's existence as a Jewish state, legitimised as such under international law, and to abandon for ever their attempt to remove it from the map. That is the real message of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. But instead, the message the Arab and Muslim world is currently getting from America and Britain — with their overtures to Iran and creeping recognition of Hamas — is that its violence and aggression have paid off and that the great prizes, not merely of Israel's destruction but also the defeat of the free world, are now within reach. Having accepted the Arab and Muslim narrative on Israel/Palestine, and having decided that appeasement is the only way forward, Obama and Miliband are making the strongest effort since Carter to pressurise Israel to become the propitiatory sacrifice to the enemies of civilisation. And from the White House to King Abdullah via the Foreign Office and the BBC, Israel is to be blamed if it refuses to play the role. Contact Barbara Taverna at bltaverna@yahoo.com |
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THE POPE CALLS FOR PALESTINIAN STATE, CRITICIZES ISRAEL'S SECURITY BARRIER
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 14, 2009. |
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This is from yesterday's Joshua Pundit website
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Pope Benedict continued his dhimmitude and appeasement today, posing for Fatah created photo-ops in Bethlehem, calling for a second Arab Palestinian state and criticizing Israel's security barrier, saying "it is tragic to see walls still being erected...I I have seen, adjoining the camp and overshadowing much of Bethlehem, the wall that intrudes into your territories, separating neighbours and dividing families." While he called for Palestinians to avoid the temptation for violence, he hypocritically neglected to mention that the security barrier was built precisely to prevent that very thing at the hands of the Palestinians. I was prepared to give Benedict a pass on his lackluster remarks at Vad Yashem yesterday — after all, everyone knows that only Muslims merit apologies from the Vatican and this Pope, not Jews, and I expected nothing else from him. But Pope Benedict knew full well to whom he was speaking to today, in a place where Palestinian Muslims have driven out Christians en masse, and established a government based on sharia law that holds the few remaining Christians in contempt. In an even more monstrous irony,Benedict praised Fatah capo del tutti Mahmoud Abbas and promised him support in creating that state...overlooking the fact that Abbas was Arafat's second in command during the period when Palestinian Christians were driven out, and the Church of the Natrivity, exactly where Benedict was standing, was invaded by Arafat's thugs... Whatever personal feelings he claims to have about Jews, Benedict has firmly aligned himself with Israel enemies — and with the enemies of the Church he claims to represent. Such an attitude merits nothing but contempt. ************************* (A bit of fact checking...the first story linked to in this piece is from the British Telegraph and, as you might expect contains a number of errors and shadings of the truth. Israels' security barrier was not 'deemed illegal in international law', but the subject of a highly controversial verdict by the International Court of Justice that Israel does not recognize ( neither does the US) and allowed no witnesses to appear on Israel's behalf; second, the wall was not completed 'on the grounds it deters suicide bombings and other security threats'. In fact it has, and any idiot comparing the amount of homicide bombings now as opposed to before the wall's completion ought to be honest enough to admit the fact — but then, this is the Brit press. Third, there's no evidence whatsoever that the denizens of the Aida refugee camp where this photo-op was held are 'Palestinian families driven from their homes through the creation of Israel in the second half of the 20th century'. Many Arabs chose to leave Israel voluntarily, either to get out of a war zone created by themsleves and their Arab 'brothers'when they attempted to destroy Israel, or at the express instructions of the leaders. The radio transcripts from Radio Cairo and Radio Amman urging civilians to leave so that the Arab armies could enjoy an unimpeded massacre of the Jews still exist. For that matter, according to Jordanian law anyone residing in the West Bank 'who is not a Jew' was a Jordanian citizen — which led to the bizarre situation of citizens of a sovereign nation being coinsidered' refugees' on the UN's tab! And finally, a number of indigent Arabs claimed refugee status after 1948 in order to get free food and lodging — something even the head of UNRWA admited at time. I suspect, as usual, this had to be cleared with Fatah before it was printed. Selah)
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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THE APPLE DOESN'T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE
Posted by Fern Sidman, May 13, 2009. |
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This is a review of
In this autobiographical account of the vicissitudes of his journey back to Hashem and a Torah life, Moishe Mendlowitz, the grandson of Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, ZT"L reaches deep into the hearts of his readers; teaching profound lessons that resonate within our souls. In "Just One Jew" (Feldheim Publishers), Mr. Mendlowitz does not mince words as he offers a refreshingly candid full disclosure of his departure from a Torah observant lifestyle, as a student at Brooklyn's Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. He chronicles both his immersion into the abysmal darkness of secular decadence along with his return to an observant life with unbridled passion and honesty. As an added bonus, this memoir is replete with vintage black and white photos of generations of prominent rabbeim and members of the Mendlowitz family. The son of Avraham Mordechai Mendlowitz, z"l, a hard working kosher butcher in Crown Heights, young Moishe rejected the lifestyle of his antecedents after graduating from Torah Vodaath. The next 15 years were spent building an entrepreneurial career that saw a highly successful string of lucrative businesses. Living in a palatial home in Rhinebeck, New York, Mr. Mendlowitz seemed at ease in his secular life; making money hand over fist, enjoying all the material possessions that he acquired, dating non-Jewish women and never entertaining the notion of returning from whence he came. It wasn't until a near death experience in a horrific car accident, seven months subsequent to his father's passing, that things began to change. "I was a total success and a complete failure", he says. "The former was how I appeared on the outside, the latter was what I couldn't even admit to myself", he ruefully observed. The year was 1986 and as a man in his early 30s, Mr. Mendlowitz took the first small step in transforming his life by shearing off his long hair out of respect to his family. As he points out throughout this book, he was never shunned or ridiculed by his family for his aberrant lifestyle and it is clear that the unconditional love of his mother and sister served as a source of moral strength throughout his odyssey. Never knowing his revered and holy grandfather personally, as he was born six years after Reb Shraga Feivel was niftar in 1948, Mr. Mendlowitz speaks of his stellar accomplishments in the world of Torah with profound respect and deep admiration. Of his grandfather, he says, "What defined him more than anything was his love for Klal Yisroel. He constantly put the interests of the whole ahead of his own. He sent his donors to other yeshivas that needed shoring up; he sent his best students away to yeshivas where there was greater need for their talents; his constant aim was not building up his own yeshiva but improving education in America for all Jews." Irrespective of the love and guidance of his family, and the constant help from his prominent uncles, Rabbi Sender Linchner and Rabbi Yitzchak Karpf, Mr. Mendlowitz found himself negotiating some uneven terrain on the road back to a Torah life. Struggling with inner conflicts and battling with his own yetzer hara, his desire to change finally prevailed as he committed himself to learning Torah again; this time in Monsey. Before long, he came to the stark realization that he could not learn Torah everyday in Monsey and then return to a completely non-religious life in Rhinebeck.. It was a maiden voyage to Eretz Yisroel with his sister and brother-in-law that was turned out to be a significant turning point in Mr. Mendlowitz's life. He began to become cognizant of Hashem's munificence throughout his entire life; not fully comprehending that a multitude of blessings and miracles were yet to come. Having experienced the holiness of Jerusalem and the sublime ruchnius (spirituality) of davening at the Kosel, he decided to stay in Eretz Yisroel a bit longer. "I touched the wall, and just like that, an overwhelming flood of emotion washed over me. I burst into tears and could not stop crying. In that moment, something that was closed opened, and something that was broken healed. I would never be the same again" he recalls. And indeed, it was tefilla (prayer) that would become the central aspect of his life; something he engaged in with a palpable zeal, something that he felt the compulsion to cling to, as it was the first mitzvah that he discarded as a teenager. After returning home, he sold his estate and lived with his sister and brother-in-law in Lakewood. While there he committed himself to learning Torah, to fitting in to the community by making drastic modifications to his lifestyle and to increasing his level of observance. After a brief and bitter marriage, Mr. Mendlowitz was now divorced; yet his soul yearned for the completeness that had hitherto alluded him. Despite it all, he recalls that, "I will always consider my years in Lakewood as the turning point in my life. It was there that I regained the love of learning Torah, started to appreciate the significance of family and the importance of surrounding myself with people who were greater than I". In September of 1996, Mr. Mendlowitz decided to move to Eretz Yisroel. "My soul was home at last" he writes, adding that "I knew that I wanted to do kiruv (bringing unaffiliated Jews back to a Torah life), but where and how, I was not sure. I knew that Hashem would point the way." Indeed, it was the Hand of Hashem that guided Mr. Mendlowitz's footsteps throughout his sojourn. Having met and connected with two outstanding figures in the world of kiruv work in Jerusalem, Rabbi Meir Schuster and Jeff Seidel, it wasn't long before Mr. Mendlowitz's prayers were answered as he was afforded the opportunity to realize his mission in life. Working part time at the famed Heritage House in the Old City of Jerusalem saw him convincing young backpacking Jews to accept free accomodations at the vibrant kiruv center amongst their brethren rather than lodging at Arab youth hostels in the Old City, as well as escorting young Jews to the homes of those who gladly took in guests for Shabbos meals. On a personal level, it was this juncture in time that saw a period of exponential growth in ruchnius for Mr. Mendlowitz as he was now learning Torah several hours each day and guiding other lost Jews to yeshivas and hence, a frum life. There was only one thing missing and this major void was something that Mr. Mendlowitz was determined to fill. He was still single and wanted to get married and establish his own family of Torah Jews. With a broken heart, he cried out incessantly to Hashem, davening with kavanah and pouring out his supplications to the "One" who orchestrates all shidduchim. After a litany of disappointing dates, Mr. Mendlowitz found that yet once again his prayers were answered when he met Esther, the woman who would become his wife. Today, they both actively work in kiruv while raising their daughters and son. The reader cannot help but be amazed by Hashem's hasgacha pratis as Mr. Mendlowitz recounts the innumerable stories and anecdotes of those who lives he touched and who in turn touched his life in such miraculous ways. His love for each and every Jew, regardless of their background became the impetus for Mr. Mendlowitz's attempt to form a new kiruv organization called "Just One Jew' (hence the title of the book). The premise was simple. Each frum person would commit themselves to mentoring a secular Jew who wished to learn more about Judaism. Based on his previous experiences in the world of kiruv work in Jerusalem, it became clear to him that when one commits to authentically devoting the lion's share of their time, energy and resources to a person who is seeking to re-connect with Hashem, we are shaping the future of Klall Yisroel in such formidable ways. Mr. Mendlowitz so deftly illustrates that within the soul of each Jew lies an enormous power that often remains dormant unless and until it is kindled. It is the power to change; to transform the mundane into the holy; the power to overcome adversity and personal travails; the power to lead others and ourselves to an awareness of the glory of Hashem and the fulfillment of a Torah life.
Contact the reviewer at ariellah@aol.com
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BIBI AND THE AMERICAN INQUISITION
Posted by David Wilder, May 13, 2009. |
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Last week PM Netanyahu told his cabinet, "I think we must make great efforts to ease life for the Palestinians while keeping security constraints in mind." Israel has much experience 'easing life' for Arabs living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Following signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel moved out of all of the major Arab-populated cities in Judea and Samaria. The results were phenomenal. The Arabs had it great, sort of like when kids get to school and find that the teacher's not there, and there's no substitute. The kids then have a free-for-all day, no holds barred. That's what happened when Israel retreated from Shechem, Jenin, Tul-Karem etc. A huge vacuum was created, leading to anarchy-plus, resulting in massive terror throughout Israel. In January, 1997 Bibi signed and implemented the Hebron Accords, which transferred over 80% of Hebron to Arafat and the PA. Finally an overwhelming majority of Hebron Arabs were freed from the yoke of the Zionist occupier. No more Israeli soldiers patrolled some 80% of the city, looking for 'freedom fighters' aka terrorists. This led, three and a half years later, to the beginning of shooting attacks from the Abu Sneneh and Harat a-Shech, hills overlooking Hebron's Jewish community, which continued for almost two and a half years. They lived the good life; Hebron's Jews lived with constant terror. The cherry on the icing was, of course, the greatest 'easing of Palestinian life' almost four years ago, when for the sake of peace and a healthy Arab state of mind, Israel expelled almost 10,000 Jews from Gush Katif and abandoned their land to the PA. "Finally," they exclaimed, "alone at last." Well, almost but not quite. There were still a few things that bothered them, like Jews living in Sderot. According to Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook, "Sderot, which may be known to some as an Israeli town, lies on the ruins of Najd, a Palestinian village ransacked in May 1948 by Zionist terrorist gangs." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/22/ gaza-israel-palestine-hamas-obama Shekh Achmad Yassin told Amira Hass in Ha'aretz, 'what is important
is that the holder of the right remain fixed in his resolve to restore
his rights. In other words, in 1948 I lived in Ashkelon. Will I, who
hold the right [to live in Ashkelon] go to make the case that it is
mine?
(Not so coincidentally, I have on my wall a 'tourist map' published by the "Palestinian Authority Ministry of Tourism, which lists three coastal cities (from south to north) Ashdot, Askelon, and (Tel Ar Rabee) Tel Aviv). Of course, the great easing of 'palestinian life' in Gaza, following Israel's abandonment there, led to thousands of rockets being shot from that very land into these Israeli coastal cities. The goal of these attacks is undoubtedly to liberate Sderot from oppressive Israeli rule, thereby giving Palestinians more breathing room, while at the same time making it easier for them to attack and liberate Tel Ar Rabee. The latest phase in life-easing situations is Hebron. Hebron leaders were notified by high ranking officers in the IDF that it is necessary to improve Palestinian living conditions. Therefore they are not opposing the opening of Tzir Tzion — the Tzion road, from north of Kiryat Arba, running past Kiryat Arba and Beit HaShalom, into Hebron. Interestingly enough, two of these generals, who have a great deal to say about what happens in Hebron are former commanders of the Judean Brigade and Hebron: Central Region Commander, General Gadi Shamni, and Commander of forces in Judea and Samaria, General Noam Tibon. Shamni was in charge in Hebron when the Hebron Accords were implemented. He didn't think they would be so bad. Tibon was in Hebron when the Oslo War started (the 2nd Intifada). He closed the transJudea road (Rt.35) leading to Beit Shemsh and Kiryat Gat, claiming he couldn't give it full protection. His successor, Col. Dror Weinberg hy"d opened it almost immediately upon taking command in Hebron. Tibon also has a thing about destroying homes in the Hebron area; he commanded the force that destroyed the home of Livnat Uzeri, whose husband Nati was killed in that home by terrorists. He also commanded over the forces that destroyed the Federman farm in Kiryat Arba and Yad Yair, near Dolev in the Shomron. The present situation is a no-brainer. Palestinian living conditions are more important than Israeli lives. I count 7 people having been killed on the soon to be reopened road,: Mordechai and Shalom Lapid, Sarit Prigal, David Cohen, Hezi Mualem, Kerin Ya'akobi and Meir Kalfon. Yet now, it's going to be safe. Just to make sure, the IDF is bringing in a full squadron of some 100 soldiers, just to make sure. In order to ensure a good view of the area they'll be using the roof of Beit HaShalom. Early this morning Hebron residents staged a small protest march between Hebron and Kiryat Arba, on the Tzion Road. A few dozen children, along with a group of adults, marched with flags and whistles up the hill to school in Kiryat Arba. Usually the kids have a ride; today they walked.
No one paid too much attention. Tomorrow a larger group, including residents of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, along with others, will again stage another protest march, this time leaving Kiryat Arba at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Again, we don't expect Shamni or Tibon or Barak or Netanyahu to care. We don't live under any illusions. Barring unpredictable events, they will open the road sometime in the near future, despite our protest marches. This will certainly 'ease' the lives of some Arabs living in the vicinity. The question is what answer these 'leaders' will offer when a majnun (crazy person) tries to run over some Jews on the road, or attempts to push an Israeli vehicle (like a bus or van, G-d forbid, tractor-style) into the valley below, from this road. Arabs have yet to prove that they can be trusted in any way shape or form. They have never lived up to any so-called agreements; to the contrary, they violate them, as if it's their right to do so. In this case, they are not giving anything; not even any promises. They're getting a gift, which endangers Israeli lives, for free. And most unfortunately, this is just the beginning. More is soon to come. Watch for chapter two following the conclusion of Obama's version of an American Inquisition, next week in Washington. The big question is whether Bibi, as they are tying him to the stake, will be willing to say loud and clear — Shema Yisrael — Israel belongs to the Jews, or whether he will, at the last moment, give in, acquiesce and agree to sacrifice more Jewish lives for the Obama republic. Let's hope for the best. David Wilder is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly in Israel to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB105, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, email: hebron@hebron.org.il or phone: 972-52-431-7055. In USA, write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, email: hebronfund@aol.com or phone: 718 677 6886. |
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WHEN BIBI MEETS OBAMA: DRY BONES ON TERRITORIAL WITHDRAWAL
Posted by Dave Alpern, May 13, 2009. |
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America should be the last country to preach to others about territorial withrawal. This is by Dry Bones from his blogsite, http://drybonesblog.blogspot.com/. Dry Bones are political cartoons by Yaakov Kirschen wno has been doing the cartoons since January 1973. He writes: Bibi is about to meet with Obama. |
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Contact Dave Alpern at daveyboy@bezeqint.net |
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RALLY UNITES DIVERSE AMERICANS; AL-QAIDA INFILTRATING SOMALIA; OBAMA'S NOTION OF PALESTINIAN ARAB MOTHERS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 13, 2009. |
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RALLY UNITES DIVERSE AMERICANS Rain kept the Sunday, May 3 rally in Times Square, New York, down to a couple of hundred, comprising a great diversity of religions, national origins, and races. The rally was held by the umbrella organization, Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam. It lasted 1 1/2 hours, including American anthems. Speakers were introduced by a pastor from Boston, who has helped free Sudanese slaves from Muslim owners. The first speaker was a Muslim reformist scholar. He called upon fellow Muslims to end the intolerance and oppression done by Radical Muslims in the name of his religion. He expressed solidarity with the victims, whether of his or of other faiths. Action Alliance head, Beth Galinsky chided the NY Times and other media for not telling this key story, just as it neglected the Holocaust story not that long ago. Joy Brighton described methods by which Islamists insinuate themselves in our society. She attributed their motive and blueprint to Islamic law. [I think that most Muslims are not activist like the Radicals in their zeal to impose an extremist interpretation of it on everybody. An Israeli victim of terrorism related spending three years in rehabilitation, where he met hundreds of other wounded Israelis. He objects to Radical Islam indoctrinating boys in killing, all over the world. Come from Khartoum, Simon Deng cited the two million Christians [and animists] murdered by jihadists. The UN was silent about that, as it is about many other major atrocities. Another black man came from Darfur, but he is a Muslim. He, too, was a victim of radical Muslims. A Hindu originally from Pakistan reminded us of the millions like him forced out of their homeland. He blessed America, his haven. A former Bangladeshi said the same. Hindus and Sikhs originally comprised 25% of the population of Pakistan. Now they are 1-2%. They were subjected to kidnap, rape, and forcible conversion. An Indian Hindu mentioned that Radical Muslims murder thousands in India, too. A Sikh priest, in white robe and turban, described his people's similar persecution. An American-born man who lost a relative in 9/11 described the feeling of seeing the empty chair at family gatherings. Another speaker, Michael Cutler, had been an immigration agent who arrested terrorists and foiled one of their plots. He denounced the lax government policy, fostered by employers who are careless in their drive to import cheap labor, that lets terrorists in. He warned, the danger is not only from those who shoot, but also from the thousands here who raise money for the guns, often raising it by criminal means. The moderator praised our police and firefighters, who protect our rights. Several speakers stressed our common humanity, rather than their particular religion, race, or nationality. Personally, I found that solidarity in diversity moving. ARABS COMPLAIN ISRAEL NOT BOMBING IRAN After Sec. Clinton asserted that the Arabs won't support Israel against Iran's nuclear facilities, Jordan and Egypt defended Israel. Jordan's King accepts PM Netanyahu's desire for peace as sincere [but the King has conditions fatal for Israel]. Egypt's intelligence chief is working with Israel on some issues. Diplomats traveling in the Arab world heard a different complaint about Israel. They complained that Israel is taking too long to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. They don't want Iran getting nuclear weapons. Not when they hear such notions from Iran that Bahrain really is a province of Iran. [Saddam called Kuwait a province of Iraq, and invaded Kuwait, leading to Gulf War I]. "According to reports published last week in Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz, President Barack Obama's in-house post-Zionist, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, told an American Jewish leader that for Israel to receive the administration's support for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it must not only say that it supports establishing a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza, it must begin expelling its citizens from their homes and communities in Judea and Samaria to prove its good faith." Good faith? Doesn't the US know that Iran controls terrorist proxies? If Israel vacated more territory, that territory would come under indirect Iranian control! The Administration is not realistic. Iran is only months away from deploying a nuclear weapon. When it gets it, the Administration can forget about peace. Iran would become bolder about putting its terrorist proxies into action. Iran probably would take over S. Arabia's oil provinces. Iran would intimidate Egypt from rounding up Iranian agents in the future and perhaps make Egypt and Jordan terminate their treaties with Israel. They may well decide to joint the axis in order to war on Israel outright or they may let Iran a-bomb Israel. Europe, already within range of Iran's missiles, would drop sanctions on Iran. Iran already is gaining influence in Latin America. The US would become isolated. The US worries that after an Israeli strike, Iran would lash out. Better lash out without having nuclear weapons than with them! The Administration is deluded that it can talk Iran out of gaining such power domination (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/27 from Caroline Glick). AL-QAIDA MEN INFILTRATING SOMALIA Veteran Pakistani terrorists have been going to Somalia, which they wish to turn into a giant terrorist base. With them comes their combat experience (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/29), OBAMA'S NOTION OF PALESTINIAN ARAB MOTHERS At a Turkish student roundtable, Pres. Obama said he would oppose al-Qaeda both militarily and ideologically. He would support education systems that do not indoctrinate in terrorism. [He's proposed financing decent schools in Pakistan.] In proposing statehood for Palestinian Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, he said, "I have to believe that the mothers of Palestinians and the mothers of Israelis hope the same thing for their children. They want them not to be vulnerable to violence. They don't want, when their child gets on a bus, to worry that that bus might explode. They don't want their child to have to suffer indignities because of who they are." He wishes the mothers were in charge. He urges Israelis to understand the viewpoint of the Arabs (www.imra.org.il, 4/8). Yes, the civilized world must oppose Radical Islam as an ideology as well as a military force, to save itself. Let's see whether the President works out how. No, what he says he believes about mothers not only is mistake but pernicious. It equates the two peoples as causes of violence. The problem is not Israel. Israelis do not hate Arab Muslims "because of who they are." If more Israelis understood the viewpoint of the Palestinian Arabs, they would stop offering them territory in exchange for hoped-for-peace. The reason is that Islamist ideology largely consists of hatred of the Jewish people and a desire to conquer them. One doesn't need mothers to be in charge of Israel, because Israel does not commit terrorism and doesn't want war. Arabs in the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) don't have to worry about their buses being blown up, because Israelis do not blow up buses. It's different with the Muslim Arabs. Pres. Obama does not seem to have studied what P.A. mothers want. Nor does it matter what they want — P.A. mothers are not in charge. Both halves of the P.A. are male, Radical Muslim dictatorships. P.A. society indoctrinates in the virtue of suicide bombing. It honors and subsidizes families of suicide bombers. Mothers there have been filmed encouraging children to murder. I've seen numerous polls showing that most of the P.A. population wants to conquer Israel. Almost half of them approve of suicide bombing. Disapproval of suicide bombing rarely is on ethical grounds but in terms of whether it pays. Turning back to the President's pledge to oppose education systems that indoctrinate in terrorism, he doesn't oppose the P.A. education system, though it does indoctrinate in terrorism. The US subsidizes the P.A., and Obama has added to that subsidy. The US even arms the P.A. in Judea-Samaria. Obama is continuing the mixed up policy of his predecessor, in which he engages against some terrorists and "engages" with others. DOUBLE STANDARD TOWARD NEW ISRAELI REGIME Even before it took office, the new Israeli regime was criticized, under a double standard. The regime was called an impediment to peace, because it did not pledge to allow future Palestinian Authority (P.A.) sovereignty, which outsiders claim is needed for peace. Those critics of the incoming regime did not call an impediment to peace P.A. rejection of existing Jewish sovereignty nor the terrorist proxies of Iran and Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. Agence France-Presse reporter Stefan Collison asked Pres. Obama how realistic it is to hope for peace when such a regime is "...not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?" Journalists don't ask "...whether Muslim states' not being 'fully signed up' to the existence of Israel and having ministers in its employ who 'insult' Jews sdthreatened Middle East peace?" All over the Muslim world, TV insult Jews. "...the people decrying the new Israeli government are the same ones who constantly call for the U.S. and Israel to 'engage' with every rogue state and terrorist outfit in the region. If the Syrian Ba'ath Party, Hamas' Islamists and the mullahs of Tehran are all worthy of our engagement, surely we can deal with the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman." Whatever one thinks of Foreign Min. Lieberman, he "...does not advocate the destruction of Iran, as its leaders do of Israel." "He does not seek the wanton slaughter of Palestinians, as Hamas does of Jews." Actually, PM Netanyahu pledged to work for peace, and Lieberman does want to confer statehood upon the P.A. (http://www.imra.org.il/, 3/31 from James Kirchick in the New York Daily News, 3/27). U.S. POLICY & THE ARABS Democracy and its openness can create jobs for the hundred million Arab youth nearing employment age, before they explode. The dictatorships are too stodgy for that. Since Arab states badly need our help against Iran, the US had an opportunity to exchange our help for their democratic reform. Unfortunately, the new U.S. administration has dropped the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy. As for Europe, it is moving fast to end the isolation of Hamas and Syria, both brutal dictatorships. We won't have much standing with the people, there. "As President Bush famously said, 'For sixty years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of liberty and ended up achieving neither.' Obama's policies and rhetoric, so far, risk getting even less of both." (http://www.imra.org.il/, 3/31.) We've lost something good, under Obama. U.S. POLICY ON ISRAEL What kind of people are the Muslim Arabs, the media, the Europeans, and the U.S. government? Consider what happened to Shlomo Nativ. Shlomo was 13 years old. He lived in Bat Ayin, a Jewish town in Judea [the cradle of Jewish civilization and national development]. An Arab from the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) chopped him to death with an ax. Why? The boy was Jewish. The Arabs justify brutal murder of infidel civilians as "resistance." Here is one more of many examples. "In 2002 for instance, when word got out about the terrorist who barged into Nina Kardashov's bat mitzva party in Hadera [in Israel] and massacred six people, the masses took to the streets in neighboring Tulkarm to celebrate. That particular attack was carried out by a Fatah terrorist employed by the US-trained P.A. security forces. [What kind of people are the Muslim Arabs? Why is the U.S. helping them and even training their soldiers?] What was the West's reaction? Silence. The West accepts murder of Israelis living beyond the 1948 armistice line. The West has arbitrarily decided that that mere armistice line should become Israel's border. [The West's sense of indignation gets aroused only when Israel fights back against Islamist terrorism. During warfare, the West complains that some Arab civilians, against whom Hamas committed a war crime by fighting near them, got injured by an Israeli attempt to stop the terrorism against it. This is an unethical double-standard. What kind of people are the Western ruling elites?] A big claque of foreign governments and appeasement-minded organizations and media stands ready to applaud any U.S. policy against Israel. They call that peace-making. Lonely is the U.S. President who finds that Islamist intolerance and imperialism thwarts peace. [The President who does is called "unilateral" rather than cooperative with foreign countries. What those foreign governments stand for and whether they are right or ridiculous is not considered. The last President who stood up to the international bullies, though in a flawed and inconsistent way, was browbeaten by fellow Americans into retracting.] How much easier it is for a President to ignore reality and say that Israel's lack of peace is due to its settlement of its people in areas they had been kept out of during the early years when it also didn't have peace. First came Arab aggression. Then came the erection of Jewish towns in the Territories. How then can Arab bellicosity against Israel be blamed on housing Jews in Judea and Samaria after the bellicosity started? Not logical. U.S. policy-makers pretend that lack of peace is due to the Palestinian Arabs not having statehood in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. [The Arabs already have statehood in Jordan, which comprises the bulk of the Land of Israel, what the British called "Palestine."] They ignore logic and truth. The truth is that Islam rejects infidel sovereignty everywhere. Islam considers Jewish sovereignty, in an area once controlled by Islam, a special affront. The Muslim Arabs don't accept the existence of a Jewish state regardless of how small. Therefore, withdrawal of Israelis from Judea-Samaria is no solution. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is falling into line with the anti-Israel policy of the Muslims and their left-wing appeasers in the West. It accepts the Arab distortion of international law — the Arabs call the Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria illegal. [The State Dept. seems not to notice that the Arabs also call the Jewish presence in the State of Israel "occupation."] The U.S. also endorses the Arab demand that the vacated area, including the Golan Heights, be ethnically cleansed of Jews first, although the U.S. went to war with Serbia, for countering Muslim ethnic cleansing of Christians in Kosovo with ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo. The U.S. would not approve of Israel ethnically cleansing itself of Arabs. More U.S. double standards. Illogical. Another instance of Administration bias is Sec. Clinton's condemnation of Israel for plans to demolish illegal Arab housing in eastern Jerusalem. No objection raised against demolition of illegal Jewish housing there. Likewise, she demands that Israelis cease building houses in Judea-Samaria. The Administration goes so far as to accept the Saudi initiative, which demands that Israel give up all the Jewish holy sites because the Muslims claim them, and which demands that Israel let in millions of Arabs. Those Arabs, alone, would be able to destroy the truncated Jewish state. "Here it should be noted that there is no difference in principle between the way the likes of the Obama administration and its supporters treat Israel and the way they treat the US and its non-Israeli allies. When on Sunday, Obama responded to North Korea's launch of a long-range ballistic missile by announcing that he wishes to all but disarm the US of its nuclear arsenal, he was effectively arguing that US strength is to blame for North Korea's aggression. He did what amounts to the same thing when he apologized to the Iranian regime for supposed US arrogance. By Obama's lights, now that the US is humble, the Iranians may one day stop calling for its destruction, waging war against it in Iraq and Afghanistan and building a nuclear arsenal." (http://www.imra.org.il/, 4/6 from Caroline Glick.) Obama's policy would result in: (1) War against Israel; and (2) Radical Islamic take-over in the Mideast, uniting it against the U.S.. What is he doing to America! Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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IF I WERE NETANYAHU
Posted by Martin Sherman, May 13, 2009. |
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This appeared initially in Ynet News.
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Bibi must inform Obama Israel no shtetl that can be bullied into submission "...An increasingly intolerant and hostile world...thinks sacrificing Israel's vital interests or even the state itself would be a small price to pay for ending the global confrontation between the West and Islamic fundamentalism." (Prof. Eytan Gilboa, October 2006) "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? ... And if not now, when? (Hillel the Elder, Tracts Aboth 1:14) These two quotes — one contemporary the other Biblical — must define the mindset with which Benjamin Netanyahu approaches his upcoming visit to Washington later this month. It is extremely seldom that leaders of nations are given second chance by history to redeem themselves — and to redress failures incurred during a previous incumbency. Netanyahu is one the fortunate few who have been afforded such a rare opportunity. Whether he will rise to the occasion and demonstrate that he is equal to the historic challenge for which destiny seems to have selected him, will very shortly become apparent. For his mettle will soon be tested. His forthcoming Washington visit will take place in the sinister shadow cast by the recent AIPAC meeting where several senior officials in the Obama team — notably White House Chief of Staff Emanuel and National Security Adviser Jones — abrasively put Israel on notice that they intend to manhandle it into making far-reaching concessions on the Palestinian issue. Particular pressure, it seems, is to be exerted to coerce the Israeli government into accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state in accordance with the "two states for two peoples" formula — despite the fact that even the so-called Palestinian "moderates" have made it abundantly clear that they categorically reject the possibility that the Jews be considered one of those "two peoples." From the outset Netanyahu must confront both the style and substance of the emerging discourse with the White House. He must make it unequivocally clear that the derogatory nature of the former is inappropriate and unacceptable, and impractical nature of latter is disingenuous and dangerous — and that Israel intends to condone neither. State of proud Jews With regard to the disrespectful tenor and the menacing tone of the language used to address Israel, it is imperative that the prime minister convey to the Obama administration that Israel is the sovereign state of proud Jews, determined to chart their own destiny, not some servile shtetl of pliant "Jewboys" who can be bullied into submission. In response to the administration's arrogant threat that it is about to get "forceful" with Israel, Netanyahu should respond with the same defiance as Menachem Begin, who in 1981, when faced with the threat of US punishment over the Knesset's decision to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Golan Heights, issued the following stinging rebuke to the US ambassador: What kind of expression is this — "punishing Israel"? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic?...You have no right to "punish" Israel — and I protest at the very use of this term...You will not frighten us with "punishments." He who threatens us will find us deaf to his threats. We are only prepared to listen to rational arguments. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then and Israeli-US relations have continued unimpaired — as has Israeli sovereignty over the Golan. As for the substance of the US demands for Israeli acceptance of the "two-state" principle, it must be made clear that it is hypocritical and self-contradictory for the administration to profess that it is "committed to Israel's security" and then insist on a policy that severely undermines that security. In this regard Netanyahu must insist that his American interlocutors demonstrate both intellectual integrity and rational consistency in dealing with Israel. He must remind his hosts that it was none other than the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that produced a map designating the areas vital for Israel's security, which showed that it must retain considerable tracts of land in the "West Bank" that make a two-state solution untenable. He must point out that is was none other than the US Under-Secretary of State, Eugene Rostow, the most senior American official involved in drafting UN Resolution 242, who pointed out that this map "is useful in interpreting Resolution 242 because it reveals ...what the US government had in mind in pushing the resolution through." It was Rostow who as late at 1993 stated that "all the studies of the Israeli security problem reached the same conclusion — from the security point of view, Israel must hold the high points in the West Bank and areas along the Jordan River." Recall Czech lesson The administration's attempt to link progress on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its ability to curtail Iran's nuclear project is equally disingenuous and ludicrous — and must be exposed as such. No serious authority has ever suggested that Iranian concern for the fate of the Palestinians was among the reasons behind Tehran's nuclear ambitions. These have always been identified as a result of domestic considerations — from national self-perception, to the trauma of the war with Iraq, to aspirations for regional hegemony. It is thus entirely unclear why "progress on the Palestinian issue" will contribute in any way to halting the Iranian nuclear program — since this is driven neither by a sense of solidarity with the Arabs in general nor with the Palestinians in particular. Indeed, not only do the Arab states have much to fear from the Iranian nuclear ambitions — perhaps more so than Israel — but so do the Palestinians, many of whom are also in danger of annihilation in any nuclear attack on their immediately adjacent "oppressor." The emerging American policy today has ominously familiar ring to it. It is strongly reminiscent of Anglo-French pressure on Czechoslovakia to yield to German demands that it cede the strategically important mountainous region of the Sudetenland to accommodate the aspirations, and address the grievances, of ethnic majority resident in the area. Netanyahu must not allow Washington to forget — or obscure — the fact that by abandoning their ally and forcing it to submit to the dictates of despots, France and England not only brought devastation to Czechs, but carnage and catastrophe to themselves — and to humanity as a whole. Dr. Martin Sherman is a political scientist at Tel Aviv University with degrees in geology, physics, finance and political science. He is active in the Jerusalem Summit conferences and has written extensively on the politics of water in the Middle East and the necessity for Israel to safeguard its water supply.
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OUTLINES OF THE COPTIC POSITION ON THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT
Posted by Morris Sadek, Esq., May 13, 2009. |
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Since the dawn of history, the Jewish people have been a powerful force for peace and civility. Their remarkable contributions to civilization are a testimony to their love of the human race. Since Christianity came to Egypt in 57 A.D., we, the Christians of Egypt, have not had conflict with the Jewish people. Copts and Jews share a common history of centuries of persecutions by Moslems and Christians alike. Indeed, we share a deeply rooted appreciation for security, and yearning for peace. Copts have been a marginal population held in captivity for sixteen centuries. They constitute the largest non-Arab, non-Moslem minority in the Middle East. The Coptic Orthodox Church, The Church of Alexandria, is arguably the oldest organization in the Middle East. It continues to exist and function as has done so uninterrupted since 57 A.D. Despite this distinguished history, it is a church that has been under siege since the Islamic invasion. The Church's relation with foreign counties is dictated by the Arab government of Egypt. Since the humiliating 1967 defeat of the Arabs in the Six-Days War, the Christians of Egypt have been allowed to immigrate to the United States, where several human rights organizations have actively worked to expose the heinous crimes committed against the Copts in Egypt. These organizations have generally avoided public ally, which addresses the Arab-Israeli conflict. The National American Coptic Assembly recognizes that it is in the best interest of the Coptic people to develop and declare a position regarding the Middle East Arab Israeli conflict. Our outline of our position is as follows: 1. We recognize the sacred right of the state of Israel and the Israeli people to the land of historic Israel. "All parties to this treaty recognize Mecca and Medina to be the holiest cities in Islam, whereas Christian and Jewish parties to this treaty give up and surrender in full any and all legal and historical rights to these cities. All parties to this treaty recognize a united Jerusalem to be the holiest city in Judaism, whereas all Arab and all Moslem parties to this treaty will relinquish and surrender in full any and all legal and historical rights in Jerusalem and as such accept it as the united capital of the Jewish state." National American Coptic Assembly
Morris Sadek is President of the National American Coptic Assembly. Visit http://www.nationalamericancopticassembly.webs.com/, http://nacopticas1.blogspot.com/, and http://nacopts1.blogspot.com/ |
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70 YEARS AGO GREAT BRITAIN SENTENCED THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO DEATH
Posted by Yid With Lid, May 13, 2009. |
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When Hitler came into power in Germany there was a large increase in the demand for Jewish immigration to Palestine as Jews tried to escape. The British allowed around 50,000 Jews to immigrate from 1934-1936 but it infuriated the Arab population. Based on the higher immigration levels the Arabs started the an intifada against the Palestinian Jews. The Arab attacks continued for three years (1936-1939). Britain did take a stab at limiting the Arab attacks, but it was more important to keep the Arabs from jumping to the German side. It began a British tradition of appeasing Muslim terrorists, that exists even today. Then to formalize their appeasement, in May 1939, seventy years ago this week, the British Parliament approved a policy paper that sentenced many Jewish people to death. Called the White Paper of 1939, the policy paper had two purposes:
The White Paper was first announced on the 9th of November 1938. If that date seems familiar, it's because it is forever stained with the name Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass." On that same night the Nazis waged coordinated attack on the Jewish people; 91 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. More than 200 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. The same day as Kristallnacht, the British released a plan to close off a major escape route for European Jews — Palestine — sentencing hundreds of thousands of innocent people who might have been saved, to death at the hands of Hitler. During WWII, Jews organized an illegal immigration effort, conducted by "Hamossad Le'aliyah Bet" that rescued tens of thousands of European Jews from the Nazis by shipping them to Palestine in rickety boats. Many of these boats were intercepted and some were sunk with great loss of life. The efforts began in 1939, and the last immigrant boat to try to enter Palestine before the end of the war was the Struma, torpedoed in the Black Sea by a Soviet submarine in February 1942. The boat sank with the loss of nearly 800 lives. When the White Paper was issued Chaim Weizmann called it "a death sentence for the Jewish people." David Ben-Gurion said it was "the greatest betrayal perpetrated by the government of a civilized people in our generation." Not that Great Britain was the only villain, FDR aided and abetted the British appeasement. The British were, after all, in a particularly vulnerable position in May 1939. Two months earlier, Hitler had completed his dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, leaving the Munich agreement in tatters. War with England seemed inevitable. "London was in such dire need of American support," the historian Selig Adler has noted, "that a strong dissent from Washington would have probably forced a British reversal" of the White Paper.) Seventy years ago this week, the British Parliament decided to abandon doing the "right thing." With tacit agreement from the United States, they decided to appease Arabs terrorizing Jewish civilians. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of Jews could have escaped the Holocaust if they were able to escape to the Holy Land. Looking at the foriegn policy of Great Britian today, very little has changed. They are still appeasing Muslims who are bent of violence instead of "doing the right thing." This comes from the Yid with Lid website and is archived at
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FROM ISRAEL: THE VISIT
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 13, 2009. |
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Something less than a resounding success on several fronts, this visit from Pope Benedict XVI: Yesterday, Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said that, contrary to common impression, the pope was never in Hitler Youth. A strange statement, considering the pope himself had said so some years previous. But wait: What Lombardi explained is that Ratzinger (the pope's family name) was in a German army anti-aircraft unit, and wore the uniform of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces — but was never a part of Nazi ideology. Well, then, this is all OK, apparently. ~~~~~~~~~~ This statement followed a visit Benedict made to the Holocaust Memorial and Museum, Yad VaShem, where he spoke on Monday night. His words were disappointing on several levels. His talk was academic in nature, lacking the passion that was required. Reading like the statement of an uninvolved third party, it simply fell short. "I have come to stand in silence before the monument erected to honor the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah," intoned the pope. "They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names... Some critics pointed to the fact that the word used was "killed," and not a more evocative "murdered," or "massacred." I was bothered by his rush to make the issue a universal one rather than focusing on a uniquely Jewish one. Lacking was apology, or remorse, or regret. Any or all of which would have been appropriate considering that he was in the Wehrmacht (or Hitler youth), that he recently lifted the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop (although he was not totally reinstated), that serious questions are raised about whether Pope Pius XII might have done much more to save Jews during the Holocaust, and that centuries of endemic anti-Semitism in Church teachings set the tone that made the Holocaust more possible. As it was, neither positions of the Church, nor Nazis, nor Germany were referred to at all. ~~~~~~~~~~ The pope's visit was further marred by an outburst on Monday evening, when he was hosting an ecumenical evening of dialogue. In a tirade that was not anticipated by the organizers of the event, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, chief Islamic judge in the Palestinian Authority, attacked Israel for war crimes in Gaza, confiscation of Palestinian land, and more, calling for Christians and Muslims to unite against Jews. The pope, who was visibly uncomfortable throughout, ultimately walked out. Criticism from several quarters followed. ~~~~~~~~~~ But the visit was not all negative by any means. Yesterday at Hechel Shlomo — next to the Great Synagogue — the Pope Benedict had an historic meeting with Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger and Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, at which he agreed to stop all Church missionizing among Jewish people. This is no small matter. Additionally, the pope addressed intention to continue Christian-Jewish dialogue and advance the process of reconciliation: "I assure you of my desire to deepen mutual understanding and cooperation between the Holy See, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and Jewish people throughout the world." ~~~~~~~~~~ Rabbi Metzger asked the pope to identify Jewish children placed with Christian families during the Holocaust. I don't know what the outcome here will be and I am frankly not optimistic. This is a source of no small turmoil and contention. There were Catholic families in eastern Europe who accepted Jewish babies and children given to them by parents facing annihilation, and literally saved their lives. But many of these children were baptized and absorbed into the Christian community, lost, after the war, to their surviving families and the Jewish people. (There was a story publicized recently of a priest who did not know he had Jewish roots until he had been in the priesthood for 12 years and now wants to make aliyah.) ~~~~~~~~~~ I share here the surprising take on the pope's visit expressed by Caroline Glick in her column, "Opportunity is knocking."
In the face of a downgrade in US-Israel relations, she says, it is important for Israel to move quickly to establish stronger strategic alliances in other quarters. It is a delicate and imperfect business, she acknowledges, often with parties each wanting more from the other than is possible. But one strategic alliance our government is now seeking, says Glick, is with the Vatican. Our goal here would be "the strengthening of [our] international position as the sole sovereign in Jerusalem." This particularly caught my eye, as there was a spate of panicked e-mail messages that came out before the pope's arrival regarding the Church's desire to acquire certain properties in Jerusalem — most notably on Mt. Zion — and the need to prevent that from happening, as Israel is and must remain sovereign here. I remained unconcerned because I had learned from an impeccable inside source that the Israeli government intended to turn over nothing to the Church. ~~~~~~~~~~ "UNDER POPE BENEDICT XVI," wrote Glick, "the possibility of winning the support of the Catholic Church for Israel's position that Jerusalem will never again be partitioned and will remain under perpetual Israeli sovereignty is greater than it was under his predecessors. Unlike his predecessors, Benedict has been outspoken in his concern for the plight of Christian minorities in Islamic countries...Since he replaced Pope John Paul II, Benedict has made repeated calls for religious tolerance and freedom in Islamic countries — most notably in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword. Glick maintains, in fact, that statements by the pope make it clear that he "views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage" — Jewish holy sites that would be at risk under Muslim control. A fascinating thesis, and one that should be followed. The power of the Catholic Church is not to be dismissed. ~~~~~~~~~~ Whether Pope Benedict knows it or not, whether or not he is willing to acknowledge this reality publicly, the bottom line is that only Israeli sovereignty will guarantee Christian and Jewish holy places. The Palestinian record in this record is abysmal. But I've yet to be convinced that he will support full Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. I've already expressed concern about statements made by the pope or his representatives that seemed to me to indicate a pro-Palestinian tilt (e.g., that there has not been justice in this part of the world for 60 years). What is certainly the case is that the PA would like to utilize the pope's visit, manipulate his presence, toward their ends. This morning, when the pope meet with PA president Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, Abbas gave him as a gift a concrete piece of the security wall. "We have been suffering since the Nakba ("catastrophe") 61 years ago," Abbas said to him. "On this holy land, there are people who continue to build separation walls instead of building bridges for connection." Never mind that on this holy land it is necessary to build a separation that prevents Arab terrorists from killing innocent Jews. ~~~~~~~~~~ And I cannot let this pass without an observation: This, above all else, is how the Palestinians represent themselves — as victims, eternally suffering and in need of succor. No attempt to show the pope what a determined people has been able to accomplish in terms of academics, social services or anything else that would indicate their readiness to have a state. There is no pride, no dignity. This is how they play it and how the world receives them. A piece of concrete as a gift to the pope? ~~~~~~~~~~ Responded the pope: "The Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders." He cautioned young people to "have the courage to resist any temptation you may feel to resort to acts of violence or terrorism." But in the same breath he sanctioned their sense of grievance, which might lead to terror: "Do not allow the loss of life and the destruction that you have witnessed to arouse bitterness or resentment in your hearts...I know how much you have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of the turmoil that has afflicted this land for decades." And as I write, the visit to the nearby refugee camp is still to come, where the "right of return" will be highlighted. Not good enough to give me any reassurance. Not by a long shot. ~~~~~~~~~~ Yet another alliance Glick anticipates that Netanyahu will be working on is with Egypt. And here I see it. The focus strategically is with regard to Iran, which, as I've been writing, Egypt is considerably worried about. She cites a statement by Netanyahu for the AIPAC conference that sets the tone: "For the first time in my lifetime... Arabs and Jews see a common danger... There is a great challenge afoot. But that challenge also presents great opportunities. The common danger is echoed by Arab leaders throughout the Middle East; it is echoed by Israel repeatedly... And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it is this: Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons." Netanyahu has just returned from a meeting with Mubarak, and, while statements were made regarding peace with the Palestinians (during which Netanyahu still did not utter that "two state solution" phrase), we don't know what went on behind closed doors with regard to Iran. Whatever transpires is likely to be discreet, as Mubarak would not be expected to assume an overtly pro-Israel stance. ~~~~~~~~~~ Glick also makes mention of something that has been of concern to me for some time now: The changing tone of Jordan's King Hussein, who now embraces the Obama theory that we have to make peace with the Palestinians in order to deal with Iran — a position very different from the one he had previously embraced. As she puts it, "the Obama administration has clearly enlisted King Abdullah II to act as its proxy in the Arab world." Indeed, as Hussein's tone changed after his visit to the US. Additionally, what we see coming next is an Obama visit to Egypt, from where he will deliver his speech for US conciliation with the Muslim world. A troublesome picture. ~~~~~~~~~~ Our prime minister has his work cut out for him and needs our prayers and support. ~~~~~~~~~~ Personal considerations are likely to prevent my posting again until after Shabbat. There is a great deal more that must be looked at, all in due course. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF INFINITY
Posted by Dave Nathan, May 12, 2009. |
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This was written by Jonathan Sacks and it appeared on the Chabad website: http://www.chabad.org |
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Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the essence of Jewish mysticism What is mysticism? The word conjures up connotations of lofty abstraction, other-worldly meditation, abstruse speculations into the meaning of existence — a world apart from, perhaps even opposed to, the mundane and prosaic questions that make up the texture of daily life. If that is so, what does mysticism have to do with Judaism? It is, after all, the defining feature of Judaism, which some praise, others criticize, that its concern is with the small details of conduct. Though it is other things as well, Judaism is supremely the Halachah, the open-ended rules for decision-making in practical contexts. Perhaps the subtitle that the first Lubavitcher Rebbe gave to his classic work Tanya — Sefer Shel Benonim, the "Book for the Average Man" — is the aptest of descriptions of Judaism as a whole. The Torah is a book for the average man in average situations. And surely, almost by definition, a mystic is not an average man; his vision is anything but the norm. In many places the Torah itself, and certainly the rabbis in their comments upon it, insists upon this fact — that the law it contains is not lofty, remote or esoteric: For this commandment which I command you this day, is not hidden from you, nor is it far away. It is not in Heaven, that you should say: Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?... But the thing is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it. (Deuteronomy 30:11-14) The Sages were fond of saying: "The Torah was not given to ministering angels" (Talmud, Berachot 2Sb). The Talmud describes a dialogue between Moses and the angels when he ascen ded to Heaven to receive the Torah. The angels protested: How could the most precious of Divine treasures be handed over to man? Moses replied with a long string of rhetorical questions: Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why then should the Torah be yours?... Do you perform work that you need the Shabbat as a day of rest? Do you have business dealings that you need a law against falsehood? Is there jealousy amongst you that you need rules against murder and theft? (Talmud, Shabbat 88b-89a) Moses descends, victorious. The Torah is not for beings who are perfect. It is not for those who live above the problems of ordinary human life. So our question returns: What has mysticism to do with Judaism? It could be said, and convincingly, that Judaism needs a mystical dimension. Do we not dress in white and refrain from eating and drinking on Yom Kippur in imitation of the ministering angels? There are times, especially in prayer, when we must commune with the Infinite. It would be a pale shadow of a religious existence if there were no place for meditating on "He who spoke and the world came into being" and no time for thinking of "He who teaches Torah to His people, Israel." In fulfilling the mitzvot we would be like someone who keeps the command of the king while forgetting that there is a king. But our concern here is with a more significant issue than the dimension of depth that mysticism is. The Talmud, which always relates intellectual issues to real choices, has a standard question when it is faced with a difference of opinion between two views. It asks: what is the practical difference? And this is our question. Does a mystical vision make a practical difference to the way we are bound to act in accordance with the Halachah? What are the practical implications of infinity? Custom, Beauty and Law It is one of the strange facts of the history of the Jewish mind that the great mystics have also been the great halachists. Their concern with infinity took them into some very finite areas indeed. To mention only the most familiar names: Joseph Caro, author of the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Laws), was a member of the great mystical circle in Tzefat. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Rebbe of Lubavitch, is as well known for his code of law, the Shulchan Aruch HaRav, as for his mystical writings. Perhaps the greatest of all the early rabbinic teachers, Rabbi Akiva, whose methods shaped the whole development of the Halachah, was a profound mystic whose views sometimes perplexed, sometimes scandalized his contemporaries. This mysticism/Halachah connection (for which a whole string of names can be adduced) is all the more striking compared with the other approach to resolving the fundamental questions of religion: philosophy. Of the great Jewish philosophers who were distinguished as halachists, only the name of Moses Maimonides stands out, with perhaps the lesser-known figure of Rav Saadia Gaon. The reason lies deep. But for a single-sentence summary it would perhaps be fair to say that while the philosopher attaches great significance to great truths, the mystic attaches it to small ones as well. Since every fragment of the infinite is also infinite, perhaps also it could be said that while the philosopher thinks his way towards G-d, the mystic experiences and lives his way. For the mystic every detail of the mitzvah is important. And hence his concern with detail — the essence of the Halachah. But did all this make a practical difference? In some ways its impact was obvious. In the area of minhag, a great many Jewish customs are based upon considerations that are Kabbalistic: the way we hold the kiddush cup or the double loaves of bread on Shabbat, for example; or the retention of mayim acharonim (the hand-washing at the conclusion of a meal) after the original reason ceased to apply. Perhaps the most dramatic incursion of a Kabbalistic practice into the normal routines of Judaism is the Kabbalat Shabbat service on Friday evenings. The Lecha Dodi song and the turning at the end to meet the Shabbat bride coming from the direction of the setting sun — all originate from the sixteenth-century mystics in Tzefat. Also, the mystics attached great significance to what is known as hiddur mitzvah — performing a precept in the most beautiful manner possible. This is an age-old concept: "This is my G-d and I will beautify Him" (Exodus 15:2) — beautify your fulfillment o f His commandments. Make a beautiful succah, a beautiful lulav, a beautiful shofar, beautiful tzitzit and a beautiful Torah scroll — write it with fine ink, a fine pen, a skilled scribe, and wrap it in beautiful silks. (Talmud, Shabbat 133b) Nonetheless it received a prominence amongst the mystics, certainly amongst Chassidim, that it had not had hitherto. But both custom and beautification, intensity and adornment, are themselves dimensions of depth within the basic framework of the Halachah. Given then that the mystics had a profound motivation to be interested in the details of Jewish law, and that they added to it refinements which went beyond the essential requirements, do we have instances where the mystical vision affected the Halachah itself, in the sense that, in response to specific practical issues, the answers which emerged did so because of a certain fundamental orientation towards the infinite dimension in existence? Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Judah bar Ilai The figure whom Jewish tradition invests with the honor of being the grandfather of mysticism — not the first but the most influential — is Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Rabbi Shimon was one of the greatest of the rabbis of the late Mishnaic period, and he is a dominating presence in the early rabbinic literature, in both Halachah and Aggadah. Mysticism as such does not figure largely in the statements attributed to him in the Talmud: that belongs to the more esoteric literature of the Zohar. Nonetheless, a graphic picture of his personality emerges. He was a man of extremes, always uncompromising, always radical, a man for whom the study of the Torah transcended all else, and a man who cared nothing for the cliches of conventional wisdom. The Talmud relates that, because of his opposition to the Roman government then in power in Israel, Rabbi Shimon was forced to escape for his life and to take refuge in a cave, where he and his son lived for twelve years, oblivious to the hardship, and only concerned not to waste a moment of time that could be spent in studying Torah: So they went and hid in a cave. A miracle occurred and a carob-tree and a well of water were created for them. They would take off their garments and sit up to their necks in sand. The whole day they studied. When it was time for prayer, they robed, covered themselves, prayed and then took off their garments again so that they should not wear out. (Talmud, Shabbat 33b) What is of interest to us here is: what occurred that Rabbi Shimon had to escape from the Romans? The account given by the Talmud is intriguing: Rabbi Judah [bar Ilai], Rabbi Yossei and Rabbi Shimon were sitting, and Judah ben Gerim was sitting near them. Rabbi Judah began the discussion by saying: How fine are the works of this people (the Romans). They have made streets, they have built bridges, they have constructed baths. Rabbi Yossei was silent. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai answered and said: All that they have made, they have done so for themselves. They built marketplaces to put harlots there; they made baths to rejuvenate themselves; they made bridges to levy tolls. (ibid.) Judah ben Gerim, who had overheard the conversation, reported it to the authorities. Rabbi Judah, who had praised the Romans, was given official honor. Rabbi Yossei, who was silent, was sent into exile. Rabbi Shimon, who had so castigated the achievements of the Romans, was sentenced to death. It is fascinating, apart from the historical significance of the account, to overhear the two great rabbis, Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Shimon, who so often disagreed on matters of Halachah, this time debating a question of political and moral values. In the broadest sense, the opinions they expressed were consistent with all we know about these two personalities. But what, specifically, was the argument between them on this occasion? Rabbi Judah was a politically sensitive individual, and there can be no doubt that he was fully aware of Rabbi Shimon's truth, that behind the remarkable technological achievements of the Romans — feats of construction that are no less awe-inspiring today, in retrospect — lay moral bankruptcy. And Rabbi Shimon, in turn, knew that what Rabbi Judah said was true. What then divided them? There are many possible ways of putting it. Amongst them, we will pursue just one line of thought. Namely, that Rabbi Judah looked at the facts, and Rabbi Shimon looked at the intentions that lay behind them. For Rabbi Judah, a fact, an achievement, could be impressive in its own right. For Rabbi Shimon the question was always, "To what end was this intended?" If it is a corrupt or self-centered one, then I refuse to be impressed. Because no evaluation of human creations can be made without a consideration of the purpose for which they were meant. It is an argument which in other forms can be heard often today. There are those who argue, for example, that something can be considered a great work of art, even if it is morally objectionable, because it should be considered in itself and without reference to any wider context. And there are others who say, to the contrary, that the moral context must be considered before we can pronounce any judgment at all. But does the argument between Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Shimon have anything to do with mysticism? In a superficial sense we could say= that Rabbi Judah looked at the concrete, physical facts, while Rabbi Shimon looked instead at the realm of thought and intention. To this extent Rabbi Shimon is interested in the intangible, while Rabbi Judah focuses on the reality that is grasped by the physical senses. But we must go deeper. What in general is the mystical vision? It is that reality lies deeper than the appearances presented to our senses. To express it in a way that is at least roughly true of the Jewish mystical tradition: the physical world conceals more than it reveals. Beneath all appearances lies the reality of the Infinite, the Ein Sof, that can neither be perceived nor described. Chabad philosophy, in particular, stresses the analogy between the way the world came into being and the way — in human psychology — in which an action develops out of thought and emotion. There is a sequence by which the glimmer of a thought is developed into a fully-fledged idea, is invested with emotion, and eventually turns into decision and action. Only the final stage of the process — the behavior — is seen by others. But its essential meaning lies way back, in the first flash of thought which set the process in motion. So, too, on a cosmic scale. The world, as we see it, is only the last stage of the process (hishtalshelut), and is, in this respect, like a human action (olam ha'asiyah). But if we were to travel backwards and inwards we would reach further towards the originating reality (asiyah, yetzirah, beriah, atzilut); perhaps back even beyond the first thought, to the personality that conceived it, and which is of course infinitely wider than any specific intention into which it is directed (Ein Sof). If this analogy is to be taken in any way seriously, then a mystical vision that looks beyond the surface reality of the world must look beyond the surface reality of human behavior as well. It is not enough to look at the final outcome. The real meaning lies in the intention. And so it happens that a deeply esoteric view of the nature of G-d and the universe may carry with it quite simple implications for the way we interpret human behavior. While Rabbi Judah is content to look upon the glittering surface of Roman achievements, Rabbi Shimon's restlessly searching mind takes him beyond, to the less than impressive intentions and qualities of the soul which set the civilization on its course. The mystic became a political radical. Action and Intention But politics is a large and abstract subject, even if at times the expression of an opinion can endanger one's life. Is the difference between Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Shimon one that has more practical consequences still? It is. We find these two rabbis arguing about what, on the face of it, is a quite unrelated and seemingly trivial issue. As it happens, the passage in question has quite wide implications for the laws of Shabbat in general. But in its original formulation it reads as follows: Rabbi Judah says: No articles may be dragged along the ground except a wagon, because it only presses the earth down... Rabbi Shimon says: A man may drag along a bed, stool or bench across the ground, provided he had no intention of making a furrow. (Mishnah and Talmud, Betzah 23b; Tosefta, Betzah chapter 2; Talmud, Shabbat 29b and elsewhere) This is the specific case. The general rule over which they disagree is: Rabbi Judah maintains that an unintentional act is forbidden; but Rabbi Shimon holds that an unintentional act is permitted. (Talmud, Betzah ibid.) The question is this: someone does something on Shabbat which is, in itself, permitted — like dragging a chair along the earth. All he intends to do is to move the chair. But while he is doing so he may be making a furrow in the ground. And making a furrow is forbidden on Shabbat, either as a subsidiary case of building or of plowing, two of the categories of forbidden labor. In fact this kind of case is quite common nowadays. For example: we open a refrigerator on Shabbat to take out some food. It may happen that the cooling mechanism is not operative at the moment when we open the door, but the sudden in-rush of warm air causes it to start up. We did not intend to start the motor. All we intended to do was to take out the food. Nonetheless, the consequence was, in fact, that the motor started. And to start a motor is certainly to transgress the Shabbat. What is the law in such cases? Is the act permitted because in itself it is innocent? Or is it forbidden because it may have consequences that are forbidden? Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Shimon disagree. But by now it should be apparent that their disagreement is — strangely enough — of exactly the same form as their difference of opinion on the Romans. For Rabbi Judah looks at the facts. And Rabbi Shimon looks at the intentions. At the end of the day, argues Rabbi Judah, the person who dragged the chair made a furrow, and that is forbidden. But, counters Rabbi Shimon, he did not intend to make the furrow, and what counts is his intention. The law, on this question, follows Rabbi Shimon. And so we have traced, in a direct line, an orientation of thought that has moved from mysticism to politics to the laws of Shabbat. And it has made a difference. Rabbi Shimon did not merely, because of his mysticism, think of Shabbat in terms of an extra dimension of depth: that it was not just a day of rest, but a day in which the spiritual rifts in Creation were healed. The Shechinah (Divine Presence) came temporarily out of its exile, and peace reigned in the Heavenly orders. He also gave practical rulings that followed from his premises; they differed from those of Rabbi Judah and they were taken up as law. The Unity of Israel So far we have traced a particular facet of mysticism through its practical implications, in political attitudes, and in the laws of Shabbat. But for our final study of the attitudes of Rabbi Shimon in contrast with those of Rabbi Judah, we shall consider a far more dramatic case, a situation of acute moral dilemma. And to understand what lies behind it we must once again reconsider the mystical viewpoint. For the mystic, what counts as reality is the inherent presence of the Infinite behind all the scattered phenomena of the world as we see it. But how can we have a conception of this invisible presence which gives life to everything and yet can never be seen? Yet there is an analogy: the relation of the human soul to the body. We know that, in relation to ourselves, we present only a mere surface of our personality to the world. No one can see into ourselves as we can. What is this "self" or soul, the "I" that we refer to when we talk in the first person? We know it is not the body: our bodies change constantly, yet we remain the same person. It is not even our personality; that too may change. Though I may act and feel differently than I once did, I have not ceased to be me. To this self we give the name of "soul." It is the most mysterious of all phenomena. Despite attempts to identify it with the brain, it remains elusive and indefinable. Yet it is more familiar to us than anything else: through it we see the world and react to it as an individual quite distinct from anyone else. The soul may hide its face even from its possessor. From Freud we learned to call this phenomenon the unconscious. That is, we may have motives that we hide even from our own conscious minds. But this was known long ago to the Jewish mystics. It is just that they took a somewhat different view of what it was like: it was a G-dly soul. Deep down, without knowing it, every Jew longs to keep the Torah and come close to G-d with a love that burns like fire. The mystical task is to take a journey into the interior of the self, and rescue that love from its hiddenness. The soul is infinite and intangible, yet in some way it inhabits the finite and tangible body. A paradox, certainly, but one with which we live. So, too, G-d, the Soul of the world, infinite and unperceivable though He is, inhabits the world, limited and physical though it is. Just as the mystic, inwardly, tries to move ever closer to the roots of his soul, so, outwardly, he tries always to fathom the Infinite who gives life to the world. But this is more than just an analogy. In several dazzling passages in the Tanya, the classic statement of Chabad thought, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi spells out the reality behind the comparison. It is not simply that the soul in its relation to the body is like G-d in His relation to the world, but that every G-dly soul is literally a part of G-d. Man, at his most spiritual level, does more than relate to G-d: he contains part of the reality of G-d. But G-d, as Maimonides lays down as one of the principles of the Jewish faith, is One and indivisible. How then can many souls each be a part of something that cannot be split or analyzed into parts? The truth is, at the deepest level, the entire community of Jewish souls is a single unity, standing in relation to one another as do the limbs of the body — many parts but a single entity. (See Tanya, especially chapter 2) This again is no mere abstract doctrine. It has the most radical implications for our feelings and behavior. The Torah says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). No doubt this is easier said than done. But there are cases where love flows easily and naturally for most people: for instance, the love of a parent for his child. He loves his child because he stands in a special relationship to him; the parent has brought the child into being. The radical conclusion of Rabbi Schneur Zalman's mysticism is that, at the level of soul, every Jew is related to every other with complete identity. Between each Jew is a bond closer even than the closest we can speak of in non-mystical terminology, the bond between parent and child. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" — because he is yourself. If we could attain this level of perception, then that love would flow unforced and without limits. But how do we get there? This, too, is obvious. When we think of human beings as bodies, then certainly each is separate and distinct. It is only when we relate to ourselves and others at the level of the soul, can we begin to sense the unity. And hence the task of the mystic — and, in truth, the task of Judaism as a whole — is to move from body to soul; from reactions prompted by ordinary physical stimuli to those wholly spiritual in character and motivation. (Tanya, chapter 32) The result? A profound emphasis on the love of every Jew — an emphasis that flows not simply from an emotion of benevolence but from a new way of viewing our identity and that of our fellow. And at the same time, a simultaneous stress on two things that might, in any other context, seem incompatible: the infinite worth of the individual and the literal unity of the whole Jewish people. The individual, because he is a part of G-d and every fragment of infinity is infinite. The community, because, at the level of soul, there are no divisions that set person against person and create ultimate loneliness. If Israel Lacked One Person These are revolutionary ideas. Certainly, they are implicit in the Torah. But it takes a special cast of mind to uncover them. As we read through the early rabbinic literature we find that no one, to my knowledge, expounds this view so strongly as Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Consider the following passage, not attributed explicitly to him, but taken from the work that bears his name, the Mechilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:6) — this teaches that they are like a single body, a single soul. And thus it says: And who is like Your people Israel, a nation one in the earth (II Samuel 7:23; I Chronicles 17:21). If one of them sins, they are all punished, as it is said: Did not Achan the son of Zerach commit a trespass concerning the devoted thing, and wrath fell upon all the congregation of Israel? And that man perished not alone in his iniquity (Joshua 22:20). If one of them is smitten, they all feel pain. (Mechilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, to Exodus 19:6; edn. Epstein/Melamed p. 139) A single body, a single soul. The proof? That when Achan, an individual, sinned, the entire nation suffered a defeat at Ai after their previous conquest of Jericho (see Joshua chapter 7). The corollary? That no Jew can be indifferent to the fate of others, for it is his fate, too. The most famous image in which this was expressed belongs, also, to Rabbi Shimon: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught: It is to be compared to people who were in a boat, and one of them took a drill and began to drill a hole beneath himself. His companions said to him: Why are you doing this? He replied: What concern is it of yours? Am I not drilling under myself? They replied: But you will flood the boat for us all (Midrash Rabbah, Leviticus 4:6). The two sides of unity: an individual cannot harm himself without harming the whole of Israel; an individual cannot be content with self-perfection, ignoring the fate of the community. The passage continues with what seems to be merely further proof of this idea, taken from the book of Job. In fact, it does more. It tells us something of the psychology of isolation: And thus too did Job argue: "And if it be indeed that I have erred, then my error remains with myself" (Job 19:4). But his companions said to him: "When he adds to his sin, he attaches rebellion to us" (Job 34:37) — you attach your iniquities to us (Midrash Rabbah, Leviticus ibid.). Job, sunk in the miseries of loss and despair, suffers a profound crisis of faith. When others try to comfort him, Job, like the man who makes the hole in the boat, replies that it is none of their concern. But they insist; his fate is theirs, and they too will be held guilty. This text is more than an example; it is a diagnosis. Depression, anxiety, melancholy, self-absorption and self-pity — these are both symptoms and causes of a loss of religious vision. Rabbi Shimon seems to suggest that, if only Job would see that at the deepest level of self he is not an isolated individual, then he would not have lapsed into nihilism, would have been able to survive his acute personal tragedy, and would have avoided his religious crisis. It is a point made again with added emphasis in Tanya (chapter 26), and stands at the furthest extreme from the philosophies of existential individualism that have dominated the intellectual life of the twentieth century. The lonely man, experiencing the angst of isolation and making his private choices in a world bereft of meaning: this archetype, admired by Sartre, Heidegger and others, is for Rabbi Shimon spiritually empty. But as we said before, in Jewish mysticism the very emphasis on the community is at the same time an insistence on the infinite worth of the individual. This again is in opposition to other ideologies of our time, such as Marx and others, which exalt collectivity at the expense of the individual. The clearest statement in which both ideas are brought together is in Rabbi Shimon's description of the giving of the Torah: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said: From where do we learn that if a single person had been missing from Israel, the Divine Presence would not have appeared to them? Because it is written: For on the third day, the L-rd will come down in the sight of all the people upon Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:11; Midrash Rabbah, Deuteronomy 7:8; see also Mechilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Mechilta de-Rabbi Ishmael to Exodus 19:11). If one person is missing, then the whole community is incomplete and its full coming-together with the Divine Presence is impossible. It is an idea that was to be taken up with great force by later mysticism, in particular by the ARI — Rabbi Isaac Luria — by the Baal Shem Tov and the Chassidic movement. May One be Sacrificed for the Many? The general implication follows immediately: love of fellow-man, active concern for the welfare of others, a refusal to tolerate isolationism, an equal refusal to sanction attitudes that lead to the dismissal of any individual as unworthy — the complex of approaches that have become the hallmark of Chassidism. But we shall focus upon a specific implication, to show yet again that mysticism has practical applications that would not follow from other ways of thinking about Judaism. Again, the protagonists are Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Shimon. And this time the subject at issue is one of agonizing moral choice. The Jews in Israel suffered severe persecutions at the hands of the Romans. Not only was the Temple destroyed, but in the aftermath there occurred the chilling events at Masada, when the Zealots decided to take their own lives rather than be killed by their enemies. Less than a century later, in the reprisals following the failure of the Bar Kochba uprising, persecution became a savage reality once more. Many of the greatest rabbis in Jewish history, Rabbi Akiva the most famous of them all, went to their deaths as martyrs rather than give up their public teaching of Torah. It is against this backdrop that the following ruling, contained in the Tosefta, can be understood: A company of men is confronted by non-Jews. They say: Give us one of your number whom we will kill; if you do not, we will kill all of you. Even though all of them will be killed, let them not deliver a single Jewish soul into their hands. (Tosefta, Terumot 7:23) An almost impossible dilemma. We are to imagine what was much more than a hypothetical possibility. A group of Jews is travelling on a journey (the Jerusalem Talmud (Terumot 8:4) in its citation of the Tosefta, adds the words "who were travelling on the road") when they are set upon by heathens intent upon blood. They issue an ultimatum: either hand one of yourselves over or we will kill everyone of you. The halachic ruling is simple, stark and uncompromising. There can be no compliance with their request. To hand over an innocent Jew to death is unforgivable in any circumstance. Even if they must all die as a result of their refusal, at least they will not have shared in the guilt. In the whole rabbinic literature from then to the final codification, this particular ruling was never challenged, never the subject of argument. It gives us awe-inspiring insight into the supreme moral inflexibility of courage that the Halachah categorically demands. However, there were cases — and again be aware that we are speaking about historical reality, not a theoretical discussion — that were similar in kind yet more complex in their ramifications. What happened when the situation was not an isolated one of meaningless violence, but an official one involving, say, the Roman authorities seeking someone regarded as a political subversive and who took refuge in a township? Here, two new factors enter the equation. The first: the person sought is not just anyone; they know precisely whom they want. The burden of choosing does not fall upon the Jewish community. Second: on a scale, with such opponents as the Roman legions, and with whole townships at stake, there enters into the equation the question of the survival of the Jewish people as a whole. Already bereft of its Temple and its political independence, might some compromise be made to ensure that the entire nation not die as martyrs? Now the moral issue becomes almost paralyzing. Legions surround a town and insist that a specific individual be handed over, and if not the entire town will be massacred. The mind is numbed by such a choice. Again we should pause to reflect that the rabbis did not recoil from this dilemma, concluding as they might have that any decision in such a circumstance would be wrong and that there is nothing that can be said. Instead, they brought to bear on it the same intellectual rigor and moral strength that they employed on every other issue, great or small. This is the argument that ensued: Rabbi Judah said: When are these words intended to apply? When he [the man sought] is inside and they [the Jewish community] are outside. But if he is inside and they are inside, since he would be killed and they would be killed, let them give him to them and let them not all be slain. And thus it is written: "And the woman came to all the people in her wisdom" (II Samuel 20:22) — which means she said to them: Since he would be killed and you would be killed, give him to them and you should not all be slain. This is a difficult passage, and needs to be understood in stages. What was Rabbi Judah doing in the course of his cryptic remarks? He was, in fact, responding to the dilemma in the way in which a Jew is bound to do in cases where there is not already a clear-cut ruling in existence. He searched the Torah for a case that might serve as a precedent and give guidance in the present instance. He found it in an episode that occurred during the reign of King David. There was an insurrection against the king: And there happened to be there a worthless man whose name was Sheva ben Bichri, a Benjaminite; and he blew the shofar and said: We have no part in David, neither have we inheritance in the son of Yishai: every man to his tents, O Israel. (II Samuel 20:1) Under the leadership of Yo'av, David's troops pursued Sheva, who eventually took refuge in the town of Avel. Yo'av's troops surrounded the town and were about to destroy it. A woman of the town conducted negotiations with Yo'av, who made it clear that the town would be spared if they would hand Sheva over to them. She reported the ultimatum to the townspeople. They agreed to the request, and Sheva met a bloody end. It is from this passage that Rabbi Judah quotes. Now here, on the face of it, was a precedent for some limited degree of compromise. The choice was the same: either hand over an individual or all die. And, in fact, they handed him over. What was the basis of their decision? Rabbi Judah proceeds to reconstruct the argument that must have taken place, and the reasoning that the woman used to persuade her townspeople to hand over Sheva. She must have argued thus, he says: Either way Sheva will be killed. If he is handed over he will be killed. If the whole town is destroyed, he will be killed. The situation is hopeless. We cannot possibly survive the besieging troops outside the city walls. Therefore: since he will die in any case, rather let us not all die as well. For we would not thereby save him. Having arrived at this point, Rabbi Judah proceeds to his conclusion. If the Jewish community is "outside" — that is, they are not completely surrounded, they have some chance either of escaping or of defending themselves against total annihilation — then no compromise must be made. A Jewish soul must never be handed over if there is some alternative. But if the community is "inside" with no means of escape, then — since they will all die anyway, and the wanted man with them — then rather they should hand him over than that they should all die. This is a sober and sensitive response to the crisis. It dictates that the handing-over should be done only if there is absolutely no alternative. And it produced a compromise for extreme situations, which, would ensure that whole communities of Jews should not die at the hands of the enemy. So far Rabbi Judah. But not so Rabbi Shimon. He rejects the analogy and with it the compromise. How, he says, can one cite a precedent from the case of Sheva ben Bichri? Sheva rebelled against the authority of a lawfully appointed king of Israel. And in Jewish law such insurrection warranted the death penalty. The people of Avel were correct in handling him over. And there was no need for calculations or fine moral distinctions. Not so with the Romans. They are not the lawfully appointed kings of Israel. They are an occupying tyrannical power, who have destroyed the Temple, taken away our statehood, killed our sages and teachers, and threatened those who publicly maintained the institutions of Torah. Nothing could be less akin to the rule of David. Thus, the analogy fails. And with it disappears the slightest grounds for ever collaborating with the requests of the enemy. Never is there an adequate reason to betray a soul of Israel and hand him over to death — even if a whole town must become martyrs to the cause of Jewish integrity. For Rabbi Shimon there can be no justified compromise. Here is idealism of a truly awesome order. And it is in character. For we have already seen that Rabbi Shimon himself placed his life in danger by refusing to silence his feelings about the Roman conquerors. The Practical Implication of Infinity Yet there is a question that calls out for an answer. Let us concede with Rabbi Shimon that no analogy could be drawn from the case of Sheva ben Bichri. Yet surely Rabbi Judah's argument, even shorn of its Biblical support, remains valid. If the wanted man will die, whether he be handed over or not, then rather let the community survive by delivering him up. For they will achieve nothing by their refusal. Is the logic of this point not unanswerable? Only now do we begin to reach a full sense of the practical implications of infinity. Finitude is quantifiable, infinity is not. If human life is very precious, and yet still finite in its value, then there is a difference between one man dying and many. And this difference makes it sometimes — in extremis — justifiable to sacrifice the one for the sake of the many. To be sure, Rabbi Judah did not accept this line of thinking in many cases: where the community might escape or fight back, or where the request was for anyone, not for a named enemy of the besieging power. But he did accept it in one case. And this is the crux. For it implies that the death of many is worse than the death of one. And this implies that life is quantifiable. Again, let us be clear that Rabbi Judah does not hold any of the doctrines, antithetical to the whole of Judaism, which hold that life is quantifiable against other things: suffering, or the happiness of others, or any other principle that would allow a life to be expendable under certain conditions. That is not his intention. Life cannot be measured against anything else. But it can, in the last analysis, be measured against other lives. Rabbi Shimon, as we have already seen, believes that each individual life is literally infinite. If one soul had been missing, the Israelites could not have received the Torah, could not have received the Divine Presence. And infinity cannot be quantified. Infinity times one and infinity times one hundred are the same. So devastating is the loss of a single life that the enormity is infinite. And as between the death of one and the death of many there can be no calculations. This total refusal to enter into any quantification where "one Jewish soul" is concerned is the strict consequence of taking infinity with absolute seriousness. No other point of view could have justified Rabbi Shimon's conclusion. Nothing less than . . . his mysticism of the Jewish soul. Sometimes carrying a mystical vision through into real situations demands courage of a supernatural order. Such was Rabbi Shimon's way. Yet sometimes just such a vision is closer to ultimate human realities than the more worldly, accommodating one of Rabbi Judah. Moments of truth like this are thankfully rare. Yet it is our painful duty to recall that in this century, under the shadow of death of the Holocaust, the question was raised again, in yet more bitter terms. Jews were asked to collaborate with the Nazis in deciding which of their brothers should live and which should be handed over to death. The facts and the rabbinic responses are on record (see Irving J. Rosenbaum, The Holocaust and Halakhah, KTAV 1976, pp 24-31), and they should be read to gain a full sense of the tragic consequences of ever agreeing to collaborate with murderers, of ever moving away from the position of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. An Old Man's Lesson Our purpose was to show that mysticism makes a difference; that infinity has practical implications. And to do so we have followed the footsteps of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai through politics, the laws of Shabbat, attitudes towards the individual and the community, and finally an extreme crisis in moral decision-making. In each case Rabbi Shimon's vision did make a difference, and he was faithful to the inferences to be drawn from his original perception. We have met a man whose idealism and uncompromising character seem almost impossible to approach. Is it possible to live by the standards of Rabbi Shimon? On one point, at least, the Talmud asks just this question: on the issue of how to compromise between the demands of learning Torah day and night, and the necessity of working for a livelihood. By now we will already have guessed what Rabbi Shimon's response would be: no compromise. Learn Torah. He had no time for the solution of his contemporary, Rabbi Ishmael — that learning Torah should be combined with a worldly occupation — nor even for that of Rabbi Judah, that the two should be combined but that study should take first place. The Talmud records the sad but resigned verdict of Abaye: "Many followed the advice of Rabbi Ishmael and it has worked well; others have followed Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and it has not been successful." (Talmud, Berachot 35b). But it is precisely this that gives us a measure of reassurance. For it seems that Rabbi Shimon was censured by Heaven for being too other-worldly after his long seclusion in the cave, hidden from everyday life and its problems. He was, records the Talmud, sent back to the cave for another twelve months to learn the lesson (Talmud, Shabbat 33b). In the end, it seems, he was not too mystical, but rather not mystical enough. For he had yet to learn the infinite significance of ordinary things and of ordinary people: that the fire of the love of G-d can be seen in the face of each Jew, when one has learned to see into the soul. Rabbi Shimon was eventually taught this lesson by an ordinary Jew. And perhaps it was the deepest message of all. This is what happened when Rabbi Shimon and his son finally emerged from their seclusion: On the eve of Shabbat, before sunset, they saw an old man holding two bundles of myrtle and running at twilight. "What are they for?" they asked him. "They are in honor of the Shabbat. " "But," they asked, "surely one should be sufficient?" He replied, "One is for the command of `Remember' and one is for the command of 'Observe. "' Contact Dave Nathan at DaveNathan@aol.com |
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OBAMA & NETANYAHU ON PRISONERS; TALKS WITH HAMAS; PALESTINIAN
GENOCIDE DOCTRINE; EU vs. ISRAEL; "LAWFARE" AGAINST ISRAEL: UPDATE
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 12, 2009. |
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ISRAELI LEADERS ENCOURAGED E.U. PRESSURE The European Union threatens to freeze relations with Israel, unless Israel agrees to statehood for the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The E.U. is moving to recognize Hamas and to de-recognize the Jewish state. The path to this stance was paved by the prior Israeli PM Olmert and Foreign Min. Livni. "For instance, in her speech at the Herzliya conference in January 2006, Livni stated outright that until and unless a Palestinian [Arab] state is carved out of land currently controlled by Israel, the Jewish state cannot expect for the world to accept its right to exist. Olmert made this point explicitly in a series of media interviews in recent months." Abbas rejects the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Therefore, he really does not believe in the "two state solution," himself. Israel, which is what the Palestine Mandate was set up for, was recognized as legitimate before the PLO existed. OBAMA & NETANYAHU ON PRISONERS Pres. Obama believes that most Guantanamo are held unjustifiably. He'd check and release them. However, the US just released an Arab terrorist who planted three car bombs in the US, after he served only half of his 30-year sentence, for "good behavior." Now he will be able to pursue bad behavior. Pres. Bush did not reject the petition to release Jonathan Pollard from his extreme sentence. Bush left it on his desk. Pres. Obama has not acted on it. For PM Netanyahu's first Knesset speech, he invited the wives and mothers of Israeli captives, but not Pollard's wife (http://www.imra.org.il/, 4/10). TALKS WITH HAMAS Israel talks indirectly with Hamas, about ceasefires. It also should be talking about Hamas' covenant, whose chapter 22 blames everything bad in the world, such as the French and Communist revolutions and WWI and WWII on the Jewish people, not just a few local problems on Israel (www.imra.org.il, 4/6). Israel does not promote good public relations. It sometimes defends itself, but it does not explain the issues nor try much to wield propaganda against the Islamist enemy. People think the conflict is nationalist, but it is religious. PALESTINIAN ARAB DOCTRINE OF GENOCIDE Hamas Covenant, schools, mosques, and media teach its society, "Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him...", etc.. So does the Palestinian Authority. Both factions' militias there attack Jews, as taught, and the populations there celebrate successful murders of Jews. Britain denies that reality. Its media claim that Israel dehumanizes those Arabs and delights in murdering them. Actually, every major Israeli organization condemns hatred of Arabs, while every major Arab organization exhorts hatred of Jews. The British media ignores Arab murder of Jews, but waxes indignant when Israeli self-defense kills Arabs. That is how Britain portrayed Israel's 2002 raid into Jenin against terrorists who had slain 133 Israelis. The Israeli raid killed 52 Arabs who fought against them or were used as human shields, losing 23 of its own troops doing so. Britain's media called that a massacre of Arabs, attempted genocide, as bad as 9/11. That journalism is perverse. Britain has a long history of antisemitism. This has been aggravated by the infiltration of the Labor Party and unions by hard-bitten Trotskyites, internecine rivals of the Communists (Prof. Steven Plaut, 3/30). DRAMA AT UNIVERSITY & ON TV IN GAZA "Following are excerpts from a drama show presented at the Gaza Islamic University, during a festival commemorating Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin. The show aired on Al-Aqsa TV on April 4, 2009. To view this clip, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2073.htm.
To view more clips on Al-Aqsa TV, visit
'You Must Drink From the Blood of Muslims. But Mix It With Soda Water' Jewish father: 'We Jews hate the Muslims. We love killing Muslims. We Jews love drinking the blood of Muslims and the blood of Arabs. Are you Arabs? Are you Muslims? I hate you. Yes, I hate you. I hate you in order to please God. In order to please God. In order to please God.' GAYS UNDER ATTACK IN IRAQ Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric in Iraq, has prayer services denouncing homosexuality. Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali-al-Sistani, said that Gays and lesbians should be "punished, in fact, killed." Such executions are taking place in Iraq. Most of them are "honor killings" by family members. Others are by death squads. This reaction is not consonant with the increased tolerance of Iraqi women to dress more in Western style (Timothy Williams & Tareq Maher, NY Times, 4/8, A1). Months ago, I came across reports of oppression of gays in the Palestinian Authority. Gays there flee to Israel, for sanctuary. Oddly, one hears of organized gays in the US taking an anti-Israel line. EUROPEAN UNION VS. ISRAEL For the second time in a month, the European Union (E.U.) has issued vague threats against Israel. This time it threatened not to upgrade its trade with Israel, unless the new Israeli government commits to E.U. policy on the Arab-Israel conflict. That policy is statehood for the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/, Arutz-7, 3/30). Does the E.U. know better than Israel's elected government what is good for Israel. What arrogance! Wasn't the E.U. a major critic of the US for allegedly imposing its policies upon other countries? Now the E.U. is doing it. Hypocrisy! The E.U. insist that the P.A. get sovereignty, without justifying it. The E.U. could not justify it. The P.A. has violated all its agreements, include the prerequisite for peace — eradicating terrorism and the indoctrination in religious warfare. BRITAIN HEADING OFF TERRORIST RECRUITS? British police think that they can study Muslim school children and identify those who are vulnerable to recruitment by terrorists. One police method was cited. Police would examine students compositions for sympathy for al-Qaida (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/, Arutz-7, 3/30). ISRAELI ARAB VIEW OF IRAN An Arab party's first female MK in Israel welcomes Iran's development of nuclear weapons and its influence on the Palestinian Authority. She explains that Iran would counter Israel, which is dangerous (http://www.imra.org.il/, 3/31). Iran's influence is by supporting Hamas terrorism. Iran threatens to use a-bombs. U.S. REJOINS THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION Pres. Bush withdrew from that Commission, because it was anti-human rights. It was and remains stacked with human rights violators. Therefore, it protects human rights violation and even resolved against free speech. Instead, it concentrates almost exclusively on drumming up false charges against Israel. Under its rules, Israel is not eligible to join it. The Obama administration claims that it seeks to rejoin the Commission, in order to "engage" with the other members and improve it. Critics say that considering how stacked the Commission is, significant improvement is impossible. They condemn the Administration for lending respectability to the Commission (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/, Arutz-7, 4/3). The NY Times favors U.S. membership, but acknowledges that offending Commission members protect each other from condemnation, and that many other members defer to them, under an exaggerated theory of protecting sovereignty from foreign interference (NY Times, 4/11). The Commission is so evil, that the best the U.S. could hope to do is a slight toning down of resolutions against Israel. Those measures would pass with U.S. participation, giving them some kind of cachet. Resolutions offered by the U.S. against real human rights violators would be watered down. That's what the UN does, it dilutes resolutions. I think it best to abolish the Commission and its parent body, the UN. Mankind is not ready for it. About sovereignty. Many of the same governments that guard their sovereignty jealously against the Human Rights Commission, support intrusions on sovereignty by the International Criminal Court and economic agencies, because these would deprive the U.S. of freedom of action and would condemn the U.S. and Israel. Inconsistent, isn't it! "LAWFARE" AGAINST ISRAEL: Update Spain's public prosecutor asked the magistrate to cease investigation in the case accusing Israel of having committed war crimes in Gaza. Checking Spanish and international law, the public prosecutor found that Spain lacked jurisdiction. This is especially true because Israel has an independent judiciary that is investigating the issue, itself, and with standards above the necessary minimum (http://www.imra.org.il/, 4/5). Few judicial systems have the integrity and independence from lobbies to be fair to foreign scapegoats. Accusations bring headlines for years, before trials end. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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OBAMA, NETANYAHU AND AMERICAN JEWS
Posted by Saul Goldman, May 12, 2009. |
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An insightful and hopeful essay. But, as Isi Liebler's optimism reposes upon the capacity of American Jews to become assertive and united in a politcal campaign against Obama's intentions to abandon Israel. People like the court Jew Rahm Emanuel have always been a danger to the Jews since the time of Joseph. Leibler's essay appeared today in the Jerusalem Post
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It was with mixed feelings that I returned from New York after extensive discussions with a wide range of American Jewish leaders. The outcome of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's forthcoming meeting with President Barack Obama will indicate the probable direction of the relationship with our most crucial ally and arms supplier. Optimists predict that a conflict is unlikely to materialize now. They argue that Obama has sufficient on his plate with the economic crisis, Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran without seeking a confrontation with Israel which could also lead to domestic friction. Besides, public opinion is still overwhelmingly pro-Israel and Congress remains strongly supportive. Yet the accumulation of negative signals over the past weeks is highly disconcerting. Whatever Obama's genuine personal views may be, clearly he is strongly pressured by left-wing Democrats and Europeans to adopt a tougher, even anti-Israel approach. Some of his key aides blame Israel for the region's problems and believe that the only way for the US to build bridges with Islam is to distance itself from the Jewish state. Obama's new policies of "engaging" with rogue states and striving to modify the behavior of tyrants by persuasion have ominous parallels with the appeasement policies of Europe in the 1930s. It is probably not coincidental that the Czech Republic is the European country most supportive of Israel. To date, Netanyahu has not put a foot wrong. But his real test will be Washington where he will face the awesome challenge of trying to achieve an understanding with Obama over Iran and the Palestinians while simultaneously resisting pressures for concessions which could further erode our security.
IN THIS CONTEXT, the support of American Jewry is enormously important. Obama would presumably seek to avoid alienating his Jewish constituency, 80 percent of whom voted for him and also contributed more than 50% of Democrat campaign funding. However should Jews be perceived as being ambivalent, or worse, hostile towards the Israeli government, there is little doubt that this would dramatically influence his approach. Regrettably, in addition to a decline in enthusiasm for Israel from a new generation for whom the Holocaust and struggle to create a Jewish state are dim memories, the Israeli relationship with American Jews over the past decades, has also undergone considerable erosion. Successive leaders have neglected to nurture the American Jewish lay leadership, concentrating instead primarily on wooing rich Jews as donors for their political or personal projects. Jewish lay leaders are largely unknown and, aside from AIPAC, national Jewish political activism is concentrated primarily in the hands of three highly capable but aging professionals — Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee and Malcolm Hoenlein of the Presidents Conference. In addition, aside from the negative impact of the general financial meltdown, American Jews have been traumatized by an escalation of virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic outbursts, reflected even in the purportedly reputable media. Anti-Israeli hysteria on the campuses has mushroomed and campaigns to boycott Israel have intensified. Ominously, American Jews, especially after the Freeman and AIPAC "espionage" imbroglios, are now also being accused of harboring dual loyalties.
JEWISH LEADERS are loath to openly express their concerns. But off record, many despairingly predict a Jewish head-on clash over Israel with the most popular US president since Franklin Roosevelt. Their concerns are exacerbated by the behavior of key Jewish officials in the administration who privately proclaim that they would not flinch from a major confrontation with the Jewish state and predict that most American Jews continue to venerate Obama and will support him. AIPAC leaders were bluntly told by Jewish White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that failure to advance with the Palestinians would impact on progress with the Iranians. Similar messages were conveyed by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones assured a European foreign minister that unlike Bush, Obama would be "forceful" with Israel. More chilling was the bland announcement without notice, from an assistant secretary of state calling on Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Jewish leaders are also appalled with the favorable media exposure provided to fringe groups like J Street, whose prime objective is to "balance" AIPAC activities by lobbying the Obama administration to force Israel to make further unilateral concessions. At recent State Department briefings, Jewish leaders were also shocked to be accompanied by organizations masquerading as Zionists, who were urging the US government to extend the same "tough love" to Israel as parents apply to "drug addicts." J Street and its "pro-peace" allies allege that the Jewish establishment is practicing "McCarthyism" and denying them freedom of expression. Most Jews would indeed concur that it is unconscionable for American Jews to be pressuring their government to intervene in matters affecting the life and death of Israelis. But the issue is not freedom of expression. What is required is that like the Jewish communists who engage in bogus Soviet-style "peace" campaigns and defend Soviet anti-Semitism, these fake "Zionists," should be exposed and isolated from the Jewish mainstream before they undermine Israel's position, particularly in Congress.
NETANYAHU APPRECIATES the crucial importance of our need to restore relations with Diaspora Jews and reinforce our role in the war of ideas. His nomination of Natan Sharansky to head the Jewish Agency and his upgrading of Yuli Edelstein's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs are positive signals. But his most creative decision may prove to be the appointment of Michael Oren as ambassador in Washington. Oren is charismatic, eloquent and scholarly and has the capacity of reaching out to Americans of all persuasions as well as encouraging greater Jewish involvement in support of Israel. Some predict that he may emerge as one of Israel's most effective diplomats since Abba Eban. Our prayers are that Netanyahu will succeed in convincing Obama of the existential threat a nuclear Iran poses for the Jewish state. He will surely reiterate his willingness to renew negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of reciprocity and will probably assure the Americans that undertakings to dismantle unauthorized outposts will be honored. But he will also resist efforts to deny "natural growth" within existing settlement blocs that will not be relinquished. Without necessarily explicitly saying so, he will endorse the "two-state solution" subject to the caveats that Israel's security interests are not compromised, that terrorism is outlawed and that the Palestinians display a genuine willingness to coexist peacefully with a neighboring Jewish state. However Obama should have no illusions. We are still light years away from reaching an accommodation with our Palestinian neighbors. Paradoxically, a greater proportion of Israelis favor a genuine two-state solution than the Palestinians for whom the destruction of Jewish sovereignty enjoys a far greater priority than creating a state of their own. These are challenging times for American Jewry. Its support is vital to resist those deluding themselves that problems with the Islamic world can be overcome by sacrificing Israel and transforming us into a new Czechoslovakia. American Jewish leaders failed to speak up in defense of their brethren during the dark days of World War II because they were intimidated by a popular American president. We have every reason to believe that the vast majority of strong and confident American Jews of our time will not be intimidated or remain silent if the Jewish state is endangered. Contact Saul Goldman at gold7910@bellsouth.net |
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OPPORTUNITY IS KNOCKING AT ISRAEL'S DOOR
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 12, 2009. |
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This was written by Caroline B. Glick and it appeared in the Jewish
World Review
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Like nature, Israel's strategic relations abhor a vacuum. In the wake of the Obama administration's decision to drastically curtail the US's strategic alliance with Israel in the interest of American rapprochement with Iran and Syria, the Netanyahu government has been moving swiftly to fill the void. On Monday, with Pope Benedict XVI's arrival and with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm e-Sheikh, two potential strategic alliances came into view. Building effective alliances with the Vatican and Egypt is a delicate process. Each side wants more from the other than the other can reasonably provide. But each side also has much to gain even if it doesn't achieve everything it wants. The art of alliance building is making the new ally both happy with what it gets and comfortable with not getting everything it wants. This is the task that presents itself today, as Netanyahu and his colleagues engage with both the pope and with Mubarak. The strategic goal that Israel wishes to advance through an alliance with the Vatican is the strengthening of its international position as the sole sovereign in Jerusalem. The strategic goal it wishes to advance with Egypt is the prevention of Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.
UNDER POPE BENEDICT XVI, the possibility of winning the support of the Catholic Church for Israel's position that Jerusalem will never again be partitioned and will remain under perpetual Israeli sovereignty is greater than it was under his predecessors. Unlike his predecessors, Benedict has been outspoken in his concern for the plight of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. During his visit to Amman he made a point of speaking out for the protection of Iraqi Christians who are under attack from all quarters. Since he replaced Pope John Paul II, Benedict has made repeated calls for religious tolerance and freedom in Islamic countries — most notably in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword. After his words sparked murderous violence throughout the Islamic world, Benedict expressed his regret for the hurt his statement caused. But he never retracted it. Moreover, during his visit to the King Hussein Mosque in Amman on Saturday, Benedict indirectly reasserted his 2006 message. When he said, "It is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society," Benedict was reinforcing — if cryptically — his basic criticism of Islam. The pope's obvious recognition of the danger jihadist Islam constitutes for Christians puts the Vatican, under his leadership, in a position where it could be more interested than it was in the past in working with Israel to secure the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem by supporting Israeli control of the city. The pope made this possibility even more apparent in his homily at Mount Nevo. Standing on the mountain where Moses gazed at the Land of Israel, Benedict spoke of "the inseparable bond between the Church and the Jewish people." As he put it, "From the beginning, the Church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two Testaments. May our encounter today inspire in us a renewed love for the canon of sacred Scripture and a desire to overcome all obstacles to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews in mutual respect and cooperation in the service of that peace to which the word of God calls us!" In saying this, the pope made clear that he views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage. The Islamic Wakf, which would control the city's holy sites in the event of its partition, has already gone to great lengths to systematically destroy the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Jewish and Christian heritage of the holy basin through archeological theft, illegal building and digging.
ISRAEL'S ABILITY to embrace the Vatican as an ally and so advance an alliance with the Church regarding Jerusalem is constrained from its perspective by the legacy of the Church's behavior during the Holocaust. Politically, this constraint is manifested in the Vatican's stated desire to canonize Pope Pius XII. Quite simply, no government in Jerusalem has the moral right to ignore weighty allegations that Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. It is because of this moral imperative to remain vigilant in seeking justice for our murdered brethren that successive governments have strained relations with the Vatican by objecting to Pius XII's canonization. What the government can do is encourage Holocaust historians and Yad Vashem to engage their Catholic counterparts in a joint study — through conferences and research — of the allegations against Pius XII. Such discussions have taken place between Vatican scholars and Yad Vashem over the years, most recently in March. Israel should offer to institutionalize them. Specifically worthy of a joint study are the revelations made in January 2007 by Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian KGB, that the allegations against Pius XII were the brainchild of the KGB. In an article published in National Review, Pacepa, who when he defected to the US in 1978 became the highest ranking Soviet-bloc defector, claimed that in the late 1950s the KGB began perceiving the Catholic Church as the primary threat to its control over Eastern Bloc countries. Consequently, in 1960 the KGB decided to wage a campaign to destroy its moral authority. Since Pius had died two years earlier, the d ecision was made to castigate him as a Nazi collaborator. Already dead, he was in no position to defend himself. Pacepa alleged that the 1964 play The Deputy, which opened the floodgates of criticism against Pius, was written by the KGB and that its presumed author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a communist fellow traveler. He claimed that the basis for the play was documents that Romanian KGB agents disguised as Catholic priests had purloined from the Vatican archives. Those documents, he alleged, were then doctored at KGB headquarters in Moscow. Former CIA director James Woolsey has vouched for Pacepa's personal credibility. Pacepa's memoir Red Horizons formed the basis for the indictment and conviction of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989. At the same time, it is impossible to fully accept Pacepa's assertions in light of the Vatican's refusal to open its wartime archives. If Israeli scholars are willing to engage Catholic counterparts in an open exchange of information on Pius XII's wartime record that allows for new verifiable information to be fairly assessed, whatever the eventual results of the research, Israel would be able to clear some of the acrid air that makes it difficult to gain Vatican cooperation on pressing concerns like strengthening its diplomatic standing on the issue of Jerusalem. And again, this is in the Church's own strategic interest since it wishes to preserve and ensure free access to Christian and Jewish holy sites there.
THEN THERE IS EGYPT. In his videotaped address to the AIPAC conference last week Netanyahu made the case for a strategic alliance with Egypt when he said, "For the first time in my lifetime... Arabs and Jews see a common danger... There is a great challenge afoot. But that challenge also presents great opportunities. The common danger is echoed by Arab leaders throughout the Middle East; it is echoed by Israel repeatedly... And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it is this: Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons." Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2006, Egypt has demonstrated repeatedly that it supports Israel in its fight against Iran and its proxies. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported Israel in the war against Iran's Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon in 2006. They supported it in its war against Iran's Hamas proxy in Gaza in Operation Cast Lead this past December and January. Egypt helped Israel by keeping its border with Gaza closed and by allowing the IAF to overfly Egyptian airspace en route to attacking Iranian weapons convoys in Sudan destined for Gaza. Moreover, with Egypt's rejection last week of the Obama administration's attempt to link action against Iran's nuclear weapons installations to Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, Mubarak and his associates in Cairo have made clear that they will support Israeli military action against Iran's nuclear installations. On the other hand, as the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world, Egypt is a main sponsor of the Palestinian war against Israel and a leader in the campaign to delegitimize Israel internationally. The Mubarak regime may risk its own domestic stability it if is perceived as supporting Israel since the overwhelming majority of Egyptians are hateful toward Israel and Jews. Furthermore, today Egypt has Jordan to consider. The Obama administration has clearly enlisted King Abdullah II to act as its proxy in the Arab world for coercing Egypt and the Gulf states to deny support for Israel on Iran for as long as it maintains its refusal to give more of its land to the Palestinians. Given Jordan's new role, Egypt and the Gulf states have been put in an even more awkward situation vis-୶is Israel and Iran. To contend with this situation, the Netanyahu government would do well to hew very closely to the line that Netanyahu set out in his address to AIPAC. There he made clear that there will be no chance of peace with the Palestinians as long as Iran and its proxies remain ascendant. Netanyahu would also do well to recall that the reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia ended up accepting Hizbullah control over Lebanon and Hamas control over Gaza is because under the Olmert government, Israel failed to defeat them. Had Israel routed Hizbullah in 2006 and Hamas this past December and January, Egypt may have adopted a different position relating to the Palestinians. So too, like Israel, today Egypt views preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and weakening its Hizbullah and Hamas proxies as a paramount national interest. If, with Egyptian assistance Israel is able to successfully prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the regional dynamic relating to the Palestinians — who support Iran — as well as the political standing of the Obama administration — which is enabling Iran to acquire nuclear weapons — may change. So Israel's best practice regarding Egypt is to buy time on the Palestinian issue while successfully preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Building alliances is difficult business. And recognizing their limitations as well as their potential requires courage and patience. But today the opportunity to build new relationships is clear. Israel's great challenge going forward then is to seize the moment. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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OBAMA'S SIGNAL TO ISRAEL: SUBMIT
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 12, 2009. |
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This is by Mona Charen and it appeared today in Jewish World Review. |
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In early April, Vice President Biden was asked if the administration was concerned that Israel might strike at Iran's nuclear facilities. "I don't believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that," Mr. Biden replied. "I think he would be ill advised to do that." A few weeks later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the administration's solution to the threat of an Iranian bomb: "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it's looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can't stay on the sideline with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts ... they go hand in hand." And on May 10, National Security Adviser James Jones spelled it out further: "We understand Israel's preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that. ... By the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution." By what reasoning has the administration decided that pushing Israel to permit a new Palestinian state would — in any way — diminish the threat from Iran? Do they believe that Iran's (or I should say the Iranian leadership's) genocidal hostility toward Israel is the result of lack of progress toward an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza? Will the Iranian leadership, which has characterized Israel as a "cancerous tumor," declared that "Israel must we wiped off the map," and promised that "Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear" is going to change its mind if Israel enters into negotiations with the Palestinians? "Obama will be a great friend to Israel." So said a Jewish Democrat in a pre-election debate with me. I asked her whether she had any hesitations about someone who had been steeped in academic pieties and Hyde Park leftwing intellectual fashions, and who had tamely absorbed the Rev. Wright's sermons for 20 years? Her response was to mouth some of the platitudes about support for Israel that were to be found on the Obama campaign's website. I wonder if she is having doubts now. Does it give her pause that Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state and America's chief nuclear arms negotiator, has called on Israel (along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea) to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? By including Israel on a list of nations known to either have nuclear weapons or be close to acquiring them, the Obama administration is introducing a sinister note of moral equivalence to the problem of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. All previous U.S. governments have implicitly accepted that Israel's nuclear weapons pose a threat to no nation and are maintained only to deter Israel's enemies from genocidal attacks. Like other liberals, my debate opponent probably believes that Obama's apology tour of global capitals was pitch perfect. Of course, it's one thing for the United States, still the world's superpower, to delude itself that winning international popularity contests will make us safer (though it's a dangerous delusion), but Israel, which always sits inches from the precipice of destruction, cannot afford such fantasies at all. We have recent history to guide us. In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security corridor it had established in southern Lebanon. The world had long been clamoring for Israel to do this. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement immediately seized the area — trumpeting its triumph in driving out the enemy. In 2006, southern Lebanon became the launching pad for Hezbollah's missile campaign against northern Israel. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Iranian-backed Hamas movement moved quickly and took control there (not without significant internecine bloodshed with Fatah), and again used the territory not to build a peaceful Palestinian enclave but to launch 10,000 missiles against southern Israel. Fatah (which is called moderate because it wants to destroy Israel on the installment plan rather than all at once) retains tenuous control of the West Bank. But even Mahmoud Abbas admits that if Israel were to withdraw completely from the area, Hamas would gain control in a heartbeat. Next week, Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington. It is hard to see how this relationship can go well. President Obama has sent abundant signals that his foreign policy is 50 percent wishful thinking and 50 percent leftwing mush. There may not be any easy answers to the problem of a nuclear Iran. But pressuring Israel to take suicidal risks is clearly the worst possible approach. Iran will conclude, as its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas at various times concluded, that force and the threat of force work. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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THE MYTH OF A SECULAR PALESTINE
Posted by Michael Devolin, May 12, 2009. |
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The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine — a one-state "solution" — and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, and as a corollary, al-Husseini, the Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and 1940s; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the national movement from the 1960s to Yasser Arafat's death in November, 2004; and Hamas today — all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in another version, to limit it to those 50,000-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear. The Palestinian vision was never — as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to Western journalists — of a "secular, democratic Palestine" (though it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the "destruction of Israel," which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, "a secular democratic Palestine" had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power. Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi has written that "in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, replacing Israel." And Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: "The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance." This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council (PNC) never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was "a secular democratic state in Palestine." The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian main-stream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a "secular, democratic Palestine." The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to "Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion" — that is, 1917. True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, "freedom of worship and of visit" to holy sites to all, "without discrimination of race, colour, language or religion." And, no doubt, this was music to liberal West-ern ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently? Western liberals like, or pretend, to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances. So where did the slogan of "a secular, democratic Palestine" originate? That goal was first explicitly proposed in 1969 by the small Marxist splinter group the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). According to Khalidi, "It was [then] discreetly but effectively backed by the leaders of the mainstream, dominant Fatah movement ... The democratic secular state model eventually became the official position of the PLO." As I have said, this is pure invention. The PNC, PLO and Fatah turned down the DFLP proposal, and it was never adopted or enunciated by any important Palestinian leader or body — though the Western media during the 1970s were forever attributing it to the Palestinians. As a result, however, the myth has taken hold that this was the PLO's official goal through the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. And today, again, and for the same reasons — the phrase retains its good, multicultural, liberal ring — "a secular, democratic Palestine" is bandied about by Palestinian one-state supporters. And a few one-statists, indeed, may sincerely believe in and desire such a denouement. But given the realities of Palestinian politics and behaviour, the phrase objectively serves merely as camouflage for the goal of a Muslim Arab-dominated polity to replace Israel. And, as in the past, the goal of "a secular democratic Palestine" is not the platform or policy of any major Palestinian political institution or party. Indeed, the idea of a "secular democratic Palestine" is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world's other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance. And matters have only gotten worse since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. For anyone who has missed the significance of Hamas's electoral victory in 2006 and the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, a mere glance at the West Bank and Gaza today (and, indeed, at Israel's Arab minority villages and towns) reveals a landscape dominated by rapidly multiplying mosque minarets, the air filled with the calls to prayer of the muezzins and alleyways filled with hijab-ed women. Only fools and children were persuaded in 2006-07 that Hamas beat Fatah merely because they had an uncorrupt image or dispensed aid to the poor. The main reasons for the Hamas victory were religious and political: the growing religiosity of the Palestinian mass-es and their "recognition" that Hamas embodies the "truth" and, with Allah's help, will lead them to final victory over the infidels, much as Hamas achieved, through armed struggle, the withdrawal of the infidels from the Gaza Strip in 2005. -Excerpted from One State, Two States by Benny Morris. Published by Yale University Press. © 2009 by Benny Morris. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. Michael Devolin is a Noachide and lives in Canada. Contact him at devolin@reach.net |
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GIANT LAG BAOMER BONFIRE IN HOMESH; LAG BOMER IN MERON
Posted by Hillel Fendel, May 12, 2009. |
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The efforts to re-settle Homesh, one of the four Shomron (Samaria) towns destroyed in Ariel Sharon's Disengagement in the summer of 2005, receive a large boost with celebrations on site. Israel National News will feature a Live Broadcast of the events during the afternoon on Tuesday. Some 10,000 people are expected to arrive at the Homesh hilltop, where once stood a flowering town of dozens of families, for Lag BaOmer festivities. The high point of the event will be the lighting of a huge Lag BaOmer bonfire that will be able to be seen from Tel Aviv and the Coastal Plain. Bonfires, in addition to singing and dancing, play a prominent part in the commemorations of Kabbalah-author Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's life and death on this day some 1,900 years ago. Homesh has been the site of a constant Jewish presence for nearly two years, and the pioneers state unabashedly their goal of resettling the site. They note that unlike Gaza, Israel has not given control of the area to a foreign entity, and there is no reason why Jews should not live there — especially in light of the failure of the 2005 Disengagement to bring security and advance peace. The events will begin with a march from Shavei Shomron, several kilometers south of Homesh, to the old Sebastia train station, the birthplace of modern Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. Modern Shomron's first pioneers will be on hand to meet with the hikers. Other activities include the screening of film clips of Homesh at Medreshet HaShomron in Shavei Shomron, buses to Homesh, picnics, activities, guided tours and more. At 4:30 PM, musicians Chaim David (Sarachik) and Ariel Zilber will perform, and Knesset Members and public figures will be on hand. The literature states, "The small flames lit in Homesh on Chanukah 5767 (2007), some two years after the expulsion, started dispersing the clouds of the expulsion... The small light became stronger and stronger, with large group ascents on the one hand, and the sound of Torah in small groups of students on the other hand; the latter, with untold dedication and self-sacrifice, wage Jewish life there, day in and day out. The nation is deciding: Enough darkness! No more expulsion! On Lag BaOmer, we will empower those ministers and MKs who wish to repair this great injustice, and who wish to restore the glory of Jewish life to Homesh and the northern Shomron. The relay torch race of the Nation of Israel will banish the darkness!" LAG BAOMER IN MERON by Hana Levi Julian
Hundreds of thousands of Jews packed into the Mt. Meron gravesite of the Mishnaic Sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Tuesday, where Lag B'Omer festivities were in full swing with music, dancing and feasting. Nearly half a million worshippers (450,000) had arrived at the site by 6:00 a.m. Tuesday, according to Northern District police, including 200,000 who reached the gravesite Monday night. Overnight bonfires, 24-hour barbeques and hundreds of little boys preparing to receive their first haircut were the focus of some of the holiday's events. The bonfires are lit in commemoration of the passing of Rabbi Shimon, who was said to have set a field afire when he gazed upon it after emerging from a cave after hiding from the Roman occupiers some 2,000 years ago. Firefighters throughout Israel were kept busy putting out 51 blazes around the country overnight. Haircut Heaven The tradition of trimming the locks of a boy at the age of three on Lag B'Omer is a centuries-old ritual carried out by Chassidim every year at the Galilee gravesite. Leaders of numerous Chassidic sects make their annual appearance in Meron at various specific times of the day. They come to pray, to bless those who ask, to celebrate with fellow Jews and to make the first honorary snip of a young boy's hair. 
Teaching a boy about the slings and arrows of life... playing with bows and arrows is another Lag BaOmer tradition, symbolizing the Torah learning by the students of Rabbi Akiva in the forests of Israel. A lookout would watch for Roman soldiers who were searching for the renegade scholars; when any would approach, the students would pretend to be hunting with bows and arrows among the trees for food.
Hillel Fendel is Senior News Editor for Arutz-Sheva (www.Israel National News.com). Hana Levi Julian writes for Arutz-Sheva. |
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ISLAMIC CLERIC TO POPE: LET'S UNITE AND KILL THE JEWS TOGETHER!
Posted by Barry Rubin, May 12, 2009. |
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It's a pity that the Palestinian Authority's (PA) chief Islamic judge Tayseer Rajab Tamimi will be criticized for rudeness rather than incitement to genocide. And the whole political context of Tamimi's statements shouldn't be missed either: he is an appointee of the PA. When he demands that Israel be wiped out either he's speaking for his bosses or if not they should fire him. Of course, they won't because in large part he is. The Syrian regime was even more open with its antisemitism during the Pope's Middle East trip, trying to foment Christian hatred of the Jews quite openly. Even Syria's president, during a previous papal visit back in 2001, told the pontiff: The Jews "tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and...tried to betray and kill the prophet Muhammad." In Jerusalem during the current visit, Tamimi stepped to the podium uninvited after Pope Benedict XVI spoke at an interfaith "dialogue" in Jerusalem. He urged Muslims and Christians to unite against Israelis who were allegedly committing mass murder and making Palestinians refugees. Of course, his goal is to commit mass murder and make all Israeli Jews refugees. Tamimi stepped to the podium uninvited after Pope Benedict XVI spoke at an interfaith "dialogue" in Jerusalem. He urged Muslims and Christians to unite against Israelis who were allegedly committing mass murder and making Palestinians refugees. Of course, his goal is to commit mass murder and make all Israeli Jews refugees. To his credit, the Pope walked out and his office said the speech by Tamimi was not approved as part of the meeting and was the opposite of what interfaith dialogue should be. Good for the Pope and his staff. But maybe it was a good thing that Tamimi seized the stage to pontificate. After all, he gave Benedict a real taste of the kind of dialogue that could be expected from radical Islamists and the true positions taken by much of the Palestinian leadership, including the PA itself. What we do know is that a few days before his diatribe to the Pope, Tamimi confirmed his decision that anyone selling land to Jews or acting as an agent or middle man has committed high treason and the punishment is death. Before today, Tamimi's most notable appearance in history was when, as chief Islamic judge in Hebron, he was deported by Israel temporarily in 1980, the day after terrorists killed six Jewish theological students in that city. His wife and those of the two others deported appealed the action to an Israeli court. The ruling came down in favor of the other two but not for Tamimi because such a strong case had been made about his incitement to violence. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, at the time a military official governing the West Bank, said this about Tamimi: "If we had not deported them, the whole area would have slid into chaos. The settlers would have reacted to the murder and the Arab population would have reacted in return. Simply absolute anarchy. Sheikh Tamimi was an agitator of the worst kind....." In May 2008, long after returning to the West Bank, Tamimi was an honored guest at a Palestinian meeting in Los Angeles. While in California he issued a religious decree saying that the Palestinian "Right of Return" was the fundamental right of all Palestinians and should be implemented. There could be no peace agreement without it. But of course this demand is for Israel to agree to take two million or more Palestinians onto its territory, an act that would lead to massive bloodshed and the dissolution of Israel amidst fire and terror. And that's what Tamimi wants. But if there is no "Right of Return," Tamimi and the rest of the PA reject peace and if there is then Israel will cease to exist. Some two-state solution. Tamimi, of course, has the perfect right to protest Israeli actions and to support the creation of a national homeland for his people. But that's not his stance at all. For if people like Tamimi and other PA leaders really wanted a Palestinian state alongside Israel they could have it, and have it remarkably quickly. But since they don't, any solution is decades off. Finally, Tamimi's social views are in line with Islamic mainstream thinking but Westerners should be aware of them. He states, in the MEMRI translation: "I say to those who demand equality and whine about women's rights that by permitting polygamy, Islam protects the woman's humanity and emotions, and secures her right to marry and gain honor and esteem, instead of becoming a professional paramour lacking in rights whose children are thrown onto the garbage heap." At any rate, Tamimi does faithfully reflect the views of the PA leadership on political matters, albeit less so in his more purely religious pronouncements. But they picked him and they promoted him and they kept him. So let's all listen to Tamimi's words. The problem isn't rudeness, it's insatiable extremism; and it's not marginal, it's mainstream. Also greeting the Pope to the Middle East was a wave of antisemitic materials in Syrian government media. The Syrians and Iranians have produced a steady stream of such programming which is little noted in the West. This week's versions, however, were written to appeal especially to Christian antisemitism. One article explained: "The sound of the church [bells] in our Arab homeland announces that Jesus — whom they wounded and whose noble, bleeding wounds they sucked — found in them yet more yearning for blood... and for the death and destruction that they sow throughout the Muslim and the Christian world, because a state of blood vengeance prevails between them and all humanity." And it continues: "Perhaps one day the world will awake and realize that these Zionist elements are the bloodletters who hang on the peoples, sucking their blood and consuming their resources." [MEMRI translations.] Yes, I believe we've seen this before, most notably in living memory promoted by a certain regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945. But there should be no doubt: for many powerful Islamic forces, the basis for Muslim-Christian dialogue is genocide against the Jews. Perhaps one day the world will awake and realize that these radical Islamist and extremist Arab nationalist regimes and movements are aggressive seekers of conquest whose defeat is the most important aspect of the present era. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go tohttp://www.gloria-center.org This article is archived at
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SAY "NO" TO AN ARAB STATE IN THE HEARTLAND OF ISRAEL
Posted by Ted Belman, May 12, 2009. |
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Everyone on this list knows the dangers of a "Palestinian" Arab state to the Jewish Nation. Every person on this list understands that we must act and we must act now to oppose an Arab state in the heartland of Israel. Please read, sign and send out this petition without delay! Susie Dym of Matot Arim and Robin Ticker, an activist in New York, have written the following petition to the major Orthodox Jewish Organizations and media outlets in the US. We might be able to appeal to their religious conscience to help build a campaign against a "Palestinian" Arab State. The major point of the petition is to build a database of people and synagogues; this is crucial. Click here to sign the petition. After signing it, please forward this email to everyone on your list, and ask them to do the same! Let's reach 10,000 names by Yom Yerushalayim. To sign, please go here. Ted Belman is a Canadian lawyer and editor of the IsraPundit.com website, an activist pro-Israel website. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com |
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ISRAEL THE BEAUTIFUL: SPRING WILDFLOWERS
Posted by Yehoshua Halevi, May 12, 2009. |
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This is one of Yehoshua Halevi's Golden Light Images. Yehoshua Halevi writes: "HOW I GOT THE SHOT: This week's dispatch features a slight departure from tradition as I'm sending two photographs. There is so much more to photography than simply learning how to use a camera and pointing it at something pretty. When asked what camera I recommend buying, I invariably answer that for most people, it makes no difference. My most important tools are my boots (when attached to my feet!), my eyes, patience and motivation. This pair of spring field portraits will help explain why. I shot these two photographs within 20 hours and within 20 feet of each other. Standing in an almost identical location, I was able to capture two vastly different interpretations of this floral field of dreams near the Sha'ar Hagay intersection of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway. I stumbled upon this site by accident after making a wrong turn en route to an assignment. After finishing with my client, I returned and spent an hour wandering and inhaling the heavenly sights and smells. My boots: From my parking spot, I had to walk about 100 meters to the edge of the field, an easy trek but for having to ford a section of mud that eventually soaked my boots through to my socks. It was midmorning, and I fought with the bright, contrasty light, trying to get a shot of the entire expanse of purple and red. My eyes: Failing, I trod into the thick of the growth, poking around in hip-high flowers and grass, trying my hardest not to trample even a single flower. Although I didn't get any winning shots at first, my initial observations led me to narrow my focus, which enabled me to spot a patch of wheat growing amid the flowers. Patience: Inspired by occasional gusts of wind, I got a bit whimsical with this shot. I lowered the shutter speed as much as I could to 1/25 of a second so as to allow the flowers to blur as they danced in the breeze. I waited until the wind kicked up again and took the shot. The fluttering grass creates a strong focal point to what would otherwise be a beautiful, albeit monotonous, display of wildflowers. Motivation: Unhappy with the lighting conditions on my first visit, I returned the following morning at sunrise, with a head full of ideas for exploiting this location. It's never easy to get out of bed in the dark, but this second photo is a reward for shooting while the rising sun is at a very low angle, casting a golden glow on the delicate red petals. I also chose to position the camera, which was mounted on a tripod, at a height just above the tallest flowers so as to maintain a view of the flowers in the distance. I pushed my wide angle lens up to the nearest flowers and pointed the camera down ever so slightly, which had the effect of adding emphasis to the immediate foreground. Exposing in these situations is critical, so I always bracket a few shots to make sure the brightest areas are not over exposed. Many great photographs lie in wait. To find them, you have to move in, look around, and stand by until the right moment to shoot arrives. If that doesn't work, hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.
Contact Yehoshua Halevi by email at smile@goldenlightimages.com
and visit his website:
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PALESTINIAN ARABS READINESS FOR STATEHOOD: FOLLOW THE EU BENCHMARK
Posted by Eli E. Hertz, May 11, 2009. |
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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his upcoming meeting with President Obama, is likely to assure Obama that he is committed to achieving peace with the Palestinian Arabs of Judea and Samaria (The West Bank). But to ensure a successful implementation of any commitment, it is Netanyahu's duty to ensure, at the end of the road, the well being and safety of the people of Israel. A good first step would be to invite all enlightened nations, Quartet and the UN included, to join in preparing the Palestinian Arab people to turn a dream into reality by adopting the European Union benchmarks set for Turkey's request to become a member of the EU — a model that will need to be implemented by the Palestinian Arabs who demand statehood. Keep in mind the goals and the ramifications of each: The Turks' goal is membership in the European Union — a political union that the Europeans already say will have an iron-clad reversibility clause for Turkey if it fails to live up to its promises. The Palestinians' goal is sovereignty as a state — status for which there is no reversible mechanism if 'Palestine' turns into a rogue state. For 46 years — since 1963, Turkey has knocked at Europe's door requesting membership in the EU. The Europeans, however, have been in no rush to invite a Muslim country into their midst, even if it is the most westernized and most democratic Muslim country in the Middle East. Although Turkey is already a strategic partner in NATO and some 2.5 million of its citizens are peaceful and productive immigrants/guest workers in Europe, these facts seem not to persuade the Europeans. Only in 1999, 36 years later, was Turkey accepted as a candidate, with no timeframe for actual negotiations. At the close of 2004, after five years of far-reaching Turkish constitutional and legal reform, the EU concluded that Turkey had reached a point where negotiations could even commence "under certain conditions." Negotiations with Turkey are expected to take ten to fifteen years, and even then "the outcome is not a foregone conclusion," declared Romano Prodi, past president of the European Commission. Turkey must 'walk the walk.' To be more precise, it must meet the EU challenge over which there is no negotiation: 'Become European' in thought and deed. The recommendation states that membership negotiations are conditional to fundamental reform not only on the declarative structural level, but also regarding realities "on the ground." Implementation must be "sustainable" and "irreversible" and reforms must be "confirmed over a longer period of time." Europeans intend to "continue to monitor" the process and examine it under a microscope every inch of the way. The first yardstick for progress is to meet the Copenhagen Political Criteria adopted in June 1993 by the EU, which states: "Membership criteria require that the candidate country must have achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities." Olli Rehn, the member of the European Commission responsible for 'EU Enlargement', made it clear in an address to the European Parliament that there are no 'discounts' for Turkey. "... These criteria, the fundamental values on which the European Union is based, are not subject to negotiation" and [there will be] "a suspension mechanism in case of serious and persistent breach of democratic principles." The fundamental freedoms Rehn cites include "women's rights, trade union rights, minority rights, and problems faced by non-Muslim religious communities" and "consolidation and broadening" of legal reforms including "alignment of law enforcement and judicial practice with the spirit of the reforms" and a host of other demands. In fact, Europe demands a complete 'makeover,' from women's rights to recycling of trash. If this was not clear enough, Prodi told the European Parliament the breadth and tempo negotiations should take: "We must take the time needed to make sure that all the important reforms adopted become day-to-day reality for Turkish citizens, both men and women. And we must also tell our Turkish partners clearly and calming that any breakdown in this program towards democracy, human rights, fundamental rights and the rule of law as practiced in the European Union will automatically bring negotiations to a halt." Prodi concludes that it is imperative for Europeans to prevent Turks from "weakening the structure we have been building for over 50 years." The same sensitivity and prudence is hardly evidenced when it comes to dangers that Palestinians will weaken the structures Israel has built in the past 61 years. Logically, the yardsticks of judging readiness should be at least equal, if not more stringent for Palestinians, a society that consciously and purposely sacrifices its own youth for political gain and tactical advantage, with a leadership that champions suicide bombers and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. *** To review the entire study "Do Palestinians Deserve Statehood?" see: www.mythsandfacts.org/article_view.asp?articleID=74&order_id=2 Eli E. Hertz is president of Myths and Facts, Inc. The organization's objective is to provide policymakers, national leadership, the media and the public-at-large with information and viewpoints that are founded on factual and reliable content. Contact him at today@mythsandfacts.org |
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EGYPT-ISRAEL PEACE; ARABS VS. IRAN; ARABS TALK PEACE BUT MAKE WAR; IRAN: FORCE, SANCTIONS OR DIPLOMACY?
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 11, 2009. |
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ISRAEL HAS NEW FOREIGN POLICY? Israel's new regime has indicated a new direction in dealing with the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). It will offer fewer concessions and demand more proof that the P.A. wants peace. Prime Minister Netanyahu's aide cited the "strong language" by which P.A. head Abbas criticized Netanyahu as not believing in peace. The aide suggested that Abbas fight terrorism instead of propa gandizing against Israel (Isabel Kershner, NY Times, 4/3). Talking about a new direction doesn't guarantee walking in a new direction. Wait and see. It never has been explained logically why Israel, the victim of Arab aggression, should make concessions to the aggressors. Past concessions have failed to bring genuine peace. Instead, they have strengthened the enemy and weakened Israel. Result: terrorist proxies, alone, have 50,000 missiles pointed at it, and Israel has less strategic depth to fall back on. Those who propose new concessions rarely examine the old ones' failure. The Israeli aide's remark, that the P.A. needs to fight terrorism, not inflame people against the Israeli government by accusing it of not wanting peace, is sensible but an under-statement. The P.A. praises, coddles, and commits terrorism. Abbas is in no position to complain that Israel doesn't want peace, when it is he and his colleagues who keep making war and a war society. What then is he really complaining about? For one thing, his constituency wants to conquer Israel, a desire that his government propaganda promotes. To keep their favor, he talks belligerently, instead of working towards peace. For another, he wants Israel to give him concessions so that he can attain imperialist goals without having to fight for them. That's what the so-called "peace process" really is. QUESTION OF THE DAY ABOUT EGYPT-ISRAEL PEACE Will the Egypt-Israel non-aggression pact survive the passing of Egyptian President Mubarak, given his people's dislike of it? Dr. Aaron Lerner of Independent Media Review & Analysis points out that the pact led to America arming Egypt heavily (www.imra.org.il — 3/27). If the pact does not survive, will Israel? ACADEMIC INDOCTRINATION IN ISRAEL Tel Aviv U. invited economics professor Steven Plaut was invited to a panel discussion on "affirmative action." He anticipated high-level discourse, to which he would contribute the economic profession's general opposition to quotas. The panel had eight other academics. All strongly favored quotas. They ignored quotas' disadvantages, such as lower standards, stigmatizing "beneficiaries" of quotas as not competent, discrimination by quotas, the arbitrariness in picking whom to favor, and the backlash and bigotry being fanned. Some points were illogical or absurd. "One speaker quoted at length from US surveys showing that whites are strongly opposed to affirmative action, apparently trying to prove that racism was behind any criticism thereof. No mention was made of the fact that the same polls often show the majority of blacks and Hispanics also strongly opposed to affirmative action." After a two-hour harangue, Plaut was he'd "...have up to three minutes to present the other side.... There were shouts from the audience that the level of the discussion would be lowered by allowing me to speak. I politely told the audience that the ground rules of the debate did not appeal to me and so I was relinquishing my three minutes, and then walked out, followed by a dozen students who demanded to shake my hand. The main victims of PC intolerance and censorship have always been college students who are denied the right to hear both sides of political issues. That PC suppression of dissent and debate should occur at Tel Aviv University was unbelievable (Prof. Steven Plaut, 3/23). Not unbelievable so much as perverse. An Israeli told me that women's pensions are higher than men's. Most of the discussion was about radical feminist demands, but Israel has instituted quotas in behalf of Arabs, too. ARABS VS. IRAN Morocco has broken diplomatic relations with Iran, for spreading Shiism in Morocco. Finding that Iran seeks hegemony over neighboring Arab states, Egypt considers it improper even to conduct dialogue with Iran (IMRA, 3/24). Iran also is spreading Shiism in Syria, whose ruling minority Alawite doctrine is closer to Shia than to Sunni doctrine. Missionary work is controversial in many countries. Is it an affront or a right? If a right by a native, may foreigners enter for the purpose of missionary work? What privacy may natives expect, similar to Americans' right not to be telephoned or mailed for commercial purposes? What recourse against missionaries who practice deception? Most of the major internet news networks didn't mention that Bibi Netanyahu was sworn in as Israel's new Prime Minister. New Foreign Minister Lieberman said "That Israel is not obligated by any agreements enumerated in the Annapolis Accords, because they had never been voted on in the Israeli cabinet." "He did say that Israel was obligated by Bush's 'roadmap,' but..." that would require the Arabs starting to fulfill their obligations before Israel keeps at it. The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) chief Islamic Judge Tamimi,
reiterated the fatwa against selling real estate to Jews.
The international human rights groups ignored that apartheid P.A. law. Imagine the outcry if the Israeli chief justice or Chief Rabbi said, not that there is such a law in Israel, that any Jew selling real estate to an Arab would be executed? The Hebron Jewish community leader, David Wilder, has been telling journalists about that apartheid fatwa for years, but they usually doubt it. It came up again, when Jews bought a house, Beit HaShalom, in Hebron. Discovered to have sold it, captured, and sitting in a Jericho, P.A. jail, the former Arab owner denied it. What could he do? Admit it and be tortured and slain? [The Jewish purchasers presented taped records of the sale being consummated, but Israeli courts favor the Arabs taking over there, and are not recognizing Jewish ownership.] PM Netanyahu's predecessor, Olmert, claimed that P.A. head Abbas was at peace with Israel, and that Israel needed to strengthen his rule against a Hamas take-over, by loosening its security measures against the P.A.. The claim was contradicted by the murder of two police in the Jordan Valley, a tractor driver's attempted murder of police in Jerusalem, and car-bomber's attempt to blow up a mall in Haifa "Here in Hebron we are told that everything is wonderful. Life with the Arabs has become tranquil...So the IDF has notified us that soon the only road leading to Hebron, passing by the western entrance to [the Jewish town of] Kiryat Arba will soon be open to Arab traffic. The last time this happened, two Jews were killed on the same day..." "Other roadblocks are being opened, [as]'gestures' to the 'moderate' PA leadership. Gestures that inevitably lead to bloodshed and loss of Jewish life.'" An Arab with an axe murdered a teenager and wounded a seven-year-old. Hamas said the attack was a natural means of defense against "occupation." Mr. Wilder asks, "So let's go out and kill some kids?" Mr. Wilder prescribes: "Bibi has always said the 'right' thing, but
done the wrong thing. Will he change his ways and start acting as a
proud Jewish leader should? Prior to the elections he espoused the
'right' thing — opposition to a 'two-state solution.' Any normal
human being with eyes in his head and a semi-working brain understands
that a 'Palestinian state' can only be catastrophic. Lieberman's
comments yesterday were greeted with consternation by staff of the
Israeli foreign ministry. Lieberman's first job should be to find
those who expressed dismay at his statements and fire them. It's time
that Israeli policy changed...The Israeli government must encourage land
purchases such as Beit HaShalom in Hebron, working to further such
deals rather than trying to squelch them
ARABS TALK PEACE BUT MAKE WAR Most of the major internet news networks didn't mention that Bibi Netanyahu was sworn in as Israel's new Prime Minister. New Foreign Minister Lieberman said "That Israel is not obligated by any agreements enumerated in the Annapolis Accords, because they had never been voted on in the Israeli cabinet." "He did say that Israel was obligated by Bush's 'roadmap,' but..." that would require the Arabs starting to fulfill their obligations before Israel keeps at it. The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) chief Islamic Judge Tamimi,
reiterated the fatwa against selling real estate to Jews.
The international human rkghts groups ignored that apartheid P.A. law. Imagine the outcry if the Israeli chief justice or Chief Rabbi said, not that there is such a law in Israel, that any Jew selling real estate to an Arab would be executed? The Hebron Jewish community leader, David Wilder, has been telling journalists about that apartheid fatwa for years, but they usually doubt it. It came up again, when Jews bought a house, Beit HaShalom, in Hebron. Discovered to have sold it, captured, and sitting in a Jericho, P.A. jail, the former Arab owner denied it. What could he do? Admit it and be tortured and slain? [The Jewish purchasers presented taped records of the sale being consummated, but Israeli courts favor the Arabs taking over there, and are not recognizing Jewish ownership.] PM Netanyahu's predecessor, Olmert, claimed that P.A. head Abbas was at peace with Israel, and that Israel needed to strengthen his rule against a Hamas take-over, by loosening its security measures against the P.A.. The claim was contradicted by the murder of two police in the Jordan Valley, a tractor driver's attempted murder of police in Jerusalem, and car-bomber's attempt to blow up a mall in Haifa "Here in Hebron we are told that everything is wonderful. Life with the Arabs has become tranquil...So the IDF has notified us that soon the only road leading to Hebron, passing by the western entrance to [the Jewish town of] Kiryat Arba will soon be open to Arab traffic. The last time this happened, two Jews were killed on the same day..." "Other roadblocks are being opened, [as]'gestures' to the 'moderate' PA leadership. Gestures that inevitably lead to bloodshed and loss of Jewish life.'" An Arab with an axe murdered a teenager and wounded a seven-year-old. Hamas said the attack was a natural means of defense against "occupation." Mr. Wilder asks, "So let's go out and kill some kids?" Mr. Wilder prescribes: "Bibi has always said the 'right' thing, but done the wrong thing. Will he change his ways and start acting as a proud Jewish leader should? Prior to the elections he espoused the 'right' thing — opposition to a 'two-state solution.' Any normal human being with eyes in his head and a semi-working brain understands that a 'Palestinian state' can only be catastrophic. Lieberman's comments yesterday were greeted with consternation by staff of the Israeli foreign ministry. Lieberman's first job should be to find those who expressed dismay at his statements and fire them. It's time that Israeli policy changed...The Israeli government must encourage land purchases such as Beit HaShalom in Hebron, working to further such deals rather than trying to squelch them (http://www.imra.org.il/, from Hebron@Hebron.com). RUSSIA TO SELL 31 ADVANCED MIGS TO SYRIA Israel believes that the 31 fighter planes could pose a threat to Israel, coming as it does in addition to upgrading other branches of the Syrian Army (IMRA, 3/29). These military buildups make it ever more difficult for Israel to attack a proxy militia without risking a wider war or to raid Iran's nuclear facilities. RADICAL ISLAMISTS UNDAUNTED BY THE GAZA WAR Israel's secret service reports that Hamas has brought in many more tons of war material from Sinai. He credits Egypt with attempts to block the shipments. Dr. Aaron Lerner, head of Independent Media Review and Analysis, scoffs at the notion that Egypt is trying hard, when its area to monitor is small and open. Various radical Islamist groups in Gaza are planning to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The recent war has not dampened their ardor. Hamas, however, is keeping them relatively still, so as not to provoke another Israeli incursion and interference with Hamas' military buildup (www.imra.org.il, 3/29). Israel's incursion missed its objectives. This failure hardly was reported. Perhaps that explains the plurality for the Kadima Party, whose Prime Minister and Foreign Minister made major decisions that made the war inadequate. DEFENSE SEC. GATES PREFERS SANCTIONS ON IRAN Sec. Gates said he thinks that sanctions would work better against Iran than would diplomacy ((www.imra.org.il, 3/30). There is a general lack of understanding of international relations. Here is my understanding: Military might can work, under favorable circumstances. It did for WWII. Diplomacy can work, when the parties involved have a common interest in resolving a problem. That is not the case with Iran. Iran seeks not resolution, but Islamist domination. Sanctions can work, when universally and firmly applied, as against the Union of S. Africa. Sanctions against other countries can work if backed by a credible threat of military might. Those conditions don't apply to Iran, supported as it is by other great powers — Russia and China — and when the US does not make a credible threat of force but keeps temporizing. Iran exploits the diplomacy and weak sanctions to keep developing nuclear weapons. WHO'S CRAZY, THE ISRAELIS OR PRES. OBAMA? Upon greeting the Saudi king at the G20 meeting, Pres. Obama was videotaped bowing before the foreign monarch.. Shortly after winning the presidential election, and in his first meeting with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Obama was quoted as saying of S. Arabia's 2002 plan, "The Israelis would be crazy not to support this initiative." What does the Saudi plan consist of? "The Saudi Plan calls on Israel to cede Gaza and all land east of the 1949 armistice line, including much of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, to the Palestinian Authority P.A.). Israel would also be required to cede the strategic Golan Heights region to Syria." "In addition, the plan requires Israel to release all terrorists currently in its prisons, and to offer citizenship to millions of foreign Arabs who say they are descended from Arabs who fled pre-state Israel during the War of Independence." "In exchange, Arab states would normalize their ties with the
Jewish State."
What do those terms mean? Are they reasonable? REFUGEE DESCENDANTS Under the plan, millions of Arabs could enter Israel. Not that there is room and resources for them. That's not the point. Those Arabs have been raised on hatred of Israel and of Jews. They tend to wreak vengeance. Their entry would take over Israel, dispossess the Jews, and probably exterminate them. Do you suppose that S. Arabia does not envision that? Does Obama? Why should Israel have to take in the descendants of Arabs who proved their disloyalty to Israel by attempting genocide. Israel took in a greater number of Jews whom the Arabs had expelled from their states simply out of prejudice. Israel absorbed its own people; let the Arabs absorb theirs! ARMISTICE LINE The Saudi plan refers to the 1949 armistice line. An armistice line has no legal significance for determining boundaries. It's where troops were left at the end of the war. The Arabs never had a state there. They had rejected the UN suggestion to partition between Jews and Arabs that part of Palestine that is west of the Jordan River. (Jordan originally was in that Mandate, because it is part of the historical Land of Israel, that the British called "Palestine." The Arabs have 99% of the rest of the Mideast outside of Iran.) Instead, they made war on Israel, so as to prevent formation of a Jewish state, to seize its area for themselves, and with declared intent to annihilate the Jews. They have forfeited any right to make territorial demands now. The legal status of the P.A. is of unallocated portions of the Palestine Mandate. That Mandate was set up to incubate a Jewish state, not an Arab one. Isn't 99% of the rest of the Mideast outside of Iran enough for the Arabs? The Arabs invading the Jewish homeland about 1400 years ago were instrumental in driving most of the Jews out. The re-establishment of the Jewish state rectifies that historic injustice. Forcing hundreds of thousands of Jews off the land they settled in, in Judea and Samaria would commit a new injustice. TERRORIST BASES Gaza has become a terrorist base armed and directed by Iran against Israel. The portion of Judea-Samaria (W. Bank) run by the P.A. attempts terrorism, too, but Israeli forces operate in it and tamp down terrorism. This means that the Arabs are not entitled to a state there, are not deserving of any concessions, and pose a threat to Israel and, in concert with other Radical Muslims, to world peace. HOLY CITIES Jerusalem is a holy city of paramount importance to Judaism and historically of slight importance to Islam. Muslim rulers gave away Jerusalem a couple of times or used the area around the holy site as a dump. When they controlled the Old City, they kept Jews from access to their holy site. By threatening riots, they still do. They illegally demolish Jewish religious artifacts there. They threaten to bar Jewish access if they get control there and in Hebron, Judaism's second-holiest city. P.A. Arabs destroyed Jacob's Tomb and attack Rachel's Tomb. By contrast, Israel allows Muslim access to their holy sites, subject only to reasonable sharing and security measures necessitated by the Muslim Arabs' failure to respect the sanctity of holy places and of their truce agreements.. GOLAN HEIGHTS The Golan Heights was part of ancient Israel. Originally it was in the Palestine Mandate intended for a new Jewish state. Britain removed it from the Mandate for political reasons, and put it into the Syrian Mandate. Using the Heights repeatedly for committing aggression against Israel, finally Syria lost it to Israel. Israel has incorporated it into Israel, in accordance with international law that protects victims of aggression. Syria has no valid claim to it, now. The Golan and the mountains of Judea and Samaria contain about half of Israel's water sources. Without them, the country could not sustain itself. Those same areas also have mountains that block tank assault and offer observation posts for spotting movement of invaders. They afford Israel fairly secure borders. Without them, Israel could not withstand invasion. That is why Arafat devised his "Phased Plan for the Conquest of Israel." His plan is, by terrorism and diplomacy, to wrest territory from Israel in phases, until Israel becomes unaqble to defend itself. The Saudi initiative includes some of those phases. RELEASING TERRORIST PRISONERS Israel holds a varying number of terrorists in prison, about 6,000 now. They were convicted of war crimes. They are not POWs. Most are dedicated to destroying Israel. Israel released others, but about half resumed terrorism. Why should the 6,000 be released before their term is up? Why should they, who specialize in attacking civilians, be treated as honorable prisoners of war? Who would admit the folly of having released them, when they resume their murderous rampages? The King of S. Arabia? Pres. Obama? The Israeli Prime Minister? NORMALIZING RELATIONS After Israel were to make all those concessions, would the Arabs keep their agreement? They haven't before, so why expect them to, this time? However, I think this aspect of the plan is moot. Having ceded defensive borders and admitting enough Arabs to swamp the Jewish residents, the Arabs from within and from without would destroy Israel. That is because the conflict is not territorial or nationalist but religious. Ceding territory does not end the religious conflict by Islam. CONCLUSION Israel would be crazy to accept the Saudi scheme. The Saudis propose it out of cynicism. Why does Obama? Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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BRANDING
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 11, 2009. |
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This was written by Marilyn Penn. She is a freelance writer living in New York whose personal essays and social commentary have appeared in national magazines such as Newsweek and The American Enterprise. |
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By the end of World War 11, at least twelve million Germans had either fled or been expelled from various parts of Eastern Europe in retaliation for the war they started yet one never hears or reads a plaintive sigh of regret for a German's "exile" from Danzig. In the same time span, there were almost thirty million refugees world-wide who considered themselves lucky survivors of the war who somehow all disappeared into new cities or countries without clinging to the status of permanently displaced persons. There were undoubtedly many tragedies among this group yet they ceased to be the cynosure of the world press as people got on with their lives and accommodated to their respective fates. By contrast, the half million Palestinians who fled and/or were forced out of their villages after Arabs started a war to protest the UN mandated birth of Israel, have been kept in a state of permanent refugee status. That they have been denied citizenship anywhere in the Arab world, that they have been rejected, expelled, mistreated and killed by their own brethren, that they have been maintained in squalor as political pawns — all these facts are brutally shocking. Instead of focusing on these inhumanities, the press insists on a knee jerk reaction to the smallest details of the Palestinian plight. In a NYTimes review of a new biography of a Palestinian poet (My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness), Dwight Garner introduces the subject, Taha Muhammad Ali, as "a gruff, working-class Palestinian poet who, exiled from his hometown during the creation of Israel in 1948, has owned and operated a souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth for more than fifty years, playfully calling himself a "Muslim who sells Christian trinkets to Jews." The word "exiled" leaps out of that sentence as it would if we described the residents of New Orleans as exiled to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. The word of choice is relocated as Mr. Ali, at the age of seventeen, could no longer return to the Galilee village previously governed by the British Mandate, to that very village now governed by the state of Israel. Like many other casualties of war, the village was razed and the family had to move to another one in the same vicinity — not a long physical trek compared to the dispossession and eviction of Jews from all Arab lands to many other countries in the world. There are thousands of New Yorkers raised in the Bronx who, because of urban destruction, blight and crime, can't go back to the homes of their youth either. We don't consider them exiles simply because the demographics have changed. Palestinians are citizens of Israel and though some complain that they are only second class citizens, that's infinitely better than being denied any citizenship in the 22 countries that share a common language and religion with them. I can understand Mr. Ali's nostalgia for the home of his youth but I can't abide Mr. Garner's hyperbolic politicization of that emotion. Throughout the modern world, populations have shifted geographically — some for political necessity, some for economic need and some because of natural disaster. Only one group that has more than quadrupled in size in sixty years insists on the original branding of refugee and insists on the right of return to the territories they lost in a succession of wars they started since 1948. One can only hope that reason will miraculously overtake indoctrinated hatred and that Palestinians and other Arab nations will recognize the state of Israel and begin to work towards a sustainable co-existence with their neighbor. The inflammatory language of exile only helps people to see themselves as victims instead of autonomous individuals who can move on to a productive future instead of wallowing in the illusions of the past. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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MISSIONARIES THREATEN TEENS ON CAMPUS
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 11, 2009. |
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This below is entitled "Target: Teens: Christian missionaries focus on younger audience," by Maayan Jaffe and appeared on the Jews for Judaism of Baltimore website. |
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You're 18 and the world seems expansive, vast. You head off to college with an open mind and an eagerness to search and grow. It's amazing. This generation of Jewish youth, however, is not as knowledgeable about its religion as those prior. And Christian missionaries are more knowledgeable about how to target Jewish young adults than ever before. "We know that about 80 percent of Jewish college students are proselytized to or experience missionary activity during their college years," said Ruth Guggenheim, Executive Director of Jews for Judaism. "Over 90 percent of those college students are the target of peer-to-peer evangelism, proselytized to by friends, roommates and even teachers." Amy's Story Amy Dow was studying to be a counselor at a Christian university. "I was born Jewish, raised Jewish, but had no Jewish education at all," Dow said. As she progressed in her studies, she made friends with her classmates. They pushed Jesus and offered their Christian love. "I got so into it. I started going to church on Sundays," said Dow. "I was a disenfranchised Jew seeking and asking questions." Dow's relationship with Christianity lasted upwards of a year. On Yom Kippur, she tried going to a Reform synagogue. When she couldn't understand the Hebrew text or follow the mechanics of the service, she became frustrated. She didn't like that when her toddler son asked her what some fancy Hebrew lettering on the wall said she could not tell him. Dow went to church the next day. "I liked that I could participate in the service from day one. I did not have to go to school to learn to pray. Everyone at the church was up there, dancing and singing and I felt, 'this is for me,'" she said. 
Dow wanted a relationship with God, and the Christians handed one to her. Fortunately for Dow, she happened upon a Chabad rabbi one summer and he showed her that relationship could exist in Judaism too. She learned that God can be in a Jew's life and there is a deep Jewish spirituality. "I now understand the reason I do mitzvoth is to get closer to God. It is not something cold and mechanic. It's all so meaningful to me," said Dow. Losing Jason Unfortunately, Dow's story is not so uncommon. Most Jewish youth are not aware of the beauty Judaism has to offer, said Guggenheim, and they are confronted by extremely passionate and well-educated missionaries. In addition, teenagers and young adults are often in search of spirituality, explained Mendi Baron, who heads Jews for Judaism's Jewish Teens Teaching Values program, or JTTV. That was the case with Marilyn Leavey Meryerson's son, Jason. Now 39, he has been a Hebrew Christian since he was 22. "Jason was approached when he was studying on campus at the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic," said Meyerson. "He had always been searching for an identity. There, he met members of Jews for Jesus. They befriended him, invited him to bible studies, to Passover Seders. He thought he could debate them, discount their arguments. Instead, they won him over." Meyerson's son is now married with children. The Meyersons maintain a relationship with Jason, but it's difficult. "He did not know how to respond. I believe if he had been given the Jews for Judaism college checklist with information on how to respond, he would have been fine," Meyerson said. "These college kids need to have the arguments. They need to have the truth." Meyerson urged parents across the religious spectrum to open their eyes to the missionary threat, to recognize that these Christians are after their children — "our children" — and they want to convert them. "It is [the Christians'] path to heaven and it is scary," said Meyerson. "They are so well funded and they will use any means to convert our children." Battling With The Band Jews for Judaism is fighting back. With Baron's help, the JTTV program is expanding, developing a new Web site for teens and utilizing a now very active Facebook page to dialogue about Jewish issues. Most recently, Baron began offering teen parties and programs to provide a positive Jewish experience for the youth ... before they go off to college. On May 17, JTTV is partnering with the local Jewish Community Center to host "Summerstock," a teen concert. Around 200 teens are expected to attend. "Giving someone a Jewish experience, giving them an experience where they can learn to have pride in Judaism, is the first step. ... It is like an immunization," Baron said. "We need to catch teens between the ages of 15 and 18 because that is when we can educate them. He referred to the Jews for Jesus Internet site, aimed at "helping Jewish college students find a meaningful and true experience of God through Jesus, the Jewish Messiah." Jews for Jesus, one of the nearly 1,000 Hebrew Christian groups around the world that raise over $300 million a year to carry out their missionary activities, has members on college campuses across the country. Said Baron: "The Jewish community is falling behind."
Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il
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SETTLEMENT FREEZE FORCES OVER 3/4 OF COUPLES TO MOVE AWAY FROM HOME COMMUNITIES WHEN MARRIED
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 11, 2009. |
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This was written by Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent.
It appeared in Haaretz
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The head of the municipal council of West Bank settlements accused the government on Monday of indirectly causing the "expulsion" of young Israelis from the territories. "Every year all over Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) there is a quiet expulsion of thousands of young couples who are forced to leave their communities due to a lack of housing and budget freezes that have continued for years courtesy of Israel's governments," said Danny Dayan, the head of the Yesha council of settlements. Dayan and other municipal leaders convened a press conference in Jerusalem on Monday where they cited figures which they claim are the result of the government's freeze on settlement expansion. Dayan argued that the news media and left-wing groups paint a false picture alleging that construction in settlements is continuing apace. In reality, the near complete freeze on building in the territories has pushed some 1,600 young couples — out of the 2,100 couples who marry each year in the West Bank — to live in communities far from their parents and the towns in which they grew up. Dayan and settler leaders demanded that the Netanyahu government alter this policy, as the prime minister vowed he would do during his election campaign. They accused political officials of "littering Netanyahu's road to Washington with distorted facts that are completely contrary to the reality on the ground." "Shimon Peres told [President Barack] Obama that it is inconceivable that there won't be anywhere to live for children born in Judea and Samaria, and that it is impossible to put them on the roofs," Dayan said. "That's all fine and good, but in reality, they really have no place to live." "Most of the parties who make up this coalition promised to put an end to the freeze policy of the Olmert and Sharon governments, but a senior official in the defense ministry told us that from his standpoint there were no elections and that in practice the reality has no changed," said Yesha director-general Pinhas Wallerstein. "In order to transport a caravan or to seal off a balcony or to add a room, today what is required is authorization from the defense minister. This is an abnormal situation, and when everything is verboten, then everything is allowed. Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com |
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ZOA PRESS RELEASE CRITICIZING AIPAC FOR SUPPORTING PALESTINIAN STATE
Posted by Boruch Ruvain, May 11, 2009. |
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This was written by Avraham Zuroff. |
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(IsraelNN.com) The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has expressed "deep concern" that pro-Israel lobbyist group America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has endorsed establishing a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel's longest border. At this week's annual AIPAC conference, member activists were instructed to ask their congressional representatives to endorse letters addressed to U.S. President Barack Obama that explicitly promote the need for a "viable Palestinian state." In a statement issued Wednesday, the ZOA blasted the move, saying it was mystified that "AIPAC is supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state despite the fact that [PA Chairman] Mahmoud Abbas refuses to accept Israel as a Jewish State and other PA leaders refuse to accept Israel at all." The ZOA added that when Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir asked AIPAC to support the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria, the group refused. "The letters being circulated to lawmakers on Capitol Hill are especially troubling in that they promote Palestinian statehood while Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah (strongly supported by Palestinian opinion) refuse to accept Israel or even to depict the country on PA maps, atlases...[Fatah] continues to permit incitement to hatred and murder against Jews and Israel in the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps," the ZOA stated. "Fatah does not arrest and jail terrorists or outlaw terrorist groups; [it] retains the Fatah Constitution with its calls for terrorism and Israel's destruction; and honors terrorists like George Habash and Samir Kuntar." The ZOA charged that the AIPAC action "constitutes a major reward for Palestinian terrorism and non-acceptance of Israel when we should only be rewarding moderation and acceptance and fulfillment of written agreements of Oslo, Wye and the Roadmap." Ruvain Boruch is Moderator, New York City Shuls. Contact him at ruvainboruch@aol.com |
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JEWISH ORGANIZATION IMPLORES POPE TO HELP IDENTIFY HIDDEN CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST
Posted by Miki and Herb Sunshine, May 11, 2009. |
| This is by Zalman Nelson. |
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(lubavitch.com) Pope Benedict XVI's scheduled visit to Israel May 11-15 is eliciting mixed reactions among Israelis. But Chabad Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifshitz hopes the visit will help him in his efforts to save lost souls. Lifshitz is director of Yad L'Achim, the Israel based
anti-missionary organization. In advance of the papal visit, Rabbi
Lifshitz sent a letter to the Pontiff's office calling for his support
and help in revealing the identities of Holocaust orphan children who
were given up to Christian families.
"I wanted to use the opportunity to draw attention to this pressing issue," Lifshitz told lubavitch.com about his motivation in writing the Pope. Known for its work saving Jews from missionaries and Jewish children of Arab men who want to integrate in the Jewish community, Yad L'Achim began collecting information and searching for missing Holocaust orphans about five years ago. "As our activities in other areas helping Jews became more known, people began sending us information and turning to us for help finding family members," said Lifshitz. "We began collecting names, information and stories, and were surprised to discover that the issue wasn't getting the attention it deserved. Between that and the Lubavitcher Rebbe's exhortations that we must work to find Jews lost to their heritage, we decided to get involved." One woman, who shared her story with Rabbi Lifshitz on condition of anonymity, said she was raised as a Catholic in Holland and later in life developed a desire to convert to Judaism. Related Lifshitz, "She told me that she went to the states many years ago to meet with the Rebbe and discuss her conversion. The Rebbe asked her why she needed to convert, she might already be Jewish. "The woman was confused by the Rebbe's comment, but went back and pressed her mother for more information, who then finally revealed that she was Jewish. She had concealed her true identity, living as a Catholic since the Holocaust." In advance of the papal visit, Rabbi Lifshitz sent a letter to the Pontiff's office calling for his support and help in revealing the identities of Holocaust orphan children who were given up to Christian families.
According to Lifshitz's rough estimates based on a 2003 fact finding trip to France and Holland, and discussions with rabbis, community leaders and historians in Europe, thousands of Jewish children were placed by their parents in monasteries or with Christian families during the Holocaust, to be reclaimed after the war. Many of their parents never survived. "Small agencies popped up after the war all over Europe in an effort to find children who were stashed away. From those initial efforts there are bits and pieces of lists. Minimally, we need the names. In general though, I didn't get a lot of cooperation for municipalities, archives or churches. It's a big job that requires a full time office with team of researchers and coordination across Europe," said Lifshitz. "Those hidden children would today be at the youngest, in their mid 60s. Many have no clue that they are Jewish. Some are married to non-Jews and have raised children and grandchildren as Christians. It's very challenging," said Lifshitz. Another challenge lies in the fact that many of the Holocaust survivors who worked on the original lists have already passed away, their knowledge gone with them. Recently, a survivor from Holland gave Yad L'Achim a list of over 2,000 names of children who were handed over to Catholic families and institutions to hide them from the Nazis. Because a coordinated effort has been lacking, says Lifshitz, actual discoveries of Holocaust orphans, or their children, have been rare, but positive. Lifshitz says he won't rest until they reach every lost Jewish child. "Our motivation is simple. The Lubavitcher Rebbe said that the souls of their parents have no rest all the while their kids are unaware of their Jewish identity."
Asked how he broaches this sensitive issue with these people who've lived into their 70s assuming they knew who they were, Lifshitz says he treads carefully. "Usually, we'll ask them if they want to know more about some of their extended family members whom we have discovered. Then, from there, I slowly move to the subject of their being Jewish. It's a sensitive issue." Lifshitz said he is hoping to get support from the Rabbinical Center of Europe and together launch an agency to find the lost Jews. Some, like the woman from Holland, find themselves. Lifshitz share a recent conversation he had with a woman he met in Israel. "She grew up in Holland not knowing she was Jewish. Her introduction to Jews came when she was a schoolgirl and met a student who identified herself as Jewish. When she asked her classmate what a Jew is, she was told, 'Jews are people who go to synagogue, pray and ask for things from God.'" The girl escorted her to a nearby synagogue where congregants were praying. She told me," relays Lifshitz, "that she remembers sitting in the women's section for a long time, watching the congregants in total fascination. Her mother was worried when she didn't come home in time, and went out looking for her." When she found her in the synagogue and asked for an explanation, the girl could only say that she would like to pray like Jews do. As it turns out, Lifshitz continues, the mother admitted that she was hidden by her parents with Christians during the war, along with the grandmother's marriage ketuba so she would always remember her Jewish heritage." Besides Jewish parents who perished in the war and never claimed their children, many Christian families, on instructions from the Vatican, refused to return children. According to recent reports, a letter from the archives of the Catholic Church in France from Pope Pius XII to his representative in Paris on November 20, 1946 shows that he ordered Jewish children who were baptized during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents. "If the children were given over to the church by their parents and the parents are now requesting they be returned, they can be returned as long as the children were never baptized," explains the letter issued with the full power of the Pope's office and believed to have been accepted throughout Europe as common practice. Yad L'Achim's direct appeals to the queen of Holland and leaders in France and England for assistance were met with promises to use their influence and call on local churches to reveal the names of Jews that are hidden in their archives. "We are trying through many different channels to find them," said Lifshitz. In his latest effort, the letter to Pope Benedict XVI, he asked the pontiff to declare that all those who follow him must reveal the truth to children. "The continued silence on this sensitive topic will eternalize the Jewish nation's suffering, and the triumph of the Nazi objective," he writes. "As you prepare for your historic visit to the Land of Israel," the letter reads, "we turn to you from the depths of our hearts and souls, in light of the story that shocks every Jewish heart regarding the Holocaust orphans left by their holy parents with Christian families with the express purpose of returning them to their Jewish families. However, to our great sorrow, anguish, and disappointment, the adoptive families refuse to tell the children of the holy martyrs of their background, and thus prevent them from returning to the Jewish People." A gesture by the Pope, says Lifshitz would be very significant. "Not returning the children is like a continuation of the Holocaust. The visit to Israel is a unique opportunity turn the page on this chapter, and would be meaningful to the entire Jewish People." Rabbi Lifshitz said Yad L'Achim received specific acknowledgment of their letter from a director at the Vatican. Regardless of the Pope's decision, Lifshitz says he won't rest until they reach every lost Jewish child. "Our motivation is simple. The Lubavitcher Rebbe said that the souls of their parents have no rest all the while their kids are unaware of their Jewish identity." Herb Sunshine is a lawyer, qualified to practice in U.S.A. and Israel. He and his wife Miki live in Jerusalem. Contact them by email at sunshine.h@012.net.il |
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THE-ARAB-REFUSAL-TO-RECOGNIZE-ISRAEL ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.
Posted by Dave Alpern, May 11, 2009. | ||
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Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu, I am a proud citizen of both America and Israel. English is still easier and faster for me. As you prepare for your talks with the Obama administration... as we hear and read about the supposedly "inevitable clash" you will have with said administration... and as an Israeli very worried about our country's future, I call upon you to stand firm and resolute against any and all pressures for the totally untenable and patently absurd "two-state solution" that trendy pundits have been advocating repeatedly. I implore you to put Israel's vital interests ahead of any and all political considerations and expediencies. This is what Israel needs from you now, and if necessary, you must not be afraid to say "no" to President Obama. It is why a majority of Israelis "turned right" in last November's elections. Moreover, and if necessary, I am more than willing to tighten my own personal financial belt should economic sanctions be imposed upon us for our so-called "intransigence". I am willing to pay such a price to prevent further danger to Israel and hope that other Israelis are communicating similar sentiments to you and your colleagues. Respectfully,
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ISRAELI ACADEMIC EXTREMISM
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 10, 2009. |
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Below Isracampus issues a challenge to Israeli Law Professors
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Isracampus hereby challenges the professors and lecturers in law schools in Israel to speak out against the McCarthyist suppression of freedom of speech and the anti-democratic firing and political persecution, in the case of Rabbi Israel Shiran at the Moriah-Barkai high school in Haifa, Israel. He was fired and demonized by Minster of Education Yuli Tamir because he dared to express a political opinion of which she disapproved, namely his belief that Yitzhak Rabin's political ideology should not be a matter for indoctrination in Israeli schools. We call upon professors of law to defend democracy and freedom of speech in Israel by speaking out against the persecution and repression of Rabbi Shiran. Here is an update on the case: 'One of Israel's most famous victims of leftist McCarthyism is the young rabbi Israel Shiran, who was fired and persecuted by Israel's Leftist Minister of Education, Yuli Tamir, because he dared to express the opinion that schools should not teach Yitzhak Rabin's political ideology as unchallengeable dogma and theology. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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PAKISTAN IS BASICALLY A TALIBAN STATE
Posted by Salim Mansur, May 10, 2009. |
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There is frantic concern in Washington and elsewhere that Pakistan has reached its tipping point and might succumb to the Taliban forces entrenched barely 80 km (50 miles) from the capital, Islamabad. But the concern is misleading. A country of some 160 million Muslims is not about to be overrun by the Taliban. On the contrary, Pakistan is more or less a Taliban state shaped by its origin and history. This is the unpalatable reality that cannot be publicly discussed in Washington, London or Ottawa due to diplomatic niceties. It is also complicated by the patron-client relationship the Pakistani elite pursued with the U.S. over the past six decades as a means to counter India's dominant position in the region. Pakistan was forcefully established by an elite on the basis of an exclusivist and bigoted idea that since India's Muslims constitute a "nation" they deserve a state of their own. The perversion of Islam into a nationalist ideology hugely aggravated communal politics in undivided India that would not end with the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, ruthlessly planned this division when he called for direct action — communal blood-letting — by his supporters which led to the massive Hindu-Muslim riots known as the Great Calcutta killings of August 1946. This act of terror made certain that trust between Hindus and Muslims was irreparably broken, and Britain was compelled to depart by partitioning India. To recall this history is to have an inkling of the sort of a country that emerged as a result of terrorism followed by ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim population — most Hindus and Sikhs left or were forcefully driven out from present-day Pakistan. Subsequently, the Pakistani elite declared the Ahmadiyyas — a small peace-loving sect of minority Muslims — to be non-Muslims, and persecuted them as the harbinger of further bigotry to be unleashed in the slide of Jinnah's Pakistan into a Taliban state. Click here to find out more! The economic exploitation of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by the ruling elite began with Mr. Jinnah imposing Urdu as the national language on Bengali Muslims with their own rich linguistic and cultural tradition. Eventually the two halves of Pakistan would tear apart in 1971 following civil war and systematic massacre of Bengalis by the Pakistani military. Since 1971 the unremorseful and bloody-minded ruling elite of Pakistan — civil and military — pushed Pakistan deeper into a dependency alliance with Saudi Arabia. It meant importing the Saudi version of Islam — Wahhabism — and its spread deep across the country through the rapid expansion of religious schools and mosques funded by money from the Gulf countries. The products of these schools and mosques are the Taliban "jihadis," or holy-warriors, who set forth for Afghanistan in the war against the former Soviet Union. Steel fist The Pakistani elite is corrupt, opportunistic and ruthless. Behind the conniving smile of the civilian politician is the steel fist of the military with nuclear weapons. The fear of Taliban acquiring Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is manufactured by the elite to garner diplomatic and financial support from the West. This is extortion brazenly practised by the elite responsible for making Pakistan into a rogue state with its people crushed by poverty. It is this reality that makes for terror and war in the region, and threatens peace beyond. This article was posted on IsraPundit
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HAMAS SMUGGLING WORSENS; HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH'S RECORD; LAWFARE; FINING TERRORISTS; DISTORTING POPE'S VISIT TO ISRAEL
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 10, 2009. |
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IMPETUS FOR THE SAUDI INITIATIVE The focus turned on S. Arabia, when its citizens comprised most of the 9/11 terrorists. In reaction, S. Arabia dusted off its Israeli surrender initiative, euphemistically called peace plan. That turned the focus on S. Arabia as a peacemaker. Israel should devise its own plan (www.imra.org.il, 3/24). My plan: let the Arabs drop territorial and population demands, and simply make peace! ISRAELI LEFT TURNS ON IDF Long subjected to unwarranted and criminal attack from Gaza, Israelis greatly approved the combat against Gaza terrorists. Since the leftist Olmert regime, the leftist media war had to support the combat, too. The Left did not want to admit that the same regime made the war necessary, by evacuating from Gaza. The media had derided right-wing warnings that doing so would lead to bombardment of Israel from Gaza. Neither did the Left want to admit the leftist regime's criminal negligence in withdrawing before having destroyed Hamas forces and toppling it from power. Hamas' survival made it seem victorious and legitimate. Combat over for now, a supposedly right-wing government is coming in. Now the Left no longer supports the war. It slanders IDF officers the same as do the usual foreign anti-Zionists. This slander provides grist for the enemy's mill. Thus the Left has made it more likely that when IDF officers travel abroad, Muslims and leftists there will bring them to court on charges of war crimes Israel did not commit. Who expects justice abroad? Hamas did commit war crimes, but who expects them to be brought to justice abroad? (Caroline Glick in www.imra.org.il, 3/23.) Israel should have captured top Hamas leaders and put them on trial for war crimes. That would have made their criminality apparent. Israel could have drawn distinctions between Hamas' criminal methods and the IDF's legal ones. HAMAS SMUGGLING WORSE WEAPONS IN "The Egyptians continue to try and halt the smuggling via the Philadelphi Corridor [tunnels]. With this, in recent weeks Hamas has succeeded in smuggling into Gaza raw material used for producing explosives for rockets and materials for their weapons industry." "Likewise, Hamas has also succeeded in smuggling heavy machine guns, scores of rockets, tons of explosives and anti-aircraft missiles. Alex Fishman — page 3 Yediot Ahronot 5 April 2009." (www.imra.org.il, 4/5.) HOW TO DEAL WITH DICTATORS B.R. Myers' Op.-Ed makes a shrewd point. He suggests judging a dictator's promise to reconcile with us by whether he retracts his propaganda against us. More important than weapons control, "This means demanding changes where they matter most, and can be immediately verified — on the propaganda front — before putting our faith in some grandiose timetable of disarmament." Otherwise, the dictator is negotiating in bad faith (NY Times, 4/2/09). How would this apply to the Mideast? For example, Iran should stop calling the US and Israel "Satan." Likewise, the Palestinian Authority should stop claiming that all of Israel belongs to it, and should stop glorifying suicide bombers. Makes sense. If the dictators there continue to agitate for war, then their statements about making or recognizing peace agreements are insincere. Nor are they likely to be honored by their incited populace. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH'S RECORD Before the combat in Gaza, Human Rights watch (HRW) issued 18 statements about Gaza, accusing Israel of "collective punishment," "continued occupation," and fostering a "humanitarian crisis," without evidence and inconsistent with international law. During the second Lebanon War, HRW promoted a myth that Israel committed a massacre in Qana, inflating to 54 the death toll that the Red Cross pegged at 28. HRW had to retract its figure. HRW also denied that Hizbullah had used civilian areas despite documentary and video proof of extensive Hizbullah fortification of villages. HRW later retracted 9 out of 21 cases cited in its report, "Fatal Strikes." In a report on the use of white phosphorus, HRW omitted the context of Hamas' use of civilian areas for launching attacks on Israeli cities. It denied that Hamas operated near a hospital in Gaza, but a Gazan taxi driver reported Hamas attempts to hijack the hospital's ambulances [to illegally disguise ferrying of troops or arms]. Despite photographic evidence of fortifications, HRW denies that Hamas operated in Beit Lahiya. HRW relies upon testimony of Arabs whose independence of view and reliability are unknown. HRW accuses Israel of war crimes, i.e., of intending to harm civilians. Evidence? None presented. The report's authors are notorious Arab propagandists (IMRA, 3/25 from NGO Monitor). One would think that its record of constant error would prompt HRW to be careful about its claims. Accusing Israel of intending to harm civilians, without evidence, is a new low. LAWFARE "Lawfare" is the term coined to indicate warfare by judicial system. Originally it referred to harassment by lawsuits for libel. I think the term should be expanded to include the use of phony suits against Israelis and Americans for non-existent war crimes. Some of the people bringing those indictments are allied with real war criminals, known as jihadists. Hypocrisy is their secret, since the major media rarely expose this method. There are other abuses of the judicial system to stifle free speech or punish those with insufficient funds to defend themselves in courts. Israel and the US need to study and devise reforms that prevent such abuses in their own countries and that might shame some other countries to adopt them. At least a standard would be set for criticizing countries that abuse the legal system. I foresee a rash of accusations that Israel committed war crimes, based on the usual false testimony by Arab "eyewitnesses" and misrepresentation of international law by biased humanitarian organizations. How ironical that Israel tries harder than other countries to minimize civilian casualties! But the accusers' motive is not truth, it is propaganda. FINING TERRORISTS Courts in the US and in Israel have been approving of damage suits against terrorists and their organizations. Large fines are assessed. Assets may be frozen. What we don't hear of are collections. The State Dept. appeals against fines levied by Americans in US courts, and courts are inclined to defer to it. MEDIATION Turkey is one of the latest countries to offer to mediate the Arab-Israel conflict. People assume that mediators are sincere and practical. Offering to mediate brings prestige, actually mediating brings more, and success brings the most. Governments have an incentive to offer, despite poor chances of success, and to press the weaker side to yield, in order to get credit for having brokered an agreement. Broker may fall into the rut of demanding more of Israel, to the sound of global applause. Conflict of interest may overcome sincerity. Should you assume that brokers always have integrity? No. Turkey's government is Islamist. It has trade relations with Israel, but its policy favors the Arabs over Israel. So does the State Dept., which keeps making demands only of Israel, demands that get Israelis killed or would get it conquered. Example: demands to remove anti-terrorist checkpoints or to cede secure borders. CAN OBAMA'S DIPLOMACY MAKE PEACE? Foreign diplomats welcome President Obama's conciliatory manner. He personally impressed the conference of leading economic powers, trying to curb the recession. He did not, however, achieve results. Participants went their own way. Some resorted to protectionism. That helps them in the short run, but hurts all in the long run. Those diplomats were not fanatics. How will Obama's smile work with the fanatical Radical Muslims he is trying to conciliate? Why doesn't he know that in their culture, if he is sweet to them, they will think he is afraid of them? They will be more resistant to what he demands of them. Also on Obama strategy:
DISTORTING THE POPE'S VISIT Israel News photo:
The Pope is visiting the Holy Land soon. His tour is being distorted into a political football. People say that if he visits this or that town, it means he favors such-and-such. He can't just inspect a place and see for himself, his mere arrival is taken as a stance on it. Everything is seen as symbolic. For more on the Vatican & Israel:
I PROPOSE RENAMING WESTERN WALL, "WAILING WALL" The Western wall remaining from King Solomon's Temple was nicknamed the "Wailing Wall." That was because the Muslims and then the British forbad Jews from worshiping on the Temple Mount. They could worship only at the base of the wall, bewailing the loss of Jerusalem. When Israeli forces liberated the Old City of Jerusalem, Jews could go onto the Mount and pray. Israel restored the name, "Western Wall." For some years, however, Muslim Arabs have threatened riots if Jews pray on it. Israel gave in to the Muslims, curbing Jews' freedom of religion. Therefore, I suggest returning to the usage, "Wailing Wall," to signify government betrayal and shame of its people. That is not like a Jewish state. JUDGING PALESTINIAN ARABS BY A FEW ACQUAINTANCES I met an Orthodox Jew whose best friend is a Palestinian Arab. They've been to each others' homes. Based on that friendship, he is not concerned about the Palestinian Arabs as a menace to Israel and the Jewish people. He is generalizing a complex issue from very few examples. That is specious logic. Besides, Israeli Jews have found themselves suddenly attacked by Palestinian Arab friends and co-workers or attacked by others, when visiting. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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HYPOCRISY
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 10, 2009. |
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If Israeli citizens occupy Palestinian land in the so-called West Bank, then U.S. citizens occupy the Mexican lands now called California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and even Texas. Israel secured her presumably occupied territory in 1967 as a consequence of defeating Arabs intent on destroying the Jewish Homeland. The United States secured her Southwest in the 1800s as a consequence of defeating Mexicans during battles related to "Manifest Destiny", a presumption that the United States had a God-given right to occupy and civilize the entire continent. Israel's war was a war of survival. America's wars were of an imperialistic nature. In both cases, however, the territories acquired by the victors should arguably remain with the victors, rightly or wrongly, based on global historical precedent. Why then is Israel considered an occupier while no such label stigmatizes the United States? Is it because in the former case Arabs still disproportionately inhabit the conquered territories, while in the latter case American citizens far outnumber Mexican citizens in the conquered territories? Might an argument then be made for Israeli settlement expansion in order to acquit Israel of her less than honorable label? Furthermore, might professors, students, and other 'settlers'; especially those similarly occupying Mexican territory within America's so-called Southwest; protesting Israeli settlements in the so-called West Bank, stigmatizing Israelis with the big "O", similarly stigmatize themselves with the big "H"? If it smells like Hypocrisy, indeed it must be Hypocrisy! Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at larose@snip.net |
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FROM ISRAEL: HOLDING FAST
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 10, 2009. |
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There are many contexts in which this concept is relevant. At a Likud forum today PM Netanyahu vowed that "Israel will not withdraw from the Golan Heights." His comment was prompted by a question posed by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who then said, "I view this declaration as a message to the Golan's residents and to all of Israel's residents. The prime minister's statement carries good news [for] Israel's security. It is a message to the United States, the region's countries and the rest of the world. ~~~~~~~~~~ While he indeed may apply pressure on us in this regard, it's just possible that Obama will take this decision more in stride than we might have expected. For — in spite of his having sent US emissaries to Syria in an effort to improve US-Syrian relations and his having expressed intent to promote Israeli-Syrian negotiations — Obama himself has just taken a stand against Syria. Just five years ago, President Bush issued an executive order with regard to Syria, declaring a national emergency in dealings with this nation and authorizing sanctions. The law states that the sanctions will be automatically terminated at the end of a year unless the president provides notification of intent to continue them. This process has been sustained annually until now. Now President Obama has officially provided notification again: "The actions of the Government of Syria in supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining U.S. and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq pose a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. For these reasons, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect the national emergency declared with respect to this threat and to maintain in force the sanctions to address this national emergency." In fairness, just how hard could he push us to negotiate with a state that he describes this way? ~~~~~~~~~~ Would that Obama demonstrated so clear-eyed an understanding of matters in other regards. Jeff Jacoby, in his latest column, "Lady Justice's blindfold," describes one way in which Obama is missing the boat. This particular situation reflects a left-wing, "touchy-feely" approach that is actually contrary to the spirit of how the US is supposed to operate. (As will become clear, I am able to say "supposed to" without fear of contradiction here.) What is more, it exemplifies an attitude that I would suggest is at the heart of what's wrong with Obama's foreign policy more broadly. Jacoby provides us with the oath taken by every federal judge: "I . . . do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me..." Impartiality is at the core of this pledge. Says Jacoby, "Without judicial restraint there is no rule of law. We live under 'a government of laws and not of men.'" But Obama is calling for something else: "Time and again, Obama has called for judges who do not put their private political views aside when deciding cases. In choosing a replacement for Justice David Souter, the president says, he will seek not just 'excellence and integrity,' but a justice whose 'quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles,' would be 'an essential ingredient' in his jurisprudence. In an interview last year, he said he would look for judges 'sympathetic' to those 'on the outside, those who are vulnerable, those who are powerless.' "...in 2005, Obama declared that the 'truly difficult' cases that come before the Supreme Court can be decided only with reference to 'the depth and breadth of one's empathy,' and that 'the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.'" As Jacoby points out, "Sympathy for others is an admirable virtue, but a judge's private commiserations are not relevant to the law he is expected to apply. "If Obama means what he says, he wants judges who can be counted on to violate their oath of office."
~~~~~~~~~~ And if this is the yardstick utilized for making decisions in the international arena? If one identifies, for example, with Palestinians who call themselves refugees, or has great empathy for them in one's heart, does this mean one judges with less severity terrorist acts for which they are responsible, or demands less transparency with regard to how they expend funds? ~~~~~~~~~~ The nation is currently in a turmoil because of budget issues. And so we might apply the term "holding fast" here as well. In a time of global economic downswing, PM Netanyahu, who rescued us from financial straights via his policies as finance minister just a few short years ago, is now attempting to levy budget cuts. But they are not being well received in several quarters — most notably Labor and Shas, but even within his own party. Already the prime minister has backed down on some projected cuts. Of concern here is a coalition rift with internal fiscal battles just on the eve of Netanyahu's important meetings in Washington. He is walking a tight-rope between the necessity of tightening the national belt and responding to protested concerns with regard to education, childcare subsidies and more. ~~~~~~~~~~ The Pope, Benedict XIV, will be arriving here for an official visit tomorrow and the tone in the nation is one of enormous ambivalence His predecessor, John Paul II, worked sincerely on improving Catholic-Jewish relations and was loved here. Born Karol Jozef Wojtyla, he served as Bishop of Krakow and was sensitized by what he witnessed during the Holocaust. A supporter of Vatican II, he declared, "We owe a debt to our older brother, the Jewish People." Benedict XIV, on the other hand, was born Joseph Alois Ratzinger in Germany, and during the Second World War, when a young teenager, served in the Hitler Youth. A theological conservative, he embroiled himself in controversy recently when he reinstated the excommunicated Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson. It has further been noted that only weeks ago, when Ahmadinejad spoke at Durban 2, the EU delegates left the hall but the delegates of the pope remained. Former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, advises, "We must not rebuff the visit. We need not bend over backwards or flatter him, but it should not be rejected." ~~~~~~~~~~ The pope will be visiting the Al-Aida refugee camp outside of Bethlehem, and — as I had indicated — bells went off for me when his representative said the camp, "Symbolizes the right of return." Then, just the other day, the bells got louder, when a statement on behalf of the pope was released. He was coming in a spirit of peace he said, because for 60 years now there has been injustice in this part of the world. And how would that be? ~~~~~~~~~~ The PA, hoping to politicize the pope's visit to the camp, arranged for the ceremonies to be adjacent to the security fence. The plans have since been readjusted at Israeli insistence (the refugee camp is in an area controlled by Israel). Still, every effort will be made by the Palestinians to get that fence, promoted as a sign of Palestinian suffering, into photographs that will be taken. Never mind that the fence — having been necessitated by Palestinian terrorism — can also be seen as a means for saving Jewish lives. ~~~~~~~~~~ There is the possibility that Netanyahu will meet with Jordan's king Abdullah before he goes to the States. Our prime minister will be meeting with Egyptian president Mubarak tomorrow. Their top agenda item will be Iran ~~~~~~~~~~ I was not happy to see today that James Jones, US National Security Adviser, is mouthing the same nonsense about a link between Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement as other members of the Obama administration. In an ABC interview, he said: "There are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat [Iran] by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution." According to Arutz Sheva, Jones "added that European and Arab leaders had high expectations of the United States advancing a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict." Sigh. A whole lot of people are going to be disappointed here. ~~~~~~~~~~ There is the possibility that my next posting will not come until Wednesday or Thursday. On the agenda to be examined: Durban follow-up and UN charges against Israel. (No, it never ends.) Tomorrow night and Tuesday are Lag B'Omer — the 33rd day of the counting of the Omer, which lasts from the second day of Pesach until Shavuot. This is counted as the day when a plague that fell upon the students of Rabbi Akiva stopped and is celebrated here with bonfires at night and a day of fun. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" Toxicity in soil (waste products, including toxic metals such as lead and cadmium, from various industries)presents a serious problem. The toxicity has to be kept from entering the food chain, and can render real estate worthless. But now a solution may be on the way. Professors from the life sciences, chemistry and engineering faculties of Tel Aviv University are working on an innovative technique for cleaning soil, using a cement mixer as a giant "washing machine." The secret is a complex, biodegradable, environmentally-safe formulation for cleaning soil. Ultimately it should be possible for soil by the truckload to be cleaned and returned to its source. The compound binds to and removes toxic materials but leaves beneficial minerals in place. The product will be able to be customized to remove specific chemicals or minerals. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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THE POPE BENDS OVER FOR ISLAM — BUT NOT FAR ENOUGH
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 10, 2009. |
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This comes from today's JoshuaPundit website
and is archived as
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Pope Benedict made his first landfall on his Middle East Trip in Amman, Jordan, expressing his 'deep respect for Islam..and the values it proclaims." Unfortunately, he didn't quite abase himself far enough in the eyes of Muslims:
Jordanian clerics expressed disappointment that Pope Benedict XVI in an address to Muslim leaders on Saturday failed to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam.
"We wanted him to clearly apologise," Sheikh Yusef Abu Hussein, mufti of the southern city of Karak, told AFP after the pope's address in Amman's huge Al-Hussein Mosque.
"What the pope said (in 2006) about the Prophet Mohammed is untrue. Islam did not spread through the power of sword. It's a religion of tolerance and faith," Hussein said.
Mufti Hussein's words are highly illuminating when it comes to the unfortunate state of mind of many Muslims. They are particularly ironic in the wake of the peace and tolerance exhibited by many Muslims the world over in recent years. The events that happened after Pope Benedict made his original speech in Regensburg are an example — the violent riots, the firebombing of churches, threats to church property like the the Church of the Holy Sepulcher still in lands under Muslim control, death threats and the actual murder of several priests and nuns.
As for Islam not being spread by the sword, the Mufti and Muslims who think like him have willfully blinded themselves to the sack of Byzantium, the jihad against India and the Islamic invasion of Southern Europe, among many other events of Islam's bloody history. And that's not to mention the body count of the modern Islamist war against the west, which is still ongoing.
This Pope, as I've noted before, has already participated in a number of events designed to show his submission to Islam and Islamism. He's morphed into the classic dhimmi, indulging in appeasement out of fear.
It's interesting to contrast Pope Benedict's attitude towards Islam with his atitude towards Jews and Israel.
He started out by courageously linking the fate of the Church and the Jews, but has moved to the other end of the spectrum with astonishing speed.
During his time as Pope, there has been the movement to beatify
Pope Pius XII, the head of the Church during the Holocaust and later
make him a saint. There have been the Church's issues with Israel,
such as the ridiculous statements from Papal officials likening Gaza
to a concentration camp and the constant shilling for the Palestinians
in an effort to preserve Church property even as Arab Christians are
being deliberately driven out of the Holy Land by Muslims. There was
the abrupt closure of the Vatican's Holocaust archives and the refusal
to cooperate with both Catholic and Jewish scholars researching the
Church's actions during the Holocaust, the re-instituting of the old
Pre-Vatican II Latin mass calling for the conversion of the Jews.
Finally there was the clumsy attempt at rehabilitation and restoral
to the Church's bosom of a bunch of unrepentant Jew haters and
Holocaust deniers, and Benedict's absolute refusal to discipline or
censure openly anti-Semitic Church figures like Poland's Cardinal
Joseph Glemp or Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, the
Archbishop of Honduras who, among other things blames "the Jews"for
the Church's scandals involving priests and sexual abuse of young
parishoners and calls for Jerusalem to be taken away from Israel as
its capitol.
When Iran's Ahmadinejad made his foul speech at the UN earlier this week, virtually the only European delegation not to walk out was the one from the Vatican.
And the Pope himself recently made a fairly plain statement by
accepting and wearing a Palestinian kefiyah, a symbol of Palestinian
'resistance' in Rome, the equivalent of donning a swastika armband
whether he fully realized it or not.
Given Pope Benedict's superb intellect, there's no doubt in my mind
that he fully understands what he's doing and what direction he's
taken the Church.Like Pius XII in the 1930's, Pope Benedict appears to
have made a conscious decision to avoid a battle with the Church's
enemies and to focus on political expediency.
He has chosen appeasement, and it will cost the Church dearly in
the future, because Islam is not a religion of tolerance and there's
no amount of supplication Pope Benedict can do that will satisfy it.
And as for the Jews, no amount of concilliatory, facile remarks on his
part are going to change the fact that he has chosen to ignore the
anti-Semitic bigotry in the Muslim world and in his own Church as part
of that supplication.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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GROUNDBREAKING FILM: THE THIRD JIHAD
Posted by Isaac Oppenheim, May 10, 2009. |
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We are currently launching a new film entitled "The Third Jihad". Our previous movie "Obsession" was distributed to over 28 million people. We will be launching our film this week at the National Press club with a VIP premiere screening. We are currently seeking partners to help us get our message out to the world and we would like your assistance in promoting this film. To view the trailer, go to
Contact Isaac Oppenheim at ioppenheim@clarionfund.org |
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ISRAELI ARABS MUSLIMS, OFTEN FIRST CLASS CITIZENS ABOVE JEWS — PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR ARABS OVER JEWS
Posted by American, May 10, 2009. |
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This has appeared on today's Reality Show
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Introduction Critics point out to the reversed unevenness, some have summed it up in one phrase: "If Arabs Can Live in Jewish Neighborhoods, Why Can't Jews Live in Arab Neighborhoods?" [1], In fact, many have raised the issue of Arabs not only being equal citizens as Jews in Israel, but often as first class citizens, Arabs, Muslims first class citizens in Israel whereas Israeli Jews are second class citizens [2] [3] Land issues: an example: Israeli Police evict Jews from Jewish-owned Hebron home as applauding Palestinian Arabs looked on [4], there are complaints of Jews who proclaim that they are sick and tired of being second-class citizens, while all Arabs in Judea and Samaria are treated like first-class citizens. [5], in another case An Israeli Supreme Court ruling did not deny that the land was Jewish-owned, but ordered the Jews to be moved out. [6] In another case, a lawyer for Y. Herskovitz, owner of property in Jerusalem, said Sunday his client will sue Jerusalem police for failing to execute court orders to evict Arab squatters from his property. [7] In court (broader issues), the Israelis routinely decide in favor of the Palestinians against their own government, applauded by U.S. Justice Brennan,[8] preferential treatments to Israeli Arabs, Palestinian-Arabs include steps on the expense of security, such as the 'Democracy in action' [9], Israel's Supreme Court took up the grievances of Palestinians and required the government to move the fence in the area near Jerusalem to make things easier for the Palestinians [10] Even the NYTimes acknowledges that at least [11] periodically, Israeli courts rule in favor of Palestinians (instead of security/government officials). Voting: the Arab minority are full citizens who enjoy equal rights despite not being required to serve in Israel's army. [12] and decry: Israel is the only country in the world that endows a community of its citizens with full voting rights on both local and national levels without also requiring them to serve in the army, adding that Israeli Arabs even refuse the alternative National Service. They even refuse a national service in their own communities and exercise intimidation against members of their community that raise the subject. [13] In academia: a professor has written about Israel's "affirmative action", quotas and preferences for Arabs [14] and that Israel already has a system in place whereby Jews are often treated as second-class citizens. [15] Checkpoints: From May 2009, All Israeli citizens — including Jews — must now show their ID cards at the large Tarkumiyeh checkpoint, at the same time, life is being made easier for Arabs in the region — despite the several murders that have been perpetrated by Arabs. The IDF explained that the decision was made to "reward" the Arabs for not rioting or attacking during the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza. [16] Media freedom: whilethe Arabs have unlimited freedom of broadcast [17] and the Hebrew radio stations like Kol Yisrael and Galei Tzahal (IDF Radio) systematically broadcast from an Arab point of view, yet the Arutz Sheva radio station, often called "Free Israel Radio" (because it is the only independent news network in the Middle East) [18], has seen restricting steps from the Israeli government. [19] [20] Access to holy sites, often Israeli police closes the Temple Mount to non-Muslims Like: Temple Mount shut to non-Muslims on election eve — was closed to Jews today in response to Muslim threats of violence [21] and on more occasions. [22] Footnotes [1] http://smoothstoneblog.com/2009/03/
[2] http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/67486 [3] http://www.think-israel.org/jan07bloged.html#jan07.50 [4] http://www.jnewswire.com/article/2587 [5] http://www.think-israel.org/nov05bloged.html#nov05.160 [6] http://www.ourjerusalem.com/action/story/
[8] http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=12822 [9] http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/critiques/
[10] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/talking/24_fence.html [11] http://freedemocracy.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/
[12] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf18.html [13] http://www.think-israel.org/shifftan.voting.html [14] http://www.standwithus.org/HOT_TOPICS/?type=bytopic&TID=4 [15] http://www.sazionism.co.za/index.php/
[16] http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/922037.html [17] http://www.freeman.org/m_online/feb04/plaut.htm [18] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/6670 [19] http://www.dafka.org/news/index.php?pid=4&id=173 [20] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/130309 [21] http://english.katif.net/index.php?id=1345&sub=2 [22] http://mideastoutpost.com/archives/000372.html [23] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/2904 [24] http://freedemocracy.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/
[25] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=
[26] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=
Contact American at american1627@yahoo.com |
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THE WISDOM OF THE NATIONS
Posted by Miki and Herb Sunshine, May 10, 2009. |
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This article was written by Rabbi Meir Kahane and it appeared in the Magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea, September — October 1990 Ellul 5750 — Tishrei 5751. It is distributed by Barbara Ginsberg, who writes: "Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at: barhow@netvision.net.il " Previously e-mailed Rav
Kahane writings are available at |
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If one tells you that there is wisdom among the nations — believe it. So speak the sages of the Talmud in laying down for the Jew the principle that, outside of the study of Torah, there is indeed wisdom and art to be learned from the non-Jewish world. And, truly, the world of our times is filled with gentile wisdom that is proper and necessary for the Jew to learn and in which he should become proficient. In one of these areas the nations of the world have a long lead on us and have been studying their art for centuries with as much zeal and diligence as the Jew bent over his Gemara in the long winter nights and the hot summer days. It is an important art, this gentile craft, and one which is more than a luxury for our people. It is an area whose knowledge and proficiency is basic to surivival, and Jewish existence in this era of the jungle trumpets forth the need for studious and diligent Jewish study of Torat Ha'amim — the wisdom of the nations. I speak of the art of shooting, the craft of self-defense, the marriage of the Jew and the gun. "Jewish youth, learn to shoot." So wrote the late, great Zev Jabotinsky in an essay that has to rank as one of the most brilliant and prophetic writings of modern Jewish times. The days were the 1930's, the era Churchill so aptly labeled the Locust Years. In Eastern Europe, the pogromchiks and anti-Semites of all intellectual stripes, fumed and raved against the Jew. The seeds of Jew-hatred sprouted there with unbelievable speed and in the Third Reich the catalyst for the worst of anti-Jewish horrors had surfaced. And Jabotinsky watched the agony of his people and beheld — as a latter-day Jeremiah — the black future that was moving inexorably upon them. He saw it all, felt it all and sat down to write his essay. He called it Oifen Priptchek. What knowledgeable Jew does not know the song of that name! The haunting tune and indescribable words of the poet Warshawsky paint for us a picture of the Jew that opens for us the secret of his survival. A fire is burning on the hearth and the house is warm. The melamed — the teacher of tiny children — sits about with his little wards and teaches them their first Hebrew letters. 'Learn my children, learn with diligence," he tells them. "Remember what you learn here, Aleph, Beis, Gimel." And as he teaches his three and four year olds, he speaks to them but, in reality, to himself and to each of us. "Children, you will get older and then you will understand yourselves, how much within these letters lie tears and how much pain." And Jabotinsky took this song — this unofficial national anthem of Diasporan Jewry — and used it as his point of departure. The Rebbe continues to teach his children, continues to sigh with the persecution and pain of centuries but continues his lesson saying: "One must be strong to survive all that we have borne and consolation can be found only in strength. Every generation has its Aleph Beis and Jabotinsky takes his Rebbe and has him look at his tots, the tots whose fathers and grandfathers before them faced a hostile and vicious Jew-hating world, who were beaten and wracked with pain, who died at the hands of nations who knew not to shoot. And Jabotinsky's Rebbe sees his tots who will have to face the same muzhiks and the same animals, who will face the guns of the nations, and he teaches them the new Aleph Beis — "Young men, learn to shoot!" It does not matter that the Aleph Beis is difficult. It is not relevant that it is strange and we are instinctively repelled by it. The Rebbe must teach his children that "of all the necessities of national rebirth, shooting is the most important. We are forced to learn to shoot and it is futile to argue against the compulsion of an historical reality." There were too few Rebbes in real-life who taught Torat Ha'amim to their children, and in the Eastern Europe of Jabotinsky's time he was vilified and condemned for his new Aleph Beis. 'Fascist,' Fuehrer,' 'militarist' were but some of the kinder epithets used by enemies and by those whose lack of vision and timidity blinded them to the realities of what was happening. They looked at the clock and saw that it was six, while Jabotinsky was already reading midnight. Because they hooted him down and because they had not learned to tell Jewish time and because Jewish youths were told not to learn to shoot, the black night came down upon European Jewry, finding them unprepared, ill equipped, untrained and amei haaretz (ignoramuses) in Torat Ha'amim. They paid for their ignorance by the millions and for their clumsiness with whole communities. If a handful of the enemy could pursue with ease a thousand Jews, it was because they had mastered the art of shooting while the Jew — the man of the book — stood naked in his incompetence. The nations had the rifles and we did not. The Jewish dropout paid the supreme penalty. Every Jew a 22. Let it be shouted and let the educational campaign go forth. Let Aleph Beis be taught to Jewish young men and women. Let the study halls be filled with Jewish diligence and deep scrutiny. Young Jewish men and women, learn to shoot. Drink thirstily at the feet of the non-Jew this one art in which he excels. Learn, practice and outdo all the rest for we dare not be as ignorant as our fathers were before us and we cannot repeat the errors of the past. If Jewish neighborhoods are prey to muggers and rapists and robbers because it is well known that Jews and Jewish homes have no guns — let it be changed. If Jews are victims of hoodlums and hooligans because the Jew is not one who is armed and dangerous — let it be different. If the Jewish image is one of fearful timidity and ignorance in Torat Ha'amim; if the nations of the world laugh at our backwardness and confidently beat us for it — let Torat Ha'amim also go forth from Zion and the voice of Jewish strength from every Jewish neighborhood and home. If there is a difference in the level of crime and violence in an Italian neighborhood as compared with the Jewish one, the difference is that within the mind of the hooligan, one has the shadow of the gun while the other is filled with peaceful ignoramuses. If those who, in future days, would bring to these shores the night of the long knives, contemplate such thoughts with confident impunity, let them hear that Jews are learning their new Aleph Beis. The bully and the hoodlum do not so swiftly move to trample Jews when their own noses will be bloodied and when the taking of a Jewish life is pursued at the risk of his own. The problem is not the non-Jew, but the Jew. What is needed is a change in his psychology and in the way he looks at the gun. He must be made to understand that, in a world where the nations master the art of shooting, Jewish survival depends upon Jewish knowledge of the same and on non-Jewish knowledge that the Jew has this knowledge. A wild dog fears a whip; the mad-dog anti-Semite fears the gun. He should; being proficient with it he knows what it can do to the Jew — and to himself. With love of peace and desire for tranquility, young Jewish men and women, learn to shoot. Herb Sunshine is a lawyer, qualified to practice in U.S.A. and Israel. He and his wife Miki live in Jerusalem. Contact them by email at sunshine.h@012.net.il |
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QUEEN'S MEDAL OF HONOR SCRAPPED — IT'S TOO OFFENSIVE TO MUSLIMS & HINDUS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 9, 2009. |
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This comes from the May 8, 2009 Gateway Pundit website. |
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A British medal established by the Queen will be withdrawn after if was found to be too offensive to Muslims (and Hindus). The Daily Mail reported: A medal established by the Queen is being withdrawn after it was declared unlawful and offensive to Muslims and Hindus. For some reason, I'm guessing it was the Muslims and not the Hindus that were feeling slighted... But, that's just me.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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WILD IN SPRING
Posted by Fred Reifenberg, May 9, 2009. |
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Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il
Go to
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JERUSALEM HOUSING: ILLEGALITY JUSTIFIED?; ISLAMISTS MAP STRATEGIC
TARGETS; ISRAEL REBUTS WORLD BANK ON WATER FOR ARAB
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 10, 2009. |
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JERUSALEM HOUSING: ILLEGALITY JUSTIFIED? The NY Times covered a UN report on Jerusalem, criticizing the municipality for demolishing illegal Arab housing. [My running comments are in ellipses.] Only Jewish neighborhoods are "settlements?" The UN calls Jewish neighborhoods and only Jewish neighborhoods "settlements." [Tendentious language. Shows a double standard.] Too few cases to warrant UN attention Scores of buildings that Arabs erected without permits are demolished every year in Jerusalem. The UN finds 60,000 Arabs "are at risk of having their homes demolished as a result." The UN asks Israel to freeze demolition orders. [The city has a building boom, in which illegal construction has far outstripped the demolitions. Demolition is a tiny proportion of the illegal buildings. Why the excitement? What justifies UN interference? The UN devotes half its energy to interfering with Israel. Now that is discrimination!] "Pushed out?" Arabs are flocking in "The Arabs say that Israel limits their construction in order "to push them out of E. Jerusalem, which they claim as the capital of a future Palestinian [Arab] state." The Arab population of the city has increased from 66,000 in 1967 to 250,000. ["Push them out?" Their numbers have increased by a 184,000; demolitions were only a few hundred. The Arabs are crowding in, not pushed out. The accusation is absurd. Why do journalists or the UN repeat such nonsensical defamation as if factual? This Arab claim is as ridiculous and as exaggerated as Arab claims that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, although the actual Arab fatalities were 1,300, mostly gunmen, out of one and a half million. Most of the rest occurred because the terrorists fought near civilians, putting them at risk.] Wishing for a future state & capital gives no right to one [Capital of a future state? A wish is not a legal right.] The article attributes the Arabs' need for housing solely to population growth. [Some of it is due to foreign subsidy of housing, to attract Arabs, so as to bolster their claim to the city. That is a form of jihad. Some of the Arab increase is due to an influx from the Palestinian Authority, out of fear that terrorists would oppress them. Do not rule out the attraction of Israeli welfare benefits!] Presents history out of context, to make Israel look bad "Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and then annexed it, after expanding the boundaries of the city into the West Bank. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, but the annexation has never been recognized by the UN or its member states." [The Times usually presents history as if starting from 1967, when Israel captured territory. The paper fails to show who held that territory before, on what basis, and with what results. Jordan held it before. Its basis was imperialist conquest, which only two states recognized any legality to. The result was that Jordan used that territory for bombarding the rest of Jerusalem, thereby starting another war against Israel. Israeli troops had to go in to stop this. They ended up in control. The legal status of that area, as well as of the Territories in general, is unallocated territory under the Palestinian Mandate for a Jewish national home. Israel has the best claim to it. Also, international law recognizes a country's right to annex land that represents a security threat against it. The UN and its members may be too anti-Zionist to acknowledge the Jewish state's rights. That doesn't mean that their prejudiced opinion should carry weight.] Double standard on demolition A UN official called the demolitions "not helpful" in re-starting the peace process. [Why doesn't he call the Arabs' illegal building and defamation of Israel "not helpful?" One-sided. And what peace process? What the UN calls a peace process is an effort to get Israel to make concessions to the Arabs, in a signed agreement like the other ones the Arabs violate. That is fraudulent. The Arabs won't make peace until they stop trying to dominate other religions.] Clinton misrepresents road map Sec. of State Clinton claimed that the demolitions are "not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road map,' the US-backed peace plan of 2003." [It is typical of the State Dept. and the Times to: (1) Claim that Israel is bound by some agreement; (2) Ignore Arab obligations; and (3) Fail to cite what in the agreement binds Israel. Can you imagine Israel pledging not to enforce housing law against Arab violators, because they are Arab?] [Israel didn't relinquish that right. Here is the pertinent
statement from the road map, in which "GOI" stands for "government of
Israel": "GOI takes no actions undermining trust, including
deportations, attacks on civilians; confiscation and/or demolition of
Palestinian homes and property, as a punitive measure or to facilitate
Israeli construction. A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent
Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict April 30, 2003,
A housing plan for the city would be difficult, "...because of the unresolved land ownership disputes among Palestinian [Arab] neighbors." (Isabel Kershner, 5/1, A8) What does that mean? The Arabs don't own their buildings? Jerusalem's response The City dashed out a brief press release in response. The City denies the UN accusations and rejects its statistics. It acknowledges a housing problem, but corrects the misimpression given by the UN and newspaper reports that it affects only the Arabs. The housing shortage affects all ethnic groups. That puts it in a different, non-discriminatory light. Recognizing the problem upon taking office, Mayor Barkat expedited
city planning. He anticipates offering a City Plan in a few weeks.
He wants it to provide for more housing while preserving the city's
holy places
NY Times bias on demolition Some Jews also build in Jerusalem illegally. Their houses are demolished, too. The UN and NY Times fail to mention that. If they did, Israeli action would not appear discriminatory; the critics' would. Arabs who complain that Israel plots against them would be seen as paranoid slanderers. Since the newspaper makes one-sided reports, the UN knows it can get away with being more biased. no discrimination in building permits I studied this issue some years ago, working with CAMERA and the municipal buildings department statistics. Numerous building permits were given to Arabs and approved. Arabs who built illegally just wanted to evade the fees or they knew that they were building on land zoned for public use. They knew permits for building there would be rejected for cause. It is unethical of them to pretend that rejection would be for discrimination. All over Israel they squat on other people's land, build, and then demand rights. Foreign pressure keeps Israel from cracking down. HIZBULLAH SHOWS ITS IMPERIALIST SIDE "UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern about Hizbullah operations outside Lebanese territories, saying interference in another country's internal affairs constitutes a violation of sovereignty. Egypt announced earlier this month that it had uncovered a plot by 49 men with links to Hizbullah to destabilize the country by carrying out attacks on Egyptian institutions and Israeli tourists.. .Ban expressed concern about the possibility of violations of an embargo on arms smuggling through the Syrian border, saying Hizbullah continues to claim that it has acquired more advanced military technology. He said Hizbullah continues to possess huge military infrastructure capabilities, in violation of Resolution1559." "The UN chief added that he was worried about statements made by
the Hizbullah leadership during the Israeli offensive on the Gaza
Strip, in which it urged the Egyptian army to back Hamas fighters.
Such remarks 'reveal that Hizbullah operates outside Lebanese
territories,' he said. 'I condemn the unjustified interference in the
internal affairs of a sovereign country, 'he said, adding that the
disarming of Hizbullah and its transformation into a political party
are necessary for Lebanon to regain its full sovereignty and political
independence. He urged 'all parties that have influence on Hizbullah,
in particular Iran and Syria, to encourage this process.'"
When Israel maintained a security zone in Lebanon, from which it helped Lebanese fend off Hizbullah, people contended that Israel could leave that zone. They argued that Hizbullah was a Lebanese movement. They were mistaken. Being Islamist, Hizbullah doesn't have a national sense. Many Third World people don't. Hizbullah is motivated to wage holy war. It now uses the security zone for attacking Israel and for preparing to attack Israel. Sec. Ban is naïve, if he thinks that Iran and Syria would encourage Lebanese independence. They arm Hizbullah to subvert other countries. For a little more on Hizbullah in Egypt:
ISLAMISTS MAP STRATEGIC TARGETS Islamists have web sites on which they post maps identifying
strategic military sites "in nations as diverse as Belarus, Ukraine,
Russia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom,
Turkey, Greece, Israel, Eritrea and Japan that they write, "we should
strike."
WHO IS ISRAEL'S ALLY? Turkey "has been Israel's closest Muslim ally."
"Closest Muslim ally?" Which is any other Muslim ally? How are Turkey and Israel allies? They have no alliance. Turkey agrees with Israel's enemies. I think that journalists and diplomats label countries as allies carelessly. UAE IMPORTS THE THIRD MOST ARMS The UAE imports the third most arms
Think what that means! A small country, with modest armed forces, nevertheless imports more arms than all but two other countries. Obviously, it doesn't absorb most of those imports. It must trans-ship them. Why don't its customers buy direct? Prohibited? Then the UAE is helping rogue states evade sanctions. What a sensational story! The major media should feature it. Unfortunately, the media have slashed their reporting staffs. They now rely mostly on handouts. ISRAEL REBUTS WORLD BANK ON WATER FOR ARABS A World Bank report apparently accuses Israel of not meeting its agreement with the Palestinian Arabs on how much water to allot them. Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs refutes that report. It showed the report's authors facts proving the opposite. The authors nevertheless ignored the Israeli presentation. They based their accusation entirely on unsubstantiated reports from the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). Paragraph 40 of the pertinent Interim Agreement states that Israel would allocate to the P.A. 23.6 million cubic meters of water annually. Israel more than meets that obligation. Indeed, the P.A. Arabs have access to double that amount. As for violations, the P.A. had agreed not to drill wells without
Israel's approval. Its people drilled 250 illegal wells
The World Bank, like the UN, reports one-sidedly, but pretends to be moralistic. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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ASSISTING PRIME MINISTER NETANAYHU TO STAND STRONGLY AGAINST A PALESTINIAN STATE
Posted by US4Israel, May 9, 2009. |
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LET'S GET SERIOUS ABOUT COMBATING THE PALESTINIAN STATE NOTION We need the help of all major Orthodox public affairs and media organizations in the United States to combat the Palestinian state notion. So far, only wonderful Young Israel has really started working to keep those rockets away from Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Ben-Gurion airport. If we aren't speaking for A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE, these organizations (Agudath Yisroel, AMIT, Emuna Women, Nachum Segal Radio Show, Yated Neeman, etc.) will simply say NO when we ask for their help. So, we need several thousand people to sign this petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/1eys/petition.html." We will then promptly approach each of the Orthodox Jewish media and public affairs organizations in the name of the whole group and ask them to help. Prime Minister Netanyahu's first trip to the US is in a few days time so please sign TODAY and pass on. Thank you very much. Notes: (1) Please don't fuss about the precise wording of the petition since it does not matter at all. (2) When asked for "state", simply write "none" if you live outside the USA (3) Sometimes the petition doesn't work well, but if you click around, eventually it "lets you" sign. Thanks. THANK YOU, KNESSET MEMBER DANNY DANON Danny Danon is a Likud member of Knesset who represents Israel's Coastal Plain — a highly populated area here in Israel, including many cities which will be within rocket range of Palestinian state. Mr. Danon will be holding a "no to Palestinian state" session in the Knesset this Wednesday 13 May at 10:00 AM. To attend, please email to ddanon@knesset.gov.il indicating your name — preferably in Hebrew exactly as it appears in your teudat zehut, cell phone number and teudat zehut number. Your email should be entitled "ishur knisa" since the purpose of the email is to arrange an "ishur knisa" (permit to enter the Knesset on that day). Then, arrive at the Knesset at 9:30 AM and say you are attending the "no Palestinian event" in the Yerushalayim Hall in the Knesset as a guest of MK Danny Danon. If you don't get an email reply from Mr. Danon's office tomorrow, email again to make sure your "ishur knisa" has been arranged. AMERICAN CITIZENS, HOW ARE YOUR WRITING SKILLS? — suggestion from David Bedein Establishing a Palestinian state means deporting more Jewish communities and handing over their property to terrorists, following the precedent of Gush Katif. There are US Congressional committees that oversee all aspects of American Middle East policy — ONLY if they are inundated with well-reasoned calls and letters to do so. Give your letter a title which makes it immediately clear that you are against Palestinian state. Write to (then call to follow up): Near East Subcommittee, Foreign Relations Committee, US Senate.
Middle East Subcommittee, US House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Chaired by Rep. Gary Ackerman, New York 5th District:
DON'T HAVE TIME? THEN JUST EMAIL "SAY NO TO PALESTINIAN
STATE" secretary@state.gov, john_kerry@kerry.senate.gov, howard.berman@mail.house.gov, gary_ackerman@mail.house.gov, bnetanyahu@knesset.gov.il, sar@mof.gov.il, gsaar@knesset.gov.il, mancal@justice.gov.il, eyishay@knesset.gov.il, ulandau@knesset.gov.il, minister@most.gov.il, mcachlon@knesset.gov.il, yedelstein@knesset.gov.il, yiskatz@knesset.gov.il, rrivlin@knesset.gov.il, ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il, sshalom@knesset.gov.il, bbegin@knesset.gov.il, zelkin@knesset.gov.il, myaalon@knesset.gov.il, aliberman@knesset.gov.il, sar@mfa.gov.il Don't worry if some of the emails bounce and come back to you. If most got through — that's fine. REHOVOT SAYS NO TO PALESTINIAN STATE Israel's 20th largest city, Rehovot, is home of the world-famous
Weizman Institute of Science and was also home to Israeli former
Presidents Chaim Weizman and Prof. Efraim Katzir and former Prime
Minister Sharon. 70% of Rehovot's Municipal Council members (14 out of
20) have signed a letter opposing Palestinian state, in order to keep
rockets out of Rehovot.
Thanks for helping Israel.
Write us at us4israel@gmail.com about supporting Israel's rights and overcoming anti-Semitism toward Israel and Israelis. |
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TAKE A STAND! THE TIME HAS COME TO FIGHT DISCRIMINATION AND RACISM INSIDE ISRAEL!
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 9, 2009. |
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1. The time has come to take a courageous stand against arbitrary discrimination, racism and bigotry inside Israel. Such discrimination rightly deserves the epitaph of apartheid. Nothing can justify such behavior. The victims must be compensated and defended. And the Jewish Left, including such outfits as J Street, Meretz, Peace Now and Tikkun must lead the campaign to correct this injustice. I am of course referring to the policy of institutionalized ethnic discrimination recently officially adopted by the Negev Bedouin town of Rahat and its decision to fire all Jews who work for the municipality. The details of the case are reported in Maariv on May 8, 2009. In the recent municipal elections, a local party list representing the "Islamic Movement," a thinly disguised Islamofascist movement, won the elections. The new Islamic mayor of the town is one Faiz Abu Sahiban. Among his first decisions was the arbitrary firing of two senior civil servants working in the municipality. He proudly announced that they were being fired because they are Jews. Maybe he should change his name to Jim Abu Crow. The victims include the head of the department of supervision (of building in the town), plus one inspector in the department. The Jews showed up for work and were simply evicted from the municipality and told they were fired without cause. The mayor explained that they were fired because they are "aliens," meaning not Arabs. Now Israel's Left has been emoting in recent days because the Israeli Railroad Authority recently laid off some Arab workers. They were not exactly laid off because they were Arabs but rather the Railroad grants preferences to army veterans in hiring and layoffs, and they did not have it. Like just about every other country on earth, Israel sometimes grants army vets preferences in some things. It is true that Arabs are not conscripted into the army (unlike Jews and Druse and Circassions), but THAT is discrimination against Jews, not discrimination against Arabs. No one is stopping Arabs from volunteering to serve in the IDF to get the same vet benefits as others, and some do. More generally, Israeli Arabs enjoy affirmative action preferences in their favor in all sorts of things, like employment in the civil service and admission to universities, although there is now a proposed bill to revoke such racism and affirmative apartheid. But the caring Left has been strangely silent about the blatant racism and ethnic cleaning of Jews out of the Rahat municipality. You might want to write to Israel's new Minister of the Interior and demand that all Israeli public funds be cut off from Rahat in retaliation for this anti-Jewish racism. Write to Minister Eli Yishai, Ministry of the Interior, Kiryat BenGurion, Jerusalem Israel, fax 972- 2-5666376 972-2-6294755 or 972-2-6469442. Their email (less reliable than fax) is info@moin.gov.il 2. The anti-Israel political bias in Israel films became evident to
everyone recently thanks to two events. The first was the media
promoting the anti-Israel "Waltzes with Bashir" film, which almost got
an Oscar. The second was when the Israel Prize was awarded this year
to a professor of film at Tel Aviv University, "Judd" Neeman, who is
one of the most open haters of Israel at Tel Aviv University, and that
is saying a lot! Concerning the second item, see
Now a different faculty member at Tel Aviv University, and — somewhat amazingly — this time not someone who wishes to see Israel annihilated, has published a study of political bias in Israeli films over recent decades. The researcher is Dr. Ilan Avishur. The study says that starting in the late 1970s, Zionist film makers retired or left the scene, and Israeli filmmaking was were converted into the production of anti-Israel propaganda weapons, all with governmental funding. These include the endless "protest films" that no one will pay money to see, films that invariably paint Palestinian terrorists as poor victims and Israelis as Nazi-like bullies. Historic revisionism, meaning lying, about the Six Day War is common. One of the worst film atrocities is titled "On a Clear Day you can See Damascus," and it beatifies the Israeli convicted traitor Udi Aviv, a kibbutznik who was arrested for undergoing training as an anti-Israel terrorist in Syria and who then organized a terrorism and espionage cell. Adiv spent many years in jail and now is employed as a lecturer in politics by Israel's "Open University," a poster boy for Israel's Jewish Left for a Second Holocaust. Even relatively popular films like Beaufort are filled with anti-Israel bias and propaganda. Bibi Netanyahu is now looking for ways to cut Israel's budget, and ending government subsidies to Israeli films would be one of the most constructive ideas for such savings. Israel's governmental subsidized treason on celluloid is a clear and present danger to the survival of the country! And government spending to subsidize such trash makes the "art" of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe look civilized. 3. One of the more amusing things happening in Israel is the sudden misuse of the word "McCarthyism" by so many idiots. It began when Ben Gurion University professor of politics David Newman published an Op-Ed in the Jerusalem Post insisting that anyone who expressed disapproval of leftist anti-Israel traitors in Israel was in fact guilty of "McCarthyism," and that freedom of speech means people can criticize Israel but they cannot criticize critics of Israel. Newman was joined by Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University (educational psychology) who has long turned out anti-Israel propaganda, and he insists that just because someone wants to see Israel exterminated is no reason to call that person anti-Israel, and that it is McCarthyism to do so. Now the latest fan of the term is the owner of Bank Hapoalim, Sherri Aharonson, and she is bandying it about when she attacks the head of Israel's Central Bank, the Bank of Israel, Prof. Stanley Fischer. Fischer insists that Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank, needs to fire its CEO for gross incompetence, and Aharonson is attacking Fischer viciously, including calling him a "McCarthyist." Now don't get me wrong. There actually IS a lot of McCarthyism in Israel, but it is always leftist McCarthyism coming out of Israel's neo-fascist Left, from people insisting that freedom of speech does not necessarily mean that people may be permitted to disagree with the Far Left. I am probably the country's most famous victim of judicial McCarthyism, although the Supreme Court is expected to make that right this coming fall and declare that freedom of speceh is not something restricted only for traitors. One of Israel's most famous victims of leftist McCarthyism is the young rabbi Israel Shiran, who was fired and persecuted by Israel's Left because he dared to express the opinion that schools should not teach Yitzhak Rabin's political ideology as unchallengeable dogma and theology. (Actually, after 17 years of Oslo disaster, it should be taught as the world's worst example of folly and foolishness.) For his sin of expressing a politically incorrect opinion, the rabbi was fired from his job as a teacher in a religious high school in Haifa. He was fired nine years ago, and has been pursuing his case in the courts. One local rep of the Ministry of Education had ordered that he be reinstated as far back as 2001. But other pointy-headed education bureaucrats vetoed that. The Rabbi then tried a serious of different courts. After a Haifa appeals court found in his favor, while sharply denouncing the Ministry of Education for having fired him in the first place, the school still did not rehire him. Now the parents in the school from which he was fired are suing the school and the Ministry for contempt of court, because they have ignored the court order to reinstate the rabbi-teacher. One of Israel's Supreme Court justices, David Cheshin, expressed astonishment that the parents had to take such action. Meanwhile, the case drags on, the Ministry of Education is still refusing to allow the rabbi to return to work, and freedom of speech in Israel remains the kidnapped bound hostage of Israel's neo-fascist Left. Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist,
a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author
of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and
satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic
community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is
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OBAMA'S GREEN LIGHT TO ATTACK IRAN
Posted by Gadi Eshel, May 9, 2009. |
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This was written by Caroline Glick and it appeared May 7,
2009 in the Jerusalem Post
Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Contact her at caroline@carolineglick.com She tells it as it is. Regardless of the unease it overwhelms one with; in spite of the need to look-the-other-way one has to resort to, we are faced with the new harsh reality. |
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Arctic winds are blowing into Jerusalem from Washington these days. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's May 18 visit to Washington fast approaches, the Obama administration is ratcheting up its anti-Israel rhetoric and working feverishly to force Israel into a corner. Using the annual AIPAC conference as a backdrop, this week the Obama administration launched its harshest onslaught against Israel to date. It began with media reports that National Security Adviser James Jones told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians. According to Haaretz, Jones was quoted in a classified foreign ministry cable as having told his European interlocutor, "The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush." He then explained that the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states must determine together what "a satisfactory endgame solution," will be. As far as Jones is concerned, Israel should be left out of those discussions and simply presented with a fait accompli that it will be compelled to accept. Events this week showed that Jones's statement was an accurate depiction of the administration's policy. First, quartet mediator Tony Blair announced that within six weeks the US, EU, UN and Russia will unveil a new framework for establishing a Palestinian state. Speaking with Palestinian reporters on Wednesday, Blair said that this new framework will be a serious initiative because it "is being worked on at the highest level in the American administration." Moreover, this week we learned that the administration is trying to get the Arabs themselves to write the Quartet's new plan. The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi pan-Arab newspaper reported Tuesday that acting on behalf of Obama, Jordanian King Abdullah urged the Arab League to update the so-called Arab peace plan from 2002. That plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights and accept millions of foreign Arabs as citizens as part of the so-called "right of return" in exchange for "natural" relations with the Arab world, has been rejected by successive Israeli governments as a diplomatic subterfuge whose goal is Israel's destruction. By accepting millions of so-called "Palestinian refugees," Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state. By shrinking into the 1949 armistice lines, Israel would be unable to defend itself against foreign invasion. And since "natural relations" is a meaningless term both in international legal discourse and in diplomatic discourse, Israel would have committed national suicide for nothing. To make the plan less objectionable to Israel, Abdullah reportedly called on his Arab brethren to strike references to the so-called "Arab refugees" from the plan and to agree to "normal" rather than "natural" relations with the Jewish state. According to the report, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was expected to present Obama with the changes to the plan during their meeting in Washington later this month. The revised plan was supposed to form the basis for the new Quartet plan that Blair referred to. But the Arabs would have none of it. On Wednesday, both Arab League General Secretary Amr Moussa and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that they oppose the initiative. On Thursday, Syria rejected making any changes in the document. The administration couldn't care less. The Palestinians and Arabs are no more than bit players in its Middle East policy. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace. To make certain that Israel understands this central point, Vice President Joseph Biden used his appearance at the AIPAC conference to drive it home. As Biden made clear, the US doesn't respect or support Israel's right as a sovereign state to determine its own policies for securing its national interests. In Biden's words, "Israel has to work toward a two-state solution. You're not going to like my saying this, but not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement."
FOR ISRAEL, the main event of the week was supposed to be President Shimon Peres's meeting with Obama on Tuesday. Peres was tasked with calming the waters ahead of Netanyahu's visit. It was hoped that he could introduce a more collegial tone to US-Israel relations. What Israel didn't count on was the humiliating reception Peres received from Obama. By barring all media from covering the event, Obama transformed what was supposed to be a friendly visit with a respected and friendly head of state into a back-door encounter with an unwanted guest, who was shooed in and shooed out of the White House without a sound. The Obama White House's bald attempt to force Israel to take full blame for the Arab world's hostility toward it is not the only way that it is casting Israel as the scapegoat for the region's ills. In their bid to open direct diplomatic ties with Iran, Obama and his advisers are also blaming Israel for Iran's nuclear program. They are doing this both indirectly and directly. As Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel made clear in his closed-door briefing to senior AIPAC officials this week, the administration is holding Israel indirectly responsible for Iran's nuclear program. It does this by claiming that Israel's refusal to cede its land to the Palestinians is making it impossible for the Arab world to support preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Somewhat inconveniently for the administration, the Arabs themselves are rejecting this premise. This week US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Persian Gulf and Egypt to soothe Arab fears that the administration's desperate attempts to appease the mullahs will harm their security interests. He also sought to gain their support for the administration's plan to unveil a new peace plan aimed at isolating and pressuring Israel. After meeting with Gates, Amr Moussa — who has distinguished himself as one of Israel's most trenchant critics — said categorically, "The question of Iran should be separate from the Arab-Israel conflict." Just as the administration is unmoved by objective facts that expose as folly its single-minded devotion to the notion that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East, so the Arab rejection of its view that Israel is to blame for Iran's nuclear program has simply driven it to escalate its attacks on Israel. This week it opened a new campaign of blaming Israel directly — through its purported nuclear arsenal — for Iran's nuclear ambitions. Speaking at a UN forum, US Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said, "Universal adherence to the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea... remains a fundamental objective of the United States." As Eli Lake from The Washington Times demonstrated convincingly, by speaking as she did, Gottemoeller effectively abrogated a 40-year-old US-Israeli understanding that the US would remain silent about Israel's nuclear program because it understood that it was defensive, not offensive in nature. In so doing, Gottemoeller legitimized Iran's claim that it cannot be expected to suspend its quest to acquire nuclear weapons as long as Israel possesses them. She also erased any distinction between nuclear weapons in the hands of US allies and democratic states and nuclear weapons in the hands of US enemies and terror states. The Israeli media are largely framing the story of the US's growing and already unprecedented antagonism toward Israel as a diplomatic challenge for Netanyahu. To meet this challenge, it is argued that Netanyahu must come to Washington in 10 days' time with an attractive peace plan that will win over the White House. But this is a false interpretation of what is happening. Even Ethan Bronner of the The New York Times pointed out this week that Obama's Middle East policy is not based on facts. If it were, the so-called "two state solution," which has failed repeatedly since 1993, would not be its centerpiece. Obama's Middle East policy is based on ideology, not reality. Consequently, it is immune to rational argument. The fact that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, all chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab world will disappear, is of no interest to Obama and his advisers. They do not care that the day after Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashaal told The New York Times that Hamas was suspending its attacks against Israel from Gaza, the Iranian-controlled terror regime took credit for several volleys of rockets shot against Israeli civilian targets from Gaza. The administration stills intends to give Gaza $900 million in US taxpayer funds, and it still demands that Israel give its land to a joint Fatah-Hamas government.
REGARDLESS OF the weight of Netanyahu's arguments, and irrespective of the reasonableness of whatever diplomatic initiative he presents to Obama, he can expect no sympathy or support from the White House. As a consequence, the operational significance of the administration's anti-Israel positions is that Israel will not be well served by adopting a more accommodating posture toward the Palestinians and Iran. Indeed, perversely, what the Obama administration's treatment of Israel should be making clear to the Netanyahu government is that Israel should no longer take Washington's views into account as it makes its decisions about how to advance Israel's national security interests. This is particularly true with regard to Iran's nuclear weapons program. Rationally speaking, the only way the Obama administration could reasonably expect to deter Israel from attacking Iran's nuclear installations would be if it could make the cost for Israel of attacking higher than the cost for Israel of not attacking. But what the behavior of the Obama administration is demonstrating is that there is no significant difference in the costs of the two options. By blaming Israel for the absence of peace in the Middle East while ignoring the Palestinians' refusal to accept Israel's right to exist; by seeking to build an international coalition with Europe and the Arabs against Israel while glossing over the fact that at least the Arabs share Israel's concerns about Iran; by exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal and pressuring Israel to disarm while in the meantime courting the ayatollahs like an overeager bridegroom, the Obama administration is telling Israel that regardless of what it does, and what objective reality is, as far as the White House is concerned, Israel is to blame. This, of course, doesn't mean that Netanyahu shouldn't make his case to Obama when they meet and to the American people during his US visit. What it does mean is that Netanyahu should have no expectation that Israeli goodwill can divert Obama from the course he has chosen. And again, this tells us two things: Israel's relations with the US during Obama's tenure in office will be unpleasant and difficult, and the damage that Israel will cause to that relationship by preventing Iran from acquiring the means to destroy it will be negligible. Contact Gadi Eshel by email at gadi.eshel@ptk.co.il |
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PULLING COTTON
Posted by Fred Reifenberg, May 9, 2009. |
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Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il
Go to
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HAMAS SAYS `KILL NEXT WEEK'; MEDIA PERCEIVES MODERATION
Posted by Barry Rubin, May 8, 2009. |
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Nothing is funnier than when someone wants to avoid an obvious conclusion.
Following up on rewriting the clearly extremist words of Iran's leader on the basis of wishful thinking and reinterpreting the equally extremist words of Syria's leader based on wishful thinking, it is now Hamas's turn. Right after giving op-ed space to the shadowy Alistair Cooke — whose group even dared to publish on the Internet its plan to fool the West into thinking that radial Islamism was no threat — the New York Times has an interview with newly reelected Hamas leader Khalid Mashal on May 4. What wisdom does he and the interviewer have for us? First this in the avoiding obvious conclusions' department: "In April, only six rockets and mortar rounds were fired at Israel from Gaza, which is run by Hamas, a marked change from the previous three months, when dozens were shot, according to the Israeli military....Mr. Mashal made an effort to show that Hamas was in control of its militants as well as those of other groups, saying, `Not firing the rockets currently is part of an evaluation from the movement which serves the Palestinians' interest.'" Note that the reporters, Taghreed el-Khodary and Ethan Bronner, interpreted this as showing Hamas deserved praise for its restraint and respect for its ability to control its militants and others. Here's my interpretation: Hamas got badly beaten up by Israel during the December-January fighting and wants a break. As soon as it rebuilds, though, it will start attacking again. (See below for more on this point). The Times interpretation: Hamas works. My interpretation: Force works, up to a point. This idea — so basic in international affairs — is impermissible under current thinking for which only concessions (mine and yours) can solve problems But there's much more here. Note how the interviewers define the war: "In late December, Israel began a three-week invasion of Gaza, saying that it sought to stop the rockets, which land on its southern communities. About 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the invasion." While nominally balanced — Israel is responding to rocket attacks — these two sentences are both misleading and slanted. Most obviously, the mention of Palestinian casualties tells readers that the poor Palestinians suffered a lot and that they aren't much of a military threat to Israel. The article isn't extreme — the word "civilian" isn't thrown in — but Israeli civilian and military casualties aren't mentioned, nor is the fact that most of the Palestinians killed soldiers (or militants or terrorists) and that the casualties were higher because Hamas hid behind Palestinian civilians and used getting its own people killed as a strategy. Equally unmentioned is the fact that Israel didn't want the war but it began not just because of rockets being fired — Israel generally ignored that for months — but that Hamas openly ended the ceasefire and began firing a lot more rockets. In effect, Hamas declared war and Israel defended itself. But my main point here is not that Israel was acting in self-defense — though that's important — but that Hamas started a war when it wanted to do so, and it will start another war when it's ready to do so. Don't take my word for it. Listen to what Mashal himself said in the interview: "Not firing the rockets currently is part of an evaluation from the movement which serves the Palestinians' interest. After all, the firing is a method, not a goal. Resistance is a legitimate right, but practicing such a right comes under an evaluation by the movement's leaders." What's he saying? We have to eliminate this Israel-Egypt blockade and international sanctions so we can not only fix up our economy but also get more military equipment to get ready for the next round. (By the way, the phrases he uses here are very parallel to those employed by the "moderate" (well, it is more moderate but I get sick of this being exaggerated) Fatah. Firing, he says, is a method, not a goal. And what is the goal? Wiping Israel off the map. Resistance is legitimate, he says, but the leaders have to decide precisely how to do it. In other words, shooting at Israel is not useful for us right now so let's rearm, indoctrinate Gaza's young people into being suicide bombers and terrorists (or militants, if you prefer that word), and we will attack again when the movement's leaders decide that suits our interests. Is it really so hard to see this? Mashal isn't trying all that hard to conceal his views, ideology, and strategy. In part, that's because he thinks the people he's trying to fool are really stupid. In part, it's because he will have to defend anything he says to his colleagues. In part, too, it is because he is a real true believer (called fanatics in a less enlightened age). Finally,in this interview Mashal made this statement professing his moderation: "I promise the American administration and the international community that we will be part of the solution, period." Unfortunately, the solution he was referring to was Hamas's final solution for the Jews and Israel. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and co-author of "Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography" and "Hating America: A History" (Oxford University Press). His latest book is The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). Prof. Rubin's columns can now be read online at http://gloria.idc.ac.il/columns/column.html. Contact him at profbarryrubin@yahoo.com |
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JUST SAY NO
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 8, 2009. |
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This was written by Yoel Meltzer and it appeared in Arutz-7 (www.IsraelNationalNews.com). |
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(IsraelNN.com) With the American leadership intensifying its demand that Israel accept the "two-state solution", the slogan "just say no" — used by former first lady Nancy Reagan as part of the 1980s campaign against adolescent drug abuse — keeps popping into my head. Although perhaps overly simplistic, many argue that her words went a long way in raising awareness of the problem. At this time, our present leadership would do well to adopt the same slogan. Thus, the next time the Americans demand that Israel accept the two-state solution, just say "no". Don't ignore their demands, don't try to evade answering them and don't state conditions for eventually accepting their demands; rather, just say "no". Kindly explain to them that, although we understand the difficulties America is currently facing, as well as its need to appease various leaders in our region as a prelude to dealing with its own problems, nonetheless a two-state solution is not in Israel's best interest. Surely America, which like any sovereign state worries first and foremost about what is in its best interest, can appreciate another sovereign state doing the same. Kindly remind the Americans that after removing our soldiers from Lebanon, missiles eventually fell in Haifa. Then, just a few years later, after dismantling thriving Jewish communities in Gaza and removing every last citizen, missiles eventually landed in Beersheva. Moreover, please explain to them that it is nearly 100% certain that a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria will eventually bring missiles to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Equally important, make it clear to them that this is a prediction based upon Middle Eastern reality, and not some sort of "scare tactic" or "right-wing analysis". In addition, please remind them that suicide, in any shape or size, is forbidden in Judaism. Therefore, national suicide, which will be the result of a two-state solution, is clearly forbidden. True, such an Israeli position would complicate America's regional plans. However, if firmly stated by our leadership, most Americans would probably respect it. Even more importantly, it would certainly gain the overwhelming support of the Jewish population in this country. After years of spiritless leadership, the average Israeli Jew longs to see the day when our leaders will stand up and proudly tell the world what is good for the Jewish state, rather than continuing with unabashed adherence to the dangerous demands that are imposed upon us. Such an approach, which is commonly dubbed "unrealistic" or "extremist" by various segments of the ruling establishment, is anything but that. In fact, it is the normative approach of any healthy self-respecting Jew. Moreover, it has nothing to do with confrontation; rather, it is all about higher principles such as truth, righteousness and justice. The real problem is not America, but our leadership. For nearly 20 years it has avoided taking any stand against American "peace demands", no matter how detrimental to the State of Israel these demands might be. Unfortunately, this is not a surprise. To a leadership that, for the most part, is not a faith-based leadership, taking such a stand is probably terrifying, if not impossible. Nonetheless, the time has come. Either our leaders finally overcome themselves and take a stand, thereby averting a national disaster, or they will, heaven forbid, bring destruction upon us all. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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THE TRUTH ABOUT DURBAN II; ALISTAIR CROOKE, MI6 AND THE HATRED OF THE WEST
Posted by Seth J. Frantzman, May 7, 2009. |
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May 7th, 2009 1) The truth about Durban II: People complain that the U.N anti-racism conference called Durban II was 'hijacked' by third world countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Third world countries and their antics are merely playing within the rules, lies and rhetoric set up by the people who created the U.N. The entire day of an 'anti-racism' conference is a Western notion. The fact that the conference was in itself racist is no surprise, western 'peace' and 'human rights' movements have for many years championed genocide and called it 'peace' and championed terrorism and called it 'human rights'. From Pol Pot to Ahmadinjed and Castro and Chavez, all the third world leaders merely learned well from the West how to exploit its rhetoric and were widely supported by leftist wealthy intellectual collaborators. Reasonable people are aware of the travesty of the UN anti-racism conference entitled Durban II that took place in Geneva recently. The appearance of the nationalist holocaust denier Mahmud Ahmadinjed overshadowed the event, making a conference that was anti-racism actually a racist conference. People condemn the UN. People condemn Ahmadinjed and some condemn the Muslim and third world countries that are accused of 'hijacking' the organization and 'distorting' the meaning of human rights. But those who condemn it are wrong. They are wrong not because they condemn the ridiculousness of it all but because they don't understand what underpins the entire process and rhetoric. Human rights is an invention of the West. Freedom of Speech is an invention of the West. Racism and anti-racism are ideas invented in the West. Xenophobia and protesting against it are inventions of the West. All of the ideas and dialogue and conventions and panels that underpin everything that happened at the conference is part of the West. The "unacceptable behavior" that resulted in the banning of Jewish groups from the conference is part and parcel of the West. On both sides it is Western. The outburst of the protesters and the idea that there is some sort of 'acceptable behaviour'. Who do you think wrote the rules for that behavior, the people in the Third World who barely know how to behave? No. It was people from the West who wrote up the rules about what 'behavoir' was acceptable. The entire idea of having an 'anti-racism conference' is a Western
idea. The idea of conferences is Western. The idea of a United Nations
is western. The entire idea of 'peace' and 'world peace' are Western.
No other tradition understands or recognizes these ridiculous ideas.
People have complained that the conference only focused on Israel as a
violator of human rights and that the fact that Iran and Libya chaired
the committee setting up the conference is a 'hypocrisy'. But such
hypocrisy was all built into the UN when it was created after World
War Two. The entire idea that some giant ungainly bureaucracy could
provide 'collective security' is a myth of the West. No other region
of the world has such as ridiculous organization, except perhaps the
Organization of African States, whose creation was also envisioned by
Western do-gooders.
PEOPLE WONDER 'WHY DOESN'T THE CONFERENCE NOTE RACISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES LIKE IRAN?' What do people expect. The idea of racism is western and it was brought to these other countries by western whites. These Western whites told the natives that "the white man is racist against you." This is the narrative that these people learned. When tribes in Rwanda massacred and genocided eachother they didn't see it as racism. People in Iran cannot imagine that the hatred and discrimination against black Iranians in south Iran is 'racist' because such a concept does not exist. There cannot be racism in countries outside the West because these people, even when they are all obviously racist, cannot understand the idea. Even when the Turks were busy raping and murdering all the Armenians, or when Palestinians call Jews dogs and blow themselves up or when Arabs in Sudan call the blacks "Kaffir" there is no idea that this is racism. This is entirely the fault of the West which communicated to these people the liberal idea of 'anti-colonialism'. The fact is obvious. Whether it is white Mexican woman, descendants of Spaniards who deride Indians as 'dirty savages' complaining that she suffers racism as a 'hispanic' or it is white Iranians in an Iranian film trying to 'wash the black off' a black child from southern Iran or it is a Palestinian claiming that the fact that no white Arab will marry a descendant of slaves living in Rahat in Israel is not slavery we live in a world of the lie of racism, the western leftist colonization of our mind by the concept of racism and the forcing of the whole world to believe in a twisted concept of racism. Durban II represents everything that underpins the West and its leftists; weakness, soft racism, bureaucracy, hate, extremism, hate disguised as 'justice', and appeasement. The genious of the West in creating the committees and processes and rules underpinning Durban II is that the West was able to export the extreme dictatorial ways of extremist hate regimes that are racist to the center of Europe to continue their dictatorial ways. In a ridiculous place that claims to believe in free speech, inside the UN chamber there was no free speech. There was the speech of Amadinjed and their was Libya chairing a session in which a doctor who tried to mention Libyan tortures of him, based solely on the fact that he was a foreigner. During the session the doctor was silenced and ordered to leave. Only Europe. Only the West and all it represents could create something like this where the dictatorship that is Libya could be transported to an international gathering so it would be allowed to dictate the entire gathering, not just in its own country. People shouldn't be shocked by Durban II. They should look into their own souls. The Third World didn't 'hijack' Durban II, it just played by the rules set down by the idealist Western leftists who created the UN in the first place. The West and Franz Fannon and Albert Memmi were the ones that wrote 'Wretched of the Nations' and 'Colonizer and the Colonized'. They communicated the message "you are colonized, you are victims, you suffer racism." The people thus received a blank check to engage in whatever evil they wanted in the name of opposing these things. They butchered, murdered, genocided, ethnically-cleansed and slaughtered and all in the name of the Western ideal of 'justice' and 'anti-colonialism' and 'anti-racism' and 'peace'. Albeit the savage behavior of these people palled in comparison to the West's own Nazism and their savage behavior had existed before Fannon and Memmi. What happened is that their actions, of cruel murder and terrorism and genocided simply received an excuse in Western terms. When these people slaughtered eachother it was understood in the 'context of colonialism'. There could'nt be racism between 'Third World Peoples'. No. Racism only exists from the 'powerful' against the 'weak' and from 'white' to 'black'. That is why Durban II could never condemn the Sudanese Genocide as a racial conflict because there can't be racism among 'native peoples' or 'between Muslims'. The West created these myths of the 'tolerant east' and 'tolerant multi-racial Islam'.
TO DESTROY DURBAN II AND ITS 'HIJACKING' ONE NEED ONLY DESTROY THE LIBERALISTIC UNDERPINNING OF THE WEST. Remember the fall of South Africa. Remember what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated? "Racism arrived in South Africa in 1652 with the arrival of the first colonizers." That myth of a 'non-racist' indigenous wonderful noble savage utopia being invaded by 'white racists' is part and parcel of the entire Western liberal narrative that underpins everything the collective Western peace-minded justice types believe in. Africans didn't understand in the 17th century that these few hundred Dutch immigrants with their stone church building and boats were 'white racists'. They understood they were different. They were busy fighting one another. When the Zulus systematically destroyed neighbouring tribes and smaller Zulu tribes that would not submit to Shaka those people being destroyed looked to the 'racist whites' for protection and guns. But the neatly crafted 'narrative' of whiteness and blackness was created in 1988 by Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing who claimed that the Mfecane or 'crushing period' when the Zulus scattered tribes all across Southern Africa, was actually an Apartheid conspiracy. How could something that happened in the 1820s be a conspiracy of something from the 1960s? It turned out the Apartheid historians exaggerated the crushing in order to create a myth of black on black violence. Cobbing 'proved' that European slave traders forced the Zulu to engage in the destruction of neighbouring tribes, to what end or why is not clear, since there were few slavers operating in the area at the time nor did the Zulus sell their victims to Europeans. No matter. It reminds one of the riots against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa in May of 2008. This was black on black of course. But what was the reason? Reporters and commentators noted that it was the 'legacy of apartheid'. This is liberalism at its best. The Mfecane of 1820 can be said to be an 'apartheid conspiracy' even though descriptions of it are proudly related even in Zulu history from the period. The slaughter of Zimbabwe immigrants by machete wielding Zulus and Xhosas in 2008 can be said to be because of Apartheid, no matter that Apartheid ended 14 years ago and the 20 year olds engaging in the riots have no memory of it. That is Durban II. It is the creation of a liberal myth, a myth of race and racism and anti-racism. Then people wonder "why doesn't Durban II find any racism in the world except in Israel?" Because that is what liberalism and white people told people in the Third World to find. Europe told them to find racism only in Israel. Europeans told them that there is only one racist country. No matter how many Arabs are crammed into tenaments in Paris, no matter how many blacks in Iran have their skin washed to 'get the black out', no matter how many 'kaffirs' die in Sudan, no matter how many Philipinos are beheaded in Saudi or how many Ethiopians are kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the UAE, no matter how many Han and Hui Chinese are attacked by Tibetans angry at their settlement in Lhasa by the government, no matter how many murders and rapes and slaves are sold in their world and how many people slaughter and genocide and murder eachother, there will never be any racism or xenophobia or 'related intolerance' outside of what liberalism has created. Liberalism created, for instance, "islamophobia" as the newest bogey-man that we all have to be worried about. The new racism of the 21st century is "islamophobia". Don't blame these people at Durban II for their extraordinary racist and hateful and extremist behavior. The venue was given to it by Europeans. The money for it came from America and other wealthy countries. It is run 'demcoratically' so that means that it is run by Muslim countries since there are more of them and Liberalism gives it its talking points and rhetoric. Every single value found at Durban II, even some of the words and rhetoric of Ahmadnjed, were crafted and learned in the West. To destroy Durban III the entire underpinnings of the West and its 'anti-racism' and 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'peace' and 'collective security' and 'talking rather than fighting' and 'conferences' must be undone. The entire of infrastructure of the UN must be undone. Until that is done don't expect Muslim nations to continue to use the tool as Muslims know how to do, to promote their nationalistic religious beliefs. They are only being themselves and playing by the rules of the West and Fannon and Memmi. They didn't 'hijack' the UN, the UN should never have been allowed to grow into its present form. 2) Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West: May 4, 2009 Alastair Crooke, 30-year veteran of MI6 has authored a new book that brings Islamism to the West and argues that is merely resisting capitalism. Crooke is merely the latest in a century long string of members of the British elite and veterans of the secret service who have come to hate the West. From Harry St. John Philby to his son Kim a line runs directly to Crooke. It is not easy to find information on Alistair Crooke, not to be confused by Alistair Cooke, a well known journalist who died in 2004. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), studied in Switzerland and at St. Andrew's in Scotland and received a degree in Economics. What is known is that he worked for MI6, the U.K's secret intelligence service for more than 30 years. As an agent in the 1980s he worked in Pakistan, running guns to the Mujahadin fighting the Soviets. He was thus part of Charlie Wilson's 'war' in which the U.S government helped fund Islamism's war against Communism. According to one biography he then became a "security advisor to Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative and Head of Foreign and Security Policy. He played a role in the negotiations to end the Siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 and helped facilitate the Palestinian cease-fires of 2002 and 2003. He also was a staff member of the Mitchell Committee that enquired into the causes of the Intifada." It is not clear when he left MI6, or if he ever left, but it is clear that the British government ended all official employment contracts with him in 2003 in response to fears that he had become completely partial to Islamism. Now this confidant of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas, Yasser Arafat and Nasrallah, lives in Beirut and has penned a book entitled Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. In this tome he argues that Islamism is merely "resisting" the West's "market-based definition of the individual and society." He has gone one step further than merely writing a book to bring the ideas of Islamism to the West, he has started a 'Conflicts Forum' in 2004 in Beirut. The Forum supposedly includes "former spies, diplomats and peace activists." Mark Perry, a military intelligence and foreign affairs analyst, is the co-director of the forum. Crooke has made it his mission to spread the bible of Islamism in a language the West can understand. He wants to "valorize what they are saying." He also wants to challenge "western misconceptions." For Crooke the West's values are no longer interesting but Islam is being revived and is "in the ascendant." In addition the Economist's review of his book accuses him of "1960s campus radicalism" and that he believes "the force used by Islamist movements is to be understood as an act of spiritual, cultural and social resistance." Crooke believes that Hezbollah's television station, Al-Manar is part of a "resistance media." Crooke's hatred of the West is merely the latest manifestation of self-hatred of some British elites who have worked in British intelligence in the Middle East. Harry St. John Philby was the first. A radical socialist he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907. Like Crooke he was not born in the U.K but rather in Sri Lanka and educated at Trinity College at Cambridge. He became an adherent and follower of the Saudi warlord Ibn Saud and Wahhabism and helped provide advice on the best way for this radical Arab family to take over what is now Saudi Arabia. He opposed British entry into the Second World War. He became a dutiful ally of Arab nationalism as well, supporting Nasser against his own country and making anti-Semitic statements. But it was his son Kim Philby and the 'Cambridge Five', along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. After working for MI6 and becoming a double agent for the Soviets he ended up in Beirut like Crooke. In Beirut he was unmasked for a second time (the first time prominent people had defended his good name) as a Soviet agent. But during the same time he became an adherent of Arab nationalism and wrote biased articles for the Economist as their correspondent. When he was finally whisked away to the Communist utopia he had so loved it didn't turn out as he expected. He became an alcoholic and the Communists gave him little honour. The other Cambridge Five didn't have life as expected in the USSR either. One died of alcoholism and the other's wife left him. The utopia was not as expected. One who had enjoyed the freedom of being an open homosexual in upper class British society found that Socialism in action didn't cater to his sexual orientation as he had expected. The modern self-hatred of Alistair Crooke and his career for MI6 should not be such a surprise. His loyalty to Islamism mirrors the former loyalties of the Cambridge Five to Communism and Harry St. John Philby's earlier loyalty to Wahhabism and Arab nationalism. Why does MI6 produce so many people with such a virulent hatred for the West? It is not clear but whatever the problem it is clear that hatred for the West has a long and gloried tradition among certain sectors of the British intelligence community and their prestigious pedigrees. This stretches back to Sir Oswald Mosley's Nazi-sympathizing right down to the present. Seth J. Frantzman is a graduate student in Islamic and Middle Eastern
Studies, living in Jerusalem. Contact him at sfrantzman@hotmail.com
and visit his website:
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THE INSIDIOUS INFLUENCE OF MORAL RELATIVISM
Posted by Shaul Ceder, May 7, 2009. |
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This was written by Professor Paul Eidelberg, an internationally known political scientist, author and lecturer. He is the founder and president of The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, a Jerusalem-based think tank for improving Israel's system of governance. He has written on the Arab-Israel conflict and on Judaism. Contact him at list-owner@foundation1.org |
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The thesis of Michael B. Oren's much heralded book, Six Days of War (Ballantine, 2002), is that neither the Egyptians nor the Israelis wanted the conflict. This thesis is biased by Oren's professed moral neutrality. He writes: "My purpose is not to prove the justness of one party or another in the war, or to assign culpability for starting it" (p, xv). Contrast Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism (Yale University Press, 2006), who cites evidence indicating that Nasser did indeed initiate the war, as the closing of the Straits of Tiran, a casus belli, clearly indicates. In fact, Oren himself quotes Egyptian President Abdel Nasser: "We knew that closing the Gulf of Aqaba meant war with Israel" (p. 91). Oren also refers to Egypt's on-going war plans, confirmed by of Egyptian Field Marshall 'Amer, who confided to Gen. Murtagi: "This time we will be the ones to start the war" (p. 92). ('Amer had in mind the Israeli-British-French Sinai Campaign of 1956.) Moreover, writes Oren: "The families of Egyptian officers were evacuated from Gaza while scores of civilian managers, engineers, and even doctors were transferred there in preparation for [our] occupying the Negev" (97). Oren quotes Amin Tantawi, a 4th division company commander: "I was fully confident of victory... I believe the day of liberation had arrived and that we would attack first and destroy Israel ... (p. 97). Probing more deeply (and objectively) than historian Michael Oren, Professor Karsh writes: "Nasser's belief in Egypt's ability to absorb an Israeli strike and still win the war was widely shared by the Egyptian military ..." (p. 163). Nasser wanted Israel to preempt so that Israel would stand condemned by the international community. Consider again Michael Oren's approach to the Six-Day War: "My purpose is not to prove the justness of one party or another in the war, or to assign culpability for starting it." Would he say this in writing an "objective" account of the war between Israel and Hamas, or between the United States and Japan, or between England and Nazi Germany? Oren's moral obscurantism — rooted, in moral or cultural relativism — is pandemic in the democratic world, which has succumbed to moral inversion. Notice how Israel is condemned for its Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Israeli political scientist Yair Evron is another moral relativist. In his book The Middle East, Evron writes: "Only by avoiding questions of right and wrong and also by limiting oneself to an analysis of patterns of behavior and strategies in conflict, can we approach this complex [Arab-Israel] conflict not in any emotional or apologetic way but scientifically and analytically." As I have elsewhere shown, the late Professor Y. Harkabi, a former head of Israel military Intelligence as well as an erstwhile head of the Command and Staff College, was a relativist. Despite all the lurid evidence he himself documents in Arab Attitude to Israel — evidence that would lead any person of common sense — to oppose a Palestinian state, Harkabi nonetheless advocated the idea and its expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria — as does Israel's appointed ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren! Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il |
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FROM ISRAEL: PUSHING ALONG
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 7, 2009. |
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After meeting with Quartet envoy Tony Blair, PM Netanyahu today announced a ministerial committee to work on improving the economic situation and the quality of life for the Palestinians. Members include Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Minister Silvan Shalom; Netanyahu himself will chair the committee. Shalom has been asked to begin with economic projects in Jenin and Jericho. Also, at the Qasr al-Yehud baptismal site, which is on the Jordan River, near Jericho, although I haven't a remote clue as to what sort of economic project would be initiated at a baptismal site. The release about this emphasizes that the projects are in line with the economic track to peace that Netanyahu had announced earlier. May be. But I would describe this as the do-something-for-the-Palestinians-to-show-good intentions announcement that is traditionally a precursor to high level meetings between our officials and US officials. ~~~~~~~~~~ Also announced was outreach by Netanyahu to Egyptian president Mubarak. Eager to stress Egypt's diplomatic importance, Netanyahu will be traveling to Sharm el Sheikh on Monday for a meeting. This will be his first trip abroad since assuming office. Netanyahu wants to see greater involvement by the "moderate" states — Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — in what is alluded to as "the peace process" — whatever that entails at present — which would be approached at a regional level. (Note: while Jordan and Egypt have peace treaties with Israel, Saudi Arabia is technically still at war with us.) ~~~~~~~~~~ Just as important, if not more so, in Netanyahu's meeting with Mubarak is seeking Egyptian cooperation in thwarting Iran's nuclear goals. Egypt is not a nation to be trusted, nor one that has ever exhibited good will towards Israel. But Sunni Egypt fears and hates Shiite Iran and will find a measure of common cause with Israel here. Of some concern, however, have been recent statements by Mubarak regarding the dangers of Israel as a nuclear power. (Mubarak's position is that the Middle East would be safer nuclear-free.) ~~~~~~~~~~ Word had come in the last few days — from anonymous Arab diplomatic sources — that the Obama administration had requested of the Arab League that the Arab (Saudi) peace plan be adjusted in order to be more palatable to Israel. The Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper on Tuesday then indicated the Arabs were considering concessions, most specifically with regard to withdrawing the demand for the return of refugees and permitting UN control of the Old City of Jerusalem, where holy sites are situated. But there has now been a rejection of the request in several quarters: "It is not possible to amend the Arab peace initiative. ... I don't see any justification for amending this initiative," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem told a press conference. Similarly, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa has voiced his rejection. And the PA news agency Maan has quoted PA president Mahmoud Abbas as saying that there will be "no new document," as all sides were in agreement regarding the soundness of the current proposal. ~~~~~~~~~~ At the same time, it has been announced that Abbas will be asking prime minister Salem Fayyad to begin formation of a new government without inclusion of Hamas. He's tired of waiting on failed negotiations; he will attend one more meeting on May 16, where he expects nothing will be achieved. ~~~~~~~~~~ And where does this leave Barack Obama and his grand plans to push ahead peace between Israel and the Palestinians? It is clear that the Arabs are adamant — as is their wont — that there will be no compromise on right of return or control of all eastern Jerusalem. And if there is no unity government, he's stuck with the problem of what happens with Hamas and Gaza. One might hope that this dose of reality might set him back a bit, give him just a little pause, inject a note of humility into his assumption that he can succeed here. But that would be silly. He is Barack Obama. He is the president. And he is going to go ahead with his new plan. ~~~~~~~~~~ In fact, not only is he going full steam ahead on this front, he is also pushing for us to negotiate with Syria. Jeffrey Feltman, the State Department's top Middle East envoy, and White House official Daniel Shapiro have gone to Damascus as part of the Obama plan to reach out to nations shunned by President Bush. "We came here today as part of President Obama's commitment to use diplomacy, to use dialogue in order to try to see where we can move forward," said Feltman. After a meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, Feltman indicated that he had conveyed "President Obama's sincere commitment to pursue Arab-Israeli peace on all tracks including on the Syria-Israel track." ~~~~~~~~~~ Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has been tasked with overseeing "strategic dialogue" with the US. I'll have more definitive information on this in due course. Additionally, he will be heading a ministerial committee to lead the Israeli struggle against lawsuits filed around the world against Israelis — public figures, ministers, military and defense officials — their goal being to foil these actions. In a spate of highly politicized and deeply anti-Israel maneuvers, various parties are abusing universal jurisdiction laws that permit charges to be brought in courts in one country against parties in another, even if the country in which the charges are brought has nothing to do with the issue. The committee will include Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman, Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional Development Silvan Shalom, Welfare and Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog, Minister of Information and Diaspora Yuli Edelstein and Minister Yossi Peled. They will call upon the services of experts in international law, PR, and more. This is a serious matter — just one more attempt to delegitimize and weaken Israel, and I applaud the seriousness with which the new government is approaching this. The first issue to be addressed will be the reopening in Spanish court of the matter of the 2002 assassination of Hamas official Salah Shehadeh. ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" The news is so often grim, I've decided to make an effort to also share good news (largely non-political) with my readers from time to time. — Research by geneticist Prof. Karen Avraham of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine and Dr. Lilach Friedman and other post-doctoral researchers in her lab, has brought about a discovery that may lead to a cure for deafness, whether caused by genetics, disease, aging, or drugs. Single-stranded RNA molecules, called MicroRNAs, regulate gene expression in cells and decide whether proteins will be produced. The research team has discovered for the first time that these molecules are vital to the development and survival of hair cells in the inner ear necessary for normal hearing. Healthy babies are born with 15,000 sensory hair cells in each ear, which are responsible for translating sounds to electrical pulses. When these cells die off hearing disability results. Avraham believes that scientists now need to figure out how MicroRNAs regulate hair cell growth. — Scientists at the Weizmann Institute have been researching the nature of sea urchin teeth. While these animals dig themselves holes for shelter in underwater limestone, the sharp edge of their teeth never grows dull or blunt. Their teeth in the main are composed of the same calcite as the limestone, but they also contain crystals of magnesium calcite that are harder. What is more, all the crystalline elements are aligned in two different arrays that are interlocked like the fingers of folded hands, just at the tip of the tooth. It is believed that this interlocking results in a notched, serrated ridge — like that of a carpenter's file — that is self-sharpening. As the tooth is ground down, the crystalline layers break in such a way that the ridge always stays serrated. It is hoped that the information being explored will lead to the development of ever-sharp tools and mechanical parts that do not go blunt. — A new archeological garden has been opened outside the Knesset, on display are some artifacts that are 2,000 years old. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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SOME UNJEWISH ORGANIZATIONS THAT PURPORT TO SPEAK FOR THE JEWS. THEY DON'T
Posted by Yaaqov Ben-Yehudah, May 7, 2009. |
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"AIPAC Delegates To Lobby for Two-State Solution"
While Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to explicitly endorse a two-state solution to resolve the Palestinian conflict, participants at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference will this week be urging their elected representatives to press President Barack Obama for precisely that.... ...In this year's lobbying effort, to take place on Tuesday, the AIPAC thousands will be asking their congressmen to sign on to a letter addressed to Obama that explicitly posits the need for a "viable Palestinian state." Vice-President Joe Biden encouraged the acceptance of a two-state solution. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich "blasted the Obama administration for setting itself on a collision course with Israel and endangering the Jewish state." However, he also "added that creating prosperity among Palestinians was important, and that the US should be helping their leaders grow their society and crowd out Hamas." Why? So, they will be strong enough to build a state? Sorry, guys, but we "Jews" already beat you to it. Two thousand years in galuth (the diaspora) has trained us, all too well, in the art of co-dependence and self-destruction. OTHER "JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS" which require a name correction include...
ADL: "Anti-Defamation of Islamic Terrorism League" "The ADL strongly condemns Geert Wilders' message of hate against Islam as inflammatory, divisive and antithetical to American democratic ideals." rhetoric is dangerous and incendiary, and wrongly focuses on Islam as a religion, as opposed to the very real threat of extremist, radical Islamists." Mr. Andrew Rosenkranz
(Tip credit: Nurit Greenger, Los Angeles; In addition, Debbie
Schlussel has been exposing various ADL shenanigans.)
See below.
"The Israel Project is a new national non-profit, non-partisan educational organization devoted to ensuring an accurate portrayal of Israel — a democracy where all citizens have freedom of speech, press, religion and a right to vote" (except for Torah-observant Jews). The Israel Project was founded by three American mothers who were (way too) concerned (and culturally co-dependent) that Israel's image in the media could cause an increase in anti-Semitism at home and abroad. (In other words, be worried about what the goyim think of Israel, than what we think of ourselves.) According To Halachah (Jewish Law), non-Jews have severe limitations on their rights to reside in Israel, and have NO right to vote, let alone to rule over Jews, even on local councils or in the IDF. Israel does NOT have freedom of speech for those dissenting with government opinion, to which The Israel Project aligns itself, whether just or unjust. Leftists may do whatever they want in Israel, including entering Hevron and other parts of Yehudah and Shomron (Judea and Samaria) to incite the Arabs to riot and destroy agriculture projects and property. Furthermore, The Israel Project supports the inclusion of non-Torah-based "Jewish" groups and "clergy" in Israeli society, a further watering down of the Torah-based society in which Jews are obligated to live, leading to the even destruction of everything identifiably Jewish. Aren't you proud to be an American Jew? Organizations like these used to make me cower in shame. But then I realized something. Most of their members may be Jewish, but the organizations and certainly their ideas are not. Does that sound too harsh to you? Think about it some more, and you'll realize why I call them
American un-Jewish organizations.
Contact Yaaqov Ben-Yehudah by email at
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OBAMA'S PLAN TO DESTROY ISRAEL
Posted by Sultan Knish, May 7, 2009. |
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If there's one thing that the Carter Administration can be given credit for, it's creating the new wave of Islamist terrorism, both Sunni, operating out of Afghanistan, and Shiite, operating out of Iran. The Carter Administration cracked down on Israel and put its "faith" in Muslim terrorists, who then went on to wage war on America, even while Carter was in office. 
28 years after Carter was removed from office, we're in reruns again with the Obama Administration, which is not only following the Carter line, but whose plans greatly exceed it. 28 years ago, Wahhabi Sunni and Shiite terrorists were generally an afterthought when compared to the standard USSR backed Marxist terrorist groups, such as the PLO. Today, thanks in part to the Carter Administration, they control several countries and have designs on several more. From Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Gaza to Lebanon, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the threat is very real and bigger than ever particularly as the race by both Sunni and Shiite groups to build and deploy nuclear weapons continues. Like Carter before him, Obama has chosen to cut backdoor deals with the Mullahs in Iran, offering them power over Iraq and Afghanistan, in exchange for quieting things down enough to let him hang up a Mission Accomplished banner and pull the troops out. "Peace with honor", preferably before the next election. The rape law for Shiites in Afghanistan, the push for a US funded Hamas/Fatah Unity government in the territories and the rising expansion of the Taliban are all fruits of this arrangement. If Iran is to be our new best friend under this arrangement, Israel is to be our new best enemy. Obama stacked the deck by deploying Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in a position that gave her an important title, but absolutely no power to go with it, while stacking the National Security Council and even the Pentagon with oil appointees in the pockets of the Saudis or his own left wing radical friends. Israel electing a conservative government really put the ball into play, freeing up even more resources for attacking Israel. The strategy runs something like this. The Obama Administration has broken down the Israel problem into two subsections, Israel itself, and American Jews. Obama's people have studied the problem and understand where Carter went wrong. Obama does not want to have the same image problems as Carter in the Jewish community. Should that happen, the Beloved Leader and his lapdog press are fully prepared to unleash a Chavez style hate-on targeting American Jews. But that would be inconvenient and messy. Even with the changing face of America, there are significant differences between the average American and European or Venezuelan, and what kind of ugliness they are willing to tolerate. So Obama's people have split their attention in handling the two factors as two different problems. 
American Jews — Obama has been clever about putting his Jewish appointees front and center. Like many minorities, some American Jews suffer from self-esteem problems that are soothed when they see a seeming acceptance. Of course what they fail to realize is that exploitation is not acceptance. And that Obama's appointees are creatures of his backers, Nazi collaborators like Soros, who have nothing but contempt for Jews, individually or collectively. While outwardly courting Jews, Obama's people have also been quietly shoving Jewish organizations and their leaders into a corner. Within the Jewish organizational world there has been a silent but deadly takeover of major Jewish groups by left wing radicals. Former alumni of the far left wing and anti-Israel groups like Breira or Coname in the 70's have been elevated to key positions in such organizations as the UJA Federation. Behind the scenes any Jewish leaders who expressed even doubts about Obama during the primaries were intimidated and silenced. Much as with conservatives, a list has been drawn up of those figures who can be won over, and those who cannot. The ones who can be won over are described as "moderates", the ones who cannot be won over are described as "extremists". Meanwhile a bevvy of left wing Jewish In Name Only groups have been organized to play their part. Key among them is the Soros funded J Street, a group created as an anti-Israel lobby meant to eventually replace AIPAC. Meanwhile AIPAC itself has been kept on the ropes with such things as the well timed Harman leak. The message once again is fairly clear, cooperate and keep quiet, or we'll destroy you. The multi-layered approach to American Jews can then be summed up as follows; 1.) Co-opt existing Jewish organizations and swing them to the left using old school 70's leftists. The overall idea is to keep a happy face pasted on American Jewry while the knives are out in the dark. Israel — The basic understanding in the Obama Administration is that Israel Must Go. In the worldview of the more moderate Obama appointees, Israel is a destabilizing factor in the Middle East. To the more left wing Obama advisors, Israel is a Western imperialist colonialist state that must be destroyed in the name of revolutionary justice. To the Islamist mindset, Israel is a Kufir state that has no right to exist in the Dar Al Islam. While intractably hostile to Israel, the Obama Administration wants to avoid the kind of public confrontations that marked the Carter and Bush Sr administrations. Instead they would much rather model the way that the Clinton Administration waged a quiet war against Israel, removing one government, and forcing extensive concessions to terrorists, all the while keeping a happy face pasted on the whole affair. On the one hand that means avoiding harsh public attacks on Israel, but keeping the pressure up for Israel to make extensive far reaching one sided concessions, to accept Saudi and Arab League "peace plans", to legitimize Hamas as the new government of the Palestinian Authority, and to insure that Israel does not reply to any rocket or terrorist attacks. There are two forms of quiet leverage that the United States has on Israel, the first is financial and the second is military. On the financial side, the goal will be to bring down the Netanyahu government coalition by destabilizing Israel economically. This is the surest and most direct path to bringing down Israel's conservative government and replacing it with a left of center coalition. The Obama Administration has a wide variety of tactics at its disposal for doing so, from the overt, such as targeting Israeli exports and imports, to the covert, that would involve targeting the Shekel. Additionally fundraising in the US could be investigated and groups such as the Jewish National Fund, prevented from raising money in the US. All of these have been in play before at one time or another. On the military side, Obama's people will make their non-existent efforts to stop Iran's nukes conditional on more concessions to terrorists. Since Israel will never be able to make enough concessions and since Obama is working with Iran, rather than working to stop Iran's nukes, this is a hollow charade. Furthermore while Israel has already been locked out of the military technology pipeline for anything cutting edge, it still remains dependent on US military equipment for parts and supplies. The decades of US foreign aid have also served to create dependency. Unlike many other countries, including even Sweden, Israel does not have its own jet fighter. Israel's Air Force is heavily dependent on US weapons, parts and equipment. Cutting Israel off, would leave the Israeli military dangerously vulnerable in the case of a war. This is an effective chokehold that has been used before to prevent Israel from attacking Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, as well as preventing Israel from carrying out a preemptive strike against its enemies before the Yom Kippur War. The overall Obama policy will be to push Israel to the brink, using financial and military blackmail against the Netanyahu government, while maintaining control over American Jews to prevent any protests or backtalk. The more Israel will offer, the more the Obama Administration will tighten the screws. No offer will be good enough, and Israel will be blamed for every breakdown in talks and every bit of violence that takes place. The media will portray Israel and particularly Netanyahu as extremist and intransigent. Hamas will be slowly whitewashed in the media, the same way that Arafat's goons were, (assuming that they prove more willing to cooperate in creating a positive media image of themselves than Ahmadinejad is.) The plan is to destroy Israel, and to do it by pushing Israel to the edge of the cliff and then over the cliff. Israel's enemies will be getting top of the line US military equipment. Israel will not. Israel will be squeezed economically until the Netanyahu government collapses, leaving a weak left wing leader like Livni in charge of Israel, and in charge of acceding to the new Pharaoh's demands. Meanwhile so-called American Jewish groups will support Obama all the way, some because they were created precisely for that purpose, e.g. J-Street, and others because they have been hijacked, cowed or subverted. That is the game plan and some of it's coming. The rest is already here.
The NY-based Israeli-born writer Daniel Greenfield writes from the
Sultan Knish website.
Contact him by email at sultanknish@yahoo.com
This article is archived at |
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SITTING DOWN WITH BLOODY DESPOTS: USA AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Posted by Daniel Mandel, May 7, 2009. |
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IF the Obama administration really wants to improve human rights, it's taking the wrong approach in seeking a seat on the seriously flawed United Nations Human Rights Council. The best thing now, ironically, would be for the HRC to show its true colors and reject Washington's application in the vote it plans for Tuesday — although don't count on it. The administration says it's aiming to "promote universality, transparency and objectivity" in the council, but more likely its presence simply would legitimize a body hostile to democracy and human rights. The Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to supersede its corrupt predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, which at its end counted six of the most politically repressive regimes — Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, China and Vietnam — as members. Iran, a country known for "honor-killings" of wives and daughters, headed its women's rights committee; Saddam Hussein's representative once presided over its disarmament panel. A satirist could scarcely conceive so perverse a record, but its successor has equaled it. Because the new body's membership has been reduced to 47 from 54 countries and a greater emphasis is placed on geographical distribution, fewer democracies and more autocracies are represented. True, the council can suspend members for human-rights abuses, but that requires approval by a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly — which has been unable to muster a simple majority merely to condemn the genocide in Sudan. It's a worthless measure. In just three years, the council's controlling membership has eliminated probes into the most serious human-rights abuses in Belarus, Congo, Cuba, Liberia and Sudan. In that time, some 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in Darfur alone. Asian and African autocracies have also acted in tandem to minimize scrutiny of nations like Zimbabwe, a veritable human-rights Enron. So what has the council been doing? Following the dubious path of its predecessor by fixating on Israel, the Middle East's lone democracy. Israel has been the subject of 26 of the council's 33 resolutions, even while human-rights abusers serenely occupy its seats, as before. Some say US participation in the council could help prompt a shift toward fulfilling the noble aspirations for which it was presumably intended. But any such efforts are likely doomed to fail, as non-democratic African and Asian regimes exercise an unbreakable controlling majority of 26 of 47 seats. It's true that Western countries participate in many UN bodies beholden to anti-democratic majorities in attempts to mitigate their worst deficiencies. But that debatably useful function is unlikely to bear fruit here. Any US effort to do something constructive on the council would bring it into collision with Third World tyrants and even major powers it's wooing — like Russia, which provides cover for Iran, and China, which does the same for Sudan. This seems to suggest that, unless the Obama administration is determined to effect change regardless of such opposition, any role it plays on the council would necessarily be half-hearted, inconsistent or otherwise compromised. History is full of surprises. There's a slim chance US participation might produce some good. Assuming America is elected to the council on Tuesday, the administration must adopt a strict timetable for producing clear benchmarks. If results aren't seen, Washington should withdraw. EDITOR'S NOTE: UPDATE May 14, 2009 "U.S. on Human Rights Council"
The United Nations General Assembly elected the members of its lead human rights body, the Human Rights Council, Tuesday in New York and among them are some of the world's worst human rights abusers. Now in a position to give the rest of us advice on protecting human rights are Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Russia. In a slap in the face to President Obama, the United States was elected with fewer votes than either Belgium or Norway, the only two other states running for the three Western slots. Even a country like Kyrgyzstan received more votes than the United States. A special mockery of the process resulted from this year's election of Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan. The U.N. resolution that created the council, and abolished the discredited commission before it, was hailed as an achievement because it was said to require pledges from candidates to protect human rights. Candidates Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan had no difficulty getting elected though neither had bothered to make any pledge at all, let alone making promises they had no intention of keeping. Electability as a U.N. human rights authority, however, has little to do with caring about human rights. The Chinese circulated a pledge reading: "The Chinese government is committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Chinese people and has worked unremittingly toward this goal." That would be news to the billion Chinese subject to arrest for typing "human rights" into an Internet search. And China is not alone — Tuesday's election also means a majority of council members are not fully free democracies (on the Freedom House scale). The election also solidified the chokehold of the Organization of the Islamic Conference on the United Nations' human rights agency. The OIC managed to defeat Kenya, a non-Islamic but major African state. This enabled the OIC to retain a majority of the council seats allotted to the African regional group. The OIC also maintained a majority of the seats allotted to the Asian group. Since the Africans and Asians together hold an absolute majority on the council, Islamic countries hold the balance of power. The OIC stranglehold on what the United Nations considers "human rights" has meant the council has been fixated on condemning Israel and removing Islamic and other human rights violators from their agenda. In its short three-year history the council has adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning the state of Israel than all other 191 U.N. member states combined. At the same time, it has abolished human rights investigations into the abysmal human rights conditions in Belarus, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Into this human rights farce now strolls the United States. Following the election, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice could hardly contain her glee. She told reporters the United States was there to change things — that old "join now and reform some time in the future" line. It is hard to understand why Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama can't just do the math. Of a total of 47 seats, there will be one U.S. vote and 26 votes controlled by the Islamic group; there are just seven Western votes altogether. The United States is either going to lose big or it is going to join "consensus" on human rights abominations because news of losing too often might find its way back to American taxpayers — who foot 22 percent of the bill. On Tuesday, the United States became part of the problem and not the solution. By being elected to pretend to protect human rights along with the likes of China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, the United States gave the election and the council a stamp of approval it didn't deserve. Promoting the tool of human rights abusers promotes human rights abuse — now courtesy of the president of the United States. For more United Nations coverage see http://www.EYEontheUN.org. Daniel Mandel is a fellow in history at Melbourne University. This appeared today in the New York Post
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AIPAC'S MYSTIFYING BEHAVIOR & A CAUTIONARY TALE
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 7, 2009. |
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As you read the following exposé from February 7, 2008 about AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), in supporting Terrorist States, you will find the fingerprints of the U.S. State Department and certain PC ('Politically Correct') leaders in AIPAC who seem to direct policy. But, it's much worse that the State Department has Allies or Moles within AIPAC. This is not to criticize the membership of AIPAC as a whole. The doctrine of the State Department and various successive Presidents who were tied to the Oil Industry, have used certain events tied to compromise AIPAC and Israel to virtually blackmail AIPAC and certain Leftist Israeli leadership into being compliant with State Department policy in order to appease Iran and other Terrorist States. That doctrine has expanded under President Barack Obama's Administration, although substantial efforts are being made to mislead Congress, Jewish voters and the Israeli Administration. The effort to intimidate Jewish organizations has been ongoing since 1948. Intimidating AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents seemed to silence both the Jewish Organizations and the Jewish community at large on policies that negatively targeted Israel. Two outstanding efforts as follows: One was the events leading up to the Pollard Affair. Then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, without the approval of President Ronald Reagan, deliberately cut off vital Intelligence to Israel which was previously approved by an M.O.U. (Memorandum of Understanding) where the U.S. and Israel would exchange vital Intelligence which could assist each other's security — mostly against the existential danger from Islamic Terror States. Secretary of Defense Weinberger secretly broke that agreement and withheld Intelligence about Iraq's effort to build unconventional weapons to strike Israel. This included WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) including NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) weapons. In 1984 Jonathan Pollard was a civilian Naval Intelligence analyst and good at it. He blew Weinberger's scheme. Because he was ordered not tell Israel about the gas weapons Saddam was developing, he leaked the information to Israel — despite his mandatory agreement to hold all intelligence confidential. Pollard was arrested by the FBI in full view of the TV Media which the FBI had invited as he sought sanctuary at the Israeli Embassy. Pollard was imprisoned for life without parole, despite plea agreements to mitigate his sentence in return for his cooperation. It was then that Weinberger used the Pollard conviction and his betrayal to attack other Jews working for the Government — particularly on what is referred to as "Black Ops". Weinberger hated Jews and the Jewish State. He was an Arabist through and through and should himself been tried for conspiring with Arab enemies — which even compromised U.S. security. But, that never happened. Israel was put under pressure to obey the dictates of State and other Arabists in the U.S. government. They had a vested financial interest in Arab Oil States and, if it meant threatening Israel's defensive capabilities, that's what they did. Let us move on to the continued AIPAC affair where George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the FBI arranged a Sting to falsely accuse AIPAC of spying on the U.S. That case was dropped only a few days ago because the Government would have had to produce Rice and FBI leadership for testimony and cross examination. It would have shown that the commonly used back channels by the State Department to float ideas and information to all nations, including Israel via the method they falsely accused AIPAC was simply a Sting. The scheme was intended to intimidate AIPAC not to lobby Congress and scare Israel into not objecting to any arms deals with Arabs, even with the Islamist Terror nations. They also wanted Israel to accept a radical Palestinian Islamic State into its heartland — which everyone knew would threaten the existence of Israel in the fashion of Gaza and Hamas. Those Jews who belong to AIPAC believe that AIPAC is free of outside influences would be surprised to see the weakness and submission of present day leadership of AIPAC. It's no longer the organization of Si Kennan (who founded AIPAC) and Morris Amitay who succeeded him as Executive Director. Now those who can give big dollars or raise big bucks became the ruling board despite their lack of knowledge or courage. It was not difficult for the State Department or other Intel Agencies to penetrate and influence. Clearly, AIPAC is due for a serious house cleaning at all levels from the top down. At one time when Morris Amitay was the Executive Director of AIPAC, I was on the Executive Board. It was a pleasure promoting and encouraging grass-roots support from the Jewish community. After the creative time of AIPAC with Morrie, Wolf Blitzer, Ken Wollock, Lenny Davis, and Aaron Rosenbaum, things changed. I hope it can change back to being the Jewish people's organization to rightfully lobby for Israel in Congress, the Media and to all the successive Presidential Administrations. Note the following two articles articles by Caroline Glick entitled "AIPAC's mystifying behavior", which appeared in the Jerusalem Post. Contact her at caroline@carolineglick.com See also David Wilder article below about AIPAC'S agenda vis a vis a Palestinian State. |
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1) "AIPAC's mystifying behavior"
Josh Mandel is a first-term legislator in the Ohio House of Representatives. He is also a sergeant in the US Marine Corps reserves. Last year, Mandel arrived at the state house in Columbus after a tour of duty in Iraq. There, he saw first-hand how Iran was fueling the insurgency that is killing his fellow servicemen and Iraqi innocents. His experiences led him to introduce a bill that would divest Ohio's public employee pension funds from companies that do business with Iran and fellow state sponsor of terror Sudan. As his bill made its way through the various committees, Mandel's initiative received a body blow from an unexpected direction. AIPAC representatives asked him to pare down his bill's divestment requirements to include only companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran's oil and gas sector. Mandel was surprised. Why should companies that invest in Iran's defense, telecommunications and other sectors be immune from divestment? AIPAC went over his head to Ohio House Speaker Jon Hustead. Hustead amended the bill along AIPAC's suggested lines. Mandel's experience is not unique. Christopher Holton is director of the Divest Terror Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, where I serve as a senior fellow. In August 2004, the CSP launched its campaign to divest public employee pension funds from companies that do business with countries listed as state sponsors of terror by the US State Department. The decision was inspired by a study of companies invested in states that sponsor terrorism undertaken by Roger Robinson, the founder and president of the Conflict Securities Advisory Group. Working from Robinson's research, the CSP discovered that on average, 15 percent-23% of US state employee pension funds were invested in companies that do business with state sponsors of terrorism. In 2004, the estimated total value of those investments was $188 billion. Some $70b. was invested in companies that did business with Iran, Syria and North Korea. In 2005, after coming across the CSP's research, Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman divested a portion of Missouri's pension plans from companies that do business with state sponsors of terror. In late 2006, the terror divestment campaign received a major boost when Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu embraced it as a means of slowing down Iran's race to nuclear capabilities. Encouraged by Netanyahu, Republican presidential hopefuls John McCain, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich announced their support for the plan in late 2006. Their announcements induced state legislators around the US to introduce bills that would follow the Missouri example and make their pension funds free of investments in countries that sponsor terror. Working with Robinson, London's FTSE financial index announced last November that it would begin providing a series of terror-free screened indexes that will allow public and private investors to easily screen their portfolios and divest from countries that do business with state sponsors of terrorism. And then, AIPAC moved in. Holton assists state legislators in their bid to introduce divestment bills. He explains that in Texas and California, AIPAC lobbyists led by AIPAC's policy director Brad Gordon, advocated that divest terror bill sponsors take North Korea and Syria off their bills. As they did in Ohio, they also strongly recommended that divestiture from companies invested in Iran be limited to companies that invest more than $20m. in Iran's oil and gas sector. In Texas, AIPAC's interference so frustrated the bill's sponsor, State Senator Dan Patrick, that he allowed the initiative to fizzle out. In California, the bill passed into law reflected AIPAC's view, except that at the insistence of the bill's sponsor Assemblyman Joel Anderson, it also divested California from companies involved in Iran's defense and nuclear sectors. In Florida, AIPAC pre-empted supporters of broad-based terror divestment. It advocated its pared-down, Iran only, oil and gas sector only divestment plan before a broader-based initiative could get off the ground. Currently, AIPAC is working to pare down bills in Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Georgia. In the meantime, without AIPAC's intervention, the Louisiana legislature moved toward a broad-based divestment policy by establishing a terror-free investment index last year. Mississippi and Utah are also considering broad-based bills. A message to Gordon's office this week requesting his comments on AIPAC's actions went unanswered. Ron Dermer, who as Israel's economic minister at the Washington embassy works on the issue with AIPAC, provided three general explanations for AIPAC's actions. As Dermer explained, first, AIPAC wishes to limit divestment to large investors in Iran's oil and gas sector because that sector — which makes up at least 80% of Iran's exports and 40% of its governmental revenues — is the engine of Iran's economy and its Achille's heel. Second, AIPAC argues that it is unconstitutional for states to divest from companies that do business with terror sponsoring states. Third, AIPAC believes that by limiting the divestment program to Iran's oil and gas sector, they will mitigate opposition from pension and hedge fund managers and so enable more divestment laws to be passed than would be passed if states tried to adopt a broader approach.
YET AIPAC's arguments — as explained by Dermer, who does not work for AIPAC — fail to stand up to scrutiny. While it is true that oil and gas are the anchor of Iran's economy, it is also true that Iran's ability to function economically, support terror and build nuclear bombs is dependent on many other economic sectors as well. It is also clear that the strength of Iran's fuel economy is not dependent only on direct investments in oil and gas but also on indirect investments from other sectors. Take Iran's dependence on imported refined fuel products, for instance. Although Iran is the second largest exporter of oil and gas after Saudi Arabia, it lacks refining capabilities and so is dependent on imported fuel products. Last week one source of that refined fuel disappeared. India's oil refiner, Reliance, decided to end its supply of refined oil products to Iran after the French bank BNP Paribus announced that it would no longer issue letters of credit for Iran. BNP Paribus and its cohort Calyon bank stopped offering Iran letters of credit due to political pressure from the US Treasury, which sanctions financial institutions that deal with Iran. So in the BNP Paribus example, financial sanctions from the US government on the banking sector are making it more difficult for Iran to run its oil and gas sector. Many other firms not involved in oil and gas similarly contribute to the viability of the Iranian regime and its rogue activities. For instance, Alcatel SA, a French telecommunications firm, has operations valued at $300m. in Iran, Sudan and Libya. Much of its technology is inherently dual-use with major civilian and military applications. Alcatel's militarily relevant operations in Iran include the provision of data transmission and switching network capabilities to state-owned companies. Alcatel is also installing an undersea telecommunications cable in Iran. It is undertaking similar activities in Sudan and Libya. Germany's Siemens has operations in Iran valued in excess of a half a billion dollars. They include the development of Iran's mobile telephone network, power plants and transportation sector. All of these projects have enormous military implications. Austria's Steyr-Mannlicher arms manufacturer sold Iran sniper rifles in 2006. None of these companies are targeted in AIPAC's limited divestment plan. Beyond that, as Holton explains, most of the major companies invested in Iran's oil and gas sector — like France's Total SA and Norway's Statoil and China's Petro China — invested in Iran's oil and gas sector after Iran was declared a state-sponsor of terrorism. That is, they made a conscious decision to invest in Iran in spite of its behavior and irrespective of the financial implications for doing so in their trade with the US. The likelihood that these companies will end their operations in Iran as a result of the divestiture movement is not large. In contrast, many companies whose investments in Iran are below $20m. would be more likely to pull out their investments if maintaining them cost them US investment capital. So AIPAC's plan targets companies that are less likely to change their behavior while giving a free pass to companies that are more likely to be convinced by the divestiture movement to pull out from Iran. AIPAC has informed state legislators who push for broad divestment that it would be unconstitutional for individual US states to divest from companies that do business with Syria. Its contention is based on a US Supreme Court decision from 2000 relating to a Massachusetts statute that prohibited the state from signing business deals with companies that also do business with Burma. But according to Prof. Orde Kittrie, who served for years as an attorney at the State Department working on issues related to international sanctions, there is a distinction between divestment and taking direct action against foreign firms. A state is within its constitutional rights to decide where to invest its funds. Finally, AIPAC's argument that broad-based divestment bills cannot expect to pass is troubling on two different levels. First, objectively, this is untrue. Louisiana's law is broad-based. Currently, broad-based divestment bills are moving through the Utah and Mississippi legislatures. But even if AIPAC is right, and these broad-based divestment bills lack sufficient political support, why AIPAC is actively working to undermine them is a mystery. There is a legitimate debate regarding the capacity of financial tools to compel governments to change their behavior. Generally speaking, when dealing with ideologically motivated, terror-sponsoring regimes such as Iran, Syria and North Korea, financial tools will be insufficient to force a consistent and credible change of behavior. But they can make it more difficult for such states to conduct their nefarious business as usual. In the case of Iran, these extra difficulties can conceivably buy the West more time to either strike Iran's nuclear facilities militarily, or to induce regime overthrow by backing regime opponents, or both. What is absolutely clear is that the broader a divestment plan is, the worse for Iran and its fellow state sponsors of terrorism. AIPAC's arguments are not without merit. It is not the contentions that are strange, but their source. It is simply bizarre that of all the organizations in the US, the organization dedicated to strengthening America's alliance with Israel is leading the effort to shield the North Korean, Syrian and Sudanese economies from divestment and to limit the damage the divest terror movement can exact on Iran's economy. 2) "A Cautionary Tale"
Just in time for the annual AIPAC conference, the US Justice Department announced last week it is dismissing its charges against former AIPAC staffers Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen. Their prosecution, and what it exposed about the nature of AIPAC, and the position of Israel, and of pro-Israel Jews and non-Jews in America must serve as a cautionary tale for Israel and its American supporters. A brief summary of the now five-year-old affair is in order. In August 2004, just as the question of how the Bush administration should contend with Iran's nuclear weapons program was becoming the issue of the day, CBS news reported on an "Israeli spy scandal." According to that report, AIPAC lobbyists were working with a pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawk in the Pentagon and the Israeli embassy in Washington to try to force the Bush administration to adopt a more confrontational policy towards Iran due both to its nuclear weapons development program and to its central role in fomenting the insurgency in Iraq. At the time, as a New York Times report noted, the Bush administration had yet to adopt a clear policy on Iran. As one government source told the newspaper, "We have an ad hoc policy [on Iran] that we're making up as we go along." The idea behind the AIPAC spy scandal story then was that these nefarious pro-Israel forces were being used by Israel to compel the Bush administration to adopt Jerusalem's preferred policy on Iran. The truth however, was far less impressive. In the event, Rosen and Weissman were approached by Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin (who happens to be Catholic, not Jewish). Franklin asked them to use their connections with the National Security Council to make then-president George W. Bush aware of Iran's central role in the insurgency in Iraq and of its swift progress in its nuclear program. He felt that this information was being obfuscated by the CIA and the State Department in their briefings to the president. After that meeting, Franklin was approached by the FBI, which had been wiretapping his conversations, and was compelled to entrap Rosen and Weissman in a sting operation. He was given false information relating to a supposed imminent threat to the lives of Israeli agents operating in Iraqi Kurdistan which he passed to Weissman and Rosen, who in turn, passed it on to Naor Gillon then serving at the Israeli embassy. It was this incident that spurred the CBS report and the accusations that Weissman and Rosen were Israeli spies. ROSEN AND WEISSMAN were indicted under the 1918 Espionage Act — a law that had not been enforced since World War I — and accused of "conspiracy to communicate national defense information to people not entitled to receive it." The maximum penalty for this offense is ten years in prison. Franklin, for his part was sentenced to 12 years in prison for mishandling classified information. For similar offenses, prominent Democrats like former national security advisor Sandy Berger and former CIA director John Deutsch were dispatched with misdemeanor convictions and slaps on their wrists from friendly prosecutors. Franklin's lawyer is now seeking to overturn his conviction. The decision to prosecute Weissman, Rosen and Franklin was clearly political — and deeply discriminatory. In speaking to Franklin and acting on the information he provided them, Weissman and Rosen did nothing that lobbyists and journalists in Washington don't do every day of the year. By selectively choosing to enforce an arguably defunct law against them — and against no one else — the FBI and the Justice Department and whatever forces in the State Department the CIA and elsewhere that supported them made clear that the US government will treat pro-Israel forces in Washington differently than everyone else. This politically motivated prosecution was wildly successful. No, it didn't lead to Rosen and Weissman being convicted of anything. But that was never the point. The prosecutors — and those faceless bureaucrats pulling the strings — managed to drag not only Weissman's and Rosen's names through the mud for five years, they managed to cast a pall of criminality and treason on the whole pro-Israel community and the hawks in the Pentagon that tended to agree with it on matters of national security policy. And having accomplished this goal, the forces behind the Rosen-Weissman-Franklin persecutions went on to intimidate AIPAC into firing Rosen and Weissman. In an act of disgraceful cowardice, AIPAC not only fired the men, they refused to pay their legal fees and so cast them adrift as millions of dollars in legal bills began piling up. AIPAC was not alone in abandoning these men to their fates. side from some lone voices — almost never heard above a whisper — the organized American Jewish community lost its voice when it came to the AIPAC scandal. While behind closed doors everyone was quick to shake their heads and acknowledge the obvious fact that these men were being railroaded in a scandalous abuse of legal power, in public everyone was mute. There were no angry letters to the White House and the Attorney General's office demanding an explanation of how these prosecutions came about. There were no demonstrations outside the Justice Department demanding that the charges be dismissed. There was no media campaign to discredit the decision to abuse legal tools to weaken the pro-Israel community and specifically, to weaken the anti-Iranian hawks in the US. There was silence. In a perfectly fair world, where people care about both process and outcome, the human rights and specifically the first amendment crowd at places like the American Civil Liberties Union and like-minded institutions, could have been counted on to stand up and denounce the abuse of executive power that stood at the heart of the AIPAC scandal. After all, in transferring a classified memo on Iran to Weissman and Rosen, Franklin was doing something that the ACLU generally supports. At one of its major 2008 conferences, for instance, the ACLU invited Daniel Ellsberg, the former Rand Corporation official who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers regarding US involvement in Vietnam to The New York Times in 1971 to serve as it keynote speaker. Both in photocopying the documents and in transferring them to The New York Times, Ellsberg committed serious criminal offenses. And yet, because he was doing so to advance the cause of the anti-war movement, groups like the ACLU worked to discredit his prosecution. Charges against Ellsberg were dropped in 1973. Ever since, he has enjoyed hero's status in left-wing, first amendment circles in the US. But then, apparently, process is not important. For like the organized American Jewish community, the ACLU, The New York Times, The Washington Post and all the other outspoken champions of free speech were silent on — if not supportive of — the Justice Department's case against Franklin and against Rosen and Weissman.
THIS ENTIRE STORY, in all of its disparate parts, holds some very sad lessons for supporters of Israel in the US and beyond as well as for the government of Israel. First, AIPAC's cowardly decision to abandon Weissman and Rosen and the willingness of the overwhelming majority of the organized Jewish community to mutely endorse the move exposes an unpleasant truth about the nature of the American Jewish community. Simply stated, the majority of American Jews are either indifferent to the treatment of Israel and its supporters, or are too frightened to express their concerns. Second, the fact that the AIPAC scandal unfolded during the Bush administration's tenure shows that even when administrations friendly to Israel are in office, a persistent, powerful group of bureaucrats in the federal government remains ready and able to persecute pro-Israel activists and policymakers. Moreover, members of this group are willing to abuse executive power to achieve their aim of weakening the standing of both Israel and its supporters in the US capital. One of the disturbing aspects of the AIPAC scandal was the readiness of pro-Palestinian Jewish organizations like the Israel Policy Forum and J Street to defend the persecution. As James Kirchick from The New Republic noted over the weekend, M.J. Rosenberg, the Director of Policy Analysis for the IPF, wrote recently that "as a guy on trial for espionage," Rosen had no right to point out that Charles Freeman, US President Barack Obama's initial choice to serve as Director of the National Intelligence Council, had a record of egregiously anti-Israel behavior and action. What the behavior of the likes of Rosenberg shows is that anti-Israel forces in the federal bureaucracy can depend on having an anti-Israel American Jewish amen corner backing any decision they take to persecute Israel's supporters. The silence of the human rights and free speech crowd also provides food for thought. The fourth lesson of the AIPAC affair is that Israel and its supporters can expect to receive absolutely no backing from this policy community. As is the case with the US feminist movement's silence on the plight of women in the Muslim world, and the US human rights community's silence on the plight of human rights activists in places like Iran and Syria, Israel can expect that the American Left — both Jewish and non-Jewish — will be silent about any actions taken against the human rights of Israelis and the civil rights of Israel's supporters in the US. It is important that these lessons be properly understood by pro-Israel activists in the US. And it is imperative that they be internalized by the Netanyahu government as it crafts its strategy for contending with an openly hostile Obama administration in the months and years to come. Many in Jerusalem expressed their disappointment that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decided not to travel to Washington this week to participate in the AIPAC conference but rather delayed his visit to the US for two weeks to better prepare for his meeting with Obama. But what the AIPAC scandal shows is that it may be advantageous that Netanyahu's first visit to Washington as premier not be conducted as part of the AIPAC conference. The weaknesses of the pro-Israel community — and first and foremost of AIPAC — which the Rosen-Weissman-Franklin affair exposed show that it is unwise for Israel to rely on pro-Israel organizations to sell its policies to the American people and their elected officials. These groupscannot be trusted to help out in a crisis because they may simply not care that much about Israel's security or because they are too frightened of being persecuted to stick their necks out. Rather than focus his efforts on rallying the likes of AIPAC, Netanyahu would be better served to bring his message directly to the American people. Only by garnering wide-scale, popular, grassroots support for a strong US-Israel alliance will Netanyahu have a chance of maintaining strong ties with Washington under the Obama administration and beyond. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at gwinston@gwinstonglobal.org |
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FROM ISRAEL: HAMAS AND MORE
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 6, 2009. |
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Yesterday Vice President Biden addressed the AIPAC conference, and he sang the very same administration song as we've been hearing in other quarters. President Obama, he told the delegates gathered, is "strongly and personally committed to achieving what all have basically said is needed — a two-state solution..." Then he made a link between Iran and a peace agreement with the Palestinians: "One of the most pressing reasons may be to deprive Iran of the ability to extend its destabilizing influence." Well, he's got that absolutely backwards too. For the possibility to achieve peace with the Palestinians is far greater if we defang Iran first. In fact, there are statements from Netanyahu regarding the absolute impossibility of reaching peace here until the Iran issue is confronted. I've written extensively about Hamas — the "elephant in the room" — making a viable peace impossible. Hamas is funded and guided from Teheran. ~~~~~~~~~~ And here we have it: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, after a meeting in Damascus yesterday, told journalists that they continue to support "Palestinian resistance." The two were conducting meetings with the key Hamas officials in Damascus. ~~~~~~~~~~ And with regard to Hamas... I indicated yesterday that there will likely be a separate Hamas government in Gaza. If a final unity government agreement is not achieved at a May 16 meeting, they are likely to proceed. Apparently Ismail Haniyeh — who was briefly the prime minister of a 2007 joint Fatah-Hamas government — is slated to be prime minister. ~~~~~~~~~~ But Hamas has also gone public in another venue, as politburo head in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal (newly elected to another term), has just given an interview to the NY Times. What is obvious here is that Mashaal is playing to the Obama administration, which has not yet recognized this group as a negotiating partner (but is on its way to doing so should Hamas join a unity government). "His [Obama's] language is different and positive," he said. Shouldn't we take note of the fact that a jihadist terror group sees Obama's language as positive? "I promise the American administration and the international community that we will be part of the solution, period," he intoned. But he was not going to recognize Israel, for "There is only one enemy in the region, and that is Israel." In light of Hamas intentions to be "part of the solution," Mashaal says Hamas has stopped firing rockets at Israel for now. "Not firing the rockets currently is part of an evaluation from the movement which serves the Palestinians' interest. After all, the firing is a method, not a goal. Resistance is a legitimate right, but practicing such a right comes under an evaluation by the movement's leaders." This is what Hamas is proposing: Israel must return to '67 lines (which includes leaving eastern Jerusalem), dismantle settlements, and permit the "right of return." In exchange, Hamas would offer a 10 year truce. Not a final cessation of hostilities. Oh, no. For 10 years Hamas would not fire rockets on us, and but would reserve the right to do so again thereafter. To secure this, we would have to move into indefensible borders and permit ourselves to be overrun by hostile Arab so-called refugees. Actually, as I think about it, the cessation of rocket fire might be permanent, because at the end of 10 years with this formulation, there'd be so little of Israel left that Hamas might not want to bother. I note that there is nothing said about cessation of smuggling weapons during that period of truce. Nor was it said that there would be a renunciation of terrorism — which means Hamas, while not shooting rockets, could covertly foster terror attacks from which it distanced itself. All in all, quite a deal, is it not? Mark my words, there will comments somewhere indicating that Hamas is moderating. ~~~~~~~~~~ Both Hamas and the PA have rejected Netanyahu's statements made by video to the AIPAC conference regarding readiness to enter talks without delay. This is no surprise, for he doesn't speak about a two-state solution. What raises the blood pressure once again is this, however: Tony Blair, envoy for the Quartet (i.e., the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia), has announced that the Quartet will be unveiling a new peace plan in a few weeks. It is being devised by the "highest level of the American administration." Another attempt to dictate terms from the outside. ~~~~~~~~~~ According to Reuters, at a meeting of Non-Proliferation Treaty signatories yesterday, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller was quoted as saying, "Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea...remains a fundamental objective of the United States." Uh oh. Big time. This hits at our essential right to protect ourselves. Dov Weisglass, a former Israeli strategist, told Army Radio that these comments were alarming: "If these statements indicate a change in American policy on this issue, I believe this may be the most worrisome development for Israel's security in many years." Today, however, Israel Radio quoted an Israeli Foreign Ministry official as saying there was no significant shift in US policy on this matter. I hope so, but I don't know. I have the sense that the world is upside down and that we are besieged on all sides. ~~~~~~~~~~ British journalist Melanie Phillips has my greatest respect and regard. I close today with excerpts from her latest piece, "Obama prepares to throw Israel under the bus." "...It is of course, by any sane standard, quite fantastic [i.e., incredible] that America is behaving as if it is Israel which is holding up a peace settlement when Israel has made concession after concession: giving up Sinai, giving up Gaza, offering all the territories to the Arabs in return for peace in 1967, offering more than 90 per cent of them ditto in 2000, ditto again to Mahmoud Abbas in the past year — only to be attacked in return by a Palestinian terrorist entity, backed in its continued aggression, let us not forget, by the countries of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has made no concessions at all and is not being pressured to do so. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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A SPEECH IN RESPONSE TO ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK AT BOSTON COLLEGE
Posted by Mr La, May 6, 2009. |
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This was given today by Dennis Hale, a member of the Political Science Department at Boston College. He has been teaching at Boston College since 1978, where he teaches introductory political science classes, and elective and graduate courses in public administration and American political thought. His work has appeared in Polity, the Journal of Politics, the State and Local Government Review, the American Political Science Review, and the Political Science Reviewer. He helped to found the Episcopal-Jewish Alliance for Israel. Since 2004, Hale has given talks for the David Project at universities in New England, exploring the abandonment of Israel by liberal Christians. He is also a board member of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. |
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What can we make of the viewpoint represented by Israel Apartheid Week? What are its origins, what does it mean, and what are its consequences? These are important questions. But many people must wonder why a conflict so far away has so many echoes on the American college campus? Why should you worry about Israel Apartheid Week or about other efforts to demonize Israel, to portray Israel as the sole cause of the war in the Middle East, and to work for the elimination of the Jewish state? I want to talk first about the origins of what I will refer to, in honor of its authors, as the "apartheid narrative," and then consider its effects in three dimensions: 1) on Israel; 2) on Arab Palestinians; and 3) on those who promote the apartheid narrative, and on the circles in which they travel, including the American university campus. We often hear talk of the need to "balance" the presentation of controversial political topics, and so in some quarters this panel tonight might be considered an effort in the direction of a more balanced presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the words "unbalanced" and "one-sided", as they are generally used, mean simply an overly uncritical presentation of a single viewpoint. For example, we might give an "unbalanced" view of our favorite candidate's performance in a presidential debate, exaggerating his performance or over-estimating the faults of his opponent. However, if we said to someone who didn't know better that our favorite candidate showed up for the debate but his opponent did not, we would not be giving an "unbalanced" summary of the debate. We would be telling a lie. And so it is with the Israeli apartheid narrative. It is not an exaggeration of a truth; it is not an overly enthusiastic bit of cheering for one side as opposed to the other. It is simply not true. If you have attended any of the other events over the past week that were not sponsored by Israel Apartheid Week, then you have already heard some of the arguments and some of the evidence in this respect. I'll just mention a few of many:
If apartheid — which means separate" or "apart" — does not describe the reality of Israeli Arabs, does it describe the reality of Arab Palestinians living in the West Bank — the territory captured during the 1967 Six-Day War? Much has been made during Israel Apartheid Week of the separation barrier dividing Israel from the West Bank, and of the military checkpoints that so disturb the lives of Arab Palestinians. But the barrier separates West Bank Jewish communities from Israel as well as Arab communities. And in any case the barrier not built until 2002 — 35 years after the 1967 war, and only as a result of the terrorist atrocities of the Second Intifada, during which suicide bombers recruited by Hamas and Fatah killed one thousand Israelis and maimed thousands more. So if this narrative is not true, what motivates people to promote it? Now, as you also know, we have been told by certain academics on this campus and many others that this question makes no sense — that is, the question of whether a "narrative" is true or false is said to be a meaningless question, since all narratives are conditional, or "contingent" — and that what are erroneously called "true" narratives — what used to be called "history" — are merely the narratives favored by those with power. Some of you may have heard such theories propounded in your own classrooms. It's a confusing idea, to be sure: that no story can be true except the story that no story can be true. But let's see what it sounds like outside the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Let's look at what we might call the Nazi Party narrative about the First World War. Here's how it went: Germany (said Hitler and, eventually, his followers) should have won World War I (or the Great War, as it was then called). Its arms, its tactics and strategy, the racial characteristics of its soldiers — these were all superior to the forces arrayed against the Reich by the Allies. And Germany would have won the First World War, except for one thing: Germany was stabbed in the back by the Jews. What is the conclusion of this narrative — which must, by the way, be a superior narrative, according to the current academic fashion, because at its inception the Germans were the weaker party, and it was the Allies who were powerful, and who were busy writing the history books? The conclusion is simple: next time Germany goes to war, it must deal decisively with its Jewish problem. And Germany proceeded to do precisely that. Now we can say many things about the Nazi narrative about the Great War; but the most obvious thing to say is that it is false. Needless to say, the Jews did not stab Germany in the back, and this could not be the reason for Germany having lost the Great War. But note what happens when large numbers of people believe preposterously false stories, and then proceed to act upon them. They commit horrible crimes, and they make disastrous mistakes. In Germany's case, the crime was the Holocaust. The mistake was to go to war with England, America, France, and Russia simultaneously — precisely the mistake Germany made in the first war. Except, of course, Germans had been convinced by Hitler that they lost the first war because of the Jews. As events demonstrated, that's not why Germany lost the first war. Thus, the narrative appears to have been wrong. What are the consequences of the false Israeli apartheid narrative? On Israelis, the consequence is obvious: instead of winning the world's support in its struggle against the Arab governments and movements that have tried to destroy the country for the past sixty years, Israel gets the world's condemnation, which means that the war continues, and will continue far into the foreseeable future. For example, what can possibly be the effect on Hamas, Fatah, the PLO, and Hizbullah of watching a credulous world community blame Israel for going to war in Gaza? Even the Saudis blamed Hamas for the Gaza war — but not the liberal churches or the human rights activists on college campuses and in the UN. The effect is obvious: the terrorist organizations responsible for waging the war will be encouraged to continue their activities. Hamas has already declared that it was victorious in the Gaza war, and will therefore, sooner rather than later, cause more suffering to Israelis and Arabs alike. After all, Hamas has said very clearly that Jews will lose because the Jews love life, while Hamas loves death. Which brings me to the second dimension of the consequences of the false apartheid narrative: its effects on Arab Palestinians. Many Arabs living on the West Bank would almost certainly welcome an end to hostilities and the beginning of a genuine effort at political and economic reconstruction. These people are called "moderates." How many moderates are there? We don't really know;=2 0and one reason we don't know is that the people who are not moderate, who want the war against Israel to continue to the bitter end, will promptly kill anyone who gets in their way. A very brave Arab in East Jerusalem circulated a petition back in the 90s, just as the PLO was about to be installed as the Palestinian Authority, the first Arab government of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His petition said: We Arabs do not want to be governed by Yasser Arafat. He collected 20,000 signatures before gunmen from Hamas, or perhaps from Fatah, caught up with him and shot him seven times. Surprisingly, he lived; not surprisingly, he stopped circulating his petition. The war against Israel might have ended decades ago, if only those who fuel it wanted it to end. Instead of producing suicide bombers, the West Bank might be producing goat cheese, olive oil, wine, and computer chips. But their leaders have chosen, instead, to continue the war against the "Israeli occupation" — by which they mean not just the West Bank but all of Israel as well. One reason they continue this war is that they believe they will win. And one reason they believe they will win is that so many people outside the region, including many American and European academics, who think they are pursuing peace and justice, have joined them in their campaign=2 0to eliminate the Jewish state. What do we call people who do whatever they can to keep a war going? When I was a college student, we called such people "warmongers." But the warmongers live far away from the carnage they help to create, and they will never see the Arab children who are taught by Palestinian TV to seek martydom, and they will never see the bloody results of the terrorist handiwork that their "narrative" helps to inspire. Too bad. And this brings me then to the final set of consequences. What does the promotion of this false narrative do to those who get caught up in it? Let's start with what it does to their grip on reality — that is, on their ability to understand what's going on in the world, how the world really works, and even where their own interests lie. We've already seen what anti-Semitism did to the Germans' ability to understand something as basic as the folly of repeating the mistakes of the First World War. Do you think that this is an extreme example? Don't be too sure. I've just been shown an article from the American Jewish Yearbook from the 1940s. It describes the campaign being run by Father Coughlin, Senator Burton Wheeler, and Charles Lindburgh, the purpose of which was to convince Americans that a small group of clever Jews was leading the campaign to oppose Nazi Germany, and that America had no reason to be on unfriendly terms with Nazi Germany. What "narrative" do you suppose convinced such men that it was in the interest of the United States for Nazi Germany to succeed? What does embracing such a narrative do, furthermore, to the souls of those who possess it? We know what it did to Coughlin, Wheeler, and Lindburgh: it recruited them into the ranks of one of the most evil political movements the world has ever seen, and for this reason their names will be linked with shame until the end of days. What does the Israeli apartheid narrative do? Look at the news footage of the demonstrations against Israel, in the US, Canada, and Europe, during the campaign to defeat Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Notice the hatred, the rage, the embrace of the most vile slogans about "Jewish Nazis", the demands to "Smash the Jewish State", the open embrace of Hamas, Fatah, and Hizbu llah — organizations responsible for the slaughter of thousands of innocent people. If you are concerned about Arab Palestinians, then you owe it to yourself to ask these questions: Is this what you want to become? Are these the people you want as allies in the struggle for "peace and justice"? Or consider the now infamous Oliphant cartoon from the New York Times, a publication that is often mentioned as part of the "Zionist media" controlling what Americans see and hear about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Oliphant pictured a large, jack-booted, headless brute pushing a Star of David with wheels and teeth through Gaza, chasing a small "Palestinian" figure holding a child, cringing in fear. This cartoon should not simply make you angry; it should make you afraid. Because this is how Jew-hatred starts. But this is never how Jew-hatred ends. One more consequence: the impact of anti-Israel demonizing on scholarship. Look at the success of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose foolish book on the Israel lobby made them rich and famous — despite the book's failure to demonstrate a single American foreign policy decision that could be traced to the influence of the Israeli government, or even Israel's supporters in the United States, and despite its amazing ability to misunderstand every important foreign policy decision over the past 30 years. And notice the way in which all this talk about "narratives" subverts the most important aims of scholarship: the search for truth. After all, if there is no truth, then what is a university for? The insistence that history cannot tell a true story, but only a contingent one, is the end of scholarship, and the death of the University and all that it stands for. It is the opening wedge in the transformation of learning into propaganda, and is therefore the mortal enemy of everyone who values learning and the search for truth. That is reason enough for all of us to be concerned about events like Israeli Apartheid Week. It is time, not for a "balanced" discussion of the Middle East, but for a discussion that demonstrates a respect for the truth, and a willingness to seek it. Contact the poster at mrla26@aol.com |
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A "JEWISH" STATE IS OF COURSE VERBOTEN. BUT AN "ARAB" STATE ....NOW YOU'RE TALKING
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 6, 2009. |
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This was posted by Hugh Fitzgerald on the Jihad Watch website
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025978.php |
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Well, well. So Mahmoud Abbas doesn't like the idea of a "Jewish" state, that is, a state connected to a particular people or a particular religion. Or sometimes to a particular people and a particular religion. Mahmoud Abbas, you see, rejects that idea, and so he must object to the belief of so many Arab Muslims that what should count for Arabs are only two things: Islam and, within Islam, as a vehicle for Arab linguistic, cultural, and other forms of imperialism, the supremacy of those who possess 'Uruba, or Arabness. He's apparently all for "diversity" and the universal rights of man, and so on. Or is he? Let's see. Let's start with a few questions. What does Mahmoud Abbas think of the official title of the country we call Egypt — that is, "The Arab Republic of Egypt"? What does he think of the Christian Copts, the original Egyptians, who were there long before the Muslim Arabs arrived? And when they did arrive, they killed, or forcibly converted, or converted over time through inexorable and sometimes unbearable pressure, many of the indigenous Copts, even making them take Arabic names and think that they were Arabs, forgetting their own Coptic identity. And what does Mahmoud Abbas think of the country we in the West call Syria, but that is actually — and this is important for the Arabs — the Syrian Arab Republic. Why put that word "Arab" in? Are there not hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Haleb (Aleppo)? Are there not some Maronites and other Christians who, in the Middle East, are prior in time to the Muslims? And why was it, do you think, when Egypt and Syria briefly joined, until irreconcilable differences between the rulers of Syria and Nasser of Egypt caused a split, was that conjoined country known by the name The United Arab Republic? Then there is Jordan. That's what we call it. But it's not what the Arabs call it. No, they call it "The Arab Kingdom of Jordan." Not the Kingdom of Jordan, but The Arab Kingdom of Jordan. In the Gulf itself the richest of the sheikdoms — seven of them have joined to form one country — are known as the United Arab Emirates. And the largest and richest country on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf is Saudi Arabia, in case anyone were tempted to forget who the people in the peninsula are. Over in North Africa, there are millions and millions of Berbers, but you wouldn't know it by the outward aspect of the countries where Arabs have everywhere subdued the Berbers, everywhere made it hard to study and use the Berber language or to preserve Berber culture that predates the arrival of the Arabs and Islam. And some countries put into their own names the assertion of an Arab identity. There's Libya, for example. You read about Libya in the papers. You hear our policymakers prate about Libya. But Libya is more than just Libya. Libya is, officially, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. All over what is so inaccurately, and so unfairly, called "the Arab world," there are non-Arabs: not only those Berbers mainly in Morocco and Algeria, but also Kurds in Iraq, black Africans in the Sudan, and there are non-Muslims too: Maronites, Copts, Chaldo-Assyrians, even Samaritans, Yazidis, Armenian Christians, Greek Orthodox, Melkites, and others. But we are presented, and our leaders appear to believe, that there is just this "Arab World" and then, quite out of place, Israel. How wrong they are not to see through time and space, what North Africa, and the Middle East, contain. By the way, does anyone remember the Ta'if Accord? In it, Saudi Arabia forced down the throats of the Lebanese Christians — with a State Department representative, David somebody or other, there as a passive observer who had no idea of the significance of what was being demanded — in the second clause of that agreement, the requirement that Lebanon, that is, Lebanon's Christians, who had for centuries regarded the fastnesses of Lebanon as their redoubt against the Muslims who in the Middle East seemed to surround them, be called an "Arab" country. Here's that clause B, the significance of which has entirely escaped the State Department, but which all Arabs, and all those Christians in Lebanon who use Arabic and may even have Arab names but are not Arabs, understand: "B. Lebanon is Arab in belonging and identity. It is an active and founding member of the Arab League and is committed to the league's charter." That was a blow to the Maronites and, to a lesser extent, other Christians. But the malevolent Saudis were there to dictate terms, not to satisfy any Christians, Lebanese or otherwise. Then, of course, all the Muslim countries in which Arabs are a majority, or if not a majority at least the dominant power, are members of the Arab League. There is Arab this, and there is Arab that. But Mahmoud Abbas? He's worried about the Jewish commonwealth that was re-established on a strip of land one-one-thousandth, or even less, of the total land area of the countries that compose the Arab League. He thinks it's terrible for Israelis to think there ought to be one place in the world where Jews have political expression as Jews, and that that place ought to be where ancient Israel existed and where Jews have lived continuously, through the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, and the British, and to which Jews everywhere, as we all know, continued to express a longing — the one to be found in that allusion to "next year in Jerusalem" or "in Zion and Jerusalem." So choose sides. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. Are you with Mahmoud Abbas, who was for decades Arafat's loyal henchman in the most vicious activities, and who now presents himself, suit-and-tied, as a Fayyad type, a no-one-here-but-us-accountants type — please forget his Holocaust-denying thesis at good old Moscow U. — the kind of man who is just so sweet-reasonable compared to, say, Benjamin Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman? But Lieberman and Netanyahu do not want to wipe out the Arabs, or destroy every last Arab country. They simply want to ensure that Israel survives. That's it. They don't have a book that inculcates the idea that the entire world belongs to them, that they must engage in a "struggle" or Jihad to ensure that all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Judaism are removed. Israel's survival, or the satisfaction of the likes of Mahmoud Abbas. Israel's survival, or the State of Palestine, the Arab State of Palestine. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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MY GAZA ROOTS
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 6, 2009. |
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January's Operation Cast Lead, launched against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, was made necessary by the earlier unilateral withdrawal from Gaza when the entire Jewish community there was forcibly evicted by the Kadima government of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. That attempt at appeasement has resulted in thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians inside the pre-1967 Israeli Green Line. When Jewish settlers were evicted, the Israeli government marketed the "deal" to the country by insisting over and over again that Gaza is not part of the Land of Israel and is devoid of Jewish roots and heritage. There's an old joke that has the Lone Ranger asking his sidekick Tonto, "How can we can escape this charge of attacking Sioux warriors?" Responded Tonto, "What do you mean we, paleface?" Whenever I hear someone insisting that we Jews have no roots in Gaza, I am always tempted to respond similarly: "What do you mean we, paleface?" My family has roots in Gaza. We were there a century ago. OK, technically it is my wife's family. I am married to the granddaughter of Nissim Ohana, the rabbi of Gaza City. But let's back up a bit here. In Genesis, Gaza is explicitly listed as part of the Land of Israel promised to the Jews. It was conquered by the tribe of Judah during the era of the Judges, though it was later recaptured by the Philistines. It was captured again by the Jews during the time of the Maccabees, only to be seized by the Romans, who handed it over to King Herod. Gaza had a small Jewish community during the era of the Talmud. A synagogue was erected near the Gaza waterfront in 508 CE. A survey of the town in 1481 found about 60 Jewish households there, many producing wine. Later, quite a few followers of Shabbtai Zvi lived there, including the famous Natan of Gaza. There was a thriving Jewish community in Gaza when Napoleon arrived in 1799 via Egypt, but a plague followed his troops and the Jews abandoned the city. The modern Jewish community of Gaza got its start in 1885. The initiator of the community was Zeev Wissotzky, scion of the Wissotzky tea company (founded in 1849 in Moscow and still to this day Israel's largest tea producer). In 1907 a young rabbi named Nissim Ohana, educated in the Sephardic yeshivas of Old Jerusalem, arrived in Gaza. He set up a school in Gaza named Talmud Torah whose language of instruction was exclusively Hebrew, an unusual and controversial decision at the time. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the initiator of the use of Hebrew as the language of communication in the pre-state yishuv, was so impressed that he paid the school a personal visit. In those days, Muslim-Jewish relations in Gaza were cordial, even warm. Rabbi Ohana maintained a close relationship with the local mufti, Sheikh Abdallah al-'Almi. The rabbi was well versed not only in Judaic sources but also in the Koran and the New Testament, and occasionally the mufti would consult with him concerning judicial questions arising in Islamic law. The mufti was particularly worried at the time about the influence of Christian missionaries on local Muslims and he asked Rabbi Ohana for help in countering the missionaries' claims. Later, Rabbi Ohana compiled his anti-missionary arguments in a book titled Know How to Respond to an Apikores, still one of the best such volumes. When World War I broke out, the ruling Ottomans ordered all "foreigners" to leave their territories. Rabbi Ohana had a French passport (his father having been born in Algeria) and was forced to leave. Rabbi Ohana served for a while as the rabbi of Malta, then as rabbi at a small Syrian synagogue in Manhattan. He went on to head the rabbinical court in Cairo before moving to Haifa, after Israel became a state, to serve as chief Sephardic rabbi of Haifa. The Gaza Jewish community was destroyed by rioting Arabs in 1929, with surviving Jews fleeing to other towns in what would become Israel. Jews returned to the area after the Six-Day War, but when Israel adopted the Oslo "peace process" as national policy, Gaza terrorism exploded and the Jews in the renewed Gaza communities faced mortal danger. Their actual eviction, however — the third ethnic cleansing of Gaza Jews in less than a century — was perpetrated by the government of Ariel Sharon, years after the collapse of Oslo. But back to Rabbi Ohana of Gaza. In the early 1980s, one of his granddaughters met an American who was teaching at the Technion. Convinced that American men were far too goofy for her to have any romantic interest in any of them, she agreed to go on a date with him only so that she could tell him about her available single American girlfriend. But she never got around to introducing the American to her girlfriend. And while her opinion about the goofiness of American men is undeniably correct, she married me anyway in 1985. One last strange twist: A grandson of the mufti of Gaza is today a leading Hamas terrorist, and has served as the Hamas representative in Damascus. Some of Rabbi Ohana's grandchildren in Israel are in possession of manuscripts written by the mufti. It is their hope that once Hamas is finally defeated and peace is established, the manuscripts will be turned over to the descendents of the mufti, Rabbi Ohana's close friend. Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist,
a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author
of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and
satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic
community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is
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US WANTS ISRAEL TO PAY FOR "RESET BOTTON" WITH ARABS
Posted by Judith Apter Klinghoffer, May 6, 2009. |
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So that there will be no misunderstanding: The new Obama "realist" administration wishes to push "the reset" bottom on its relationship with Arab autocrats. It is willing to pay them with Israeli currency in the form of forcing Israel to agree to create a Palestinian state on her Western front regardless of the clear and present danger that such a state will become a third Iranian satellite on Israel's border. Let us not forget, Iranian satellite Hezbollah is perched on Israel's Northern border and Iranian satellite Hamas on the Southern one. An Iranian satellite on the Western one would complete the encirclement. The American argument would be funny, if it would not be so frightening. If you help create a weak/corrupt Palestinian state, the Arab autocrats will help you fight Iran. Thousands of years ago, Jermiah raged against the efficacy of relying on the Egyptian "week reed" to save Jerusalem from the Babylonians. He was right. The temple was destroyed and the people were exiled. Yes, that is Ahmadinejad's plan, too. Relying on Egypt to protect Israel from Iran would be as foolhardy now as it was then. Even had Mubarak wished (which is most doubtful) to help Israel prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons it is doubtful it could. Let us not forget, it has not been able to prevent Iranian cell from thriving in Egypt proper. To be fair There is nothing unique in Obama's treatment of Israel. Poland and the Czech Repulic share the experience. Obama has already tried to pay for a "reset botton" with Russia with their currency. Then, Michael Rubin presciently asked: Obama may see his offer to Russia as pragmatism, but gestures create precedent. U.S. allies who fear that Washington is willing to sacrifice allies for the sake of diplomatic convenience may question whether alliances remain built on today's interests only, or also on shared values and history. If, after all, Russian antagonism forces U.S. concessions over Poland and the Czech Republic, why not increase Russian belligerence in the Caucasus, Central Asia, or on the Korean Peninsula? Well, they should. They do and the Obama administration is more than willing to oblige. Moreover, by choosing a Jewish chief of staff to do the dirty work, Obama showed himself a "worthy" successor to LBJ. You see, Arthur Goldberg was LBJ's point man to read the riot act to Israel. It was his Jewish UN representative that was charged with berating Israel for daring to retaliate against Palestinian acts of terror in 1966 and to inform Israel that it should not rely on any American assistance against Nasser in May 1967. The Jerusalem Post reports The task of forming an international coalition to thwart Iran's nuclear program will be made easier if progress is made in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has said, according to sources in Washington. The NYT also predicts a US Israeli battle royale. For the sake of peace, I hope Netanyahu will do what Olmert failed to do during the Lebanon war: Just say no! It would not be easy. Arafat has taught Arabs that saying or even whispering the "right words" to the right Americans can do the trick. Hamas leader, Mashall is already begun dropping hints to the welcoming ears of NYT reporters. An accommodating US and Israel has already emboldened Iranian hardliners just as it had emboldened Egyptian ones in 1967. The result was the Six Day War. Given the advancement in destructive weaponry, the results this time are bound to be much more destructive. Israel must continue to insist that dealing with Iran must precede the creation of a Palestinian state and not the other way around. Indeed, Iranian bellicosity should be exposed as the barrier it is to the realization of a two state solution. Contact Judith Apter Klinghoffer by email at jklinghoff@aol.com |
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FROM ISRAEL: CONFRONTATION
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 5, 2009. |
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I knew it was going to be ugly. But the bounds of the confrontation we are going to face with Obama's administration transcends what I had expected. We have an enemy in the White House. And we have been let down by large parts of the American Jewish community. Following here are excerpts from a report that has just come out from Middle East News Line (MENL) — an exceedingly reliable news and intelligence source. (My emphasis added) "President Barack Obama intends to press Israel to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank over the next two years. ~~~~~~~~~~ Where to begin in responding to this enraging information? It's the tone, perhaps most of all, that infuriates: "Israel would not be allowed..." "Obama was convinced that Israel should..." We are a sovereign state and yet Obama believes he can dictate to us. Or maybe it's the threat that riles: If you want help in taking down Iran's nuclear program, deliver what we want first. ~~~~~~~~~~ Then again it might be the collosal, pig-headed stupidity of this approach. I've said it before and I'll say it again here, and as many more times thereafter as is necessary: Establishment of a Palestinian state and stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions are two different issues that should be handled separately. The linkage being made by Obama is simply not acceptable or reasonable. Supporting our efforts to stop Iran does not DEPEND on anything except Obama's will to act appropriately. Iran is a threat to the free world, not just to Israel. If it goes nuclear it will certainly undermine all of the genuine interests of the US. So, if Iran does — G-d forbid — go nuclear, and US interests are threatened, is Obama going to say, "Gee, I couldn't act because Israel didn't establish a Palestinian state"? He has a responsibility to his nation and to the West on this score and he's evading it. The moderate Arab states — most significantly Egypt and Saudi Arabia — whatever they say publicly, are very much frightened by the prospect of a nuclear Iran and would be pleased to see Iran stopped. What is more, they have no genuine, deep, and abiding interest in a Palestinian state. As to the European states, Obama has moved to the left of them now with regard to Iran and nations such as France have expressed unease. ~~~~~~~~~~ And we have not yet come to the ludicrous or devious parts of this entire line of reasoning: Obama is saying that we must produce a Palestinian state by 2012 and then he'll act on Iran. But by 2012 Iran would have already gone nuclear and it would be much too late. Is this Obama's true intention? To let this happen while holding a threat over our heads? ~~~~~~~~~~ And finally this: The time is not ripe for a Palestinian state, even if it were a good idea (it's not) to establish one some day. Actually, the time is so wrong for this that anyone pushing for a state "within two years" has to be acting without concern for the repercussions of its establishment. Consider: — Abbas is a weak leader who has not established the solid civic infratructure necessary for the establishment of a stable state. So, go build a stable, responsible Palestinian state from this that is supposed to lead to "peace." ~~~~~~~~~~ And this is just the beginning, for there is also an elephant in the room: Hamas. Obama clearly would prefer not to deal with this, but Hamas won't go away. Hamas refuses to renounce terrorism, honor past PA agreements with Israel or recognize Israel's right to exist. Hamas is in control of Gaza, which is currently a center for terrorist activities and an area into which ever more weaponry is being smuggled. What does Obama suggest will happen to Hamas if we sign a deal with Abbas and the PA? There are two possibilites. One is that the PA will form a unity government with Hamas. In this case, Obama would be expecting us to deal with a government that has a party that still embraces terrorism. More likely, Hamas will remain independent. It is already on its way to establishing a separate government. (More on this, hopefully tomorrow.) What this means is that we're being asked to live with TWO Palestinian states between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. What is more, Hamas has clearly indicated a desire to take over in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) if the Israeli forces that contain them pull out. This means Palestinian states on both flanks that are overtly terrorist. ~~~~~~~~~~ So, what we're seeing is that Obama's bow to the Saudi king was emblematic of his kissing-up-to-the-Muslims intent, which includes a willingness to put Israel on the chopping block. But we Israelis are not having it. ~~~~~~~~~~ Yesterday Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the AIPAC conference by video. He's playing a difficult game — the game I wrote about recently: being as conciliatory as possible without stepping over a red line. He spoke about the fact that he is ready to do negotiations with the Palestinians — on economy, security and political matters. He said that he was sure that it was possible to reach peace. HOWEVER, he refrained from ever referring to either a "two state solution" — the sacred mantra — or referring to a "Palestinian state." He has neither in mind. What is more, he says he will never sacrifice Israel's security. That alone precludes a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. And he will insist that Israel be recognized by the Palestinians as a Jewish state. ~~~~~~~~~~ I would like, then, to return to what I wrote about yesterday. Netanyahu requires the maximum in support from all of us before he heads to the White House. If you have not yet communicated with him, please, do so. Israelis: Let him know that you are a citizen, and that you support him as he goes to the US. Ask him please to stand strong and to resist pressure to accept a "two state solution." Tell him that this is what his nation needs of him right now, that we need him to speak in the best interests of Israel and to speak out for Israeli rights. Numbers matters, folks! American citizens can also contact him. But you will need to say something different. From Americans he needs to hear that not everyone in the US wants a two-state solution. Tell him briefly about how you personally work to support Israel from within the US: rallying support via e-mails, holding discussions with people, writing letters to the editor, contacting your Congresspersons or Senators — or whatever else you do. Whether here in Israel, or in the US, please share this broadly by forwarding. Remove the "forwarding" data from the subject line and at the head of the message, and, if you wish, add your own introduction. Note that I've added the proper way to dial from the States and
note as well that the e-mail has an underscore after "pm."
~~~~~~~~~~ One more word about AIPAC here: The question has been raised in several quarters regarding whether Netanyahu signed off on their "two state" position. This was asked because normally AIPAC, which is a US organization lobbying for Israel, takes its cue from the Israeli government. It would seem he did not sign off on this, because had he, in his address to AIPAC he would have spoken about his vision of a "two state solution," and instead he studiously avoided this term. But I went further and asked some questions of people in the know, and the best answer is that it is highly unlikely that he did. What has happened, however, is that AIPAC has now made things more difficult for Netanyahu. There are various theories floating, but why they did what they did is a question to which I have no answer as I write. My bet has something to do with pressure from the White House in one form or another. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Many assume it was tit-for-tat. The Government dropped its case against AIPAC's staff (It was phonus-bolonus and wasn't going anywheres but it was costing AIPAC a lot of time, money and status.) and AIPAC came out for the 2-state solution on its own.] ~~~~~~~~~~ Americans must wake up and understand that what Obama is doing is enormously destructive to America. They must be educated to the realities. And I'm hoping that those of you in the US reading this who are activists and care deeply about the current situation will be on board over the next several months as we mount campaigns to fight this. I've provided core information to bolster arguments and am available to anyone who seeks more. Those of you who are Jewish Americans and connected to establishment Jewish organizations must begin to apply serious pressure on the leadership of these organizations, which has let us down — caving to Obama rather than making the case that needs to be made. In short order I hope I will be able to have more regarding contact with elected representatives.
Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il
and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
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US IS DANGEROUS OBSTACLE FOR ISRAEL; A PERFORMANCE-BASED AGREEMENT BUT
NO PERFORMANCE BY P.A.
Posted by Brother Shane, May 5, 2009. |
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The article below is by Steve Shamrak. I wrote him this: Good stuff. But i do not agree with your plan to move the Philistinians to the Sinai. Jordan was long ago established as the Palestinian Arab state (within Israel). So why should Israel make any more concessions? |
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[Note by Steven Shamrak: My comments are interspersed in () brackets] The US is Dangerous Obstacle for Israel. According to a report in World Tribune, an Israeli source familiar with the US' intelligence assessment said that "Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and until now the worst enemies of the United States. Under this policy," the source added, "we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle." The U.S. Administration would reject Israel's intelligence opinions on Iran and Syria while advancing the Obama plan to reconcile with the two states, although both were listed as state sponsors of terrorism by the U.S. State Department. (For too long over reliance on the United States has kept Israel from achieving freedom from Islamic terror, prosperity and self-respect!) To Hell with Israel, Let's Make Money and Play Games. 1) For the sake of dialogue and cooperation, Washington is ceding Tehran the chance to feed its natural gas into the Nabucco pipeline project (from the Caspian to the EU via Turkey). Why Must Israel Talk to Syria? Israel must sit down and talk with Syria to resolve differences and work for peace, the U.S. State Department said in response to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's recent statements that the Israeli government cannot sit down with a government that backs Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas. (Do not preach to Israel about peace! Does Syria to want resolve differences and work for peace?) Please Ask, What would Happened if it was Israel? Sri Lanka has admitted its air force bombed a safe haven established for up to 150,000 civilians fleeing fighting between the army and the Tamil Tigers. According to the United Nations unofficial figures 6,432 civilians have been killed and 13,946 wounded in fighting in Sri Lanka since January 20. The figures were not made public by the UN, but were circulated among foreign embassies in Colombo. Food for Thought by Steven Shamrak Diversity is the main tool of economic survival. Israel must use political diversity for political survival and reduction of unfair international political pressure. Three economic, political and military super powers (Russia, China and India) will benefit enormously from Israel's economic, scientific and military expertise. It will end over-reliance on the US. We must remember that the main reason why the United States supported the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was the fear of having a Soviet platzdarm in the Middle East! Independence Day or Catastrophe. Israeli Arabs, Mohammed Barakeh chairman of the Hadash Party and a member of the Knesset said: "Their (Jews) Independence Day is our (fake Palestinians) Nakba, catastrophe". (In 1948 they tried to make the creation of the new Jewish state into another Jewish catastrophe, but failed! It is time to revoke the citizenship of this traitorous Fifth column and let them leave the Jewish land.) Afghanistan on Its Way to Democracy? A new Afghan law, which reportedly was never debated in parliament, makes it legal for a man to rape his wife should she refuse to have sex with him. One of the articles of this law has a provision that a woman cannot leave her home without her husband's permission. (When will the thick-sculled analysts in the West realise that it is a fantasy or delusion to expect development of a democracy in a Muslim country?) Is Turkey a friend or Islamic steppingstone into Europe? Turkey, the member of the NATO who disallowed the US entry into Iraq, has made a decision to hold military manoeuvres with Syria and intends to sign a letter of intent for Turkish-Syrian cooperation in the defence industry. (This will disclose military secrets of Israel and NATO to the enemies, Syria and Iran!) Time for Israel to Change Direction. PA president Mahmud Abbas rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demand to recognise Israel as a Jewish state: "You can call yourselves as you like, but I don't accept it and I say so publicly." (But the PA 'must' be a Palestinian state and 250,000 Jews must be removed from Judea and Samaria, as was done in Gaza? Enemies hope to bring more Arabs to Israel and change its demography, effectively destroying Jewish state! That is why Abbas rejected Netanyahu's demand.) Quote of the Week: "Israeli strategy is all too often constructed, if not dictated, by American foreign policy and in particular, (pressure from) the American President. How then could American Jews risk the survival of the State of Israel on a man who they knew befriended and listened to an anti-Semitic pastor for 20 years, surrounded himself with anti-Semitic friends and advisors, promised to unconditionally reach out to Israel's (and America's) enemies, and flip flopped on the status of Jerusalem?" — Lauri B. Regan, an attorney. Anti-Semitism in Genetics. Researcher Gregory Cochran and anthropologist Henry Harpending claim that deadly genetic diseases prominent amongst European Jews are linked to higher IQ (average from 108 to 115). However, the theory has its detractors. Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at UC San Francisco asked: "Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African Americans perform worse academically?" ( There would be an outcry of "racists" if they did so. But even Jewish cleverness must be due to 'disease', so no outcry!) Joseph Tomb Vandalized. Swastikas and other anti-Semitic vandalism were found with a boot stamping on one wall, as the ultimate insult in the Arab world. The tomb, which according to the Oslo Accords is under Israeli control, is surrounded by territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. On Wednesday night, over 500 visitors were transported into the area in bullet-proof vehicles and under heavy IDF protection. (This is result of 'the Peace process' in action. Theoretically, Joseph's Tomb is also a Muslim holy place. But Arabs do not care about Jewish Bible heritage and systematically desecrate Jewish and Christian places of worship!) Spiritual or Political Bigot, or Both? Plans for the Pope's visit are becoming more political. The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem said he will preach to Arabs claiming "right of return." Performance-based Agreement without Performance! The following is a performance-based and goal-driven roadmap, with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the Quartet. Phase I: Ending terror and violence, normalising Palestinian life, and building Palestinian institutions (present to May 2003) In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below; such action should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel. (The PA's groups, including Fatah, have never stopped terror acts against Israel!) Palestinians undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood, including drafting a Palestinian constitution, and free, fair and open elections upon the basis of those measures. (Worked only partially for a short time) Israel takes all necessary steps to help normalise Palestinian life. ( Israel is unable to due to the continuation of the PA's terror) Israel withdraws from Palestinian areas occupied from September 28, 2000 and the two sides restore the status quo that existed at that time, as security performance and co-operation progress. (Israel withdrew and gave the PA an opportunity to self-govern. But security co-operation has been continuously undermined by PA terror attacks.) Israel also freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report. (Building of settlements was stopped for a while but has been resumed, as the PA has not fulfilled any of its undertakings!) Security: — Palestinians declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere. (Fatah, Hamas and other PLO/PA members never stopped their involvement in terror attacks against Israel.) — Rebuilt and refocused Palestinian Authority security apparatus begins sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. This includes commencing confiscation of illegal weapons and consolidation of security authority, free of association with terror and corruption. (Members of the PA security apparatus are part of the terror network and their salary is paid by Western countries!) — Arab states cut off public and private funding and all other forms of support for groups supporting and engaging in violence and terror. (When halal/kosher pigs fly!) Phase III: Permanent status agreement and end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (2004-2005) ( The deadline of the agreement expired a long time ago. Old ways of international anti-Israel hypocrisy do not work — a new approach is needed!) Progress into Phase III, based on consensus judgment of Quartet, and taking into account actions of both parties and Quartet monitoring. (And the actions — or lack of them — speak out loud !) Phase III objectives are consolidation of reform and stabilisation of Palestinian institutions, sustained, effective Palestinian security performance, and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at a permanent status agreement in 2005. (There is nothing actually to consolidate. All other subsequent agreements did not take into account the violations of the Roadmap agreement by the PA and put unfair pressure on Israel to agree to the Annapolis Accord's two-state-solution, which is not ratified by either Israel or the PA, therefore it is not legally binding!) Contact Brother Shane at wisevirgin_777@yahoo.com |
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AS THE U.S. RETREATS, IRAN FILLS THE VOID
Posted by Amir Tahiri, May 5, 2009. |
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Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran's Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises. Iranian strategists believe that Egypt is heading for a major crisis once President Hosni Mubarak, 81, departs from the political scene. He has failed to impose his eldest son Gamal as successor, while the military-security establishment, which traditionally chooses the president, is divided. Iran's official Islamic News Agency has been conducting a campaign on that theme for months. This has triggered a counter-campaign against Iran by the Egyptian media. Last month, Egypt announced it had crushed a major Iranian plot and arrested 68 people. According to Egyptian media, four are members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Tehran's principal vehicle for exporting its revolution. 
Seven were Palestinians linked to the radical Islamist movement Hamas; one was a Lebanese identified as "a political agent from Hezbollah" by the Egyptian Interior Ministry. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, claimed these men were shipping arms to Hamas in Gaza. The arrests reportedly took place last December, during a crackdown against groups trying to convert Egyptians to Shiism. The Egyptian Interior Ministry claims this proselytizing has been going on for years. Thirty years ago, Egyptian Shiites numbered a few hundred. Various estimates put the number now at close to a million, but they are said to practice taqiyah (dissimulation), to hide their new faith. But in its campaign for regional hegemony, Tehran expects Lebanon as its first prize. Iran is spending massive amounts of cash on June's general election. It supports a coalition led by Hezbollah, and including the Christian ex-general Michel Aoun. Lebanon, now in the column of pro-U.S. countries, would shift to the pro-Iran column. In Bahrain, Tehran hopes to see its allies sweep to power through mass demonstrations and terrorist operations. Bahrain's ruling clan has arrested scores of pro-Iran militants but appears more vulnerable than ever. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has contacted Arab heads of states to appeal for "urgent support in the face of naked threats," according to the Bahraini media. The threats became sensationally public in March. In a speech at Masshad, Iran's principal "holy city," Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described Bahrain as "part of Iran." Morocco used the ensuing uproar as an excuse to severe diplomatic relations with Tehran. The rupture came after months of tension during which Moroccan security dismantled a network of pro-Iran militants allegedly plotting violent operations. Iran-controlled groups have also been uncovered in Kuwait and Jordan. According to Kuwaiti media, more than 1,000 alleged Iranian agents were arrested and shipped back home last winter. According to the Tehran media, Kuwait is believed vulnerable because of chronic parliamentary disputes that have led to governmental paralysis. As for Jordan, Iranian strategists believe the kingdom, where Palestinians are two-thirds of the population, is a colonial creation and should disappear from the map — opening the way for a single state covering the whole of Palestine. Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have both described the division of Palestine as "a crime and a tragedy." Arab states are especially concerned because Tehran has succeeded in transcending sectarian and ideological divides to create a coalition that includes Sunni movements such as Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, sections of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Marxist-Leninist and other leftist outfits that share Iran's anti-Americanism. Information published by Egyptian and other Arab intelligence services, and reported in the Egyptian and other Arab media, reveal a sophisticated Iranian strategy operating at various levels. The outer circle consists of a number of commercial companies, banks and businesses active in various fields and employing thousands of locals in each targeted country. In Egypt, for example, police have uncovered more than 30 such Iranian "front" companies, according to the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Alawsat. In Syria and Lebanon, the numbers reportedly run into hundreds. In the next circle, Iranian-financed charities offer a range of social and medical services and scholarships that governments often fail to provide. Another circle consists of "cultural" centers often called Ahl e Beit (People of the House) supervised by the offices of the supreme leader. These centers offer language classes in Persian, English and Arabic, Islamic theology, Koranic commentaries, and traditional philosophy — alongside courses in information technology, media studies, photography and filmmaking. Wherever possible, the fourth circle is represented by branches of Hezbollah operating openly. Where that's not possible, clandestine organizations do the job, either alone or in conjunction with Sunni radical groups. The Khomeinist public diplomacy network includes a half-dozen satellite television and radio networks in several languages, more than 100 newspapers and magazines, a dozen publishing houses, and thousands of Web sites and blogs controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The network controls thousands of mosques throughout the region where preachers from Iran, or trained by Iranians, disseminate the Khomeinist revolutionary message. Tehran has also created a vast network of non-Shiite fellow travelers within the region's political and cultural elites. These politicians and intellectuals may be hostile to Khomeinism on ideological grounds — but they regard it as a powerful ally in a common struggle against the American "Great Satan." Khomeinist propaganda is trying to portray Iran as a rising "superpower" in the making while the United States is presented as the "sunset" power. The message is simple: The Americans are going, and we are coming. Tehran plays a patient game. Wherever possible, it is determined to pursue its goals through open political means, including elections. With pro-American and other democratic groups disheartened by the perceived weakness of the Obama administration, Tehran hopes its allies will win all the elections planned for this year in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. "There is this perception that the new U.S. administration is not interested in the democratization strategy," a senior Lebanese political leader told me. That perception only grows as President Obama calls for an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan and Iraq. Power abhors a vacuum, which the Islamic Republic of Iran is only too happy to fill.
Amir Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution," is published by Encounter Books.
This appeared in today's Wall Street Journal
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A PROTEST AGAINST INSENSITIVE TEE SHIRTS AND BUMPER STICKERS
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 5, 2009. |
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The most curious document has just been discovered by archeologists working in the rubble left behind in a suburb of Munich in Germany. The document is a statement dated August 23, 1944. It was evidently issued by the Reichsamt gegen Rassismus und Benachteiligung, which means the Reich's Bureau against Racism and Discrimination. I have turned the original German document, which reached me through some bizarre channels about which I cannot give details, over to a colleague for translation into English. I bring it to your attention because it is curiously similar to some items currently on the internet regarding the wearing of tee-shirts containing slogans of poor taste in Israel today! Here is the translation: The Reich's Bureau against Racism and Discrimination Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist,
a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author
of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and
satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic
community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is
This essay appeared yesterday in the Jewish Press
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ADL CONDEMNS ANTI-ISLAM REMARKS BY DUTCH PARLIAMENTARIAN
Posted by Boris Celser, May 5, 2009. | ||||
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The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — whose mission is to protect Jews from defamation — has stated: "The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) strongly condemns remarks made over the last few days at various appearances throughout South Florida by Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders. In his speeches, he claimed that "Islam is not a religion" and "the right to religious freedom should not apply to this totalitarian ideology called Islam." Mr. Wilders also stated that the Koran is a book of hatred, and that Mohammed was both "a pedophile and a warlord." EDITOR'S NOTE: Please note that Geert Wilders is under attack by Islamists just as the Jews are. Please note that Geert Wilders was scrupulously accurate in his remarks that Islam is an ideology, that the Koran is filled with hate statements against Jews, that Mohammad was a pedophile (what else do you call someone who "marries" a six-year old child), and a warlord who encouraged his men to loot, plunder, rape and kill. Moreover, Geert Wilders speaks out forcefully that the Jewish people and Israel are under attack by resurgent Islam. | ||||
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Boris Celser is a Canadian. Contact him at celser@telusplanet.net |
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HEZBOLLAH: THE WORLD'S MOST EFFECTIVE TERRORIST ORGANIZATION
Posted by Elias Bejjani, May 5, 2009. |
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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" — Edmund Burke — 17th century philosopher and author" The U.S. government has labeled Hezbollah, in its State Department report for 2008, as the world's most effective terrorist organization. The report said that Iran remains the most active state sponsor of terrorism, including supporting terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. According to the same report, "Iran's involvement in the planning and financial support of terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia had a direct impact on international efforts to promote peace, threatened economic stability in the Gulf, and undermined the growth of democracy". It singled out the Qods Force, an elite branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as the Islamic republic's main means to cultivate and support terrorists overseas. The Qods Force gave "weapons, training and funding" to Hamas and other Palestinian anti-Israeli groups, Lebanon's Hezbollah as well as Iraq-based militants and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/nea/119120.htm) How can the US, the mightiest military and financial power in the whole world, officially recognize the serious and great dangers of Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah, while expecting the Lebanese people and their crippled government and military institutions to tame, control and disarm this terrorist organization? Hezbollah from day one of its creation by Iran in 1982 up until now, is a serious and deadly threat to all the civilized and free world countries. As such, it is not a mere Lebanese problem, but rather a serious problem, grave threat and challenge to global peace, stability and democracy. What is unfortunate and shameful, is that the free world and surrounding Arab countries, are not showing enough determination, transparency, seriousness or persistence in dealing with the most dangerous terrorist organization in the whole world, Hezbollah. Unbelievably, some very influential Western countries, among which is England, are actively negotiating with this terrorist organization and providing its fanatic and extremist leadership with academic, media and political platforms to justify and spread the support of their doctrines of terrorism under the false pretext of 'free speech'! In reality, Hezbollah is an Iranian militant organization on all levels and by every definition. Its' Iranian mission, terrorist activities and objectives have become crystal clear, not only to the Lebanese people who are suffering on daily basis from its' oppression, intimidation and dictatorship, but also to the majority of the Arab states, US, Canada and Australia. This intimidation, fear mongering and illicit fundraising activities extend also to many European, African and Southern American countries. The only positive element in this Pandora's Box lies in the fact that Hezbollah can no longer fool the educated patriots and nationalists in Lebanon or in the Arab communities, that they are an indigenous resistance entity and liberation movement whose sole purpose is to defend Arab rights and Lebanese sovereignty. Its' extremely active involvement in worldwide drug trafficking and terrorism activities have exposed Hezbollah's hierarchy and Iranian dictated leadership, ripping off the seductive facade of 'resistance' that they so cleverly attempt to hide behind. Thankfully, most of Hezbollah's devious tactics of camouflage and deceptiveness are no longer working, revealing their proxy Iranian destructive criminal agenda. Many of Hezbollah's own Shiite Lebanese community, which it dominates and controls by religion, money, bribery, intimidation and brute force, is losing its' patience and quickly realizing the true color of the Hezbollah resistance cloak. Many are turning their backs on this militia whose loyalties and agendas are more Iranian and less Lebanese! Hezbollah has nothing to do with resistance, liberation or any
actual patriotic Lebanese or Arabic cause by any means. In reality,
Hezbollah is an Iranian militant brigade, a division of Iran's
notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
According to dozens of well documented and trustworthy reports, Hezbollah continues to run a vast, well organized and extremely sophisticated global network of drug trafficking, crime, terrorism and arms trafficking, infiltrating many Arab states, Israel, Mexico, Canada, Australia, United States, Europe, South America and numerous previous Islamic states of the USSR. It is pathetic that the Free World in general, and the Arab world in particular, continue to appease and cajole Hezbollah's leadership, inflate their already swollen egos, hail their fabricated and cleverly titled 'divine victories', and keep a blind eye to their ongoing activities of arms smuggling from Syria through the Syrian-Lebanese borders. Since 1982, Hezbollah systematically has been devouring the state of Lebanon, destroying its' military, judicial and financial institutions, crippling its legislature and democratic government and fragmenting and terrorizing its' delicate social fabric, all the while solidifying the terrorist infrastructure and Iranian-modeled institutions of its mini-state and scattered cantons. The looming devastating threat that Hezbollah poses on Lebanon and the Lebanese, will be an unfortunate and lethal reality if it wins a majority government in the upcoming June 7th parliamentary Lebanese elections with its pro-Syrian mercenary allies. If this nightmare comes to bare on Lebanon, Hezbollah and Iran will have the upper hand in running the country's new government, imposing by force a replica of Gaza's terrorist Hamas government. Prior to these elections, Hezbollah has already confiscated by force, money and intimidation, all the allocated Shiite seats in the parliament. It has also forced its' candidates on Christians, Druze and Sunni Muslims who live inside their cantons. Almost 100 out of the 128 elected MPs are going to win their seats uncontested because of both the biased electoral law and Hezbollah's terrorism and religious decrees (Fatwa and Takalief Sharia). The 28 seats that will decide who gets the parliamentary majority
or minority will be challenged in four constituencies where the
Christian voters are the majority. Accordingly the Christian voters
will hold in their hands the fate of Lebanon. Either they will vote
against Hezbollah's allies and keep Lebanon a democratic, free and
multi-cultural society of coexistence and peace or they will vote for
Michel Aoun, the Christian ex-general egomaniac who entered into a
self-serving alliance with Hezbollah in order to better his chances of
obtaining the Presidency. This unholy alliance has furthered the
legitimacy of Hezbollah and increased their tyrannical grip over
Lebanon with their "Wilayat Al-Faqih" religious Iranian religious
doctrine.
Hezbollah's essence and spiritual, cultural and political foundation are totally derived from the Iranian Mullah's doctrine of "Wilayat Al-Faqih". The main pillars of this doctrine are zero tolerance for all others who are of different faith and culture and who do not fully submit to their control. It is a blatant rejection of the civil, democratic and free societies; a systematic, tireless effort to export the "Wilayat Al-Faqih", and impose it on the whole world through "Jihad" (holy war), deeply rooted hatred for the western democracies and cultures, staunch enmity and hostility towards the US and Israel all with a suicidal mentality. One of its prime aims is to destroy Israel and 'liberate' the Holy city of Jerusalem. General Michel Aoun, Syria and Iran's mouthpiece, is a Maronite Christian whose personal ambitions and lust for power has completely allied himself with the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah agenda. He has negated all his previous pro-Lebanon, pro-sovereignty and pro-independence slogans and he has viciously turned his back on and attacked the Maronite Church and its' Patriarch. He has betrayed every historic social, religious and national conviction of the Lebanese Christians. Christian voters must vote for those who are committed to the holy cause of Lebanon's freedom, sovereignty and culture of peace, coexistence and progress. Voting for Aoun's tickets is voting for Iran's Mullah's and their project to swallow Lebanon and turn it into a dictatorship run by their proxy Hezbollah. Nobody at the present time knows better than the Iraqi people what terrorism is, that Hezbollah imposes on Lebanon. I will end my piece with a quotation that I took from Mr. Noori Kamal Al-Maliki, Prime Minister of Iraq in his statement at the 62nd UN General Assembly: "Terrorism kills civilians, journalists, actors, thinkers, and professionals; it attacks universities, marketplaces, and libraries; it blows up Mosques and Churches and destroys the infrastructure of State institutions. We consider terrorism an extension of the fallen dictatorship, whether it may vary in its outside form or by the gangs that carry it out. Terrorism aims at aborting the political process, and igniting sectarian dissension as a prelude to hijack Iraq back into the era of tyranny, oppression, and backwardness." Elias Bejjani is a Canadian-Lebanese Human Rights activist,
journalist and political commentator. Email him at
phoenicia@hotmail.com and visit his websites:
This article is archived at http://www.10452lccc.com/elias english09/elias.hezbollah 6.5.09.htm |
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MASHTAPIM
Posted by David Wilder, May 5, 2009. |
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Oren also stated that the eviction of thousands of Jews from Gush
Katif was not a mistake, despite the attacks on Israeli cities from
the abandoned communities: "The mistake was Israel's failure to react
to the Qassam fire, which sent a message of weakness to the entire
Middle East." Another Jew in a major leadership position, Obama's Chief of Staff,
Rahm Emanuel, linked American efforts preventing Iran from fully
developing nuclear weapons with Israeli concessions. "the ability to
confront Iran will depend on the ability to make progress on the
Palestinian front. Solving the conflict will make it possible to
advance the handling of the main threat posed by Iran."
Obama's national security advisor, Gen. James Jones, told a high
ranking European diplomat that Obama will be "forceful" with Israel.
Undoubtedly, the most damaging American special interest lobby
dealing with Israel is AIPAC. Steve Grossman, AIPAC president in the
early-middle 1990s, was quoted as saying "There were people in AIPAC
who felt Oslo was a bad idea, but I'm still proud of the fact that the
first American Jewish organization to support Rabin and Peres and the
Oslo accords was AIPAC." In an article called "AIPAC Lobbying," AFSI president Herb Zweiban
writes, "AIPAC President Steve Grossman has declared that he supports
sending $500-million in U.S. aid to the PLO, despite the PLO's
massive violations of the Oslo Accords. (JTA, Dec. 5, 1994) While
other pro-Israel groups endorsed legislation to pressure the PLO (e.g.
the Specter-Shelby Amendment), AIPAC worked behind the scenes to
"discourage congressional measures aimed at supervising administration
grants to the PLO." (Jerusalem Post, Nov. 10, 1994)"
A JTA article headlined, " AIPAC offers strong backing for withdrawal plan" says, "Sharon already has won the endorsement of an array of national Jewish groups...but AIPAC's endorsement is the plum." And further on, "We're very pleased that AIPAC has given its formal endorsement to the U.S. government's support for the disengagement initiative," said Debra DeLee, American for Peace Now's president." http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/050527/aipac.shtml
In an article by Uriel Heilman, he writes, "AIPAC has been lobbying
for strong US support for Israel's disengagement plan...."
AIPAC initiated a letter, signed by US Congressman, showing support
for the abandonment of Gush Katif. The AIPAC web site declares, "the
letter recognizes the historic opportunity presented by Israeli
disengagement from 25 settlements in Gaza, and advises President
George W. Bush to press Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for
reciprocal peace efforts and democratic reforms inside the Palestinian
Authority.
In an article by Beth Goodtree called AIPAC of lies, she writes
that " Natan Sharansky begged to speak at the 2004 conference and was
unceremoniously turned down because he wanted to warn that giving up
Jewish land to a group of terrorists who had no intention of having a
true democracy was a roadmap to disaster for Israel. "
In the past AIPAC's 'official policy' was to toe the state line — whatever the Israeli government favored was good enough for them. Those policies, such as Oslo and the expulsion from Gush Katif, have cost thousands of Israeli lives. However presently, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is on record as opposing a 'two-state solution.' During his satellite-broadcast speech to the AIPAC convention yesterday, he did not mention the term 'palestinian state," rather he demanded that any negotiations be preceded by an official PA recognition that Israel is a 'Jewish State.' Yet AIPAC is actively lobbying in Congress, pressuring American representatives to support establishment of a palestinian state. In other words, AIPAC has began a new phase in its infamous dealings with Israel; rather than just backing State policy, they are now attempting to determine that policy and force it down Israel's throat. Anyone calling the AIPAC offices and asking whether AIPAC representatives are pushing Congress to support a 'palestinian state' are answered affirmatively. Clearly, AIPAC is fostering policies which are labeled in Hebrew, 'Mashtap' — an abbreviation for mishatef peula, which means, in English, collaborating with the enemy. AIPAC is a large group of Jews, whose collective effort is focused on initiating and supporting policies which could lead to the destruction of the State of Israel. A Palestinian state is nothing less than a death trap, waiting to be sprung at a fateful moment in the future. However, this should not surprise us. This is not the first time Jews have connived with the enemy. The initials may remain the same, but the words have changed: AIPAC: Americans Inciting for the Palestinian
Authority Committee
David Wilder is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly in Israel to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB105, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, email: hebron@hebron.org.il or phone: 972-52-431-7055. In USA, write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, email: hebronfund@aol.com or phone: 718 677 6886. |
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OBAMA'S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER JONES SAYS HE WILL BE 'FORCEFUL' WITH ISRAEL
Posted by Mr La, May 5, 2009. |
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According to Haaretz, James Jones, National Security Adviser to Democratic President Barack Hussein Obama told an unnamed European foreign minister that the Obama administration would be 'forceful' with the Netanyahu government to bring about the creation of a 'Palestinian' Gen. James Jones, national security adviser to President Barack Obama, told a European foreign minister a week ago that unlike the Bush administration, Obama will be "forceful" with Israel. ... Jones is the main force in the Obama administration stressing the Palestinian question and believes that the United States must become more intensively involved in the matter vis-a-vis both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Several days ago, a classified telegram was received in Jerusalem discussing a meeting between Jones and a European foreign minister. Jones told his European interlocutor that President George W. Bush had avoided actions on the Palestinian question that Israel opposed, but the Obama administration intended to change this practice and become more active. It would not make concessions on matters that Israel had committed to. "The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question," Jones said. "We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush." Jones is quoted in the telegram as saying that the United States, European Union and moderate Arab states must redefine "a satisfactory endgame solution." 
The U.S. national security adviser did not mention Israel as party to these consultations. Hope and change anyone? Oh that's right this guy has always been opposed to Israel.
If 'redefining the endgame' and then imposing the new definition on
Israel isn't 'pushing Israel under the wheels of the bus,' what is?
Contact Mr La by email at mrla26@aol.com
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INTERVIEW WITH DR. SAMI ALRABAA: ISRAEL, IRAN AND THE PEACE PROCESS
Posted by Alex Maistrovoy, May 5, 2009. |
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We discussed: could president of USA Barak Obami promote peace process in the Middle East and neutralize the nuclear threat from Iran? Should the West open dialogue with Syria, HAMAS and "Hizballoh"? Will the new government of Israel become an obstacle to the peace process? Editor's Note: Dr. Sami Alrabaa is a sociology professor and an Arab/Muslim culture specialist. Before moving to Germany he taught at Kuwait University, King Saud University, and Michigan State University. His new book Karin in Saudi Arabia is a compilation of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. |
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QUESTION: President Obama considers peace process as a priority direction of his policy. How do you estimate the chances of peace process? ALRABAA: President Obama has proclaimed lots of priorities: economic, financial, nuclear, climatic, and peace in the Middle East. In the latter he will fail like his predecessors. He has to deal with numerous diehard players: Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran, Syria, etc. Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will not achieve anything. The only person who can make a change, a substantial change is someone like Yasser Arafat. After more than thirty years of political fanaticism and defiance, Arafat — an undisputable leader among his people — realized that he could have peace and a Palestinian state only at the negotiation table. This kind of leader is still missing among Palestinians. I am pretty sure that Avigdor Liberman would love to conclude peace with such a leader, provided the latter recognized the right of Israel to exist. QUESTION: Could Mahmud Abbas keep the power on the West Bank in case of creation of the Palestinian state? ALRABAA: Mahmud Abbas is a weak leader. He has lost a big part of Arafat's power to Hamas. Hamas is "cancer" in the Palestinian body. Hamas, however, could change into a positive player if an "Arafat" takes over. For the time being this is unthinkable. Hamas needs maybe 2-3 decades to let this happen. QUESTION: Do you see connection between the peace process and the Iranian threat? Can possible agreement between Israel and Palestinians help to West to neutralize Iranian ambitions? Do you think that the Obama's administration can solve the Iranian problem better than Bush? ALRABAA: The same applies to Iran. Unless a moderate leader takes over, Iran will stay combative and rejectionist in terms of the Palestinian issue. The rise of a peace leader among the Palestinians could neutralize Iran's role in a peace process. The pressure that the world community, including Russia and China, is exerting on Iran with regard to its nuclear program will deter Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The nuclear program in both Iran and North Korea is a desperate attempt to keep the regimes alive in these countries. QUESTION: How do you estimate the Saudi initiative? ALRABAA: The Saudi regime has always played a hypocritical role in the Middle East. All its "initiatives" have been designed to serve its interests and survival in the Middle East. The Saudis would endorse any solution that guarantees their survival. QUESTION: The new Minister for Foreign Affairs of Israel Avigdor Liberman declared that Israel will not respect decisions of conferences in Annapolis. How such position can influence the peace process and regional situation? ALRABAA: Avigdor Liberman is not less combative than Menachem Begin when it comes to secure the existence of Israel. He will accept any solution that safeguards this existence side by side with peaceful neighbors. QUESTION: Liberman is considered in the West as the extreme nationalist and opponent of peace. What your opinion about this matter? ALRABAA: It is not true that Liberman is an opponent of peace. He is an "extreme nationalist" out of fear for saving Israel from being devoured by its aggressive, extreme nationalistic, and fanatic Islamist neighbors. QUESTION: There are disagreements in Jerusalem concerning the possibility of peace with Syria. Do you see real prospect of peace between Israel and Syria in close future? ALRABAA: At present and under the current circumstances, Syria would not conclude any peace with Israel. If this happened, Syria would risk antagonizing Iran, Hizbolla, Hamas, and Islamists worldwide. Bashar Al Assad is not Anwar Al Sadat, and he will not be. A peace agreement with Israel at present would be an act of suicide for the Baath regime in Damascus. QUESTION: Whether Egypt is interested in cooperation with Israel in a matter of Gaza blockade, according to your opinion? ALRABAA: The regime of Husni Mubarak of Egypt is not interested in a strong Hamas. It is, though, interested in keeping Hamas a thorn to destabilize Israel. The Egyptians approve of those tunnels through which Hamas smuggles arms into Gaza, but they are not interested in opening their borders with Gaza. The Egyptians are notorious for being double-faced. They tell Hamas and the Palestinians something and the Israelis something different. For the Egyptian regime and the other Arab regimes, the Palestinian issue remains a distracter from tackling the titanic problems these regimes are facing. QUESTION: USA, Great Britain and some other countries in the West are ready to talk with HAMAS and "Hezbollah"? Do you think such dialog can promote peace process? ALRABAA: Talking to Hamas is futile. Even George Mitchell,
the Middle East envoy of President Obama, realized that and said that
at the outset of his mission. Check out Hamas's Charter:
Alexander Maistrovoy is a journalist with the Russian-language Israeli newspaper Novosty nedely. |
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KISS UP TO THE BAD GUYS, TALK TOUGH TO YOUR FRIENDS ..
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 5, 2009. |
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This was written by Keith Davies, Executive Director of the Walid Shoebat Foundation Contact him at www.shoebat.com/ |
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President Obama Foreign Policy love fest for foreign powers does not apply to the Jews. Official government anti Semitism by president Chavez and his Venezuelan administration as well as the Arab world and the rest of the hostile nations to Israel is accepted as OK, maybe not by words but certainly by the actions of the President and other Western leaders who use words occasionally but no action. A new dark age of antipathy to Jew hatred is being tolerated by the so-called civilized world. As the Bible points out in Joel 4:3 in the Tanach and in the NJKV Joel 3:3: They have cast lots for my people, have given a boy as payment for a harlot and sold a girl for wine that they might drink. The above verse is talking about the harlot religion of Islam, selling out on both your Jewish or Christian faith for Islam as well as selling out the girl (Israel) for wine, which is the oil. On the Jewish side we have the ADL and the 78% of Jews who voted for President Obama who condemn Islamists but publicly at least bend to say that is Islam is a peaceful religion that has been hijacked. A large chunk of the Christian community fails to understand what the bible is predicting and has shown both a hostility to Israel and willing to be deceived by interfaith dialogue with Muslim sheiks who distort what their Koran and Hadith teach, in order to placate the peace wishers who will swallow the kibosh of lies and deception for the comfort of their own souls. The policies of America and the free world have sold out their soul for cheap Arab oil and continue on this path. They sell out Israel and their own souls, and no more so than the current administration. On May 4 Iranian Army General Commander Ataollah Salehi claiming that it "Will Take Us 11 Days 'To Wipe Israel Out of existence. He is obviously referring to the nuclear capability, which the Iranians say is only for peaceful purposes. The free world bowed before the little corporal from Austria, tried to make nice to him and we all know how it ended. It has been reported that even the Chief of Staff of the White House Rahm Emanuel an Israeli Jew has decided to betray his people for his messiah President Barack Obama by telling AIPAC that the USA will allow Iran to get the Atomic bomb if Israel does not make peace with the Palestinians. So let us get this straight, it is not in the interests of the USA and the free world for Iran to have nuclear weapons but if we can only get the Palestinian issue solved we will subordinate our own interests and security, for the sake of a peaceful Palestinian state, which has eluded the grasp of umpteen leaders for over ninety years. If this is true then the foreign policy of the United States is stark raving mad and that our President and his administration is subverting the interests of its own citizens to the dependence of a foreign power even if that power is regarded as an ally. This undermines the defense of the USA by relying on the decision of a foreign power for our defense. This has got to be unconstitutional and dare I say an act of treason. If the above report is factual, the people of the USA better awaken quickly because we will need much more than a tea party to save us now. All we know is that we can take comfort in that the Bible predicts these times and eventually things will work out but not before the real messiah comes to take care of business. Dare I say that the Day of Lord is not too far away, can't give you a date but things are heating up fast. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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ISRAEL THE BEAUTIFUL: FARMLAND
Posted by Yehoshua Halevi, May 5, 2009. |
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This is one of Yehoshua Halevi's Golden Light Images. Yehoshua Halevi writes: "HOW I GOT THE SHOT: In my ongoing pursuit of personally satisfying photographs, I encounter the same subjects over and over again. Sometimes I walk away uninspired, but on other occasions, I look for ways to build on what I learned from working with the subject previously. This small section of farmland outside Metulla on Israel's northern border has been a treasure trove of excellent photographs for me. On my first visit, I was enthralled by the colors of the trees in spring blossom, and worked on getting a shot that emphasized that small detail of the landscape. The air quality during that first visit was so poor, however, that pointing the camera anywhere above the foreground horizon revealed only a dull, detail-less white haze. Returning again a day after an air-cleansing storm and shooting from a slightly different vantage point, I tried to build something more complex that revealed the larger grandeur of this area, set in the foothills of the Lebanon mountains. I like this shot because it works despite the challenge of bringing together two visually unrelated pieces. As the first light of the new day creeps over the ridgeline, the blossoms and new buds begin to glow. The mountains, on the other hand, are awash in a bluish, early morning haze and back lit by the sun, which is rising behind them in the upper right corner of the frame. Exposing for the foreground, I knew I'd lose most of the mountain detail but I also knew I could bring most of it back. After uploading my memory card, I opened this image in Photoshop and boosted the contrast while reducing the exposure of the upper half of the composition in order to reveal the various ridgelines as they appeared to my eyes as I took the photo. The final trick to bringing it all together was my choice of lens: A 200mm telephoto, which compresses the depth and makes the distant peaks look closer to the foreground. The photo's clear division into two parts creates a visual tension but at the same time elevates its sophistication and appeal. At least it works for me, and that's the only goal a photographer should seek with his or her personal work.
Contact Yehoshua Halevi by email at smile@goldenlightimages.com
and visit his website:
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THANKS FOR SPOILING THE PARTY
Posted by Mr La, May 5, 2009. |
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This was written by Emmanuel Navon and it appeared on his website
http://navonsblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/thanks-for-spoiling-party.html |
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I was interviewed today on RFI, France's international radio. The topic was Avigdor Lieberman's upcoming visit to Paris. It went, in substance, like this. Question: How come Lieberman is not officially endorsing the two-state solution? Answer: Why should Israel support a "solution" that keeps working in theory and failing in practice, and that is systematically rejected by the Palestinians? They rejected partition in 1937 and in 1947, showed no interest in establishing a state between 1949 and 1967, and rejected both the Camp David proposals and the Clinton parameters. They are now partially ruled by Hamas, which denies Israel's right to exist, and by Fatah, which denies Israel's right to be Jewish. Creating a Palestinian state while Hamas has the upper hand and Iran is about to become nuclear would pave the way to Israel's destruction, not to peace. The Palestinians have to choose between the "right of return" and the "two-state solution." And they will not be inclined to choose realism and compromise while backed, incited and manipulated by a nuclear Iran. Silence.
Question: Hmm. Well, Lieberman's refusal to unequivocally endorse Palestinian statehood is probably why he's going to get a cold shoulder in Paris. Bernard Kouchner is not going to hold a join press conference with him. Isn't that understandable? Answer: I don't remember your country giving a cold shoulder to a Turkish official for not accepting the creation of a Kurdish state or for not ending the occupation of Cyprus. Silence # 2 (slightly longer this time).
Question: President Sarkozy will probably not receive Lieberman, obviously because of his views. How do you feel about this? Answer: Sarkozy had no problem receiving Muammar Gaddafi at the Élysée Palace. How do you feel about that? Silence # 3 (swiftly replaced by a "thank you very much," meaning "I think we'll stop here"). Lieberman is "guilty" of failing to toe to the party line. The fact that Europe's "recipe" for Middle East peace has consistently failed in the past fifteen years is irrelevant. And it doesn't seem to cross Europeans' minds that Israel might be interested in peace as well (who gets blown up in buses for goodness's sake?) But, mostly, Europe feels that Israel should get a taste of China's medicine. After all, if European leaders can be scolded by China about Tibet and Taiwan, surely Israel can be scolded by Europe about the West Bank? China put Sarkozy in quarantine after he received the Dalai Lama during the French EU Presidency. President Hu Jintao agreed to meet with his French counterpart at the G20 summit in London only after the latter accepted to "recognize" that Tibet is part of China. Pressuring Europeans works, because business is business. Why do the Tibetans or the Kurds need a state of their own? Who needs self-determination when Europe's interests are at stake? Indeed, this "rights of man" thing is really a European idea, and trying to impose it on other cultures is surely another expression of Western arrogance and imperialism (and don't you dare having the nerve of reminding those wimps that the official ideology of China's communist party was "made in Europe"). Hence are Kurdish, Irish, and Basque separatists labeled "terrorists" in European media while Hamas killers are mainly "militants." Europe is entitled to put its interest before its principles. But it should not expect Israel to put its security at risk. If the price for saying the truth is to be snubbed by nerdy hypocrites, may Lieberman have the privilege of being a party pooper in European chancelleries and of spoiling dinner parties in Brussels. Contact Mr La by email at mrla26@aol.com |
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WHAT RULE OF LAW IN JUDEA-SAMARIA?; DID IDF FIRE PHOSPHORUS SHELLS AND AT MEDICS?
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 5, 2009. |
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NETANYAHU CHOOSES AMBASSADOR TO U.S. Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu proposes Dr. Michael Oren, senior researcher as the Shalem Institute in Jerusalem to be Ambassador to the U.S.. He has no academic, diplomatic, or government experience. He was a Mossad agent. He seems to be in a string of Israeli politicians sponsored by Henry Kissinger or his Council on Foreign Relations or in any case the US, as future rulers of Israel (Barrychamish@netvision.net.il). Dr. Oren advocates unilateral and almost full Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. He thinks that would reduce tensions with the Arabs. He would wait for the Palestinian Authority to develop a leadership that can make peace. The next generation there is likelier to make peace; it cannot be imposed from above. There was unilateral and full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Hamas turned the area into a rocket launching pad. Wasn't that withdrawal a blunder? Dr. Oren said no. He thinks the mistake was in failing to crack down on Hamas immediately it started firing. This hesitancy appeared to the Arabs as weakness [which emboldens their aggression]. (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/24.) There are no signs of the younger generation of Arabs being less radical, for they are more indoctrinated. Tensions did not decline between the Gaza Arabs and Israel, when the State of Israel forced Jewish residents out. The settlers had not caused tension. Neither did the Israeli Army, so much as prevent terrorism and therefore tension. What does cause tension? Advocacy of intolerance and jihad on Arab TV and in their schools. The notion that territorial withdrawal would reduce tension assumes that the Arab-Israel conflict is over territory. It isn't. It is over religion. The Arabs don't tolerate other religions. They won't be satisfied until Islam triumphs over Israel. That means mass-murder, dispossession, repression. Even that would not satisfy them. They would expand jihad to other areas. WHAT RULE OF LAW IN JUDEA-SAMARIA ("WEST BANK")? The Yesha Civil Rights Organization scorns diplomatic relations with a government that bans the sale of land to Jews. The Organization is referring to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The P.A. exacts a death penalty for it. [Jordan has a similar law, but repealed the capital punishment for violation. Would the Organization reject diplomatic relations with Jordan?] Israel takes the word of Arabs that they did not sell houses to Jews in Hebron. Israel claims to be enforcing the rule of law. What rule of law? The Arabs fear for their lives, when discovered to have sold houses, so they pretend not to have sold (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/23. DID ISRAEL FIRE PHOSPHORUS SHELLS ILLEGALLY? The IDF fired very few white phosphorus shells in Gaza. It did not use them for anti-personnel purposes, considered illegal. It did not fire in built-up areas. One type was fired for range-finding and uncovering the entrances to arms smuggling tunnels. The other type, not incendiary, was for smoke screens. Both types, as used, are legal. In one battle, the smoke screens obviated the need for explosives. That kept casualties down (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/22). DID THE IDF FIRE UPON MEDICAL FACILITIES IN GAZA? Did the IDF fire upon medical facilities in Gaza? A petition to Israel's Supreme Court claimed that it had. The IDF investigated. "The investigation showed that the Hamas systematically used medical facilities, vehicles and uniforms as cover for terrorist operations. This included the extensive use of ambulances to transport terror operatives and weaponry; the use of ambulances to "evacuate" terrorists [i.e., non-wounded ones] from the battlefield and the use of hospitals and medical infrastructure as headquarters, situation-rooms, command centers, and hiding places." "For example, Ismail Haniyeh decided to place his central command center in one of the Shifa Hospital units, while the senior leaders (both military and political) stationed themselves in another unit. On the ground floor of the hospital's main building, an entire wing was closed off and was solely used by Hamas terror operatives. At the wing's entrance, terror operatives prevented entrance to all uninvolved civilians." There were other examples, too, of Hamas gunmen operating from clinics or ambulances. A clinic used for weapons storage was not identified as a clinic. Some ambulances did not coordinate with the IDF or identify themselves as ambulances. Some ambulances raced toward the Israeli troops, bypassing roadblocks and ignoring warning shots, sometimes when the troops received intelligence of imminent attack. When fired upon, they fled. In two cases of wounds alleged in the petition to the Supreme Court, the individuals were not wounded. The troops fired no more than necessary (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 4/22). The allegations against the IDF were simple minded, if not malicious. It's what now is called, "lawfare," using courts to repress defense against terrorism. Even that would not satisfy them. They would expand jihad to other areas. WHAT RULE OF LAW IN JUDEA-SAMARIA ("WEST BANK")? The Yesha Civil Rights Organization scorns diplomatic relations with a government that bans the sale of land to Jews. The Organization is referring to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The P.A. exacts a death penalty for it. [Jordan has a similar law, but repealed the capital punishment for violation. Would the Organization reject diplomatic relations with Jordan?] Israel takes the word of Arabs that they did not sell houses to Jews in Hebron. Israel claims to be enforcing the rule of law. What rule of law? The Arabs fear for their lives, when discovered to have sold houses, so they pretend not to have sold (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 4/23. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com |
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GRAFFITI ON HISTORY'S WALLS
Posted by Susana K-M, May 4, 2009. |
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When we say that this article is one of the most important pieces to date on The New anti-Semitism, we mean it. If you care about Jewry or are simply a friend of Israel, read it — and then use the e-mail forwarding option. This should serve as a wake-up call! This is by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. |
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All the isms," an English wag once said, "are wasms." Well, not quite. In the 20th century, fascism came and went. Communism came and went. Socialism came and waned. But today several virulent "isms" inhabit the world still. Among the most pernicious are an atavistic anti-Semitism and its 20th-century version, anti-Zionism. These "isms" are graffiti on the wall of history, emblems of a poison still potent and raw, evidenced, most recently, by the remarks of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who said, "Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." Mahathir's words were widely condemned. But such comments obscure a deeper truth about this new strain of anti-Semitism, which is not that it is directed at individual Jews or even at Judaism itself. It is directed, rather, against the Jewish collective, the modern State of Israel. Just as historic anti-Semitism has denied individual Jews the right to live as equal members of society, anti-Zionism would deny the collective expression of the Jewish people, the State of Israel, the right to live as an equal member of the family of nations. Israel's policies are thus subjected to criticism that causes it to be singled out when others in similar circumstances escape any criticism at all. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism as Israel is today, there would be no question of its right to defend itself. But Israel's efforts merely to protect its own citizens are routinely portrayed as aggression. To complain that such portrayals are unfair and illogical is not to dismiss all criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic. A democracy must welcome critics, and Israel surely has its critics in spades — just look at the spirited Israeli press. "Jews," as one commentator put it, "are gold medalists in the art of self-criticism." But for many, recent criticism of Israel has become so perverse, so persistent, so divorced from reality that it can be seen only as emotional anti-Semitism hiding behind the insidious political mask of anti-Zionism. The new anti-Semitism transcends boundaries, nationalities, politics, and social systems. Israel has become the object of envy and resentment in much the same way that the individual Jew was once the object of envy and resentment. Israel, in effect, is emerging as the collective Jew among nations. After more than half a century of Holocaust education, hundreds of courses in high schools and colleges, and thousands of books dedicated to exposing its evils, traditional anti-Semitism as a domestic issue had all but disappeared in much of the world. "The Jewish problem" was no longer defined by what happened to the Jews of Germany or France or Poland or Russia. Instead, in Europe and the Muslim world — even in Asia — traditional anti-Semitism has lately re-emerged as anti-Zionism, focused on the Jews of Israel, the role of Israel, and, for some, on Jews in the United States who support Israel. This phenomenon has its origins in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, the image of the Jew has been transformed. Shylock, suddenly, has been replaced by a new Jew, cartooned as an aggressive, all-powerful collective called Israel. "Rambo Jew," as the writer Daniel Goldhagen put it, "has largely supplanted Shylock in the anti-Semitic imagination." With the territories seized at the end of the war, the "plucky little Jewish state" was no more. In the years since, as it responded again and again to Arab attacks, sympathy for Israel eroded further still as the world's TVs broadcast images not of terrorists but of armed Israelis responding to terrorism. Only somehow the word "responding" too often got lost in the chaos. The TV pictures seemed to imply that the Israelis were guilty of a disproportionate use of force, for they were rarely accompanied by an understanding that a country with just 6 million in a sea of over 120 million Arabs could never fight a war of equal attrition. But no matter. It is as if the world somehow believes Israel must win the "moral man of the year" award in defending itself — as if responding to those who seek its destruction is morally wrong. Is there really no difference, then, between the violence of murderers who target innocents and the indispensable violence of lawful authorities? Are the arsonist and the firefighter truly moral equivalents? Is Israel's approach, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, the same as that of the terrorists, who seek to maximize it? Such questions are prompted by an unprecedented reversal of history: Arab terrorists, incredibly, have managed to inspire more sympathy than their victims. The Jews, having experienced the genocide of Europe, today stand accused of perpetrating genocide on the hard ground of the West Bank and Gaza. The vocabulary of the accusations presents the Jews as Nazis and their Arab enemies as helpless Jews. The worst crimes of anti-Semites in the past — racist and ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity — are now increasingly ascribed to Jews and to the Jewish state. The argument has become, if you are against Nazism, you must oppose Israel. Thus has Israeli self-defense been transmogrified as aggression. As a consequence, the era of reconciliation that obtained between Israel and the world after the Holocaust is, tragically, no more. In much of the world's news media and in its elite communities, as a result, there is a pattern of delegitimization of Israel. AMERICANS, WHO HAVE COME to take for granted the scurrilous anti-Semitism that routinely appears in the Arab press, might be amazed by what now appears in the sophisticated European press. In England, the Guardian wrote that "Israel has no right to exist." The Observer described Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "an affront to civilization." The New Statesman ran a story titled "A Kosher Conspiracy," illustrated by a cover showing the gold Star of David piercing the Union Jack. The story implies that a Zionist-Jewish cabal is attempting to sway the British press to the cause of Israel. In France, the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur published an extraordinary libel alleging that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women so that their relatives would kill them to preserve family honor. In Italy, the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano spoke of Israel's "aggression that's turning into extermination," while the daily La Stampa ran a Page 1 cartoon of a tank emblazoned with the Jewish star pointing its big gun at the infant Jesus, who cries out, "Surely they don't want to kill me again." Across Europe, the result has been not just verbal violence but physical. A report issued last year by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, titled "Fire and Broken Glass," describes the assaults on Jews and people presumed to be Jewish across Europe. Attackers, shouting racist slogans, throw stones at schoolchildren, at worshipers attending religious services, at rabbis. Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues are firebombed. Windows are smashed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated with anti-Jewish slogans. In just a few weeks in the spring of last year, French synagogues and Jewish schools, students, and homes were attacked and firebombed. A synagogue in Marseilles was burned to the ground. In Paris, Jews were attacked by groups of hooded men. According to police, metropolitan Paris saw something like a dozen anti-Jewish incidents a day in the first several months after Easter. AND THE VIOLENCE CONTINUES. In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish workers and assaulted the director of a Jewish school. In Holland, demonstrators carrying swastikas and photos of Israel chanted "Sieg heil!" and "Jews into the sea!" In Salonika, the Holocaust Memorial was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti. In Slovakia, Jewish cemeteries were firebombed. In Berlin, Jews were assaulted, swastikas daubed on Jewish memorials, and a synagogue spray-painted with the words "six million is not enough." In the Muslim world, a culture of hatred of Jews permeates all forms of public communications — newspapers, videocassettes, sermons, books, the Internet, television, and radio. The intensity of the anti-Jewish invective equals or surpasses that of Nazi Germany in its heyday. The public rhetoric combines the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with cockeyed Nazi conspiracy theories that echo the famous forgery, the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," and the fanciful notion of a Jewish drive for world dominion. Throughout the Islamic world, one finds slanderous quotations about Jews as the sons of apes and donkeys. A leading Saudi newspaper has Jews using the blood of Christian and Muslim children to make their hamantascen pastry for Purim and their matzo, the unleavened bread of Passover. In this fundamentalist religious culture, America and Israel are seen as twin Satanic forces, "The Great Satan" and "The Little Satan," as Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to them. The linkage of the two Satans has been emphasized even more intently since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, in September 2000, and the attacks of September 11. Ever hear the story of the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center being told to not show up for work on the morning of September 11? The story was planted on the Internet by Hezbollah under the cover of a Lebanese TV station. This urban legend has now taken root among Muslims the world over, calling to mind the words of W. B. Yeats: "We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare." Islamists see the fingerprints of their enemy everywhere — the fantasy that a secret and all-powerful Zionist lobby drains the lifeblood of Arabs and Muslims and incites Washington to war against Iraq, all the while carrying out its sinister plans for global control. In Egypt, a 41-part TV series was broadcast across the Arab world during Ramadan entitled Horseman Without a Horse. The theme of the series was that the Zionists have controlled the world of politics since the dawn of history and seek to control the Middle East — a fantasy, as Prof. Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University pointed out, imported from the Germany of the 1930s. It is difficult for westerners, unmarked by the searing memories of Jewish history, to realize the extent to which the survival of Israel remains an issue for Jews, who cannot dismiss the overheated Arab rhetoric that seeks to justify terrorism against innocent civilians by describing Israel's existence as illegitimate. That rhetoric is the product of a careful calculation by Arab political leaders who recognized the popular appeal of scapegoating Israel for their failure to provide for their own people while legitimizing their regimes. Not all Arab politicians, happily, indulge in such cynical calculations. Back in February, I participated in a remarkable meeting convened by President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. The group, which met in the city of Almaty, included the presidents from the central Asian republics of Kirgizstan and Tajikistan, the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, and the deputy foreign minister of Turkey. The meeting was titled the Conference on Order and Tolerance. As we exchanged views, I found myself listening raptly to statesmen who spoke with feeling of their support for a dialogue between Muslims and Jews in an atmosphere of religious tolerance and understanding while denouncing in explicit terms extremism and terrorism. If one takes the number of Muslims among the countries represented in Almaty and adds the number of Muslims in moderate countries like India, the result is a huge swath of the Muslim world that rejects the extremism of the Arab leadership among Israel's neighbors. Such tolerance, sadly, is not to be found in the world body created to foster universal values and human ideals — the United Nations. Tragically, the growth of international hostility to Israel has found its most prominent expression in the operations of the U.N. It has, in fact, come a long way from the legitimization and legalization of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to have their own state on their own land through its 1947 resolution proposing and approving a two-state solution. Since then, the U.N. has adopted an almost reflexively anti-Israeli stance canted to the anti-Israeli majority of its membership. The U.N. today is a regular forum for vicious anti-Israel attacks, conferring on the spurious and the hateful the false cloak of reason and legitimacy, and thus has become an organization for the conservation, not the reduction, of the Middle East conflict. Some U.N. actions simply defy belief. At the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East committed to civil rights, the rule of law, and Arab participation in democratic government — was attacked by Arab and Third World nations and accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Then there is the Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted originally in response to the atrocities of the Nazi regime, to protect people like diplomats and visitors subjected to a military occupation. Last year, U.N. conferees met and, for the first time in the 52 years since its adoption, excoriated one country — Israel — for alleged violations. Not Cambodia and Rwanda, with their well-documented records of genocide. Not Zimbabwe, with its racist economic policies. Not the Balkan states, with their ethnic cleansing. Not even China, with its dismal record on Tibet. Only Israel was singled out. Similarly, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, chaired on occasions by such notably enlightened states as Libya, has followed this same pattern, devoting much of its time, energy, and efforts to attacking Israel. The commission went so far as to affirm, last April 15, the legitimacy of suicide bombing against Israelis, or in judgment-free U.N.-speak, "all available means, including armed struggle." IN THE ARAB WORLD, Zionism is portrayed not as the Jewish response to a history of anti-Semitism in a world that culminated in the Holocaust but as a hyperaggressive variant of colonialism. But since this new anti-Semitism manifests itself so clearly now as political rejection of the Jewish state, it is worth examining the historical record for a moment. Fact: The majority of Jews came to Israel in the late 19th century and early 20th century not as conquering Europeans backed by a national army and treasury but as the wretched of the earth in search of respite from ceaseless persecution. They were not wealthy; they were young, poor, and desperate. The notion that the traditional position of the Arabs in Palestine was jeopardized by Jewish settlements is belied by another fact: that when the Jews arrived, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and wildly neglected land of sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, described it as a "desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds — a silent, mournful expanse. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country." Even people unsympathetic to the Zionist cause believed that Jewish immigrants had improved the condition of Palestinian Arabs. Consider the words of Sharif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic holy places in Arabia, in 1918: "One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine. . . . They knew that the country was for its original sons. The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren." Hussein understood then, as so many refuse to see now, that the regeneration of Palestine and the growth of its population came only after the Jews returned in significant numbers. As Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary, pointed out: "The land was not being taken away from the Arabs. The Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so." The hope was that the Arabs would accept Israelis as their neighbors and, finally, recognize them as such. That hope died aborning. Even war, that grim final arbiter of international relations, has made no difference. The Arabs resisted from the outset a Jewish presence in the region. They expanded their war against Israel into an attack on the very idea of Israel. Zionism, the Jewish claim to a land of their own, was declared racist because the Arabs said it deprived them of their land. They substituted the homeless Palestinian for the homeless Jew. The Arabs, having rendered the Palestinians homeless by refusing to accept partition in 1948 and having kept many of the Palestinians who fled the battle homeless in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan by refusing to resettle them in their lands, now blame this homelessness on the Jews. They have consistently charged that it was the Jews who had driven the Arabs out of Palestine. But as the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis has written, "the great majority, like countless millions of refugees elsewhere, left their homes amid the confusion of and panic of invasion and war — one more unhappy part of the vast movement of population which occurred in the aftermath of World War II."
Even the foreign press, in regular contact with all sides during the conflict of 1948, wrote nothing to suggest that the flight of the Palestinians was not voluntary. Nor did Arab spokesmen, such as the Palestinian representative to the U.N., Jamal Husseini, or the secretary general of the Arab League, blame the Jews contemporaneously with the 1948 war for the flight of Arabs and Palestinians. In fact, those who fled were urged to do so by other Arabs. As then Prime Minister of Iraq Nuri Said put it, "the Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." One Arab who fled encapsulated this thinking in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Difaa: "The Arab governments told us, `Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in." And a bad situation, impossibly, was allowed to get worse. Arabs and Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war were resettled in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the only such agency established for any refugee group since the massive dislocations of World War II. The partition of India occurred at the same time as the conflict in Palestine, and millions of Hindus and Muslims were uprooted, but virtually nothing was done for them. Nothing was done in response to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, where a long-standing religious, social, and political culture was virtually destroyed. Yet 55 years after they were first established, the Arab refugee camps still exist. With the exception of Jordan, the Arab governments home to these camps have refused to grant citizenship to the refugees and opposed their resettlement. In Lebanon, 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property, or even improve their housing stock. Three generations later, they continue to serve as political pawns of the Arab states, still hopeful of reversing the events of 1948. "The return of the refugees," as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt said years later, "will mean the end of Israel." The U.N., through its administration of the camps, has made a complicated problem infinitely more so. How? U.N. officials define refugees in the Middle East to include the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. In other parts of the world, descendants of refugees are not defined as refugees. The result of this unique treatment has been to increase the numbers of Arab refugees from roughly 700,000 to over 4 million, by including children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. As a former prime minister of Syria, Khaled al Azm, wrote in his memoirs, "It is we who demanded the return of the refugees while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon them. [We] exploited them in executing crimes of murder and throwing bombs. All this in the service of political purposes." And so it goes, to this very day. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel, 900,000 Jewish refugees were forced out of neighboring Arab states in a coordinated effort. These refugees were absorbed into the new Israel. Yet the world was, and still is, untroubled by the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
TO SINGLE OUT ISRAEL as the only state that must restore a refugee population is to hold the Jewish state to a different standard. Or, perhaps, the more accurate term is double standard. Against such a backdrop, with a history so cynically manipulated by its enemies, the distortions and outright untruths that characterize more recent relations between Israel and the Palestinians should probably come as no surprise. There are virtually countless examples from which to choose, but last year's "massacre" by Israeli forces at the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin is particularly illustrative. A Palestinian suicide bomber, on Passover eve, killed 29 people and injured 140 in the Israeli city of Netanya. It was the sixth terrorist bombing that week. The Israelis responded by sending troops into the West Bank, including the refugee camp at Jenin, the principal home of the bomb makers. A 10-day battle ensued. The Palestinians, with support from U.N. representatives, alleged that the Israelis had massacred hundreds of innocents, carried out summary executions, refrigerated the corpses, and removed them. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian spokesman, reiterated the claim of many hundreds killed. The media accepted his version. But subsequent news reports, and even Palestinian testimony and writings recently collated, established the fact that groups like Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad used women and children as shields during the fighting. The reports showed, conclusively, that there was no massacre of Palestinian civilians and documented that the Israelis exercised great restraint during the battle to minimize civilian casualties while suffering an inordinately high number of their own as a result. Distortions and untruths, unsurprisingly, characterize the Palestinians' political dealings with Israel, as well. A critical moment in the relationship was the Oslo agreement of 1993. There, the negotiating principle was land for peace. What Israel received was no peace in return for its offer of land. The most generous Israeli offer of land for peace came at Camp David three years ago. Then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Camp David offer was not only rejected by Arafat but used as a provocation to launch a campaign of violence and terrorism that continues to this day. The notion of land for peace bears exploring. If it is taken to mean that Israel must turn over more land until peace is achieved and Arab belligerence ended, the incurious may be left with the conclusion that the lack of peace must be the result of Israel's failure to yield sufficient land. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been thousands of terrorist attacks since the second intifada began, three years ago. The only way Israel has been able to reduce the number of suicide bombers is eliminating their sanctuary by controlling the West Bank through occupation and sealing off Gaza. But the story is not one of occupation of the West Bank by Israel. If the term "occupation" had any relevance at all, it was lost three years ago with Arafat's rejection of Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state. The issue is Palestinian refusal to grant Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state. Israel's battle is not the battle of Jew against Muslim. It is a battle against the hatred of the Jews and their connection to the land of Israel. How else to comprehend the Palestinian rejection of Jerusalem as the sacred city of the Jews and the Western Wall as the Second Temple, except as a rejection of the Jewish presence there? "There was no temple in Jerusalem," Arafat said at Camp David. "It was only an obelisk." To question the core of the Jewish faith is hardly an indication of readiness to resolve the conflict. Quite the contrary, the spiraling Palestinian violence evidences a single-minded determination to continue the conflict. The insight of Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, "Jews to Palestine," while today it has been changed, to "Jews out of Palestine." The message to Jews, Oz says, is simple: "Don't be here, and don't be there. That is, don't be." Contact Susana K-M by email at suanema@gmail.com |
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EMANUEL'S BLACKMAIL: 'GIVE UP HALF YOUR COUNTRY OR DIE'
Posted by Carl from Jerusalem, May 4, 2009. |
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According to Israeli media reports, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told a closed-door meeting of 300 top AIPAC donors on Sunday that thwarting Iran's nuclear program is contingent on 'progress' on the 'Palestinian' front. In other words, if we don't get going on giving away half the country, the Obama administration isn't even going to try to thwart Iran. Thwarting Iran's nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, according to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Israeli TV reports said Monday that Emanuel made the comments in a closed-door meeting the previous day with 300 major AIPAC donors. Last month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Israel that it risks losing Arab support for combating threats from Iran if it rejects peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Clinton said Arab nations had conditioned helping Israel counter Iran on Jerusalem's commitment to the peace process. I wasn't happy about Clinton's remarks when she made them, but she was talking about support from Arab countries for attacking Iran, and I don't think anyone here really expected us to have any support from Arab countries. But Emanuel is apparently talking about support from the United States for an attack on Iran. This is pure blackmail. What a expletive deleted moron. This comes from Carl's website:
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OBAMA'S GRANDMOTHER TO PERFORM MUSLIM HAJJ
Posted by Avodah, May 4, 2009. |
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This was written by Aaron Klein of World Net Daily
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'''Jerome Corsi reports 'that Sarah Obama is also the woman who affirmed her elected grandson was born in Kenya, prompting doubts that Barack Obama is eligible to serve as president of the United States. JERUSALEM — President Barack Obama's paternal grandmother, Sarah Obama, will reportedly perform the Muslim Hajj pilgrimage this year along with her son Syeed Obama. A private Kenyan television channel, quoted extensively by the Kenyan and Pakistani media, reported Sarah Obama and her son will also visit Dubai before going to Saudi Arabia for performing Hajj. The pair lives in Kenya. The News, a newspaper in Dubai, confirmed the report. It quoted United Arab Emirates' property tycoon Sulaiman Al Fahim as stating he will personally sponsor Sarah Obama's trip after meeting the elderly Obama in Kenya last week and learning she had always wanted to perform the Hajj. "I found out that she had not been to the Hajj and that she very much wants to go. As my own mother is no longer with us, our family has a spare place. So I invited her and she has accepted," The News quoted Fahim as saying. The Hajj is the largest annual pilgrimag e in the world. The fifth pillar of Islam requires every able-bodied Muslim to travel to Mecca at least once in their life in a demonstration of solidarity with fellow Muslims and in an act of individual submission to Allah. Obama's grandmother, a Muslim known locally as "Mama Sarah," lives in Kogelo, a tiny village near the Ugandan border. She was in Washington, D.C., in January for Obama's swearing-in ceremony.
WND's JEROME CORSI REPORTS IN the April issue of Whistleblower that Sarah Obama is also the woman who affirmed her elected grandson was born in Kenya, prompting doubts that Barack Obama is eligible to serve as president of the United States. And though Obama supporters say Sarah Obama's words were mistranslated, Corsi's Whistleblower investigation revealed eyewitnesses and affadavits from a translator verifying Sarah Obama testified to being present at Barack Obama's birth in Mombasa, Kenya. Whistleblower, Corsi writes, obtained an affidavit submitted by Rev. Kweli Shuhubia, the official Swahili translator for the Anabaptist Conference held annually in Kenya. In the affidavit Shuhubia states that he visited Obama's grandmother at her home to conduct a telephone conference interview with Bishop Ron McRae in the United States, in which the bishop asked Sarah Obama if her grandson was born in Kenya. "Ms. Sarah Hussein Obama was very adamant that her grandson, Senator Barack Hussein Obama, was born in Kenya, and that she was present and witnessed his birth in Kenya, not the United States," Shuhubia states in the affidavit. "During the conversation, Ms. Sarah Hussein Obama never changed her reply that she was indeed present when Senator Barack Obama was born in Kenya." Obama was 'quite religious in Islam' Obama's faith was a central part of his presidential campaign. He has repeatedly has denied he is a Muslim. His presidential campaign website contained the statement, "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian." But as WND has reported, public records in Indonesia listed Obama as a Muslim during his early years, and a number of childhood friends claimed to the media Obama was once a mosque-attending Muslim. Obama's campaign several times had wavered in response to reporters queries regarding the senator's childhood faith. Commenting on a Los Angeles Times report quoting a childhood friend stating Obama prayed in a mosque, Obama's campaign released a statement explaining the senator "has never been a practicing Muslim." Widely distributed reports have noted that in January 1968 Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta's Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro. He was listed as an Indonesian citizen whose stepfather, listed on school documents as "L Soetoro Ma," worked for the topography department of the Indonesian Army. Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students but exempt them from studying religion. After attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama was enrolled "also as a Muslim, according to documents" in the Besuki Primary School, a public school in Jakarta. Laotze blog, run by an American expatriate in Southeast Asia who visited the Besuki school, noted, "All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school, and a young 'Barry Soetoro,' being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam." Indeed, in Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," he acknowledged studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school." "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Quranic studies," wrote Obama. The Indonesian media have been flooded with accounts of Obama's childhood Islamic studies, some describing him as a religious Muslim. Speaking to the country's Kaltim Post, Tine Hahiyary, who was principal of Obama's school while he was enrolled there, said she recalls he studied the Quran in Arabic. "At that time, I was not Barry's teacher, but he is still in my memory," claimed Tine, who is 80 years old. The Kaltim Post said Obama's teacher, named Hendri, had died. "I remember that he studied mengaji (recitation of the Quran)," Tine said, according to an English translation by Loatze. Mengaji, or the act of reading the Quran with its correct Arabic punctuation, is usually taught to more religious pupils and is not known as a secular study. Also, Loatze documented the Indonesian daily Banjarmasin Post interviewed Rony Amir, an Obama classmate and Muslim, who described Obama as "previously quite religious in Islam." "We previously often asked him to the prayer room close to the house," Amir said. "If he was wearing a sarong (waist fabric worn for religious or casual occasions) he looked funny." The Los Angeles Times, which sent a reporter to Jakarta, quoted Zulfin Adi, who identified himself as among Obama's closest childhood friends, stating the presidential candidate prayed in a mosque, something Obama's campaign claimed 0he never did. "We prayed, but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque," said Adi. "But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played." Friday prayers Obama's official campaign site contained a page titled "Obama has never been a Muslim, and is a committed Christian." The page stated, "Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ." But the campaign changed its tune when it issued a "practicing Muslim" clarification to the Los Angeles Times. An article in March by the Chicago Tribune apparently disputed Adi's statements to the L.A. paper. The Tribune caught up with Obama's declared childhood friend, who now describes himself as only knowing Obama for a few months in 1970 when his family moved to the neighborhood. Adi said he was unsure about his recollections of Obama. But the Tribune found Obama did attend mosque. "Interviews with dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia," states the Tribune article. It quotes Obama's former neighbors and third-grade teacher recalling how the young Obama "occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers." Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, notes the Tribune article "cited by liberal blogs as refuting claims Obama is Muslim" actually implies Obama was an irregularly practicing Muslim and twice confirms Obama attended mosque services. In an interview with the New York Times, Obama described the Muslim call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." The Times' Nicholos Kristof wrote Obama recited, "with a first-class [Arabic] accent," the opening lines of the Muslim call to prayer. The first few lines of the call to prayer state:
Some attention also has been paid to Obama's paternal side of the family, including his father and his brother, Roy. Writing in a chapter of his book describing his 1992 wedding, Obama stated: "The person who made me proudest of all was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol." Still, Obama maintains he was raised by his Christian mother and repeatedly has labeled as "smears" several reports attempting to paint him as a Muslim.
"Let's make clear what the facts are: I am a Christian. I have been
sworn in with a Bible. I pledge allegiance [to the American flag] and
lead the Pledge of Allegiance sometimes in the United States Senate
when I'm presiding," he told the Times of London earlier this year.
Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website:
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FROM ISRAEL: WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY...
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 4, 2009. |
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Some of you who are Americans, and are of a certain age, will remember the cartoon figure Pogo, drawn by Walt Kelly. The most famous line Pogo ever spoke was, "We have met the enemy and he is us." These words of wisdom — the most appropriate I could think of — came to me today as I surveyed the news. For what I encountered was this: The AIPAC (American-Israel Political Action Committee) — an American organization — is holding its policy conference in Washington this week. As always, at the end of the conference, the delegates who have attended flood Capitol Hill and lobby their respective Senators and Congresspersons. Tomorrow the lobbying will be done. And guess what these delegates will be asking of their representatives? To sign on to a letter that will go to Obama that specifically calls for a "viable Palestinian state." This is how a "pro-Israel" group is supporting the Prime Minister of Israel, who has declined to talk about a Palestinian state or a two-state solution. Their rationale is that they can be a "bridge" between Obama and Netanyahu. ~~~~~~~~~~ According to a Jerusalem Post report on this, there will be several draft letters included included in the packet provided to the delegates. One sets out "basic principles" for negotiations, another insists upon an absolute Palestinian commitment to ending terrorism, etc. Dr. Aaron Lerner, on the IMRA website today, calls AIPAC the "pigs can fly chorus" — supporting a Palestinian state that would "ensure" peace, which is in fact an impossibility. ~~~~~~~~~~ Add to this a statement by Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, also, at least in theory, one of ours, who Sunday attended a closed door forum for AIPAC's largest donors. This was the moment of truth, he told them. The ability to confront Iran depends upon progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Give us a break!! This argument does not fly either. Actually, the very reverse is true, for the stronger Iran is, the more it foments terrorism via Hamas, and the less likely peace with the Palestinians is. As to moderate Arab states, they will not predicate support for confronting Iran on this, for they very much want the Iranian threat defused for their own sakes. ~~~~~~~~~~ This, then, is what our Prime Minister will be walking into when he goes to Washington and meets with Obama on May 18. A very, very difficult time. Each of us, however, can lend him support. It is, in fact, important that we do so. Below you will find contact information for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Sending a fax is the best option. Those of you who are Israeli citizens, please contact him: Let him know that you are a citizen, and that you support him as he goes to the US. Ask him please to stand strong and to resist pressure to accept a "two state solution." Tell him that this is what his nation needs of him right now, that we need him to speak in the best interests of Israel and to speak out for Israeli rights. Those of you who are American citizens can also contact him. But you will need to say something different. From Americans he needs to hear that not everyone in the US wants a two-state solution. Tell him briefly about how you personally work to support him from within the US: rallying support via e-mails, holding discussions with people, writing letters to the editor, contacting your Congresspersons or Senators — or whatever else you do. Whether here in Israel, or in the US, please share this broadly by forwarding. Remove the "forwarding" data from the subject line and at the head of the message, and, if you wish, add your own introduction.
~~~~~~~~~~ Very soon I hope to have more information on how you can help. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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ISRAELI CONCESSIONS WILL NOT SOFTEN IRAN, THEY WILL HAVE THE OPPOSITE EFFECT
Posted by Daily Alert, May 4, 2009. |
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This is a summary of an interview conducted with by Yaakov Katz. It appeared April 30, 2009 in the Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710823345&pagename= JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull |
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See also A New Strategy for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon (Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
The Daily Alert is sponsored by Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and prepared by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). To subscribe to their free daily alerts, send an email to daily@www.dailyalert.jcpa.org |
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THE AIPAC CASE FALLOUT
Posted by Mr La, May 4, 2009. |
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Israel, 'espionage,' and a now-failed political prosecution. Two articles. The first was written by James Kirchick for the Wall Street Journal. The second is by Michelle Cottle, Christopher Orr, Jason Zengarie and The New Republic staff |
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James Kirchick
Four years, millions in legal fees and a half-dozen conspiracy theories later, the Justice Department dropped its case yesterday against the two former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) indicted in 2005 on espionage-related charges. Now where do Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman — and everyone else besmirched, including California Democrat Jane Harman — apply to get their reputations back? Attorney General Eric Holder deserves credit for dropping the charges, though we wish he had also announced that the case should never have been brought. Instead, the prosecution acted only after adverse judicial rulings made the case virtually impossible to win. Among the tests imposed on the prosecution by a federal judge was whether the "secrets" Messrs. Rosen and Weissman supposedly disseminated to colleagues, journalists and an Israeli embassy official were closely held, and whether the pair relayed them in bad faith. Nothing like that happened here. The core of the prosecution's case concerns a memo sent to the men from Defense Department analyst Larry Franklin — now serving a 12-year prison sentence — about internal White House deliberations on Iran policy. The gove rnment also used Mr. Franklin (whose main offense was taking classified documents home) to plant an apparently bogus story with Mr. Weissman claiming that American and Israeli lives were in imminent danger. None of this should have amounted to much, and certainly not criminal indictments under the archaic 1917 Espionage Act. Reporting on White House policy deliberation is the daily bread of any Washington reporter: If the offense were really criminal, half the Beltway press corps could be indicted. Mr. Franklin's mishandling of classified documents deserved sanction, but 12 years in jail is far worse than the misdemeanor and fine meted out to former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger for stuffing secret documents in his clothing. As for the planted story, putting the defendants to a moral quandary — share classified information and save lives; keep it secret and let people die — is the worst form of entrapment. But Washington is not a normal world, and this prosecution needs to be understood in the context in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and the swirl of conspiracy theories about "neocon" and Jewish influence over U.S. policy. In this bizarro reading of events, President Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice chose to invade Iraq due to the influence of Jewish officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Scooter Libby and Richard Perle. One sign of those times: In the immediate aftermath of Mr. Franklin's arrest, CBS9 9s Lesley Stahl asked whether "Israel [used] the analyst to try to influence U.S. policy on the war in Iraq?" In other words, the Aipac case resembled a political hit more than a legitimate "espionage" case. The same goes for the recent fallout involving Ms. Harman. Late last month, Congressional Quarterly reported that Ms. Harman and a person described as a "suspected Israeli agent" had been wiretapped by the government sometime before the 2006 election in which she allegedly agreed to intervene with the Bush Administration on behalf of Messrs. Weissman and Rosen. In exchange, the unnamed "agent" is said to have promised Ms. Harman lobbying help in her effort to chair the Intelligence Committee, where she was then the ranking minority member, if Democrats won Congress. The Democrats did win the House, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed over Ms. Harman in favor of Texan Sylvestre Reyes. At this point, things get murkier. Who did the wiretapping? CQ reported that it was the National Security Agency. But Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair denies this, and other news stories claim the wiretap was placed by the FBI. When did the wiretap take place? Different accounts put the date at either 2005 or 2006, a material point since in 2005 it was hardly clear the Democrats would take the House. Who was the "suspected Israeli agent"? Ms. Harman has said she doesn't even remember the conversation, but she is cer tain that anyone she would have discussed the case with would have been "an American citizen." As for the charge of influence peddling, Ms. Harman told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that she "didn't contact the Justice Department or anybody in the Administration, ever, asking for lenient sentences for anybody." Ms. Harman has also written Attorney General Holder demanding that he release the full transcript of the wiretapped conversation. We're told Mr. Holder hasn't responded. Now the Harman story is spinning off in even stranger directions, such as whether then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales quashed the Justice Department inquiry because Ms. Harman could be helpful in asking the New York Times not to expose the existence of warrantless wiretaps of foreign terrorists. Ms. Harman is also being attacked by noted jurists Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow, and she may face a left-wing primary challenge. Especially after the Ted Stevens debacle, we'd have thought Mr. Holder would want to clear the air. Mr. Holder should also re-examine the Aipac case from start to finish. The real scandal in this case starts with the attempted criminalization of policy differences and legitimate lobbying, and ends up in the wiretapping of Congress and the wrecked careers of Messrs. Rosen, Weissman and Franklin. This smacks of abuse of power, and somebody at Justice should be held to account. Corrections & Amplifications: Former Defense Department analyst Larry Franklin is not in prison, a fact misstated in a May 2 editorial ("The AIPAC Case Fallout"). Mr. Franklin was sentenced in January 2006 to 12 years and seven months in prison on charges of disclosing and mishandling classified information, but he has remained free pending the trial of former Aipac officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. The government dropped its case against the two men last week; a final determination of Mr. Franklin's case is expected in the coming weeks. "The Plank: Will Steve Rosen's Attackers Apologize?"
Mike wrote earlier today of the federal government's decision to drop its scurrilous espionage case against two former AIPAC employees, an abuse of prosecutorial power that ruined the careers of these men and damaged the reputation of America's premier pro-Israel organization. That's all well and good. The question I have is whether the legion of bloggers who recently attacked one of those men, Steve Rosen, over his role in l'affaire Chas Freeman, will acknowledge this news and apologize for their trumping of charges that have now been dropped. Rosen, you may recall, was one of the first people to note Freeman's selection as head of the National Intelligence Council in February. Not long after, and with no prodding from Rosen, other writers (myself included) began to criticize Freeman for what we viewed as his indifference to human rights, coziness with totalitarian regimes from Beijing to Riyadh and — yes — his blinkered outlook on the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly, his lending credence to the Stephen Walt-John Mearsheimer worldview which places America's relationship with Israel at the center of our foreign policy problems. As soon as the Freeman story blew up into a major internet controversy, a whole host of (mostly left-leaning) bloggers began launching ad hominem attacks on Rosen. They chose not to contend with the entirely legitimate criticisms Rosen was making of Freeman's views and asso ciations, but instead went after Rosen personally, arguing that because he had been indicted for espionage, nothing he said could be taken seriously. And by dint of our agreeing with Rosen, all of us who had expressed serious concern over the Freeman appointment were thus tarred as being willing dupes of "The Lobby." Joining in this crusade were: M.J. Rosenberg: Director of Policy Analysis for the Israel Policy Forum: "I just can't get over the idea that a guy on trial for espionage has the temerity to take on a lifelong public servant for not being loyal to the country that he, Steve Rosen, is accused by the United States of being too loyal to." Max Blumenthal: Author of an entire article about Rosen entitled, "Accused AIPAC Spy Leads Attack on Chas Freeman." Andrew Sullivan: "Max Blumenthal profiles the leader of the anti-Freeman brigade: Steve Rosen, facing trial this spring for allegedly passing US national security secrets to reporters. No, I didn't make that up." Robert Dreyfuss: The former Middle East Editor of Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review who now covers national security for both The American Prospect and The Nation wrote of Rosen as "the former official of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee who's been indicted for pro-Israeli espionage in a long-running AIPAC scandal." Matthew Yglesias: "Meanwhile, that th e anti-Freeman charge would be led by Rosen, who's a 'former AIPAC official' because he was charged with espionage crimes, is slightly bizarre." Glenn Greenwald: The self-styled defender of American liberties observed that, "the man leading the anti-Freeman assault was Steve Rosen, the long-time AIPAC official currently on trial for violations of the Espionage Act in connection with the transmission of classified U.S. information intended for Israel." (Apparently Greenwald's presumption of innocence only applies to terrorists intent on murdering untold numbers of American citizens). And, of course, where would any crackpot anti-Israel conspiracy theory be without the musings of Stephen Walt, who compared Freeman's critics to Joseph McCarthy and referred to Rosen specifically as "the same guy who is now on trial for passing classified U.S. government information to Israel." These are just a handful of the many, many Freeman defenders who wielded the Rosen indictment as a cudgel with which to smear all of Freeman's critics, and who held up Rosen's opposition to Freeman as if his involvement alone relieved them from the burden of addressing the merits of the case. To his credit, Spencer Ackerman, who also inveighed against Rosen during the Freeman controversy, writes today that the government's case against Rosen "amounted to the criminalization of extremely routine practices in Washington: acquiring and distributing information that's overclassified" and went onto say: During the Chas Freeman affair, when Steve Rosen was leading the charge against Freeman's appointment to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council for alleged hostility to Israel, alleged disinterest in human rights, and insinuated nefarious loyalties to China and Saudi Arabia, I remarked that Rosen shouldn't have gone after another pro-Israel lobbyist with whom he disagreed over Freeman while being wrapped up in the case. I shouldn't have said that Rosen was under indictment for spying for Israel, since that was a misstatement of the case. The point that I should have made is that someone who was railroaded in this case, with its intimations of dual loyalty, should be circumspect about flinging such charges against other people. Maybe we can all take a deep breath here — doubtful, but maybe — and reflect that it's good for everyone who desires openness in government that the flimsy charges against Weissman and Rosen are on their way out, regardless of the politics of the accused. This is a bit tendentious (Ackerman's admission that Rosen was "railroaded" ought to have absolved him of being "circumspect" about raising perfectly legitimate questions about Freeman's being on the payroll of the Saudi Arabian and Chinese governments), but it's far preferable to the radio silence in other corners of the liberal blogosphere. Contact Mr La by email at mrla26@aol.com |
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RE: JORDAN. LETTER TO DAVID GREGORY OF MEET THE PRESS
Posted by Truth Provider, May 3, 2009. |
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Dear friends, Last Sunday, King Abdullah II of Jordan was interviewed on NBC Meet The Press. I wrote to you about this and other interviews of the king, most notably on the benign interview on NPR by Michele Kelerman. Here is a letter to Meet The Press which includes extremely important quotes all of you should pay attention to. The quotes clearly prove that JORDAN IS PALESTINE and already the EXISTING PALESTINIAN STATE. JUDEA & SAMARIA are clear and unquestionably JEWISH! This comes from H Bendor (HBendor@aol.com). |
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TO: Mr. David Gregory
re: interviewing 'King Abdullah II' Mr. David Gregory you had a unique opportunity to solve the Arab-Israeli Conflict by posing the right questions to King Abdullah II. Albert Camus once wrote something about the Mysterious Middle East. It goes like this ... "When historical truth is involved, the more anyone claims to possess it, the more he lies." It is most often difficult to confront an august personality by denying his integrity... But of course we are all human and we have a tendency to abscond with the truth sometimes. And this is the impression that remains with me and probably millions of viewers that watched you interviewing King Abdullah II' and basically the reason of this letter. In his book The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 page 404, the world renowned scholar Dr. Howard M. Sachar mentions one of the late King Abdullah's declarations in this respect... "He (God) granted me success in creating the Government of Transjordan by having it separated from the Balfour Declaration which had included it since the Sykes-Picot Agreement assigned to the British Zone of influence." The late King Hussein of Jordan in his book Uneasy Lies the Head, Page 118 writes... "Palestine and Transjordan were both by then under the British Mandate, but as my grandfather (Abdullah) pointed out in his memoirs, they were hardly considered as separate countries, Transjordan being to the East of the river Jordan, it formed, in a sense, the interior of Palestine". Sir Alec Kirkbride who was the advisor, confident, and for thirty years the friend of the late King Abdullah of Transjordan, states in his book A Crackle of thorns page 19... "While all of this was going on, a Mandate over Palestine, a geographical term which included Transjordan also, was granted to Great Britain in July 1920." Further he mentions... "There was no intention at that stage of forming the Territory East of the river Jordan into an Independent Arab State." Art. 25 of the 'Mandate for Palestine' describe the status of Jordan even better... "in the territories lying between the Jordan (river) and the Eastern boundaries of Palestine." The following statements by Jordan leaders and P.L.O. executives enhance the veracity of the above documentation... Prince Hassan, brother of the late king Hussein of Jordan and uncle of the Present King Abdullah II, addressing the Jordanian Assembly, 1970. "Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is Palestine; there is one people and one land, with one history and the same fate." Another... Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the P.L.O. Political Dept. 1977: "Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the P.L.O. as one people." Still another... Abdul Hamid-Sharaf, Prime Minister of Jordan, 1980. "The Palestinians and the Jordanians do not belong to different nationalities. They hold same Jordanian passport, are Arabs and have the same culture." And yet another... The late king Hussein of Jordan, 1981: "The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan." By mid November 1990, a forced transfer of 'TWO MILLION' members of a large Arab minority was being carried out without provoking any international outrage and daily excoriation from the State Department and your colleagues in the Media. This Repatriation then never affected the alliance of the US with Saudi Arabia, and hardly anyone raised as much as an eyebrow. "Indignant over Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's sympathy for Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabian king Fahd ordered all 'TWO MILLION' resident of Yemeni extraction, including hundreds of thousands that lived there before the inception of 'Saudi Arabia' in the 19th Century, to leave the Country." The reason of this exercise Mr. David Gregory, is to illustrate and substantiate the fact that Arabs (now called Palestinians) holding Jordanian I.Ds and Passports from the time Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria for 19 years are not welcomed back to Jordan by King Abdullah II. The problem of the so called Palestinian Arabs could have been solved overnight if he was conducive to accept them, or perhaps cajoled by the present US administration to accept them. The finger of political indignation should not always be pointed towards Israel since Israel controls 23% of the 'Palestine Mandate' whilst Jordan was CREATED out of the remaining 77%. Thank you for your attention. JUDEA & SAMARIA are clear and unquestionably JEWISH!
Contact Truth Provider by email at ynz@netvision.net.il |
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DUMBING UP: THE CASE OF MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 3, 2009. |
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This was written by Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch
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The statement by Madeleine Albright that "Islam is maybe the most democratic religion because there is nobody between you and God" is akin to that of Yusuf Estes, whose deficient understanding of democracy, and willful misrepresentation of Islam, were discussed last week at Jihad Watch in an article, "Fitzgerald: Islam According To Yusuf Estes: "Basically, there's God and there's you." It can be found here. The article notes that Islam, far from being democratic, is — as quite a few of the great Western scholars of Islam noted — collectivist in its lack of concern for the individual Muslim and emphasis on the Community of Believers, the Umma, and on the reducing of the individual to a mere "slave of Allah" whose duty is to submit. And many of the same scholars, those who had the word "totalitarian" available to them, did not hesitate to apply it to Islam, for as a Total Belief-System that regulates every single area of existence, calling this haram and that halal, and setting out punishments for every infraction of the rules laid down by the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam, Islam has earned the right to be called totalitarian. It offers not only a Complete Regulation of Life, but a Total Explanation of the Universe. Indeed, Madeleine Albright should actually study Islam before making her pronouncements on it, and cease relying on some sly Muslim apologist for her "understanding" of Islam — in a recent book, she thanks such an apologist for "helping her" to understand Islam, unaware of how gullible she has been, and of how obvious her gullibility will be to any intelligent and wary reader. If she had talked to even one apostate, one defector from the Army of Islam — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, say, or Wafa Sultan, or Ibn Warraq — she would have learned of how oppressive Islam is, how deeply disturbing it is to the personalities of those who are, through no fault of their own, born into it and raised within it, and it was not only Czeslaw Milosz (in "The Captive Mind"), but many who endured Communism who have noted the similarities between the ways that people tried to cope with the nonsense and lies of the Communist system, with the ways they try to cope with the nonsense and lies of Islam. Madeleine Albright married money and became a Washington hostess, and puts one in mind of Perle Mesta in more ways than one. She attracted the attention of Bill Clinton, who irresponsibly, with his usual carelessness, chose her as his Secretary of State. She did not impress. Her lack of historical training, her understanding of the world no deeper than what any newspaper reader could acquire, her officious and physically comical bustling about the world, her constantly telling us that "she knows" that "the Arab leaders" want thus and so because, you see, "they tell me," are all by now the stuff of legend. And then there is, in addition to her ignorance of Islam, her failure to understand what advanced Western democracy has required for its own development. It has required a view of the individual as important — which is lacking in Islam — but also a theory of political legitimacy, one that locates such legitimacy in the will expressed by the people, a view derived from social contract theorists (see Hobbes, see Locke, see Rousseau). But in Islam political legitimacy does not depend on the will expressed by the people, whether through the vote or through other means. It depends only on the will expressed by Allah in the Qur'an, as glossed by the Sunnah. If the ruler is a Muslim, and a good Muslim, he can be as despotic as he wishes. And the very idea that the individual liberties guaranteed by advanced Western democracies should be part of what the Ruler guarantees, would seem ridiculous to any true Muslim Believer. Part of Madeleine Albright's problem is that in the aery regions of power she has inhabited, and in her selling of contacts and influence to foreign interests, through "The Albright Group" — or is it "Albright Associates"? — she has followed former Secretary of State Kissinger (and of course Brent Scowcroft, one of his hires), and former Secretary of Defense Cohen, and so many others who managed to "devote" themselves so selflessly to what they like to call Public Service, and then to return to what they like to call, demurely, the Private Sector. There they can cash in all those public-service chips by selling their influence and contacts, especially for those foreign companies and foreign interests best able to pay. I wonder — do you wonder too? — just who is on the client list of The Albright Group. Or is it Albright Associates? I forget. As Secretary of State, and now as the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright knows there will be some, too many, who will give her a forum, or who will listen to what she has to say. It's crazy. And when she talks palpable nonsense, she becomes far more irresponsible, that is to say, must take a far greater responsibility than any run-of-the-mill man-on-the-street idiot or simple simon, for her simple simony may have real consequences. When it comes to Islam, she knows nothing, and what she thinks she knows is wrong. And she presumes to instruct others, and that means she is in the business of misleading those who so badly need to understand what Islam inculcates, how Muslims are taught to view themselves in relation to Allah, to other Muslims, and — especially — to non-Muslims. She's very easy on herself. She doesn't think she has any need to study deeply, ponder, read and re-read, either the texts of Islam, or the studies of the most important Western scholars of Islam. For all I know, she may never have heard of Joseph Schacht and C. Snouck Hurgronje and Henri Lammens and Arthur Jeffrey, but thinks that John Esposito is a swell fellow, and eminently reliable. How easy it would be to put her on the spot at some public forum, to simply read out a list of fifty, or twenty, or even ten little short-answer essay questions, and let's throw in 100 multiple-choice Identifications for the hell of it, to show how little she knows of what she thinks she can speak about, and no one will mock her, no one will show her up. Oh yes they will. As for the picture above, it is certainly comical to see Madeleine Albright going native in Almaty or possibly Astana, wearing a Central Asian (Kazakh? Uzbek?) tubeteika (elaborate female version) and robe (choban?). A Kazakh friend, pleased that I had heard of and read a book by the Kazakh writer Olzhas Sulemeinov (a book on the Igor Tale), sent me, out of the blue of distant Almaty, such a costume. I earned mine. But what did Madeline Albright do to earn hers? She merely had to be, or to have been, Secretary of State, flying into some conference at Almaty or Astana and then flying out, having learned — nothing, having understood — nothing. Meeting with this or that world leader or similar big shots, or smiling diplomats, is not the way to learn about Islam or about anything of importance. But that's the way it is with the madeleine-albrights of this earth. They somehow Sammy-glick-like slither into high positions, and once there, are accorded a mindless deference, a respect, that they have done little to deserve. In her case it was because she was a hostess-with-the-mostess with an "interest" in foreign affairs. And in Albright's case, and that of some others, out of office, and trying to flog their "contacts" and their influence-peddling wars to various foreigners, they may continue to spout off even more heedlessly than when they were in office. So when Madeleine Albright thanks some Muslim adviser in a recent book for enlightening her about Islam, or when she sometimes says that she has discovered what the Arabs want because "the Arab leaders tell me so" and of course she takes what they say at face value (I remember one of her appearances on television when she gravely noted that the other Arabs had no idea what atrocities Saddam Hussein was committing inside Iraq — when everyone in the Middle East knew exactly what he was doing to the Kurds and the Shi'a — because "they told me so"), then we are entitled to be infuriated, and also fearful, that such a fool was ever in the position she attained, and still can't shut up, still is managing to do harm. There are many like her all over Washington. When they make pronouncements on the subject of Islam, without having studied — really studied — the matter, when they lightheartedly assume that reading the newspapers and "talking to the leaders" is all that is necessary (a kind of Tom-Friedman approach to the world), they reveal that they have no idea what level of knowledge is required of them, what level they should demand of themselves. In this respect, they remind me of those interviews with high school students in big-city schools who, with dyed hair and studs in their noses, reply so enthusiastically to a question about what they want to be as adults. One says he wants to be an astronaut, and another says she intends to be a nuclear physicist, and still a third is going to find a cure for cancer, or possibly come up with a way to establish permanent peace. We laugh, or cry, depending on our mood, knowing that the students in question can hardly keep from flunking first-year algebra or second-year English, but think no more of it. And then we realize, when we come across these badly-misinformed but powerful madeleine-albrights, that the same phenomenon, at a level where the stakes are higher, can be observed. She is just like those high school students who have no idea what is required for the kind of things they grandly plan for. She has no idea what she's talking about, and has no idea what would be required to attain the level of knowledge that would be necessary for her to make, in her position, any statement at all, about the nature of Islam. Dumbing down. Yes, of course. It's all over. But there's an even graver problem. It's the dumbing up. Case in point: Madeleine Albright.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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FROM ISRAEL: PROSPECTS DIM
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 1, 2009. |
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>None of the reports are encouraging — nor did I expect they would be. That is, with regard to the meeting between PM Netanyahu and President Obama scheduled for later this month. Oh, there is the usual spin from some sources about how Netanyahu will be warmly welcomed. But other reports are positively grim with regard to how intensely and determinedly Obama will be pressuring our prime minister. We know, without a question of a doubt, that these two heads of state have different worldviews and different perspectives on how to approach the situation in the Middle East. Netanyahu — bless him for this! — has yet to even utter the term "two state solution," while Obama has set the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as his first goal, declaring with breath-taking shortsightedness that everything else depends upon this. Thus, we should not expect reports following the meeting of the beginning of a warm friendship developing between the two men, who really see eye to eye on the important issues, blah, blah, blah. Or, let us say, if we hear such reports, we should know better than to believe them. ~~~~~~~~~~ I remain pleased, at this point, with approaches reportedly being taken by Netanyahu. He is preparing with considerable care, and has a research team compiling facts and talking points for each issue that will be on the table with Obama. What I am seeing again and again, with regard to reports that are coming out, is that this government is talking "tachlis" — confronting issues that others were prepared to sweep under the carpet. The first was the matter of having the PA recognize us as a Jewish state — for you can't even talk about a "two state solution" unless it's clear that one of those states is Jewish. And so the Palestinian refusal to do so is being exposed and their intention called into question. Now I read that one source close to the Netanyahu team has said, "Two states for two people is more complicated than the slogan suggests. For example, what is to be done with Hamas in Gaza?" To which I responded, Mazel tov! Here is someone stating the obvious, at last. Hamas has been the elephant in the room: everyone talked about negotiating with the PA as if Hamas were not there. ~~~~~~~~~~~ The key here is the ability of Netanyahu to stand strong in the face of that Obama pressure. More to come on this. ~~~~~~~~~~ With regard to the entire business of a negotiated "two-state
solution," I ask you please to read and extensively share my latest
piece, "Two States: A Figment of Obama's Imagination," which ran on
Front Page Magazine. It deals in some detail with the complexities
that are being ignored by Obama.
~~~~~~~~~~ As Netanyahu plans his approach to Obama, he is in consultation with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon, and Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, Dan Meridor.. His primary message to Obama and company will be that dealing with Iran has priority over talks with the Arabs, be they Palestinians, Syrians or Lebanese. ~~~~~~~~~~ For his part, Mahmoud Abbas, PA president, is himself delusional. To date, as expected, all negotiations between Fatah and Hamas regarding formation of that much-touted unity government have failed. Abbas has now announced that he will form a new government, which Hamas has warned him not to do. Yesterday, a representative of Fatah, Palestinian Legislative Council member Faisal Abu Shahla, declared that "the new government which President Abbas intends to form will be responsible for both the West Bank and Gaza." Says he. But is Hamas on board with this? Clearly not. In fact, Hamas warns that this plan would be regarded as a "fatal blow" to Egyptian efforts to achieve a unity government. In this eventuality, Hamas intends to form its own government. But Abu Shahla says this is "tantamount to a coup, and the deepening of division." Apparently he hasn't noticed that there has already been a coup. "...this government [formed by Abbas] will not be [just] for the West Bank, as some people are saying, but will rather take responsibility for the Palestinians in Gaza, including for delivering salaries, social affairs and medical treatment abroad." The PA has been sending money into Gaza for salaries all along, and is involved with helping people get medical treatment. Have no clue what's involved in being responsible for "social affairs." But this is not the totality of a government by any means. This is a study in political confusion. ~~~~~~~~~~ While further clarifications may be necessary, I have from more than one source the suggestion that Obama, during his recent visit to Turkey, responded with such warmth to Prime Minister Ergodan, that the Turks have now been emboldened. In the wake of Obama's visit they moved to sign a pact with Lebanon — which is on its way to Hezbollah control — that will grant it both military training and arms. Bad news for Israel. And yet one more troubling sign that Israeli security is not on Obama's radar. ~~~~~~~~~~ Israel is preparing seriously for possibility of conflict with Iran. Those Air Force reservists who operate the Arrow and Patriot missile defense systems are being called up one day a week to sharpen their skills. According to a top IAF officer quoted by the Post: "We are working hard to be ready for the Iranian threat, "We are preparing for barrages, split warheads and other surprises and therefore we need to retain a high operational level by everyone, including reservists." The preparation involves different possible scenarios: large barrages of missiles fired from different countries at once, and the need for the operator to decide which missile to intercept first and at what stage of its flight. Additionally, today the French paper, L'Express, reported that Israeli fighter jets, preparing for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, recently conducted a drill above the Strait of Gibraltar. ~~~~~~~~~~ Do you remember the charges brought four years ago against two officials of AIPAC — Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman — that they had illegally disclosed classified information to Israel? The whole case smelled of ugly politics from the beginning. Now the US government has decided to drop the case because of a diminishing possibility that it could succeed in securing convictions. Among the reasons for this change of heart was the fact that the defense had secured permission to call high profile former officials such as Condoleezza Rice to testify that the sort of sharing of information they did was standard procedure. The defendants are delighted, but also express frustration that because there will be no trial there will be no opportunity to definitively prove their innocence. "I was a person who had his whole life taken away from him," said Rosen. But the issue transcends what happened to these two personally: "We're in a situation where the wild allegations against Israel and the friends of Israel are being printed all over the place, and some people believe." ~~~~~~~~~~ Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been accused of being a racist, hostile to Arabs, recently appointed Bedouin diplomat Ismail Khaldi as his Middle East advisor. Khaldi, who holds a masters degree in political science, served in the IDF and worked as a political analyst for the Defense Ministry. He was the first Bedouin to join Israel's Foreign Service, and now Lieberman is the first minister to appoint a Bedouin as his advisor. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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HOW OBAMA`S AMERICA MIGHT THREATEN ISRAEL
Posted by Chuck Brooks, May 1, 2009. |
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This comes from today's Israel Unity Coalition
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Is there a threat to Israel from the United States under Barack Obama? The question itself seems perverse. For in spite of the hostility to Israel in certain American quarters, this country has more often than not been the beleaguered Jewish state's only friend in the face of threats coming from others. Nor has the young Obama administration been any less fervent than its last two predecessors in declaring an undying commitment to the security and survival of Israel. Nevertheless, during the 2008 presidential campaign, friends of Israel (a category that, speculations to the contrary notwithstanding, still includes a large majority of the American Jewish community) had ample reason for anxiety over Obama. The main reason was his attitude toward Iran. After all, Iran under its current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was vowing almost on a daily basis to "wipe Israel off the map" and was drawing closer and closer to acquiring the nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles that would give the ruling mullocracy the means to do so. And yet Obama seemed to think that the best way to head off the very real possibility this posed of another holocaust was by entering into talks with Iran "without preconditions." Otherwise, except for campaign promises, his record was bereft of any definitive indication of his views on the war the Arab/Muslim world has been waging against the Jewish state from the day of its founding more than sixty years ago. Still — lest we forget — Obama did have a history of involvement with associates whose enmity toward Israel was unmistakable. There was, most notoriously, his longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In addition to honoring the blatantly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan, Wright was on record as believing that Israel had joined with South Africa in developing an "ethnic bomb" designed to kill blacks and Arabs but not whites; he had accused Israel of committing "genocide" against the Palestinians; and he had participated in a campaign to get American companies to "divest" from Israel. None of this, however, nor all of it together, had elicited so much as a peep of protest from Obama, never mind provoking him into leaving Wright's congregation. He remained a member for twenty years, during which time Wright officiated at his marriage and baptized his children. Then there was Rashid Khalidi, holder of a professorship at Columbia named after his idol, the late Edward Said. As befitted a reverential disciple of the leading propagandist for Palestinian terrorism, and himself a defender of suicide bombing, Khalidi regularly denounced Israel as a "racist" state in the process of creating an "apartheid system." Nevertheless, Obama had befriended him, had publicly acknowledged being influenced by him, and, as a member of the board of a charitable foundation, had also helped to support him financially. And there was also one of Obama's chief advisers on national security and the co-chairman of his campaign, General Merrill McPeak, who subscribed to the canard that American policy in the Middle East was dictated by Jews in the interests not of the United States but of Israel. Others said to be advising Obama included a number who were no more notable than McPeak for their friendliness toward Israel: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. True, as the campaign proceeded, Obama either distanced himself from or repudiated the ideas of such associates. Yet he only got around to doing so when the political exigencies of his candidacy left him no prudential alternative. Not surprisingly, a fair number of Jews who had never voted for a Republican in their lives were disturbed enough to tell pollsters that they had serious doubts about supporting Obama. Faced with this horrific prospect, Obama's Jewish backers mounted a vigorous effort of reassurance. No fewer than three hundred rabbis issued a statement declaring that his "deep and abiding spiritual faith" derived from "the teachings of the Hebrew Prophets." Several well-known champions of Israel also wrote articles explaining on rather convoluted grounds why they were backing Obama. There was, for example, Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School: "The election of Barack Obama — a liberal supporter of Israel — will enhance Israel's position among wavering liberals." And Martin Peretz of The New Republic: "Israel's conflict with the Arabs . . . is mostly about history, and Obama is a student of history." And Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution: "I believe Obama passes the kishke [gut] test." The small community of politically conservative Jews did what it could to counter this campaign, but to no avail. In the event, Obama received 78 percent of the Jewish vote. This was a staggering 35 points higher than the pro-Obama white vote in general (43 percent), and it was even 11 points higher than the Hispanic vote (67 percent). Only with blacks, who gave him 95 percent of their vote, did Obama do better than with Jews. The results were just as dramatic when broken down by religion as by race and ethnicity: Protestants gave 45 percent of their vote to Obama (33 points less than Jews), and Catholics gave him 54 percent (24 points less than Jews). _____________ But if the forecasts of a Jewish defection from Obama were all wrong, the prediction of his Jewish opponents that he would be less friendly toward Israel than George W. Bush has turned out to be more accurate than any "kishke test." Bush's friendliness manifested itself in various ways. One of the most important was his backing for the measures Israel had been taking to defend itself against suicide bombing — the building of a wall and the institution of checkpoints that would make it harder for suicide bombers to get through from the West Bank and into Israel proper. These measures were denounced almost everywhere as oppressive in themselves and as a species of apartheid, while the accompanying assassinations of the leaders who recruited, trained, and supplied the suicide bombers were routinely condemned as acts of murder. But Bush — that is, the Bush who emerged after 9/11 — would have none of this. So far as he was concerned, suicide bombing was a form of terrorism and therefore evil by definition. Israel had an absolute right to defend itself against this great evil, and in fighting it, the Israelis were struggling against the same enemy that had declared war on us on 9/11. A similar logic guided Bush's view of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006 and of its attack on Gaza in 2008. Since, contrary to the confident assurances of their opponents, the wall, the checkpoints, and the targeted assassinations had all but eliminated suicide bombing, the terrorists were now resorting to a different tactic. From its redoubt in Lebanon, Hizballah rained rockets into the north of Israel, and from its base in Gaza, Hamas fired them into the south. In each of these cases, when the Israelis finally responded, they were furiously accused by most of the world of using "disproportionate" force that allegedly resulted in the wholesale "slaughter" of innocent civilians. But Bush would have none of these egregious defamations either. Both in 2006 and 2008, he again affirmed Israel's right to defend itself against terrorist assault, and he worked to fend off efforts by the UN to stop the Israelis before they could finish the job they had set out to do. To be sure, Barack Obama (while still President-elect) said about the then impending Israeli incursion into Gaza, that If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything in my power to stop that and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing. This sounded very much like Bush. But whereas an altogether new conception of how to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians undergirded Bush's support for the tactics Israel had been using to defend itself against terrorist attack, there was nothing in Obama's record or in his past statements or in his history to suggest that he shared, or even was aware of, this conception. George W. Bush was the first American President to come out openly in favor of a Palestinian state. But he also decided to attach a codicil that was even more novel. "Today," he declared on June 24, 2002, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure. To this he added the requirement that they elect "new leaders, not compromised by terror," which amounted to an implicit demand that Yasser Arafat be replaced. Of course, Bush also challenged Israel "to take concrete steps to support the emergence of a viable, credible Palestinian state." Yet he most emphatically did not follow the usual practice of blaming Israel for the persistence of the war against it. Instead, in an entirely unprecedented move, he placed the onus on the Palestinian leaders and the Arab states backing them up. By saying up front that "there is simply no way to achieve . . . peace until all parties fight terror," he was blaming the absence of peace on the Arab states and the "Palestinian authorities" (who were "encouraging, not opposing, terrorism"), and he was exonerating the Israelis (who were being "victimized by terrorists," not supporting them). Nor was this all. Two years later, in an addendum to his codicil, Bush said that "as part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders," and that these must include "already existing major Israeli population centers." To put it plainly, the United States rejected the almost universally accepted idea that a precondition for the establishment of a Palestinian state was the forcible removal of every last Jew from the West Bank. In all other contexts, this is known as ethnic cleansing and regarded as a great crime. But in this context alone, and by a process of reasoning that has always escaped me, it has been magically transmuted into the exercise of a sacred human right. Not, however, to Bush. _____________ Now, on a number of issues — most notably Iraq — Obama as President has surprised many people by in effect signing on to Bush's policies (while claiming to be reversing them). Yet even though he will certainly follow Bush in pushing for the establishment of a Palestinian state, it would be nothing less than astounding if he were also to accept the conditions prescribed by the Bush codicil and its addendum. For neither Obama himself nor those of his appointees who will be involved in the "peace process" — his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton; his special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell; his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones; and his Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, although she made the right noises at her confirmation hearing — have ever so much as suggested that it is the Palestinians and not the Israelis who are blocking the way to the holy grail of a two-state solution. On the contrary, Obama and his team are all great worshipers at the shrine of "even-handedness," which has long served as a deceptive euphemism for pressuring Israel to make unilateral concessions to Palestinian demands. No wonder, then, that the Obama administration is already reverting to the old pre-Bush assumptions that have repeatedly been discredited in practice: that Israeli "intransigence" is the main obstacle to ending the conflict with the Palestinians; that "restarting" the "peace process" therefore requires putting the onus back on Israel; and that this in turn necessitates forcing Israel back to the 1967 borders. In other words, Jerusalem must be redivided and the major centers of Jewish population in the West Bank that Bush had promised would remain part of Israel must also be evacuated and the West Bank as a whole be made Judenrein. Indeed, during Hillary Clinton's first trip as Secretary of State to Israel, she went evenhandedly out of her way to castigate the Israelis over the issue of Arab housing in Jerusalem while making a great show of the $900 million the U.S. has pledged to Gaza. _____________ It is too early to tell whether the return to this approach will go so far as to substantiate the fear expressed by the former UN ambassador John R. Bolton, who foresees "pressure on Israel to acknowledge the legitimacy of [Hamas and Hezbollah], and to negotiate with them as equals (albeit perhaps under some artful camouflage)."1 But it is not too early to tell that nothing will come of a reversion to the pre-Bush assumptions. Nothing will come of it with the Israelis because they — even most of the doves among them — have learned that withdrawing from previously occupied territories means the creation of bases from which terrorists will rain rockets on Israeli towns. Thus, when in 2000 they withdrew from the security zone they had established in southern Lebanon, Hizballah moved in, and then their withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 resulted in a takeover by Hamas — eventuating in both cases not in peace or even improved prospects for peace but in war and more war. Furthermore, the withdrawal from Gaza, entailing as it did the dragging of some 8,000 Jews out of their homes, was so painful a national trauma that doing the same to more than thirty times that many Jews living in the West Bank has become unthinkable. Nor will anything come of the old approach with the Palestinians. The writ, such as it is, of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority extends only to the West Bank, not to Gaza, so that even if he were to reach an agreement with Israel, he lacks the power to deliver on it. But a deeper reason may be at work here as well. When people quote Abba Eban's famous quip that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, the opportunity they have in mind is the achievement of statehood. And it is true that on at least three occasions when they could have had peace and a state of their own for the asking — in 1947, under the UN partition plan; in 2000, under the extremely generous terms proposed jointly by Israel under Ehud Barak and the United States under Bill Clinton; and in 2005, after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza — the Palestinians rejected statehood and chose war instead. May it not be, then, that they failed to seize these "opportunities" because they have never really wanted a state of their own? Giora Eiland, a retired general and the former head of Israel's National Security Council, argues that this is indeed the case. He writes: The Palestinian ethos is based on values such as justice, victimization, revenge, and above all, the "right of return." . . . It's true that the Palestinians want to do away with the occupation, but it's wrong to assume that this translates into a desire for an independent state. They would prefer the solution of "no state at all" — that is, the State of Israel will cease to exist and the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River will be divided among Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. Adding to the plausibility of this theory is the most recent polling data showing that a large majority of Palestinians would reject the two-state solution even after "the settlement of all issues in dispute," and would be unwilling to accept a state of their own even with its capital in East Jerusalem and an unlimited "right of return." But whether or not Eiland is right — and I for one think that he is, at least about the "no-state" solution — the futility under current conditions of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is so obvious that even devout American "peace processers" like Aaron David Miller and Martin Indyk acknowledge it. Hence (along with certain high-placed Israelis) they now advocate shifting to the "Syrian track." But nothing will come of this either. Even under the delusion that, in exchange for the Golan Heights, Syria would be ready to give up the dream of wiping Israel off the map that it shares with its closest ally Iran, it is hard to see how the Israelis would be willing to do unto the 20,000 Jews living there what they did to the 8,000 who lived in Gaza.2 When I say that nothing will come of renewed American pressure on Israel to accept the demands that are the precondition of a deal with the Palestinians and/or the Syrians, I mean that nothing will come of it on the ground. It is, however, likely to result in the same souring of relations that developed in the 1990s when George H.W. Bush was in the White House and Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister of Israel, and that then carried over to their successors, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu. Unpleasant as this would be, it does not rise to the level of a threat. But what surely does rise to the level of a threat is American policy toward Iran. In making the ridiculous boast during his presidential campaign that he could talk Iran into giving up its quest for nuclear weapons (and the missiles to deliver them), Obama was careful to add that the military option remained available in case all else failed. But everyone, and especially the Iranians and the Israelis, had to know that this was pro forma, and that if elected Obama would pursue the same carrot-and-stick approach of the Europeans who had been negotiating with Iran for the past five years. He would do this in spite of the fact that the only accomplishment of the European diplomatic dance had been to buy the Iranians more time; in spite of the fact that they had spurned the carrots they were offered and defied the sanctions put in place by the Security Council; and in spite of the fact that the Russians and the Chinese — who had prevented stronger sanctions from being adopted — were still determined to veto measures like a blockade or a cutoff of gasoline imports that could conceivably do the trick. How much time do we have? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at first said that Iran was still five years or more away from the bomb. This estimate relied on the CIA, in which Gates worked for more than 25 years, including a stint (1991-93) as its director. But the CIA does not exactly have a brilliant record of tracking nuclear proliferation. It was wrong in 2007 about Iran's suspension of its nuclear program; wrong in 2003 about Syria's nuclear program; wrong in 2002 about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction; and wrong in exactly the opposite direction before the First Gulf War in 1991, at whose end UN inspectors discovered that the Iraqi nuclear program was far more advanced than the American intelligence community had thought. By contrast, an increasing number of experts (possibly — to judge by hints he has thrown out — the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, among them) agree with the head of Israeli military intelligence, who warns that the Iranians have already "crossed the nuclear threshold." Perhaps this is why, in an interview with the Financial Times, Gates has now backed away from his complacent five-year estimate ("How much more time [we have] I don't know. It is a year, two years, three years"). Admit it or not, then, the awesome choice of bombing Iran or letting Iran get the bomb is hard upon us. Although it is certain that Obama has removed American military action from the table, it is difficult to tell whether he still thinks that he can talk Iran into giving up its nuclear program. On the one hand, his Secretary of State reportedly admits that this is "very doubtful," but on the other hand she invites the Iranians to a conference on Afghanistan, then Obama himself sends a videotaped message proclaiming his "respect" for the brutal and tyrannical regime in Tehran, and finally it is announced that the U.S. will now join the Europeans, the Russians, and the Chinese in the farcical negotiations with Iran we had previously shunned. Naturally the mullahs, seizing this gift of an opportunity to buy yet more time for reaching their nuclear goal, welcome the renewal of "constructive dialogue." Yet to Obama's offer of a "new day" in the relations between us, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of that regime, responds in a speech heaping scorn on the United States to the accompaniment of an audience chanting "Death to America." And far from having leaped at Obama's old offer of direct talks without preconditions, the Iranians have rebuffed it and insisted on a few preconditions of their own, beginning with an apology for all the "atrocities" we have committed against them and a promise of "deep and fundamental" change in our policy. In order to avoid this humiliation, Obama (we learn from the New York Times) has chosen the slightly lesser humiliation of "seeking an understanding with Syria." The idea here, according to the Times, is that through the Syrians, "the United States could increase the pressure on Iran to respond to its offer of direct talks." And to compound the double foolishness of expecting the Syrians to lend us a helping hand with Iran and the Iranians to join with us against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Obama expects that such an understanding [with Syria] would also give Arab states and moderate Palestinians the political cover to negotiate with Israel. That, in turn, could increase the burden on Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, to relax its hostile stance toward Israel. Well, compared to this concatenation of wishful delusions, the prophet Isaiah's vision of the end of days when the lion will lie down with the lamb is a piece of hardheaded realism. _____________ The upshot is that, barring military action by Israel (or a miracle), Iran will get the bomb, and sooner rather than later. What then? For some time now, many pundits with the ear of the Obama administration have finally recognized that neither carrots nor sticks nor any combination of the two can work. But instead of going on to support military action, they have fallen back on the position that we can "live with" a nuclear Iran.In line with the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), they soothingly tell us, the mullahs can be deterred by the fear of retaliation much as the far more heavily armed Soviets and Chinese were deterred during the cold war. They also say that Ahmadinejad — who in his fanaticism admittedly sounds as though he can hardly wait to use nuclear weapons against Israel — neither runs the regime nor speaks for it. What they forget to mention, however, is that Ahmadinejad could never have issued his threats without permission from the Ayatollah Khamenei, who does run the regime, and who has himself described Israel as a "cancerous tumor" that must and will be excised. Besides, even Ahmadinejad's predecessor as president and the current Speaker of the Assembly of Experts, the Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, known far and wide as a "moderate," has declared that his country would not be deterred by the fear of retaliation: If the day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession . . . application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world. If this is the position of even a reputed Iranian moderate, how could Israel depend upon MAD to keep the mullahs from launching a first strike? Much anxiety has been voiced over the nuclear arms race that would be triggered throughout the region if Iran were to get the bomb, but in all truth we would be lucky if there were enough time for such a race to develop.For consider: if the Iranians were to get the bomb, the Israelis would be presented with an almost irresistible incentive to beat them to the punch with a preemptive strike — and so, understanding this, would Tehran. Either way, a nuclear exchange would become, if not inevitable, terrifyingly likely, and God alone knows how far the destruction would then spread. Measured against this horrendous possibility, even the worst imaginable consequences of taking military action before the mullahs get the bomb would amount to chump change. But to say it again, with American military action ruled out, the only hope is that such action — which could at the very least head off the otherwise virtually certain prospect of a nuclear war — will be taken by Israel. Forget about the Palestinian and Syrian "tracks": if there is a threat to Israel coming from Obama, it is that, having eschewed the use of force by the United States, he will follow through on his Vice President's declaration that the Israelis would be "ill-advised" to attack the Iranian nuclear sites and will prevent them from doing the job themselves. Contact Chuck Brooks at chetz18@aol.com |
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APPEASEMENT EMBOLDENS THE AGGRESSOR
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 1, 2009. |
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Dear Mr. President,
If your genuflecting to king Abdullah, and your general policy course which seems to reflect your belief that Islamic hostility towards the West is caused by American arrogance, and your recent apology tour of Europe and the Middle East, and your contrition about America's past behavior, are all part of a really sly and crafty strategy to self-denigrate and thereby to hyper-extend an olive branch to all and sundry who may hate us; so that if they torch that branch, you will have the moral high ground from which to take whatever action (including military action) you and Congress feel may be necessary to protect our country and its interests......then disregard this email. If, however, you sincerely believe that by contrition and apologetics and mea culpas, which denigrate our past presidents and distort American history, you will win the affection or at least the cooperation of Jihadist imperialist supremacist terrorist Islamic states, then I most sincerely urge you to read carefully Caroline Glick's article below. And then, to put it into some more historical perspective, read my essay and Tawfiq Hamid's Wall Street Journal article. History has shown many times over that apologetics will not win brownie points with an enemy ideologically committed to our destruction. Appeasement merely emboldens the aggressor. The aggressor will pocket your concessions, and then demands more, all the while preparing for our demise. "...Like it or not, it appears that the rising forces in the Islamic world perceive themselves as at war with Western civilization. They cannot be convinced to believe otherwise by either elections or apologies. And the current situation, in which only one side is willing to recognize that there is a war going on between two mutually exclusive ways of organizing human societies, will only lead us to more violent and devastating clashes in the future." (Glick's conclusion) |
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"One civilization clashing"
On June 7 Hizbullah will likely take over Lebanon and formally bring the oldest Arab democracy into the Iranian axis. Iran's stalking horse will not become the ruler of the largely pro-Western, non-Shiite majority country through a violent revolution. Lebanon will become yet another Iranian vassal state through ballots, not bullets. On June 7, Hizbullah and its allied parties are set to win a smashing popular victory in Lebanon's parliamentary elections. Hizbullah's projected victory in these elections is of course not an isolated event. It is part of an Islamist electoral sweep in democratic elections throughout the region. Indeed, Islamists have won every free or partially free election in the region for the past six years. Beginning with Turkey's Islamist AKP party's first electoral victory in 2003 — followed by its even more decisive reelection in last year's race; moving to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election in the relatively free, (although not open), presidential elections in his country in 2005, to the Muslim Brotherhood candidates' sweep of nearly all electoral races they were permitted to contest in Egypt's 2005 parliamentary elections, to Hamas's electoral victory in the Palestinian Authority's legislative elections in 2006, the Islamist candidates and parties have been victorious in state after state. The only outlier in this pattern is Iraq. But then, Iraq is the only country in the region where the West overthrew an enemy regime and retained an empowered military force in the country in the years that followed. What will happen in Iraq once US forces are withdrawn is an open question. Generally speaking, Western analysts have attributed the Islamists' victories to their well-run welfare programs for the poor, and to the fact that unlike their secular opponents, Islamist parties and politicians are perceived an honest. No doubt, economic interests have played a role in their election. But the fact is that people who voted for the likes of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmadinejad, and those who are poised to vote for Hizbullah are not blind and they are not disengaged from the ideological currents of their societies. They know full-well what these parties and their leaders represent and seek. Turkish voters, for instance know that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan wishes for Turkey to be an Islamic state and a leader in the Islamic world. Palestinian voters did not vote for Hamas just because it runs the best soup kitchens. They supported Hamas because they support its goal of destroying Israel. Iranian voters chose Ahmadinejad over former president Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani not merely because Rafsanjani was corrupt, but because of Ahmadinejad's outspoken extremism. Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Egypt know that the jihadist movement calls for the overthrow of the government and its replacement with a caliphate and that the group spawned both al Qaida and Hamas. And in Lebanon, voters know that a vote for Hizbullah is a vote for war against Israel and the West and a vote for placing Lebanon under effective Iranian control. They know all this, and still they vote for these parties and leaders. And once in office, these leaders do not disappoint them. In addition to expanding welfare benefits for their supporters, they have worked steadily and aggressively to Islamify their societies internally and to strengthen their alliances with likeminded governments against the West in foreign affairs. At home, through patronage, repression of political opponents, introduction of Islamic laws, and incitement against the West, these democratically elected regimes have been moving their people further and further away from secularism. As for the burgeoning alliances between and among these likeminded jihadist states, events of the past week alone make clear that backed by popular support at home, these governments are steadily expanding their military and commercial ties in a naked bid to challenge and defeat the West. Buffeted by US President Barack Obama's warm embrace of Turkey earlier in the month, Erdogan has moves swiftly to consolidate his place as a central pillar in the new regional jihadist axis spearheaded by Iran, which includes Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Over the past week, his government signed a military pact with Lebanon committing Turkey to providing arms and training for the Lebanese army — a force which is already largely subservient to Hizbullah and will likely come under its complete control on June 7. It signed a defense agreement with Syria's Ministry of Defense, and even more provocatively conducted a three-day joint land forces exercise with the Syrian military. This was the first joint exercise between Syria and a NATO member. As for Iran, Turkey signed a trade agreement with the mullocracy that is slated to double bilateral trade between the two countries within five years. Even more significantly, Ankara gave a green light to Iranian gas exports to Europe through the Nabucco gas pipeline which runs from Turkey to Austria. The Nabucco pipeline was supposed to bypass both Iran and Russia and increase instead gas exports from the former Soviet republics to Europe. Iran's access to the pipeline will earn it billions of dollars in annual income and increase its political power as Europe increases it dependence on Iranian gas. Both the popularity of Islamist parties and their behavior after being popularly elected have confounded conventional Western reasoning — particularly in the US. Quite simply, successive administrations in Washington have been unable to provide an accurate explanation of what drives the populations of these countries, and increasingly of the Islamic world in general to support Islamist parties and movements. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration came to the conclusion that it isn't that these parties and movements are popular. It is just that people are intimidated into supporting them. Were the people given the freedom to choose, they would choose to be led by liberal political forces interested in living at peace with the West. For former president George W. Bush and his advisors, the root of Islamic extremism was authoritarianism and the solution was Westernization through open elections. When time after time the citizens of these countries or societies voluntarily elected jihadists, the Bush administration was confounded. Rather than seek an alternative explanation to understand what was happening, the administration alternatively denied reality — as in the case of Turkey where it pretended that the AKP was a moderate, pro-Western Islamist party in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Or they claimed that the people were simply voting against corruption and showered them with money — as has been the case with the Hamas-supporting Palestinians. Or, as in the case of Egypt and Iran, they have simply ignored the fact that elections took place. The same of course occurred after Hizbullah's violent coup last May. Rather than cut off ties with the Saniora government — which had been compelled to accept Hizbullah control over its affairs — the Bush administration continued to support Saniora and increased US military assistance to the Lebanese army — hoping that it could pretend away the problem. Since his first moments in office, President Barack Obama has embarked on a policy course which rejects Bush's belief that the quest for freedom is universal as so much American chauvinism. For Obama, Islamic hostility towards the West is caused by American arrogance, not the absence of freedom. And because American arrogance is the root of the problem, the solution must be American contrition. It is this view that propels Obama from one international apology tour to the next and causes him to air the CIA's laundry in public. As far as he is concerned, the more apologetic he is, the more contrition he expresses for the actions of his predecessors, the greater the pay-off will be. And yet, as we see from the behavior of Lebanon, Turkey, Syria and Iran over the past week alone, Obama's apologetics are not winning them over, but emboldening them to take more aggressive positions against the West. How can this be explained? There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of the peoples of the Islamic world that actually can explain events, and has successfully forecast them. It has even engendered policy recommendations that might have mitigated both the popularity of Islamist parties and deterred these parties, once elected from taking provocative steps against Western states and interests. Unfortunately, every time this explanation is raised, Western policy makers head for the hills. This explanation is really nothing more than an observation. It observes that the populations of Islamic countries and societies support Islamist parties like the AKP and Hizbullah and Hamas because they support what they stand for. This explanation notes that tens and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Turks, Egyptians and others voluntarily congregate in public venues and swoon when Islamist leaders tell them that Islam will defeat the West and promise the death of America and the death of Israel. The jihadist message resonates with them. Their hearts and minds have already been won over. Contrary to what Western leaders as distinct as Bush and Obama believe, the hearts and minds of the Islamic world are not presently in play. From Beirut to the Taliban-controlled Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan, jihadists enjoy public support because the public supports their aim of defeating the West with bullets, with bombs, and with ballots (DML: and with babies). It is too early to know how Obama will react when he like Bush is no longer able to deny that his strategy for winning over the hearts and minds of the Islamic world has failed. We don't know if like Bush before him, he will simply ignore reality and pretend that nothing has happened; if he will blame his political opponents or Israel for not joining him in his contrition; or if he will cast about for another central organizing principle that will explain hostile Islamic behavior. What is clear is that in the absence of Western — and specifically American — willingness to consider the possibility that what is happening in the Islamic world has next to nothing to do with either what the West embodies or what it has done, and everything to do with the resonance of the Islamist message within the Islamic world, events like the expected loss of Lebanon in June will continue to be met with incoherent prattling and confusion. Like it or not, it appears that the rising forces in the Islamic world perceive themselves as at war with Western civilization. They cannot be convinced to believe otherwise by either elections or apologies. And the current situation, in which only one side is willing to recognize that there is a war going on between two mutually exclusive ways of organizing human societies, will only lead us to more violent and devastating clashes in the future. Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. "Moderate Muslim validates my claim that there is something wrong with Islam"
Tawfik Hamid (see below for his WSJ article) is in a good position to validate my previous critical comments on Islam. Since I am not a Muslim (much less a Muslim well educated in to his religious tradition), nor a theologian, nor an expert on comparative religion, my comments on Isalm have been drawn exclusively from Middle East history (a topic with which I do have some familiarity). And, due to my above mentioned lack of expertise in the realm of Islamic theology, I cannot comment on what 'true Islam' is, or is not. I can comment only on what the behavior of hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Middle East for the past 1,375 years has demonstrated. Based on Middle East history over the past 1,375 years, I conclude that there really is something wrong with Islam. As Hamid says: '....traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis, and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the 'end of days.' So, according to Hamid, and my reading of Middle East history, traditional Islam as it has been practiced in the Middle East for 1,375 years, is (& see below for mnemonic and comparison with "true Islam"): genocidal (at least vis-a-viz Jews, and not merely after Armageddon. Had the Hajj had his way, Hitler would have made Palestine Judenrein if Rommel had won the battle of el-Alamein; and neither Hamas nor Hezbollah show any patience to await the Hidden Imam before ridding the world if its Jews. They want to do it today!), And, while most of us in the west consider all of the above characteristics to be retrograde throwbacks to primitive pre-enlightenment governance, all of the above characteristics are held by leading interpreters (past and present) of Islamic tradition and texts to be necessary componnents of a Muslim state, and are considered blessed reflections of Allah's divine will as expounded in the Qur'an and Sunna. But Hamid's really condemning statement is one that I have been asserting for quite some time. 'The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.' And Tawfik does miss one very important point that highlights even more sharply the yawning chasm between western concepts of humanistic societies and the Islamic concept of society run by Shari'a. Far from Tawfik's 'near deafening silence,' we are instead witness to the deafening cheers and celebratory gunshots of those Muslims throughout the world who rejoice in 9/11, to the mass demonstrations in Gaza of Muslim joy at the murder of 8 innocent Jewish teens at the Rav Kook Yeshiva in Jerusalem, to terrorist leaders and followers celebrating the murder of an innocent civilians in Sederot, and to the polls that show substantial pluralities in many of the Muslim communities in the west who support terrorism and jihad and Shari'a in place of democracy.....not to mention the support world-wide that Osama and Nasr'allah enjoy.
Let's recall that: while not all Muslims are terrorists, almost all terrorists in the entire world, today and for the past 30 years, are Muslims It then becomes clear that there is indeed something wrong with Islam. And, as Hamid points out, the apologists for, and cheer leaders of, what is wrong with Islam are only making it more difficult for the reformers and true moderates (not the ones that pretend to be moderates so that they can get money from the west) in Islam to make any headway. David Meir-Levi
Mnemonic: JIST5EFIG Islam (sounds like: just five a fig) "The Trouble with Islam"
Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled 'What Went Wrong?' Astonishingly, there was, among many Western 'progressives,' a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right. But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense. These 'progressives' frequently cite the need to examine 'root causes.' In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological 'rootlets' of Islamism, the main tap root has a name — Salafism [*], or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion. It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the 'end of days.' The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong. The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace. Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals — who unceasingly claim to support human rights — have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western 'progressives' pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror. Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria — which happened in the last few decades — or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please. The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods. Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession. Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies. Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an anti-liberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today. Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand — but so far haven't — that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered 'moderates.' All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices. Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us. Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West. [*] DML: There are four major schools of Islamic legal
interpretation: the Maliki, Hanbali, Shafi'i and Salafi. While the
Salafi is the most puritanical and extreme in its interpretation of
the Qur'an (amd the Hanbali is a pretty close second), all four share
the same attitude toward Jihad and triumphalism and aggressive
religious imperialism. Thus, while I would not argue with Hamid's
selection of the Salafi school as the root ideology behind the
Jihadist rendition of Islam into a violent, ultra-conservative
religion, I do feel the need to point out that Salafism differs
little, if at all, from the other three schools when it comes to the
Islamic cornerstone concepts of Jihad and triumphalism and the need to
"struggle in the way of Allah" (Jihad fi-Sabeel Allah) until Islam is
the only, or at least the ruling, religion in the entire
world.....Islam uber Alles. Hence my conclusion, to quote Irshad
Manji, "there is a problem with Islam".
David Meir-Levi is an American-born Israeli,
currently living in Palo Alto. His expertise is in Near Eastern
studies and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is Director
of Peace and Education at Israel Peace Initiative (www.ipi-usa.org).
Contact him at david_meirlevi@hotmail.com
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READER-SELECTED VIDEOS
Posted by Various Readers, May, 2009. |
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The Circle of Life -- Gaza/Israel From Doris Wise Montrose A classic video. In 1 minute and 22 seconds, everything you need to know about alleged Israeli atrocities. Great YouTubes on Pentecost (Shavuot) From Laureen Moe This was sent me by Merv and Merla Watson
The Pentecost food http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjFZFzygqA&feature=related The Israeli kids dancing at Pentecost http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVkthtXb9-U A believer (Carol Cantrell) sings over Jerusalem at Pentecost http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi2ouVx2U3g Some explanation of Pentecost - and more food! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mejCKhhggRk Beautiful Pentecost music and dance by believers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8shglakt5ys&feature=related Celebrating the glorious law of God given to Moses at Pentecost Picnicing at Pentecost http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxzKw2UFaUk&feature=related Families at Pentecost http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BPO__aG0pk&feature=related Well, by now I'm so homesick for Israel I can hardly stand it. 7 strange coincidences. What Are The Chances? Gematria And Bible Code From Scott Robertson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UOKTNFMgQ8 Chinese choir sings for Yom Ha'shoah! From Boris Celser Emily Crocker(arr.): Choral Selections from Schindler's List and 'Yerushalaim Shel Zahav' - Jerusalem of Gold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WAImK9FPDs So many lies about Israel From Yael from Road 90 As we celebrated the city of David last week, it is important to remember how essential and central this city was, is and will always be for the Jewish people. If you spend some time in Jerusalem, walking through its beautiful streets, admiring its ancient architecture, and enjoying its magical atmosphere, do not forget to share the videos of - A small Israeli genius: Maya Tamir [click here] - Arab lies about Israel [click here] - Shavuot cartoon, great message [click here] - The Stone of Jerusalem [click here] - Did you ever saw the winter in an Israeli desert? [click here] - Robert Spencer: Jihad in the US? [click here] - 5th century Mosaic floor in Beit Alpha [click here] Hilla -- Hasan Mahmud's movie on the draconian Sharia law From Jamal Hasan (poplu@hotmail.com) Hilla is Hasan Mahmud's movie on the draconian Sharia law. Hilla depicts the inhuman consequence of the draconian Sharia law. It is on-line now. Here is the Youtube link to the docu-movie: http://jhasan1971.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/hilla-movie-on-sharia-law/ Disappointing debate run by Fareed Zakaria, even with Bret Stephens. And then comes Tzipi. From Boris Celser Typical American nonsense with French participation with Muslim overtones. Everybody salivating in anticipation of the expulsion of Jews from Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. Even Bret seems for it. So easy to put others out of their homes, isn't it? http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/05/24/gps.zakaria.panel.cnn Then Tzipi says she is in politics even though she hates politics. How "lucky" Israel is. Same link as before, scroll down and look for her name in one of the little windows. British MP (European Union) Daniel Hannan From Truth Provider Dear friends, I hope you know by now that I rarely touch on non-Middle Eastern politics except during election campaigns. This is one of these rare occasions. I believe all of us must learn from the eloquence of British MP Daniel Hannan, as he riles up over the slide of Britain into the socialist abyss. Please watch these two incredible video clips, one as he speaks to the European Union Parliament: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc9TVlzdEsc The other as he is being interviewed by Sean Hannity on FOX. I know, I know, some of you will refuse to watch Hannity even for a few minutes, but it is what Daniel Hannan says that is so significant. IT IS YOUR LIVES AND YOUR CHILDREN'S LIVES THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT, as well as the GREATNESS OF AMERICA and the incredible wisdom of her founding fathers. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520871,00.html Your Truth Provider,
Propaganda radical Islamic ideology exposed From Yael from Road 90 As the Israeli Prime Minister travels to the United States to convince President Obama that economical peace is possible and that new ways of building peace must be invented, the radical islamists do not rest in their efforts to spread their hate message around the world. - Propaganda radical Islamic ideology exposed [click here] - Netanyahu Talks Directly to Obama Not to The Press [click here] - Synagogue - Beit Knesset: House of Prayer [click here] - Israel/USA-Obama: Can they find common ground? [click here] - International Youth Leaders Pledge to Remember the Holocaust [click here] - Discover Jerusalem with Yaakov Shwekey [click here] New YouTube Videos for May 18 From Tsila FoxNewsChannel: Two State Solution?
HebronVideo: MK Ya'akov Katz - Ketzela - speaking in Hebron during protest march
HebronVideo: HaIchud Leumi/National Union in Hebron
(Restrictions on entering certain places in Hebron)
JerusalemU: The Case For Israel
INNTV: Peres and Obama Meet
INNTV: Preparing for PM's US Visit
INNTV: The Silent Expulsion in Yesha (MUST SEE)
INNTV: Egypt - Friendship with Problems
(Probable nuclear weapons in Egypt being investigated)
INNTV: A New Solar Power System
INNTV: Charity or Illegal Building?
(money coming in for arabs to settle in Israel)
________________________________ Other videos residing elsewhere: Obama and Netanyahu:
Danon speaks out against 2 state solution:
CBC News Video: Pope, Jordan pressure Netanyahu for sovereign Palestinian state
Brachot/Blessings Of Torah,
Asshat Radical Muslim Group Calls For Sharia & Jihad In New York City From Gabrielle Goldwater Gateway Pundit on 5/16/2009 wrote: "The asshats from Revolution Muslim staged a street protest in New York City this week. Islam in Action says it looks like they set up their protest close to the World Trade Center ruins. They ask for donations so that they can continue their work to defend 'the honor of the mujahaddin.' "Here's video of the losers calling for sharia law and jihad from the streets of New York. Could 9-11 really be that long ago?" gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/05/asshat-radical-muslims-call-for-sharia.html Please Read And Act Asap; Do Not Let U Tube Cancel This Video! From Fred Zartz On Wed, 13/5/09, Michael Cohen The IDF broadcasting on You Tube, presented by Capt. Avichai
Adraee, an Israel officer speaking Arabic, showing and explaining in
full clarity what is really going on in Gaza and how Hamas terrorists
operate from the midst of civilian neighborhood, schools and mosques
and how they used a United Nations school as shelter while firing
mortar bombs at Israeli soldiers, thus endangering Palestinian
civilians ...
However, You Tube wants to remove this video by using the excuse
that not
too many people are logging in. So please watch the video once, twice
and three times and also forward this e-mail to as many people so they
also log in and the IDF will be able to have its voice heard.
Just this one time, please send this mail to your entire list to
your friend, foes, distant relatives and/or acquaintances. This rally
is most important as the Arab propaganda machine has cranked up and
stands to completely drown Israel's position. Thank you."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sznMP3dnCg
Papal concert From Fred Reifenberg This was shot Monday in Israel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut7euIUUAtk Yuri Bezmenov: A Lesson For Israel Not To Be Destroyed Like America From Boris Celser THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING IN ISRAEL. THIS MINDSET CAN DESTROY THE COUNTRY WITH A FUTURE PALESTINIAN STATE. THINK OF AMERICA NOW, AND HOW STRONG IT WAS WHEN COMMUNISM FELL. WHO IS IN CHARGE NOW? PROJECT IT TO ISRAEL, SURROUNDED BY A HOSTILE PLANET. IT IS NOT DIFFICULT. THE PROCESS STARTED EVEN BEFORE OSLO. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32cxf_yuri-bezmenov Some of you may have seen this short movie. It is amazing. That this guy was telling us this in 1984 is really something. At some point during the interview so long ago, he says " The conquest of North America is complete... better than the Soviet's wildest expectations..." We are in the phase of 'normalization' now, I presume. Cleric:The Jews Are the Enemies of Muslims Regardless of the Occupation of Palestine From Tsila http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HluwcWVBkZs Please see added videoS update in blog as well: http://htmlspecialmessage.blogspot.com/2009/05/war-of-worlds.html Boycott Israel? From Boris Celser Boycott Israel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfK7Yal64S0 But before you boycott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saeky9I5T9c&feature=related U.S.A. Pressures Israel for a Two-State Solution From Yael from Road 90 At the crossroads of religions, Jerusalem was, is and will always stay the city of David. Reconciliation between Catholics and Jews is surely positive, but most important is the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and Jerusalem as its eternal capital. In the videos below, you will see that many people, including the Pope, do not yet realize and accept this. Thank you for visiting Road 90, and don't forget to share these videos with all your friends and family! Tel Aviv 100 years: see Tel Aviv in color in the '30s The Pope Speaks at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum U.S.A. Pressures Israel for a Two-State Solution OK to welcome the pope, but we have to tell him the truth Stupid Imam: Quran anticipates the destruction of Jews A fairy tale fantasy in the land of Israel Muslims still destroy the Temple Mount Rove: Obama's Blame Game is Inaccurate and Wearing Thin From Gabrielle Goldwater Karl Rove broke down the dishonest attempts by Team Obama to blame Bush for their outrageous and historic spending. Team Obama is going to quadruple the national deficit this year- no thanks to George Bush. Already the deficit for the year is 50% greater than expected. gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/05/rove-obamas-blame-game-is-inaccurate.html The Perfect Spy From Boris Celser http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5004897n Enemies Regardless From Dave Alpern This is from an EGYPTIAN tv station. Recall that Egypt signed a PEACE TREATY with the JEWISH State of Israel. The broadcast was early THIS YEAR! We dumb, stupid Westerners always want to ignore the truly horrendous things Arabs say to each other in Arabic. We foolishly prefer to swoon over their talk of "peace" in English and other Western languages, idiotically believing they really want peace with "the Zionist infidels". Do not think such a "sermon" is atypical or aberrant in any way, or that this is some "rogue imam" who is "hijacking a religion of peace" and doesn't speak for most Muslims. And when Obama shockingly declared that Islam "helped shape America", we should ask him if he meant sermons like this. It should help one of my listers answer the question of whether Israel has any choice regarding the "two-state solution". Click on the link below and don't be surprised if your hair stands on end! http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2042.htm Newt Gingrich speech to AIPAC - unmissable! From Zalmi http://www.aipac.org/about_AIPAC/Learn_About_AIPAC/2841_24632.asp Two Trillion Tons - Sung by the Ghost of Tennessee Ernie Ford From Boris Celser The Ghost of Tennessee Ernie Ford comes back to warn us that Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan and budget could be hazardous to our economic well-being. Jim Gossett and Lars Larson wrote the lyrics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj01Sqi0zic&feature=related 100 Days of Change You Can Bereave In From Gabrielle Goldwater The Family Research Center released this powerful video discussing Obama's many lies on life issues and his disastrous trail of debt from the first 100 days of his administration. Elected with a mandate to fix the economy President Obama has instead pursued a radical social agenda that preys upon the most vulnerable members of our society. Adn. Barack Obama's irresponsible spending will leave this country in debt for generation Here is more on Obama's many broken promises: gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/05/100-disastrous-days-of-change-you-can.html An Alarming video every Westerner should see From Yael from Road 90 Don't forget to share this email with all your friends, and join our new Facebook page! Shalom, Road 90 is inviting you to spend your vacations in Israel and enjoy this beautiful country with your friends and family! Navigate through our website and watch the videos of the places you would like to visit. Chose a place and you're set to go! And don't forget to share your "Israeli experience" after your "holydays", by uploading your videos on Road 90. Below is a small selection of the latest videos on Road 90: An Alarming video every Westerner should see [click here] A prayer for the I.D.F soldier [click here] Yad Vashem: Remembering the Past, Shaping the Future [click here] Israel: you want to know why? [click here] In Love with Tel Aviv [click here] Alan Veingrad: from Super Bowl to Synagogue [click here] New Solar Energy Technology from Israel [click here] From 51 Years Ago! From Dave Alpern This is amazing footage from 51 years ago: reporter Mike Wallace interviewing Abba Eban. Note the cigarette commercials which would be unthinkable today; note Israel's terrible dilemmas with its neighbors - there are twice as many Arab states today, and we have peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, yet too many Arabs continue to seek Israel's total annihilation. http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/eban_abba.html Another super clip from MEMRI From Truth Provider One of a very few voices in the Arab world who expresses the TRUTH. Peace in the Middle East will not be achieved by uprooting people and handing over lands. Peace will be achieved when the majority of Arabs will internalize the truths this man expresses. http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2063.htm the Mufti of Jerusalem From Esther Green here is an interesting video about Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated in the Holocaust. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xd12e_hitler-et-le-mufti_politics Pillar of fire: view the history of the creation of Israel with never before seen movie From Boris Celser In Jewish history, there are no coincidences.
http://wejew.com/media/1764/Pillar_of_Fire_Movie_1/
Slaughter of Pigs in Egypt -- but there is no swine flu From Bryna Berchuck The Egyptian Christians point out there is no swine flu. But it gives the Muslim government an excuse to destroy the livelihood for many Christians. See http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/04/30/lister.egypt.pig.slaughter.cnn |
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