WarSclerotic

Abbas talks conditions get cold reception in Israel. Times of Israel, April 22, 2014

(Abbas continues to sing the same old song; it may be the only one he knows. — DM)

Unnamed officials said Abbas was laying down insupportable conditions in order to allow talks to fail without being blamed for it.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett seen during a press conference in Jerusalem on February 5, 2014. (photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Israeli officials responded coolly Tuesday to remarks from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he would be willing to continue negotiations in exchange for a settlement freeze, saying the Palestinian leader was uninterested in peace.

Unnamed officials said Abbas was laying down insupportable conditions in order to allow talks to fail without being blamed for it.

“The meaning of all these things is that he’s not interested in peace,” an unnamed official told the Ynet news site. “Someone who wants peace does not present time after time conditions he knows Israel cannot accept.”

Earlier in the day Abbas told a group of Israeli journalists that the Palestinians would agree to extend negotiations with Israel by nine months on condition that Israel agrees to immediately commence discussing the borders of the future Palestinian state and freeze settlement construction, including in East Jerusalem.

He added that Ramallah was still expecting the release of 30 pre-Oslo prisoners as part of the agreement to hold peace talks, but that he had rejected an Israeli demand to deport a number of them — some of whom hold Israeli citizenship.

But a senior Israeli official told AFP that settlement building in Jerusalem would not be frozen and that Israel had never agreed to discuss the border issue separately from other core issues.

These include Palestinians refugees, the fate of Jerusalem, which both sides claim as a capital, security and mutual recognition.

“It is impossible to define borders before an agreement on the other issues,” the Israeli official said.

He also reiterated that Israel planned on expelling towards the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, or abroad, some of the last batch of prisoners that Abbas wants freed.

“This has been clearly explained to the Palestinians. Never has Israel committed not to carry out expulsions,” he said.

Economics Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the hawkish Jewish Home party, said Abbas’s threat that the collapse of talks would lead to the dismantling of the PA were nothing new.

“We are hearing again and again the refrain of the same threat that if we don’t advance, if we don’t give him what he wants, then woe is us, he will dismantle the PA,” Bennett told a conference. “I suggest to Abbas, if you’re going to shoot, then shoot, don’t talk.”

Opposition head Isaac Herzog, however, put the blame on Netanyahu, saying he had released prisoners without getting to an advance in peace talks, hurting Israel in the long run.

“The time has come for Netanyahu to decide if he wants a Jewish state of a bi-national state,” Herzog wrote on his Facebook page.

Islam’s Religious War with Everyone, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, April 22, 2014

(BUT:  Israel must allow Palestinians to live in peace. Only then will all in the Middle East enjoy the tranquility and prosperity they so clearly deserve and of which they have been deprived unjustly by an hostile Israel. Isn’t that the “thinking” behind the Obama-Kerry peace process? — DM)

Religions have a long history of not getting along with one another, but there is only one religion that has never gotten along with any other religion, is engaging in a religious war with every religion that exists, with atheists who have no religion, and even with its own co-religionists.

Few divides are as impossible to bridge as those of religion. You either believe or you don’t.

When it comes to Islam, non-Muslims are expected to take its goodwill on faith. If you believe your eyes and ears, Islam and violence go together like peanut butter and jelly. But if you believe Muslims and their spin doctors with academic degrees, Muslims are the victims of other religions.

If Muslims fighting Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are the victims of non-Muslims, what are we to make of Muslims fighting other Muslims in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq? Religious civil wars make it hard to believe that Muslims are the victims of other religions instead of the authors of their own violence.

Religions have a long history of not getting along with one another, but there is only one religion that has never gotten along with any other religion, is engaging in a religious war with every religion that exists, with atheists who have no religion, and even with its own co-religionists.

Is all this violence someone else’s fault? Or is it Islam’s fault?

Muslim hostility to Christians and Jews is not a phenomenon that began with the modern State of Israel or American foreign policy.

Muslims have warred with Christians and Jews as minorities and persecuted them as majorities. Academic apologists claim that Muslim hostility toward Christians derived from an ongoing conflict, but at no time during the history of Islam until the twentieth century did the Jews have a functioning state.

Israel has conveniently become the focus and explanation for Muslim hostility toward Jews, but that fails to explain over a thousand years of Muslim hatred and persecution … long before Herzl or the IDF.

Why did Muslims persecute and kill Jews long before Zionism was even a word? For the same reason that they killed Christians.

Islam hated Judaism and Christianity from the start. The Koran urges Muslims not to befriend Jews or Christians (Koran 5:51) speaks of “enmity and hatred” with Christians (Koran 5:15) and the Jews (Koran 5:65) who are also to be cursed. The Jews are accused of “creating disorder” (Koran 5:65) and Christians are accused of worshiping their priests (Koran 9:31). The Jews and Christians believe in evil things (Koran 4:52) and Allah’s curse will be upon them (Koran 9:30).

Muslims don’t hate and kill Jews because of Israel. They hate Israel because it is Jewish.

September 11 was part of an ongoing war against Christians dating back over a thousand years.

The real reason why a Muslim carries out a terrorist attack in New York or Boston is the same reason why a church gets burned in Egypt or bombed in Syria. It’s the same reason why teenage British girls get raped and why the Christian population of the Middle East has shrunk from a quarter to a tenth.

Everything else is just Muslim war propaganda that only fools and appeasers take at face value.

The Koran’s scriptural hatred encouraged Muslim warlords to spread Islam through the mass murder, enslavement and rape of Jews and Christians. The legacy of hatred began with the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians from what is today Saudi Arabia and the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians and Jews continues into the modern era.

It is this old hatred that is behind the terrorism against Israeli Jews and Egyptian Christians. It is not a new hatred, but an old one.

The religious basis for everything from Hamas’ war against Israel to Al Qaeda’s war on America derives from these and other verses in the Koran, from teachings in the Hadiths and later rulings of Islamic law.

Terrorism against Christians and Jews cannot be detached from Islam because it is Islam.

When Muslims chant the old genocidal battle cry, “Khybar khaybar ya yahoos,” at Oxford or Toulouse University or when University of California Professor Hatem Bazian recites the Hadith that states, “The Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews”; the fiction that this is a new conflict dating back to 1948 unravels.

If Islam’s conflict were only with Christians and Jews, it might be dismissed as an old rivalry. But Islam, at least scripturally, hates Jews and Christians less than it hates every other religion out there.

While Jews and Christians have the provisional status of People of the Book, second class citizens, the rest of the world is treated as idolaters and polytheists and faces an even more unrelenting genocide.

If the Koran is nasty toward Christians and Jews, it’s even worse when it comes to everyone else. “Kill the idolaters wherever you find them” (Koran 9:5), “Kill them wherever you meet them” (Koran 2:192) and “When you meet in regular battle those who disbelieve, smite their necks” (Koran 47:5).

These are not mere words. The Muslim conquests of India led to the mass murder of as many as 80 million Hindus. The Hindu Kush mountain range commemorates a small part of the genocide that took place. Likewise the Buddhists were massacred in large numbers.

Islam does not win many religious debates. It achieves its victory through the Koranic command, “Fight those who believe not in Allah” (Koran 9:29).

This isn’t ancient history; it’s why Muslims continue to kill Hindus and Buddhists today.

Apologists will claim that it’s the Hindus and Buddhists, like the Christians and Jews, who are persecuting Muslims. But it’s hard to argue that Hindu and Buddhist minorities in Pakistan are persecuting Muslims.

Not even the most shameless apologist for Islam would attempt to claim thatZoroastrians are being persecuted in Iran… because that tiny oppressed minority is persecuting the Islamic majority. The persecution of the Bahai in Iran or the Kalash in Pakistan show that Muslim religious intolerance exists even entirely divorced from foreign affairs or past history.

Islam is not intolerant as a response to intolerance. It is inherently intolerant.

Ten of the fifteen most religiously intolerant countries in the world are Muslim. There is no way to square that with the claim that Muslims are the victims of religious intolerance, rather than its perpetrators.

Muslims engage in religious conflicts both as majorities and minorities. They engage in religious conflicts with both minorities and majorities. They persecute other religions regardless of whether they are old or new, even if there is no existing history of conflict. They are motivated by a relentless xenophobia.

It doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as your belief differs from theirs. You can believe in nothing at all. You can even believe in another version of Islam.

When Muslims run out of non-Muslims to persecute, they attack other Muslims. In Libya and Tunisia, Salafists have targeted Sufis. Syria and Iraq are being torn apart by conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites.

In Australia, a Sheikh prays, “Oh Allah, count the Buddhists and the Hindus one by one. Oh Allah, count them and kill them to the very last one.” On Al Jazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Spiritual Guide,Yusuf  al-Qaradawi prayed for the Jews, “O Allah, do not spare a single one of them. O Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” A Gaza sermon demands, “Strike the Jews… the Christians…  Allah count them and kill them to the last one.”

This is genocide. It’s also Islam. Not a tiny minority of it either.

Islam did not expand by treating minorities well. It grew through genocide, slavery and war. That is still how it is growing today.

Islamic terrorism is not a protest movement; it is a new wave of religious conquests, spreading fear and death into the lands to be conquered. Into theDar-al-Harb. The House of War. A Muslim bombing is not a cry for help by the oppressed, it is a demand that the bombed submit to their new Muslim oppressors.

Turning a Blind Eye to Palestinian Bloodlust, Front Page Magazine, Joseph Klein, April 22, 2014

(Abbas et al lie and President Obama et al believe them. Might pleasing lies be more consistent with the ideologies of both groups than unpleasant reality? — DM)

President Obama has described Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as “somebody who has consistently renounced violence.”  Just the opposite was on full display once again last week.

There can be no genuine two state solution as long as Palestinian lies and incitement to violence continue.

President Obama has described Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as “somebody who has consistently renounced violence.”  Just the opposite was on full display once again last week.  An Israeli father was killed and his pregnant wife and child were injured in a Palestinian terrorist shooting attack, as the family members were on their way to a Passover Seder on April 14^th.  At first, Abbas was silent, as were President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Then, after reports surfaced that Abbas had belatedly condemned the attack, his office went out of its way to deny the reports, although the Palestinian minister of religious affairs did manage to say that the killing was “painful.” For Obama’s ears no doubt, the minister added the lie that Palestinians “condemn the death of every human being” and believe that “killing and violence is completely unacceptable,” ignoring praise for the shooting by Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh and the incitement to violence by the Palestinian Authority itself.

Israel took a major chance for peace when it released from prison hardened terrorists with blood on their hands. Israel did so in order to jump start direct peace negotiations with the Palestinians under terms worked out by Kerry. What did Abbas do upon their release? He lit a torch to welcome them home and held celebrations to honor them as heroes. For example, on October 30, 2013, Abbas congratulated 21 terrorists from the West Bank after their release from prison and heralded them on official Palestinian Authority TV as “our heroic brothers.” In December 2013, following a Palestinian Authority-sponsored children’s play in which the children acted out the killing of Israelis and a Palestinian “spy,” Palestinian Authority Minister of Culture Anwar Abu Aisha invited real-life terrorists released by Israel onto the stage and awarded them plaques of honor.

Not surprisingly, these murderers have shown no remorse. One of them, for example, said: “Through the great PA TV, I say to the Israelis: There is no Palestinian who did something for the homeland and his nation who will regret it. We don’t regret what we did and we will not regret what we did.”

No wonder, Israel is reluctant to release yet another batch of murderers. They too would be honored as Palestinian heroes. So much for the lie of the Palestinian minister of religious affairs that Palestinians believe that “killing and violence is completely unacceptable.” They are not unacceptable to Palestinians if the targets are Jews, even children. After all, it was PA Mufti Muhammad Hussein who said on Palestinian TV on January 9, 2012 that “Palestine in its entirety is a revolution… continuing today, and until the End of Days. The reliable Hadith… says: ‘The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”

Apparently, the released terrorists have been serving as role models for conducting more terrorist attacks against Jews. Such attacks – including by explosive devices, small arms fire and Molotov cocktails – increased steadily from 76 attacks in July when Israel published the list of the first 30 prisoners to be released ( they were released in August) to 160 attacks in November 2013. A bomb exploded on a bus near Tel Aviv in December 2013, which fortunately had been spotted on time, avoiding mass casualties. The pre-Passover shooting is part of the pattern, possibly even a prelude to a Third Intifada.

Palestinian Authority controlled television, radio stations and newspapers as well as Internet outlets serve to incite such violence by virtue of their steady stream of hate speech directed at Israel and Jews.

President Obama falsely described Abbas as someone not only committed to renouncing violence but one who “has consistently sought a diplomatic and peaceful solution that allows for two states, side by side, in peace and security; a state that allows for the dignity and sovereignty of the Palestinian people and a state that allows for Israelis to feel secure and at peace with their neighbors.”  This is also a lie.

Abbas refuses to give up the notion that millions of descendants of the original Palestinian refugees have a “right of return” to pre-1967 Israel, while he demands – with Obama’s support – that Israel must itself surrender virtually all land it obtained after defending itself in the 1967 Six Day War. Symbolizing his Palestinian Authority’s true agenda as uttered out of the mouths of babes, an official PA TV children’s show broadcast last December children singing “Oh flying bird,” including these lyrics: “By Allah, oh traveling [bird], I burn with envy. My country Palestine is beautiful. Turn to Safed, and then to Tiberias, and send regards to the sea of Acre and Haifa.”

Abbas gave more flight to the “flying bird” when he declared to Palestinians this January: “You want to return? You will return… I just wanted to remark on this point, that the right of return is a personal right. Even a father cannot forgo his children’s right.”

Of course, there is no “personal right” of descendants several generations removed from the original refugees – many of whom left their homes in Israel voluntarily – to move into pre-1967 Israel unless Israel consents on a case by case basis. According to the original definition by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Palestinian refugees were “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Under pressure from Arab states and their allies, and as a result of the UN bureaucracy’s own desire to turn a temporary relief agency into a permanent institution, the definition of “refugee” was perversely converted into an inheritance handed down from generation to generation until the Palestinians reach their real goal – the extinguishment of the Jewish state.

There can be no genuine two state solution as long as Palestinian lies and incitement to violence continue. Perhaps Caroline Glick’s One-State Israeli Solution is the only workable solution after all.

The Kerry charade | Jerusalem Post – Blogs.

Ira Sharkansky

Let’s call it what it is.

The US has used its muscle to get Israelis and Palestinians to discussions that neither of them wanted.

Both sides speak and deal with one another all the time. It’s part of living side by side, with pockets of one inside the other, and no clear boundaries. Arabs with Israeli citizenship ponder their identities and loyalties. Some Israeli Jews with more than one passport question the validity of Arab/Palestinian divided loyalties, without considering their own situation.

What defies solution is a general agreement, covering boundaries, refugees, Jerusalem, Israel’s legitimacy and an end to Palestinian claims.

Geopolitically, the West Bank is a mess, created largely under the direction of earlier Labor governments then Ariel Sharon during his time as Housing Minister, and meant to get in the way of any Palestinian state that would threaten Israel.

This was before Sharon’s epiphany with respect to withdrawing Jews from Gaza.

Palestinian response to the Gazan withdrawal makes a West Bank parallel unlikely.

Gaza was simpler, with relatively few Jews, a high level of human costs to settlers and soldiers meant to protect them, and clear boundaries around Gaza, most of which Israel controls.

Now Kerry wants to solve a macro problem that has been proven to be insoluble.

Are his motives any more complex than a Nobel Prize? Or a need to echo his boss’s desire for success where there might be enough American clout to pressure both sides?

The problematic elements should have been clear to all who would look.

The Palestinian leadership cannot give up the right of refugees’ return, which Arabs have preached for decades. Family members preserve the keys to homes that no longer exist. Some may be fabricated only as symbols, and passed on to generations whose parents had yet to be born in 1948.

The Palestinian leadership might not be able to admit the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, in the context of Muslim religious leaders demanding its destruction, with Iran keeping up the drum beat, and when intra-Muslim bloodshed is at one of its historic heights. Jihadists in Gaza and the West Bank are always ready to accuse a Palestinian of heresy who would concede anything to the Jews.

In recent days a Minister in the West Bank branch of the Palestine National Authority claimed that a religious principle stood in the way of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. The details of his argument are muddled, and not as important as his citation of religion somewhere in his explanation.

Israelis are not only reluctant to let in thousands, much less millions of Palestinians. There are also Israelis who cannot accept the rights of Palestinians to any of the land ceded by the Almighty to the Jews.

Israelis may justly pride themselves in being by less bloody and more rational than their Palestinian adversaries, but the settlers and their government allies have so complicated the map of the West Bank as to challenge anyone in John Kerry’s chorus.

Involved in the problems is a cultural divide that gets in the way of two sets of performers actually communicating with one another.

Trust is non-existent from either direction.

One of my Jewish friends announced the formation of a French Hill-Isaweea joint committee to deal with mutual problems, but a description of one meeting did not name any Isaweea partners. The report featured French Hill complaints of fire bombs and other violence coming from Isaweea.

Another Jewish friend is considering a literary project that will involve an exchange of letters with a Palestinian friend, but he has yet to find a friend willing to write.

I once asked a Muslim if there was anything in their holidays the equivalent of the Jewish Purim or the Christian Carnival. His answer– “We don’t need to dress up. We’re always wearing masks.”
It is common to accuse both national leaders of wearing masks. Benyamin Netanyahu says time and again that he is working toward a two-state solution, but critics see him raising the bar too high for the Palestinians. One can quarrel about the importance of their recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or the state of the Jewish people. However, it seems a fair test of their capacity to live alongside Israel in peace. Their claim that such a recognition would limit the rights of non-Jews living in Israel flies in the face of the reality that Israeli Arabs have more political rights than the residents of any Muslim country.

Mahmoud Abbas is fond of sounding forthcoming to audiences of left wing Israeli politicians or students selected for an invitation to Ramallah. Speaking to Arab audiences, however, Abbas notes the impossibility of conceding what he conceded in front of Israelis.
One of his latest demands is a capital in all of Jerusalem over the 1967 border, which he justifies by his concern for al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
His patronage of a Christian holy site provokes wonder or guffaws, against the record of Muslim harassment of Christians that has produced sharp declines in the Christian populations of what had been the largely Christian cities of Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nazareth.
Can the world’s greatest power, with most of the greatest universities, be so naive as to miss the cultural differences between the Middle West and the Middle East?

Obama’s Cairo speech suggests that the culture of this region is beyond the ken of the man who prides himself on having Muslim relatives and having part of his schooling in Indonesia.

Kerry’s investment of personal time, effort, and rhetoric suggests that he doesn’t comprehend the difference between East Jerusalem and East Boston. There Italians, Irish, and Jews learned to live alongside one another, not without a history of harassment and low level bloodshed. However, more than a century of assimilation has done its work, and made things easier for the influx of African Americans and Hispanics. Boston’s ethnic mix is less than ideal, however, as shown by last year’s disturbance of the Boston Marathon by migrants from the Middle East.

Both Netanyahu and Abbas want to keep the talks going, without aspiring to an agreement, and intent on avoiding too high a price for the other’s agreement to talk.
It’ll take a while till we can see how this works.
Israel’s week of Passover, and the following day of a Moroccan Jewish festival that has become another national holiday may give the participants time to clear their heads.
Predictions are not positive.
The European Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton has condemned the addition of some 250 acres to Gush Etzion, which is a site of old Jewish settlements overrun by the Jordanians in 1948, and re-established after 1967, and the transfer of one building to Jews in Hebron, after a long judicial process that reached Israel’s Supreme Court..
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has condemned Ashton for paying more attention to small Israeli property actions than to more than 160,000 deaths so far in Syria.

American is big enough, rich enough, and isolated enough to worry more about local matters than any implications of what it’s government doesn’t get right overseas. The White House and Departments of State and Defense can blunder here, in the Ukraine, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a few other places, while the folks at home worry more about the price of gas, the murder down the block, the success of high school or college sports stars, or how they’ll pay for medications.
The best thing that Americans can do for Israel, the Palestinians, and their own reputation is to allow the Kerry process to wind down without a declaration that it is over. It could be replaced by committees of Israeli and Palestinian technocrats that will ponder issues below the high profile matters of refugees, borders, Jerusalem, and an end to the historic dispute.
If all this proceeds without a Palestinian intifada and Israel’s repression, then John Kerry and Barack Obama might boast that they had not made things worse.

Iran admits nuclear agency reshuffle to pave way for talks – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Rouhani administration moves to remove hardliners opposing negotiations with the West; Iranian official accuses hardliners of politicizing nuclear issue.

Reuters

President Hassan Rouhani’s government confirmed rumors on Monday it had reshuffled the leadership of Iran’s atomic agency to sideline nuclear experts opposed to talks on its atomic program with the West.

Rouhani and his negotiators have been under intense pressure from Islamic hardliners opposed to the talks with the United States and five other powers seeking greater transparency in the program in return for an end to sanctions against Iran.

As the talks move toward a possible deal by late July, the hardliners, many of them hold-outs from the administration of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have stepped up their campaign, accusing Rouhani of capitulating to the West on a question of national pride and revolutionary identity.

Among rumors circulating for weeks was the alleged expulsion of several nuclear scientists from Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization in connection with the 5+1 talks.

After long evading the sensitive issue, a spokesman for the agency finally offered an answer on Monday.

“Only a limited number of people were concerned and they were neither scientists nor were they fired,” said Behruz Kamalvandi, a liaison between the nuclear agency and national parliament. His comments, made to radical Islamic students in a Tehran University, was carried by the official news agency IRNA.

“If a boss doesn’t have the authority to shuffle around a few among his 15,000-strong personnel, he shouldn’t be called a boss,” he added, accusing hardliners of exploiting the nuclear issue for “political gains and to win seats in parliament.”

“Why do you politicize the issue? Let’s stop nagging and avoid destroying each other so we can reach our goals on the international arena,” said Kamalvandi, charging that “some people are taking the lead from the supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the nuclear issue.

Comprehensive account

Khamenei, who wields unmatched power in Iran’s Islamic system, has cautiously endorsed the talks, but insisted Tehran keeps rights to uranium enrichment for scientific research.

Earlier on Monday, Kamalvandi said Iran was drafting a comprehensive account of its nuclear activities, but did not clarify if it would be published or deal with the talks underway to resolve the decade-old nuclear dispute.

The project, however, could meet Western demands for greater openness in Iran’s atomic operations to allay concerns about its possible military nature.

“There are various files on our atomic program, but we’re lacking a comprehensive document, which we are writing now,” he said. “This is time-consuming, as we need to coordinate with other government bodies, but we hope to have it finished in eight months.”

This timeframe would take the report past the July 20 deadline for the conclusion of the talks between Iran and six world powers – the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia.

Iran says the program is solely for civilian purposes such as electricity generation. However, Western powers note that some elements of the program have been concealed in contravention of international agreements.

These include the Fordow plant, built inside a mountain, whose existence was only disclosed in 2009 after Western spy services detected it.

After four rounds of talks, Iran and the major powers are due to meet again at expert level in New York on May 5-9 to start writing the final draft of a nuclear deal.