WarSclerotic

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.

Obama Knows Best, Front Page Magazine, Ronn Torossian, April 21, 2014

(The smartest man in any room, President Obama has become a legend in his own mind. All must obey him and be pleased with his insults for their own good. — DM)

Knowing about what is best for others is consistent with Obama’s ideology of big government without limits – and telling others what to do.

In February, before Russia moved into Crimea, Present Barack Obama claimed, “any violation of Ukrainian territory is destabilizing, and that’s not in Russia’s interest.” This week, now that Crimea is firmly in Russia’s hands, Obama stated, “Mr. Putin’s decisions aren’t just bad for Ukraine. Over the long term, they’re going to be bad for Russia.” Despite worldwide negative attention, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current approval ratings are above 80 percent according to independent polls by the Levada Center.

On numerous occasions, Obama has said “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.” Putin’s core aggressive nature, as a nationalist who stands up for Russians, resonates with ordinary, regular Russians.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who was dubbed King Bibi by Time Magazine – is the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister for the past 50 years.

Knowing about what is best for others is consistent with Obama’s ideology of big government without limits – and telling others what to do.  It isn’t limited to foreign leaders – In 2011, he said of the automobile industry bailout in Cannon Falls, MN, “If we’re going to help you, then you’ve got to change your ways.” “You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks.  There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market.” As he knows Russia better than Putin and Israel better than Netanyahu, he also knows cars better than car manufacturers.

With Obamacare, many Americans no longer have the right to choose their own healthcare. Many have had their policies cancelled, and are required to buy all sorts of medical coverage.  Businesses are also not free to choose as they wish.  Across the board, health care costs continue to radically rise. The Obama State has decided what kind of health insurance Americans need.

In 2013 it was unveiled that the Obama Administration had unleashed a “Behavioral Insights Team” which seeks to influence the behavior of Americans. The White House is known to be working with agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture. He knows how Americans should behave.

In The Washington Post, we learn that Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief is “not briefed to him.” Unlike any other President, he does not meet daily with senior intelligence officials. The subtext is of course that as Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said, Obama is “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.” Obama knows intelligence – his years as a community organizer must have helped. (Vietor started as a driver of a van for Obama when he was a Senator and is a long-time Obama loyalist.)

In a September 2008 New York Times profile, Obama said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.  I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Barack Obama — in his own mind – knows it all.

The Obama Administration, which spies on foreign leaders and oversees the largest intelligence network in the world, is collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.  They have said that they can kill Americans anywhere in the world at will. They spy on reporters and who knows who else. Obama is an inept, totalitarian ego-maniac.  He is a terrible American President — yet, he sees fit to lecture to Americans and the world on how they should behave and what is best for them.  Obama believes he knows everything about everything. Obama knows what is good for your children better than you do.  He knows what is best for your business better than you do. He knows what medicines you need. What foods you should eat.

Simply Obama is king.  He is the ultimate supreme. He’s brilliant at foreign relations, the economy, healthcare, human behavior, intelligence, and everything else – and everyone in the world is beneath him. All hail his master Barack Obama.

Palestinians: “Prisoners Day” Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, April 21, 2014

(But, but, but the peaceful Palestinians probably don’t violate prisoners’ most important human right, to collect postage stamps efficiently. Therefore, it’s all OK and they are great peace partners. — DM)

While the Palestinian Authority is calling on the international community to punish Israel for imprisoning Palestinians, its own security forces continue to hold hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians in prison, some tortured, some without trial.

This year alone, the Palestinian Authority has arrested 357 Palestinians accused of security/political offenses, 42 of whom are university students.

Of course, the arrests continue to be ignored by the mainstream media in the West. This is a story that does not reflect negatively on Israel, so is therefore not considered worthy of being reported to Western audiences.

The Palestinian Authority’s duplicity clearly has no limits.

On April 17, it marked “Prisoners Day” by holding rallies throughout the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

On the same day, a report published by Palestinians revealed that the Palestinian Authority has arrested hundreds of Palestinians since the beginning of this year. The report pointed out that the Palestinian Authority continues to torture detainees.

“Prisoners Day” is an event that has been taking place for nearly two decades and is intended to express solidarity with the thousands of prisoners who are being held by Israel for security-related offences, including some of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But as Palestinians were marking “Prisoners Day,” a report released in the Gaza Strip revealed that since the beginning of 2014, this year alone, the Palestinian Authority has arrested 357 Palestinians accused of security/political offenses.

According to the report, prepared by the Hamas-run Ministry of Planning, all 357 detainees belonged to various Palestinian groups in the West Bank, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The report said that 42 of the detainees are university students. During the same period, Palestinian Authority security forces also raided and searched the homes of 60 Palestinians in the West Bank suspected of security/political offenses, the report added.

In March alone, Palestinian Authority security forces raided and searched 42 private and public institutions, businesses, hospitals and charitable organizations in the West Bank, the report continued. It also pointed out that the Palestinian Authority security forces were continuing to torture detainees.

Not surprisingly, the findings of the report were completely ignored by Palestinian Authority officials in their speeches and statements marking “Prisoners Day.”

Of course, the arrests by the Palestinian Authority also continue to be ignored by the mainstream media in the West. This is a story that does not reflect negatively on Israel, so is therefore not considered worthy of being reported to Western audiences.

Instead, Palestinian representatives chose this occasion to heap praise on the Palestinian “heroes” and “fighters” in Israeli prisons, who have made “gigantic sacrifices for their people and cause.”

The PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi called for dispatching international commissions of inquiry to Israeli prisons to look into Israeli “violations” against the Palestinian inmates. She also went as far as accusing Israel of “war crimes” because of its “mistreatment” of the prisoners.

Most of the Palestinian officials told the crowds at the West Bank rallies that the prisoners are the true heroes of the Palestinians and that there would never be peace with Israel as long as one Palestinian remained in Israeli prison.

As the Palestinian Minister for Prisoners Affairs, Issa Qaraqi, put it, “There will be no agreement or peace or an extension of the [peace] talks until the gates of the prisons are opened and our prisoners are set free.”

So while the Palestinian Authority is calling on the international community to punish Israel for imprisoning Palestinians, its own security forces continue to hold hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians in prison, some tortured, some without trial. Yet, the Palestinian Authority does not see its actions as a violation of human rights and international law.

It is all right for Palestinians to detain and torture a fellow Palestinian. But apparently it is not all right for Israel to arrest and imprison anyone who harms its security or murders its citizens.

Further evidence of the Palestinian Authority’s double-talk on the issue of prisoners and terrorism was provided one day before Palestinians marked “Prisoners Day.”

At a meeting with Israeli MKs [Members of Knesset, Israel’s parliament] in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudaineh, announced that the Palestinian Authority was “completely opposed to violence by any party.”

The Israeli MKs took Abu Rudaineh’s remark as a straight and clear “condemnation” of a shooting attack that killed an Israeli police officer near Hebron in the West Bank two days earlier. Needless to say, the Palestinian spokesman had made no specific reference to the shooting attack.

Israeli police officer Baruch Mizrahi (upper right) was shot and killed by a Palestinian terrorist near Hebron on April 14, as he drove to a family celebration with his wife and four of their children. His wife Hadas Mizrahi was shot and wounded.

Still, for the Israeli MKs, this was sufficient evidence that the Palestinian Authority is opposed to terror attacks on Israelis and is therefore a reliable “peace partner.”

The following day, however, the rallies and speeches marking “Prisoners Day” provided further evidence that the Palestinian Authority continues to glorify Palestinians who launch terrorist attacks against Israel.

The Palestinian Authority even went as far as condemning those who label the prisoners as terrorists. In the words of Qaraqi, the Minister for Prisoners Affairs, “We condemn attempts to distort the image of our prisoners by describing them as terrorists.”

The Palestinian Authority told the visiting Israeli MKs that it is opposed to violence “by any party.” Hours later, the Palestinian Authority told the Palestinian public that those who carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis are “heroes” and “revolutionary pioneers.”

The Palestinian Authority complains that there are more than 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons. But the same Palestinian Authority is trying to hide the fact that it is holding and torturing many Palestinians in its prisons.

New Syrian-Iranian chlorine bombs make mockery of US-Russian chemical accord and UN monitors.

Liquid chlorine gas: Assad’s new chemical weapon

The household cleaning agent chlorine, in heavy concentration is purchased by Iran and and fitted with  detonators, to provide President Bashar Assad with a vehicle for cheating on his undertaking to surrender Syria’s chemical arsenal under the year-old US-Russian chemical disarmament accord. And Assad is indeed getting away with using chlorine bombs, with crippling effect, especially on children, every few days.

Nonetheless, Sigrid Kaag of the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said Saturday, April 19, that Syria had destroyed approximately 80 percent of its arsenal as agreed under the Kerry-Lavrov accord. At this rate, she said, Syria will have got rid of 100 percent of its chemical arsenal by the April 27 deadline.
The French President Francois Hollande admitted April 20, however, that the Syrian leader had continued to use chemical weapons on the front line, but he denied that definite proof had not been established.
On April 7, Israel Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon offered chapter and verse to prove that the Syrian army had perpetrated a chemical attack on civilians in he town of Harasta on March 27, causing scores of serious injuries and lasting damage to children.
Yet although Assad continues to fight civilians with chemical weapons up to the present, neither the Obama administration, nor the Russian Kremlin or the United Nations find his actions reprehensible enough to warrant rebuke or even concern.
Indeed, the UN OPCW expressed satisfaction with the Assad regime’s compliance with the Kerry-Lavrov pact at a time that thousands of Syrians, men, women and children, were being subjected to chemical attack – many crippled for life for lack of medical attention and medication.
On April 11, Syrian planes dropped the new weapon, made of Chinese-manufactured chlorine gas canisters rigged with explosive detonators, on Kafr Zita near Hama. Since then, British and French intelligence sources have reported at least four such attacks against the northern towns of Idlib and Homs and the Harasta and Jobar districts outside Damascus.
Assad is dropping these gas bombs at the rate of one every three days.

debkafile’s intelligence and military sources report that he is amply supplied by Iran, which is buying industrial quantities of chlorine made in Shanghai over the Internet, where the product is advertised by a company in the East Chinese town of Hangzhou. It costs $1,000 per ton. The Chinese firm is willing to meet minimum orders for 50 canisters and up to a maximum of 30,000. Most of its clients are owners of swimming pools and manufactures of common household cleaning agents based on chlorine.

Our sources report that Tehran has so far ordered 10,000 canisters. They are delivered by Iranian military transports to Damascus military airfield, where Iranian technicians repackage the chlorine in containers suitable for dropping by aircraft. They are rigged with detonators for explosions to release the chlorine gas on targets.
The use of chlorine as a weapon of war was banned by the 1925 Chemical Weapons Convention, which was promulgated after its use in World War I by the Germany army to gas hundreds of thousands of allied troops at Ypres.

Assad’s grotesque use of a household cleaning agent to poison Syrian civilians, while earning UN commendation for putatively eliminating his chemical arsenal, sends four hard messages for Israel:

1. Western, Russian and Middle East leaders have known all along that the list of chemical substances which the Kerry-Lavrov accord listed for removal covered at best 70-75 percent of Assad’s chemical arsenal.  But to prove the accord was working, they have held silent on his violations.
2.  The Obama administration has a broader motive for overlooking the Chinese-Iranian pipeline bringing chlorine bombs to helpless Syrians: If Washington makes a fuss, China and Iran may retaliate with obstacles in the way of progress on May 5, when the six world powers meet with Iran to start drafting a comprehensive nuclear accord.

As we have reported more than once in recent months, the US president will not let anything stand in the way of this accord.
3.  From the Israeli perspective, the accords and pacts produced by international diplomacy have proved worth less than the paper they were written on. Iran and Syria are cheating with complete impunity. Israel has no doubt that Iran will also find away round even the most stringent nuclear accord it concludes with the world powers and willy-nilly reach its objective of a nuclear bomb.

Air force hits Gaza after rockets barrage south | The Times of Israel.

Israeli aircraft strike Hamas targets in Gaza Strip after 10 rockets explode in southern Israel; IDF patrol comes under fire

By Ilan Ben Zion April 21, 2014, 8:43 am

7 Gaza rockets land in Israel; light damage caused | JPost | Israel News.

By JPOST.COM STAFF

LAST UPDATED: 04/21/2014 12:27

Light damage caused to neighborhood in southern city from rockets; IDF reports RPG launched toward border forces, warning shots fired in return.

Terrorists in Gaza fired 5 rockets into Israel on Monday morning, the IDF Spokesperson’s office said.

The first 3 projectiles struck uninhabited areas in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council and set off sirens and caused no damage.

Another two rockets were launched and caused light damage in Sderot.

In addition, the IDF reported that early Monday morning an RPG was launched toward IDF forces on the border but caused no injuries.

IDF later shot warning shots into Gaza. The shots caused no reported injuries inside Gaza.

Last week, Israel Air Force jets struck five terror targets in the Gaza Strip, following rocket attacks on southern Israel the previous night. The IAF hit sites in northern and central Gaza, including two Hamas posts, Palestinian media reported.

Also last week, a rocket siren went off in the Sha’ar Hanegev region, but an army spokeswoman later said no projectiles were detected in Israeli territory.

Last month, the air force stuck 29 targets across the Gaza Strip in response to Islamic Jihad rocket attack on the South. More than 30 rockets – fired in simultaneous barrages from northern and southern Gaza – exploded in Israeli territory. The Iron Dome anti-rocket battery stationed in Sderot shot down three projectiles over the town. The bombardment of the western Negev in March marked the largest flare-up of Gazan terrorism since 2012.

Yaakov Lappin contributed to this report.

Rockets fired from Gaza explode in southern Israel | The Times of Israel.

Sirens wail in Sderot, Sha’ar Hanegev region; five rockets explode in open areas, no injuries or damage reported

By Times of Israel staff April 21, 2014, 8:43 am