The ruling party in the Palestinian Authority celebrated its 52nd anniversary with Facebook posts glorifying bloodthirsty terrorists.
Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, celebrated its 52nd anniversary on Saturday. They used the occasion to heap praise on some of the most vicious Islamist terrorists in Israeli history, despite being ostensibly a secular organization.
Fatah praised Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood branch and jihadist terrorist organization Hamas, featuring his picture among those on a banner of terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians. Praise was also heaped on the founder of Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shaqaqi, along with several other secular terrorists.
“Fatah embraces its people and praises the Martyrs,” the organization posted on Facebook, as translated by Palestinian Media Watch.
“To be a real Palestinian, you must be a self-sacrificing fighter (Fida’i), know much and reveal little, search for the security in the heart of the danger, get used to having no time to cry over endings but rather to always have new beginnings.
Long life to you and long live the anniversary of the Launch [of Fatah] (Intilaqa), and may it be a good year.
A people whose leaders are Martyrs will undoubtedly triumph with Allah’s help…”
The inclusion of Sheikh Yassin, who was killed in by an Israeli missile in 2004, comes as Fatah is attempting to reconcile with its longstanding foe Hamas, which currently controls the Gaza strip.
Russia has reportedly volunteered to broker a reconciliation between the divided factions.
“The Russians will host a meeting of Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian officials in Moscow in the middle of January to discuss reconciliation,” PLO Executive Committee member Wasel Abu Yousef told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
Archbishop Hilarion Capucci earned everlasting infamy for running guns to the Palestinian jihadis who would have oppressed and subjugated his own people if they had had half a chance, and the Vatican in turn earned even more infamy by sheltering him all these years.
But Capucci’s jihad-enabling actions were no surprise: he comes from an ecclesiastical tradition that is deeply, insidiously, and inveterately anti-Semitic. Recently I encountered a bishop of that tradition who is openly and viciously anti-Semitic, dismissing Pamela Geller’s work on the sole grounds that she is a Jew. Capucci’s superior, Gregory III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and All the East, has proudly declared: “We, the Arab Christians, always defend Islam and our Muslim brothers – no one defends Islam like the Arab Christians do.”
Gregory III has also blamed “Zionists” for jihad attacks on Middle Eastern Christians. He is the Patriarch who walked out of a Ted Cruz speech in a rage over Cruz saying he stood with Israel. He, like so many of his peers, appears to have thoroughly imbibed the “Palestinian” jihadis’ hatred of and contempt for Israel, despite the fact that it is a more hospitable place for his own people than the Muslim countries he weeps over and offers a better life for Christians than the Islam he so ardently defends. They think that the jihadis will go easy on them if they echo their political line, loving what they love and hate what they hate. They will be in for a rude awakening when the jihadis to whom they have been so solicitous and accommodating turn on them.
Patriarch Gregory III and the now-dead Archbishop Hilarion Capucci are not alone in selling out their people and aligning with jihad murderers. Much of the Melkite clergy, and Catholic clergy in general, in the U.S. as well as in the Middle East, cower before jihad killers and pretends their cowardice is “respect.” The contemporary Catholic hierarchy in general is making nice with the jihad force, and thereby enabling its advance. And it will reap what it is sowing.
“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)
“Hilarion Capucci: Arms-smuggling archbishop dies aged 94,” BBC, January 2, 2017:
A former Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem who was convicted of smuggling arms for Palestinian militants has died aged 94.
Monsignor Hilarion Capucci served two years of a 12-year sentence in Israel before the Vatican helped secure his release.
He had a history of activism linked to Middle East conflicts.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered his condolences and described him as a great “freedom fighter”.
The Vatican confirmed his death on Monday, but did not say exactly when he died or give any more details.
Capucci was born in Syria’s second city, Aleppo, in 1922.
He was ordained a priest of the Basilian Alepian Order of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in 1947 and was appointed Patriarchal Vicar of Jerusalem and Archbishop of Caesarea in 1965.
In 1974, he was travelling from Beirut to Jerusalem in a car bearing Vatican diplomatic plates when it was stopped by Israeli security forces.
Inside were four Kalashnikov rifles, two pistols, ammunition and grenades intended for members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Capucci insisted he had been forced to transport the weapons, but an Israeli court convicted him of smuggling and sentenced him to 12 years in prison.
He was freed in 1977 following a personal appeal by Pope Paul VI….
In 2010, he was on board the Mavi Marmara when the Turkish-owned ship was intercepted by Israeli commandos as it took part in an aid flotilla attempting to breach the blockade of the Gaza Strip….
“For years the European Union was involved in illegal construction in Judea and Samaria. Now it turns out that EU officials, together with the Palestinians, are even documenting Israeli settlements and sensitive locations in Judea and Samaria. The Foreign Ministry must respond strongly and unequivocally against this activity, which crosses a red line and is very dangerous.”
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A drone with a video camera which crashed in a forest on Mount Hevron revealed a European Union (EU) operation to spy on and gather intelligence on Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
The footage from the drone was retrieved after it crashed in view of residents of the town of Ma’on in Judea, Channel 2 reported. The footage shows the drone flying low over residents before crashing next to a car. The drone was then retrieved by the residents.
The residents took the drone to the Regavim Movement for Preservation of State Lands.examined the drone and were shocked to discover that it was sent by the EU, acting in conjunction with residents of Arab towns and villages to spy on Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria, some of which contain IDF bases and antennas. The drone contained many such videos, the final one being of its crash.
The Regavim organization blamed the government’s failure to act against illegal construction of Arab housing by the EU for this brazen act of espionage against Jewish communities and IDF locations.
“What started as illegal construction continues and now is harmful to [our] security.” said Oved Arad, the head of the land division of Regavim. “For years the European Union involved in illegal construction in Judea and Samaria. Now it turns out that EU officials, together with the Palestinians, are even documenting Israeli settlements and sensitive locations in Judea and Samaria. The Foreign Ministry must respond strongly and unequivocally against this activity, which crosses a red line and is very dangerous.”
With a rash of news stories popping up contradicting the Obama Administration’s denial that the recent UN vote against Israeli settlements was, in fact, organized and led by Administration officials, President Obama charged the Russians with “once again exposing communications that were intended to remain private.”
One of these “private communications” entailed Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with senior Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat to coordinate strategy for advancing the UN censure of Israel. Another was Vice President Joe Biden’s phone call pressuring Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to vote for the censure.
“The revelation of official matters intended to remain confidential is precisely the same MO of the Russian hackers who tipped the recent US presidential election toward Moscow’s puppet—Donald Trump,” Obama contended. “This further provocation is an act so hostile that it qualifies as an act of war. Clearly, the retaliatory measures we have implemented thus far have been insufficient to deter our country’s greatest enemy.”
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the International Committee of the Russian Upper House of Parliament, called Obama’s actions “the agony of not only a lame duck, but of a political corpse.”
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to retaliate in response to the Obama Administration’s expulsion of Russian diplomats was labeled “yet another diabolical and sinister effort to mislead the American public,” Presidential Press Secretary Josh Earnest charged. “Imitating a reasonable demeanor in order to make President Obama appear hysterical and unhinged is meant to drive a wedge between him the people who have loved and admired him during his term in office. It won’t work. Americans will rally behind their President just as Americans rallied behind FDR after Pearl Harbor.”
Earnest’s prediction seemed to be born out when Republican Sens. John McCain (Az) and Lindsey Graham (SC), demanded an even stronger retaliatory response toward Russia. “I didn’t spend seven years in a Communist POW camp in Vietnam only to sit idly and let the Soviet Union mock our President,” McCain blustered. Graham called for “an internationally enforced ‘no fly zone’ that would shoot down any Russian military aircraft operating outside the borders of their country.”
President-Elect Donald Trump’s attempt to assert a plea for everyone “to remain calm until adults are in charge after the inauguration,” was labeled “another example of his lack of fitness,” by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). “At a time when patriots ought to be backing our President, Trump is showing he has more in common with our enemy.”
In related news, Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and two-time contributor to Obama’s successful election campaigns, denounced the Administration’s anti-Israel stance as “an appalling betrayal by a man I was twice duped into trusting.”
I suppose Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” will have to be re-spooled. So will a hundred more Bible-themed films.
With a simple abstention on the part of Samantha Power at the UN, the history of the world has been rewritten.
Jewish and Christian cultures have been cleansed out of existence…and will remain so until Donald Trump fixes this and brings the United States back to its senses.
Apparently the Bible got it all wrong and so did Hollywood, according to Barack Obama, John Kerry and Security Council Resolution 2334, which denies Jewish rights to Judea/Samaria and Jerusalem and instead hands all of it over to the Palestinian Arabs (who were invented in 1964, by the way).
So as of Friday, December 23, when that maneuver was passed by the UN, no Jews fit the picture. Only Arabs may answer the casting call as stars and extras.
DeMille made two versions of the Biblical Exodus, the first in 1923 and then again in 1956. Both times, using Jewish and Christian theologians as technical advisers, he used the Hebrew Bible as a blueprint – and both times those were Hebrews emerging from slavery in Egypt onward toward the Promised Land that was first Canaan and finally Judea/Israel.
The heroes were Jews. No Palestinian Arabs in sight.
So what’s to be done when we watch those films again – by which I also mean Otto Preminger’s 1960s “Exodus” and Melville Shavelson’s 1966 “Cast A Giant Shadow” where this time it’s about modern Israel being re-captured and still the heroes are Jews – as principally played by Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas.
Can we still cheer? Can we still be entertained? Can we still learn? How – when everything has been turned upside down?
To moviegoers, is Moses still a hero? Is King David still a hero, as depicted in the 1951 film “David and Bathsheba,” starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward.
Again, no Palestinians in sight, and no demands for a two state solution from either the Bible or Hollywood.
Or are we to root for Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas when that movie comes out?
Arab terrorists — who last month tried to burn Israel to the ground — are the world’s heroes.
That’s where we are today, as Sci-Fi writer Richard Matheson imagined a world taken over by mutants.
There were no Palestinians anywhere near Jerusalem for King Vidor’s 1959 epic “Solomon and Sheba,” starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida. Solomon builds a Jewish Temple, in Jerusalem, to fulfill the oath from his father David and according to the measurements provided by Hebrew Scriptures.
Well, that will have to be revised and rewritten, won’t it, to please Obama, Kerry, Article 2334, and the 14 nations that voted to expunge Jerusalem from Jewish sovereignty going back to the Bible. Hollywood often goes back to the Bible and now Christianity has likewise been expunged.
In movies such as “Ben-Hur and “The Robe” and “King of Kings” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” – still no Palestinians.
All the action takes place in and around Jerusalem, which was ruled by the Romans but populated by the Jews.
But there were no Jews in Jerusalem, if you ask John Kerry…or even if you ask the entire United Nations.
Our story as told through Hollywood for Christians and Jews, must now be told from a far different point of view.
Plus the old reliable classics, if they are ever to be shown again, will never be seen with the same eyes.
So buy your popcorn and watch Yasser Arafat deliver the Sermon on the Mount, and behold Mahmoud Abbas divide the Red Sea.
The victors, as we know, write the history. The victors also write the screenplay.
But there are many more pages to go and do not bet on them having the final word.
The first and last Tycoon will not be found at MGM or Paramount Pictures or at the UN. He is keeping score and He has other plans.
(I receive frequent daily Google alerts on Iraq. Most deal with terrorist attacks in and near Baghdad, sometimes resulting in a few deaths and sometimes resulting in many. — DM)
Iraqi tank blown up by ISIS bomber in Mosul battle
This week, another 1,700 US special operations forces and 4,000 members of the Iraqi federal police and counter-terrorism service (CTS) were urgently sent out to reinforce the crumbling front lines. Their deployment was officially characterized as marking the launch of “the second phase of the operation to retake Mosul.”
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The US-backed Iraqi campaign launched in October to liberate Mosul from the clutches of the Islamic State is on its last legs, although the Obama administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi are making every effort to disguise the debacle.
AS DEBKAfile has been reporting for three weeks, the Iraqi army’s Mosul operation has run aground, despite solid US military backing, giving the advantage to Islamic State fighters occupying Iraq’s biggest city since the summer of 2015.
This development has major security ramifications – not only for Iraq, but also for Syria, Jordan, Israel and the West at large.
The jihadists staunched the Iraqi army’s advance by releasing in its path hundreds of suicide killers in waves on foot and in bomb cars. This tactic has inflicted crippling losses on the two elite Iraqi divisions leading the offensive, the Golden Division, which is the backbone of Iraq’s Special Operations forces, and the 9th Armored Division. Devastating losses forced both to pull back from the battlefield.
This week, another 1,700 US special operations forces and 4,000 members of the Iraqi federal police and counter-terrorism service (CTS) were urgently sent out to reinforce the crumbling front lines. Their deployment was officially characterized as marking the launch of “the second phase of the operation to retake Mosul.”
Their real function was to prop up the few positions Iraqi forces have captured so far and save the Mosul offensive from crashing.
Western military observers noted Saturday, Dec. 31, that more and more American troops are to be seen on the embattled city’s front lines. US combatants are therefore fighting face to face with ISIS jihadists, a development the Obama administration is loath to admit, never having released the number of American lives lost in the Mosul offensive.
Our military sources add that the Iraqi counter-terrorism force sent to Mosul was previously posted in Baghdad to secure the capital against Islamist terrorist operations and ISIS attempts to seize the center and Iraqi’s national government centers. Its transfer to Mosul, 356km to the north, exposed central Baghdad to terror.
And, inevitably, on Saturday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up on a main street of the capital, killing 28 people and injuring 40 in their first major attack there in three months since the onset of the Mosul offensive..
This happened the day after the Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook released an unwelcome report that US security agencies “do think [Abu Bakr al] Baghdadi is alive and is still leading” the Islamic group and the battle for Mosul.
ISIS for its part issued a menacing new communiqué that jacked up its threat against neighboring Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his security forces, in the wake of its terrorist-cum-hostage assault earlier this month on the southern town of Karak, in which 10 people were killed and 29 injured.
The communiqué reads:“All Jordanian soldiers, police, mosque preachers, information activists and regime supporters are legitimate targets for the muhahideen’s bullets and knives. All of Jordan is an open battlefield!”
ISIS is informing the world of its coming targets, say DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources, which are:
1. The overthrow of the Hashemite king and his rule, and
2. The seizure of southern Jordan.
If Baghdadi succeeds in this scheme, he will gain control of a large stretch of land adjacent to Israel and Egyptian Sinai to the west and Saudi Arabia to the south, thereby bringing both under threat and placing itself close enough to block the port of Aqaba, Jordan’s only outlet to the sea.
From the desert region of southern Jordan, ISIS will also achieve proximity to the Sinai desert – through Israeli and Egyptian Bedouin – and be able to control the main Middle East arms-smuggling route and the Sinai center of operations of this illicit and enormously profitable trade
Who is the real winner in the passing of U.N. Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli “settlements” in so-called Palestinian land? It is not the Arabs who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, nor the leftist BDS movement, nor the world community which acted in usual blind lock-step in condemning Israel, or even the Obama administration which sacrificed American stature and credibility to express personal pique, though all appear to be gleefully rubbing grubby hands. The real winner is radical Islam, which the aforementioned parties claim to oppose.
For all the talk of preserving a “two-state” solution between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and its attendant equivocating between Arab violence and incitement and the peaceful building of Jewish homes, the real heart 2334 is the first paragraph, which states that the Resolution
Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law…
That “international law” is the creation of U.N. Security Council, which invents such law with the passage of resolutions, regardless of whether standard principles of law-making, such as precedent, judicial or statutory authority are present. If the U.N.S.C. passed a resolution declaring Mars and its “inhabitants” a country, that would be international law. Its resolutions on Israel are almost pure exercises in self-referential circular reasoning. But that does not mean that they are without legal or practical impact, especially when endorsed by the United States, still — if barely — the world’s preeminent power.
With Resolution 2334 the U.N.S.C. and the United States (thanks to President Obama) have endorsed and enshrined in international law the idea that Jerusalem is a historically Arab city, a bit of myth-making that could have come directly from an ISIS spokesman. For while it is a fact that Jerusalem (East and West) is and mostly has been a Jewish city, about which there can be no reasonable historical cavil, it has been the mission of Islam to convince otherwise.
That Islamic mission is part and parcel of the broader Muslim conception which sees Islam as the true and culminating expression of the god of Abraham. By extension Jews and Christians are, at best, deluded inauthentic monotheists, who may pay to be tolerated by Muslims, but nothing more. Denying Jerusalem’s Jewish identity denies its Christian identity as well. Thus, this resolution is as much an attack on Christians and Christianity as it is on “Israeli settlement activity.”
A couple days before the passage of the Resolution 2334, historian Bat Ye’or carefully delineated the U.N.’s continuing attack not only on Israel but on the West and Christianity in criticizing last April’s Jerusalem Declaration of UNESCO which ignores historical Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and declares the entire area Muslim. Unlike U.N.S.C. resolutions, the decisions of UNESCO’s executive council are not considered binding international law, but taken in conjunction with Resolution 2334 that is now the practical effect.
This is yet another example of how Islam, including its most radical adherents, is winning the war of ideas with the Judeo-Christian West, a war that has been going on physically and intellectually since Mohammed’s first “revelation” in the early 7th Century.
From the start, Mohammed was acutely aware that to spread the new faith he had to give it legitimacy in the eyes of pre-Islamic pagan Arabs who were already gravitating toward monotheistic beliefs, some tribes having already adopted Christianity or Judaism. Mohammed supplied this legitimacy in large part by tying Allah’s revelations to existing belief systems, pagan and monotheistic alike. Thus, the Quran famously references Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and several other notable New and Old Testament figures. Per Mohammed these men were all Muslim prophets whose words and deeds were misinterpreted by the Christians and Jews who created the Old and New Testaments.
So obviously, Christians and Jews have long presented a problem for Islam. Mohammed believed that they would be eager converts to Islam, since they were already monotheists and Allah’s “revelations” acknowledged those Christian and Jewish prophets. When this did not happen, Mohammed and his successors variously slaughtered, enforced conversions or reduced the status of the “people of the book” and taxed them.
Jerusalem plays an important role in this process as I explained in detail here. While Jerusalem in not mentioned in the Quran, supposedly, early in Mohammed’s time in Medina — possibly to encourage Jewish conversion to Islam — Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem. Mohammed gave this up after a few months and turned toward Mecca.
Islam’s second caliph, the very capable Umar, captured Jerusalem a few years after Mohammed’s death. He deliberately chose the Temple Mount, where the Jewish temple stood and where Jesus walked, as the site of Islam’s first work of monumental architecture, the Dome of the Rock. He claimed the space for Islam not only physically, but spiritually, asserting that the rocky outcrop within the shrine was the very rock upon which Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed, and Muslim scholars began to claim that the “furthest precinct” referenced in the Quran as part of Mohammed’s “night journey” was Jerusalem.
Of course, this was a lot of hooey and still is. Certainly, medieval and later Christians didn’t buy it, nor Jerusalem’s Jews then or now, but evidently President Obama and the U.N.S.C. does. Because between the UNESCO decision and Resolution 2334 it now appears that “international law” (with the concurrence of the sitting U.S. Government) establishes East Jerusalem with the Temple Mount and its ancient Jewish Quarter as historical Arab territory, although it most assuredly is not.
Unlike the New and Old Testaments, the Quran eschews narrative. It is neither a story nor a history. Muslims believe it is the direct revelation of Allah given to Mohammed as Allah saw fit, which is not man’s role to question. In failing to veto Resolution 2334 in the wake of the UNESCO move, the United States along with the rest of the international community, has now officially bought into the Islamic version of Jerusalem’s history, and with that, effectively the Muslim assertion of divine revelation in support of Islamic activity and the implementation of international law. That is a godsend to Islamic terrorists and they will see it that way too.
Fake news isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, for the mainstream news media, it’s practically a business model. The media’s propagation of fake news vis-à-vis the notion that Barack Obama and his administration are remotely pro-Israel dates back to his initial run for office.
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The most asinine, demonstrable falsehoods of the 2016 presidential election is the idea that anti-Semitism is a prevailing concern in the left’s moral universe. Coming in at a close second is the notion that widespread “fake news” is what bludgeoned Hillary Clinton, leading to her electoral demise.
This earnestness to investigate, report on, and speak out against anti-Semitism from the mainstream media is oddly confined to headlines consisting solely of the words “Donald Trump” – or his occasional cabinet nominees.
Take for instance this gem from the Huffington Post. Actual headline: “How It’s ‘Absolutely’ Possible For Steve Bannon To Be Pro-Israel And Anti-Semitic”. Never mind the fact that the Huffington Post has no evidence.
Self-satire news outlet Salon chimed in with, “Jewish Americans are worried about the rise in anti-Semitism after this election cycle.”
Fake news isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, for the mainstream news media, it’s practically a business model. The media’s propagation of fake news vis-à-vis the notion that Barack Obama and his administration are remotely pro-Israel dates back to his initial run for office.
Obama’s close ties to former Jimmy Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski – who in an interview with Salon, accused Israeli Jews of “buying Congress’s influence” – were effectively ignored. Obama is on record (in 2007) praising Brzezinski as “someone I have learned an immense amount from.”
The Los Angeles Times to this day refuses to release a 2003 tape of Barack Obama praising Rashid Khalidi – whom the LA Times referred to as “a harsh critic of Israel”, and the New York Times dubs, “a passionate defender of Palestinian rights.” In a speech given to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Khalidi justified the Palestinian “resistance”: “[k]illing civilians is a war crime. It’s a violation of international law. They are not soldiers. They’re civilians, they’re unarmed. The ones who are armed, the ones who are soldiers, the ones who are in occupation, that’s different. That’s resistance.”
When Jeremiah Wright – whose church Obama attended for two decades – said in an interview, “them Jews ain’t going to let him [Obama] talk to me,” CNN’s Jake Tapper simply tweeted, “Rev Wright clarifies – meant to say ZIONISTS are keeping him fr talking to POTUS, not ‘Jews.’”
In the summer of 2014, when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, the State Department issued a statement calling “on all sides to exercise restraint.” Nowhere to be found was the mainstream media probing the Obama Administration’s unspeakable gall to treat genocidal zealots and a free society as moral equals.
More recently, Barack Obama and John Kerry unveiled their diplomatic climax, the Iran Deal. When it was revealed that the terror-sponsoring regime of Tehran would receive 150 billion dollars a year in sanctions relief, lifting of arms and missile embargoes (and more) all while the Mullah’s chanted “death to Israel,” the media was again on the job, acting as Obama’s personal PR firm. Abnegating any responsibility to report on the deal’s bleak implications, CNN instead focused their ire on Republican reaction to Obama’s diplomatic debacle with headlines like: “Huckabee Invokes Holocaust when Talking Iran Deal.”
Most recently, New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote a column in response to John Kerry’s late-December speech on his proposed plan for peace between Israelis and Arabs.
Friedman opens by “simplifying” for readers, the current tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the soon-to-be Former-President of the United States.
“Barack Obama and John Kerry admire and want to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the Land of Israel.”
If you’ve read this far, you understand why if there ever was one exemplar of fake news being propagated by the media, this is it.
He continues,
“…He [Benjamin Netanyahu] is unwilling to make any big, hard decision to advance or preserve a two-state solution if that decision in any way risks his leadership of Israel’s right-wing coalition or forces him to confront the Jewish settlers, who relentlessly push Israel deeper and deeper into the West Bank.”
This is the biggest falsehood about the Israeli/Arab conflict perpetuated by the left, ad nauseum. For all their preening over fake news, the left does an admirable job of spreading it themselves. Friedman suggests that Netanyahu’s steadfast persistence to put up condos in Israel’s capital, East Jerusalem, or claim to ownership of the Western Wall – which Barack Obama himself visited, shamefully wearing a yarmulke – is a greater roadblock in the peace process to the waves of rocket fire, stabbings, shootings and terror both incited and carried out by the Palestinian Arabs.
Recall that in 2009, after persistent pressures from the Obama administration, Netanyahu complied, announcing a settlement freeze. After Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas still refused to enter negotiations with Israel, Obama actually scolded Israel! Friedman somehow fails to acknowledge any of this.
Moreover, Friedman makes no mention of the fact that Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas has explicitly stated, “We will never recognize the Jewishness of the state of Israel.”
Earlier this December, Friedman wrote, “The standing ovation he [Benjamin Netanyahu] got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
If any Republican – let alone Donald Trump – had suggested Congress is controlled by the “Israel lobby,” CNN would’ve shoved aside their “Canonizing Obama’s Flawless Legacy of Flawlessness” programming in a heartbeat for the chyron, “Donald Trump: The Jews Run America.”
In fact, CNN’s Brian Stetler did just that amid the election. Taking comments from Donald Trump in which he accused Hillary Clinton of placing the interests of herself and her donors ahead of the country’s (which she does), he reported it as having “echoes of anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Is Stetler’s show named “Reliable Sources” purely out of irony?
There is a reason that liberal news media’s deep concerns for anti-Semitism are scarcer than Rabbis in the Gaza Strip when it comes to covering Barrack Obama and other Democrats. The left doesn’t actually care about anti-Semitism. They care about attacking conservatives. To the left, Jews are a privileged class of colonialists oppressing Palestinians. Israeli Jews don’t have the luxury of victim-status in the left’s worldview. Their safe spaces are bomb shelters in Haifa; not the pages of the New York Times.
This is a serious category error for a Prime Minister to make. It puts critics of a religion on the same plane as people wanted for terrorism. It blurs the line between speech and action, and mixes people who call for violence with those who do not.
Only now, a fortnight later, has the true duplicity of Theresa May’s speech been exposed. For now the world has learned what diplomacy the British government was engaged in even as May was making her speech. At the same time as the Prime Minister was talking about “true friendship” in front of friends of Israel, her government was conspiring with the outgoing Obama administration to kick that friend in the back. The British government was exposed as being one of the key players intent on pushing through the anti-Israel UNSC Resolution 2334. British diplomats were revealed to have been behind the wording and rallying of allies for the resolution.
The British government, whilst saying that it remains committed to a peace deal that comes as a result of direct negotiations between the two sides, has its own preconditions for peace: a freeze on the building of what it calls “settlements.” They maintain this line despite the fact that settlements have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Before the June 1967 Six Day War, there were no such things as “settlements.” Palestinians were trying to destroy and displace Israel anyhow. The core problem is not, and never was, “settlements,” but the right of Israel (or any non-Muslim nation) to exist inside any borders in that part of the world.
If you take a stand that is based on a lie, then that stand cannot succeed. If you try to oppose anti-Semitism but pretend it is the same thing as “Islamophobia,” then the structure on which you have made your stand will totter and all your aspirations will fail. If you try to make a stand based on the idea that settlement construction rather than the intransigence of the Palestinians to the existence of a Jewish state is what is holding up a peace deal, then facts will keep on intruding.
On December 12, the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, gave a fulsome speech to the annual Conservative Friends of Israel lunch. Before a roomful of 800 pro-Israel Conservative MPs and party supporters, she lavished praise on the Jewish state. She praised Israel’s achievements and castigated its enemies. She said that Britain would be marking the centenary of the Balfour declaration “with pride.” She also stressed that cooperation and friendship between Britain and Israel was not just for the good of those two countries, but “for the good of the world.”
For many of the people listening in the room, there were just two discordant notes. The first was related to the focus on anti-Semitism in May’s speech. As she used the opportunity rightly to lambaste the Labour party for its anti-Semitism problem, she extended the reach of her own claims for herself. While boasting of her success as Home Secretary in keeping out the prominent French anti-Semite Dieudonné and finally deporting the Salafist cleric Abu Qatada al-Filistini back to his native Jordan, she also used the opportunity to congratulate herself for banning Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Pastor Terry Jones from coming to the UK. “Islamophobia comes from the same wellspring of hatred” as anti-Semitism, she explained.
This is a serious category error for a Prime Minister to make. It puts critics of a religion, such as Geller and Spencer, on the same plane as people wanted for terrorism (Qatada). It blurs the line between speech and action, and mixes people who call for violence with those who do not. The comparison also fails to follow the consequences of its logic to its own illogical conclusion. The comparison fails to recognise that anyone who objects to Islamic anti-Semitism is immediately known as an “Islamophobe.” Therefore, someone hoping to come to Britain would have to accept being attacked by Muslim extremists for fear of being banned from entering the UK. These are serious and basic misunderstandings for a Prime Minister to propagate.
There was, however, a clear political sense to them. A Prime Minister in a country such as 21stCentury Britain might believe that he or she has to be exceptionally careful not to appear to be criticising any one group of people or praising another too highly. So for the time being in Britain, a moral relativism continues to stagnate. If the Jewish community complains of anti-Semitism, then you must criticise anti-Semitism. If the Muslim community complains of “Islamophobia,” then you must criticise “Islamophobia.” To make value judgements might be to commit an act of political folly. Wise leaders in increasingly “diverse” societies must therefore position themselves midway between all communities, neither castigating nor over-praising, in order to keep as many people onside as possible.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at the annual Conservative Friends of Israel lunch, December 12, 2016. (Image source: Conservative Friends of Israel)
The same tactic brought the other discordant moment at the Prime Minister’s lunch — the same tactic brought to the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. For the other discordant note in May’s speech came when she mentioned Israeli settlement building. It was carefully placed in the speech, after a passage in which May congratulated her own Department for International Development (DfID) Minister, Priti Patel. In the days before the lunch, Patel had announced that DfID would carry out an investigation to determine whether British taxpayer money being sent to what May called “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was being used to fund salaries for Palestinians convicted of terrorism offences against Israelis. Following this May said:
“When talking about global obligations, we must be honest with our friends, like Israel, because that is what true friendship is about. That is why we have been clear about building new, illegal settlements: it is wrong; it is not conducive to peace; and it must stop.”
The comment was received in silence and May moved on.
But this comment fitted in closely with the strategy of her other comment. For having lavished praise on Israel, a castigation apparently seemed necessary. It is wrong, but hardly possible for a British Prime Minister currently to do otherwise. If there are terrorists receiving funds from British taxpayers thanks to the largesse of the UK government, then this may — after many years of campaigning by anti-terrorism organisations — finally be “investigated.” However, throughout any such investigation, the British government, whilst saying that it remains committed to a peace deal that comes as a result of direct negotiations between the two sides, has for years announced its own preconditions for peace: a freeze on the building of what it calls “settlements.” They maintain this line despite the fact that settlements have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Before the June 1967 Six Day War, there were no such things as “settlements.” Palestinians were trying to destroy and displace Israel anyhow — in 1948, 1956, and 1967. The core problem is not, and never was, “settlements,” but the right of Israel (or any non-Muslim nation) to exist inside any borders in that part of the world.
At the time of May’s speech, these two issues seemed like minor cavils to some and gained little notice. Only now, a fortnight later, has the true duplicity of the speech been exposed. For now the world has learned what diplomacy the British government was engaged in even as May was making her speech.
At the same time as the Prime Minister was talking about “true friendship” in front of friends of Israel, her government was conspiring with the outgoing Obama administration to kick that friend in the back. In the wake of the collapse of the Egyptian-sponsored initiative at the UN, the British government was exposed as being one of the key players intent on pushing through the anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334. British diplomats were revealed to have been behind the wording and rallying of allies for the resolution.
The most obvious interpretation of this fact is simply a reflection that friends do not kick friends in the back. Especially not in the world’s foremost international forum for kicking that particular friend. But some people are putting a kinder interpretation on the facts. The kindest to date is that the May government believes that a sterner line on the issue of Israeli settlements would give the British government more leverage with the Palestinians.
If that is so, then it seems that the May government will have to learn abroad the same lesson that they must learn at home. Both will come about because of the same strategic mistake: a reliance on the short-term convenience of what must seem at first to be only convenient little lies. The problem is that such little lies, when tested on the great seas of domestic and international affairs, have a tendency to come to grief with exceptional rapidity and ease.
Politicians are keen on taking stands. But if you take a stand that is based on a lie, then that stand cannot succeed. If you try to oppose anti-Semitism but pretend it is the same thing as “Islamophobia,” then the structure on which you have made your stand will totter and all your aspirations will fail. If you try to make a stand for Israel while simultaneously conniving at the UN to undermine Israel, then your duplicity will be exposed and admiration for this and other stands will falter. If you try to make a stand based on the idea that settlement construction rather than the intransigence of the Palestinians to the existence of a Jewish state is what is holding up a peace deal, then facts will keep on intruding. They have before — at home and abroad — and they will again.
John Kerry, as diplomats before him have said of nations, has no permanent friends, only his own permanent interests. He is diplomat enough to hide some of them until a convenient time arrives, and a convenient time arrived with President Obama’s betrayal of Israel at the United Nations, when at the president’s bidding the United States declined to veto a malignantly one-sided resolution condemning the Jewish state for its policy of using settlements on the West Bank as bargaining chips if the Palestinians should give up their dream of evicting Israel from the globe and seek a lasting peace.
Mr. Kerry, like the president, seems to have been waiting for this moment in time, to stick it to the pesky and resolute Jews who have no taste for the second Holocaust when, as promised by the Iranians, Israel is “wiped off the map.”
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John Kerry doesn’t come late to the betrayal of friends. He has had considerable practice.
In 1971, when he was a young lieutenant just back from Vietnam, where he was a decorated skipper of a Swift Boat patrolling the Mekong River, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pay his “respects” to the American soldiers, sailors and Marines he fought a war with.
Representing all those veterans, he told the senators, he wanted to talk about war crimes he said “were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
Mr. Kerry proceeded to slander and defame hundreds of thousands of young Americans who were serving at their country’s call in a distant place where none wanted to be, doing their best at achieving the impossible.
Most of us who were there as observers and witnesses — I spent the better part of three years in Vietnam and Southeast Asia as a newspaper correspondent — saw ugly anger at work, the brutal way of war since Cain picked up a stone to slay his brother Abel. Occasional violence verged on atrocity, but we saw kindness and mercy in the midst of the noisy clangor of killing.
Mr. Kerry testified that he saw his country only at the work of atrocity, young men, many of them highly decorated, merciless in pursuit of barbarism. He told of swapping war stories with men who “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Old soldiers who served with him on the Mekong were astonished at his fanciful recital of comic-book war story, and gave their eloquent version three decades later when Mr. Kerry was the Democratic candidate for president. They said he was full of it, “it” being neither heroism nor witness to truth. He was a phony, Purple Hearts and Bronze and Silver stars or not.
Men return from wars with different recollections, of course, usually told in good faith, but rarely has a returning soldier so slandered and demeaned so many good men. His descriptions of savagery — beheadings, cutting off ears and limbs and indiscriminate razing of villages — with the full knowledge of all senior officers defied belief. He seemed to be telling stories from pique and spite, pandering to the hysteria of the times.
“We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them,” he said. “We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.”
Most American soldiers were guilty, in fact, of kindnesses to Vietnamese children, even handing out chocolate bars and chewing gum, just as American soldiers had done in previous American wars. But there was no “very cool” acceptance of the savage massacre at a Vietnamese village called My Lai, but instead a criminal investigation, with conviction of the guilty in the midst of a war where there was cruelty at every hand. No country but the United States of America had ever done that.
But John Kerry, as diplomats before him have said of nations, has no permanent friends, only his own permanent interests. He is diplomat enough to hide some of them until a convenient time arrives, and a convenient time arrived with President Obama’s betrayal of Israel at the United Nations, when at the president’s bidding the United States declined to veto a malignantly one-sided resolution condemning the Jewish state for its policy of using settlements on the West Bank as bargaining chips if the Palestinians should give up their dream of evicting Israel from the globe and seek a lasting peace.
Mr. Kerry, like the president, seems to have been waiting for this moment in time, to stick it to the pesky and resolute Jews who have no taste for the second Holocaust when, as promised by the Iranians, Israel is “wiped off the map.”
Barack Obama entertains himself by fussing over his legacy, eager to be remembered as an American icon, perhaps to replace George Washington. John Kerry was eager to assist him with the betrayal of Israel. Both president and secretary of State were doing what comes naturally.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
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