(You cannot hide your true self forever. Apparently, Obama is no exception. It’s going to be a rough two years for us all.-LS)
The Obama administration is refusing to discuss reports that emerged early Thursday claiming that the White House is considering imposing sanctions on Israel for continuing construction on Jewish homes in Jerusalem.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf dodged several questions on Thursday when confronted with reports that the administration had held secret internal meetings to discuss taking action against Israel for its ongoing building in East Jerusalem.
The classified meetings were reportedly held several weeks ago and included officials from both the State Department and White House, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, which first reported on the meetings.
The possibility of sanctioning Israel for its ongoing construction sends a signal that the Obama administration is willing to go further in its denunciations of Israel then any previous White House.
At the same time, the White House is vigorously pushing Congress against passing new sanctions on Iran.
When asked to address the reports Thursday afternoon, Harf declined to take a stance.
“I’m obviously not going to comment one way or another on reported internal deliberations,” she said. “We’ve made clear our position on settlement activity publicly and that hasn’t changed.”
When pressed to address whether the White House has reached a point at which it believes its harsh rhetoric against Israel is not enough, Harf again demurred, stating that she would not “address hypotheticals.”
A White House National Security Council (NSC) official also would not comment on the report when contacted Thursday by the Washington Free Beacon.
News of the supposed meeting leaked to the press though Israeli officials who were apparently apprised of the discussion.
Senior Israeli officials told Haaretz “that White House officials held a classified discussion a few weeks ago about the possibility of taking active measures against the settlements,” according to the report.
The discussion about levying sanctions on Israel reportedly began after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s October meeting at the White House and the subsequent battle between Washington and Jerusalem over settlement construction.
The thought of the White House leveling sanctions on Israel as it works to lessen those already imposed on Iran prompted consternation on Capitol Hill and throughout the pro-Israel world.
One senior congressional aide who works on the issue of Israel expressed shock that a White House could even discuss such action.
“If these reports are true, this would mark a new era of unprecedented hostility from the White House against our strongest ally in the Middle East,” the source said. “It’s impossible not to notice the irony of the administration mulling sanctions on Israel while threatening to veto new sanctions against Iran.”
The aide added: “The president should be forewarned that taking such action against Israel would yield tremendous pushback from Congress.”
Those in the pro-Israel world expressed a similar view when reached for comment.
“Even this administration, which has been historically hostile to our Israeli allies, even as they worked overtime to bomb the enemies of Iranian proxies across the Middle East, could not possibly be so aggressively committed to undermining our alliances as to levy sanctions against Israel at the same time they’re lifting them on Iran,” said one senior official with a pro-Israel organization who agreed to speak only on background.
Others took a more critical view.
“The Obama administration is against sanctions on Iran, but for them on Israel,” said Noah Pollak, executive director of the pro-Israel organization Emergency Committee for Israel. “Is [White House deputy national security adviser] Ben Rhodes wearing a green headband to work these days?”
Those who find “racist” repression of Blacks in Ferguson, “racist” repression of Arabs in Israel and “racist” repression of Muslims by non-Muslims everywhere have much in common.
Leftist and mainstream media perceptions of “repression” by Ferguson’s White minority of its Black majority, of Israeli “war crimes” against her minority Muslim residents and of the “peaceful” nature of Islam hinge on increasingly common notions: fairness requires inconvenient facts to be altered if possible to suit an ideology while others, inconsistent with the altered facts, must be ignored. We must speak and act with compassion toward and empathy with the oppressed. Only in this way, it is believed, can true fairness and empathetic compassion be achieved. Then, and only then, will we have true justice.
[T]he Big Lie has been installed among us as the primary form of political and cultural address along the entire gamut of disinformation, from outright interment of fact and customizing of inconvenient truths to unmitigated calumny and virulent libel. The Western media and the “progressivist” left-liberal political class have, over the years, incrementally adopted the discursive techniques of totalitarian states and theocratic dispensations. [Emphasis added.]
Please read the whole article.
Perceptions of Ferguson, Missouri
Michael Brown, a Black “gentle giant,” was shot and killed by a “racist” White police officer, Darren Wilson, on August 9th. There were eyewitnesses and many others who claimed to be eyewitnesses but were not. The latter based their accounts on what others had told them and on what they believed might have happened. Rather than select a new grand jury, an existing grand jury was kept in session, apparently to avoid claims that the members of a new jury had been chosen to exonerate Officer Wilson. On November 23rd, the grand jury determined that Officer Wilson would not be charged with a criminal offense under Missouri law. Here’s what happened next. Although the facts presented to the grand jury have been released, the facts matter but little:
The riots went forward as planned; the media steadfastly distributed its prewritten narrative of evil racist white cop murdering innocent young black man. [Emphasis added.]
Please see also this article by Rich Lowry at Politico. His analysis points to this:
This is a terrible tragedy. It isn’t a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened—Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to give up—into a chant (“hands up, don’t shoot”) and then a mini-movement. [Emphasis added.]
When the facts didn’t back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. [Emphasis added.]
Beyond that, I don’t consider it necessary to dwell on what happened in Ferguson last August and what happened thereafter, before and after the grand jury declined to indict Officer Wilson for the “murder” of “gentle giant” Michael Brown. Most who will read this article are already familiar with what happened; perceptions and their bases are my focus here.
Reports of “racism” and associated violence help to sell print and broadcast advertising, particularly if the reports can be made consistent with the perceptions of audiences: White people are racist and oppress Black people. Hence, most in the mass media rely, consciously or unconsciously, on confirmation bias,
a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.[Note 1][1] As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs.
The “legitimate” media proceeded in similar fashion when George Zimmerman, a “racist” “White Hispanic,” shot and killed a “defenseless” Black “child” in April of 2012. The “legitimate” media changed or ignored facts in their quests to declare Zimmerman guilty, to encourage rioting and to vindicate their own perceptions that Blacks are “different” and that their actions need to be dealt with more leniently than those of others. Please see also this article about a well to do White kid who said that he deserved to be mugged because of his White privilege. Many in the mass media appear to share his perceptions, at least with respect to the mugging of others.
After digesting the factual evidence the Zimmerman trial jury disagreed with the mass media and the assorted race baiters upon whom the mass media feasted and found him not guilty. After digesting the factual evidence, the grand jury — which had three Black members — disagreed about Officer Wilson and declined to indict him.
It has been reported that, following the grand jury’s refusal to indict Officer Wilson, the Obama administration promoted indoctrination of students on the basis that Brown was “a victim of police violence.” Part of the “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans,” the indoctrination apparently is to include this:
“During the first few weeks of classes, students can create a memorial to Michael Brown on a classroom bulletin board. This activity involves having students use whatever they feel skilled in to create something that would honor Michael Brown and other people who have been victims of police and other violence. Students may choose to draw, write poetry, design art pieces, paint, or collect news clippings. Students can use this opportunity to create a counter-narrative to negative stories and images about Ferguson and Michael Brown, or even to document stories and images they have seen in the media about the case. Engaging in this type of activity allows teachers to understand youth strengths and form classroom solidarity.” [Emphasis added.]
It is important for young people to learn how to make connections between the Michael Brown shooting and similar cases that have emerged in recent history. While a discussion of the Michael Brown shooting and the current events in Ferguson are powerful, conversations about Michael Brown with a consideration of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Renisha Mcbride and other cases that involve similar scenarios place the events in Ferguson in proper context… [Emphasis added.]
Assuming that the report is accurate, is the Obama administration trying to heal racial divides, or to exacerbate them as it has often done?
David Goldman, in an article at PJ Media titled How Far Down Do You Define Deviancy in Ferguson? summed up the positions of the current “civil rights” movement and the consequences were they to be adopted:
Young black men are disproportionately imprisoned. One in three black men have gone to prison at some time in their life. According to the ACLU, one in fifteen black men are incarcerated, vs. one in 106 white men. That by itself is proof of racism; the fact that these individuals were individually prosecuted for individual crimes has no bearing on the matter. All that matters is the outcome. Because the behavior of young black men is not likely to change, what must change is the way that society recognizes crime itself. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
[T]he solution is to decriminalize behavior that all civilized countries have suppressed and punished since the dawn of history. Because felonious behavior is so widespread and the causes of it so intractable, the criminals’ rights movement insists, society “cannot afford to recognize” criminal behavior below a certain threshold. [Emphasis added.]
If America were to accept this logic, civil society would come to an end. The state would abandon its monopoly of violence to street rule. Large parts of America would come to resemble the gang-ruled, lawless streets of Central America, where violent pathology has overwhelmed the state’s capacity to control it, creating in turn a nightmare for America’s enforcement of its own immigration law. [Emphasis added.]
The response of the African-American “civil rights” establishment and the American Left to the verdict in Ferguson came quickly and predictably. Al Sharpton and other racial demagogues urged their followers to take to the streets if anything but a first degree murder indictment was handed down for Officer Darren Wilson. The protestors and rioters were prepared, but Missouri’s governor wasn’t. He failed to call out the National Guard on the day the verdict was released.
What is particularly galling is the argument that the events in Ferguson, and the no bill for Wilson, are a throwback to the segregationist era of the 1950s and 1960s, when the modern civil rights movement engaged in non-violent civil disobedience. “The Movement,” as they called it then, showed the nation and the world the immoral actions of police chief Bull Connor of Birmingham, Alabama, and others of similar ilk, thereby exposing the injustice of the system of segregation — a system based on power and violence, preventing black Americans from enjoying the rights and liberties guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution. [Emphasis added.]
Israel
Just as confirmation bias caused many in Missouri — and also in distant places — to condemn a “racist” White police officer and to preach about the benign nature of his Black “victim,” so many throughout the world blame Israel for everything bad that people do.
I recently wrote an article titled Hamas, Abbas, Obama and Islamic Savagery. It includes this photo of Palestinians celebrating their brethren’s murders of Jews praying in a Jerusalem synagogue:
Recently, there have been many more attacks on Jews in Israel.
Academia, where leftism now prevails, has done much to slander Israel as a wicked apartheid state, more barbaric than Nazi Germany.
This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”[Emphasis added.]
The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
[They did so] by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state—and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism—but as a Nazi one.” [Emphasis added.]
. . . . [O]nce Israel had been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state had been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought. “These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi’ supply the criminal indictment,” said Cotler. “No further debate is required. The conviction that this triple racism warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a ‘racist, apartheid, Nazi’ state should not have any right to exist today?” [Emphasis added.]
Does anyone really think that granting, or recognizing, Palestinian statehood will make them more peaceful? On the contrary. From past experience, any time the Palestinians achieve a political goal without effort, they take that as a reward for their violent behaviour and only increase their terrorist activities.
He did not likely make many friends; calling to people’s attention that they are sadly misguided rarely does.
Why are Islamic nations, where apartheid and violence against non-Muslims prevail, subjected to little anger and disdain while Israel, the only free and democratic nation in the entire region, gets nearly all of the anger and disdain? Might this double standard be useful because it caters to the notion that Israel’s freedom and democracy for all of her citizens, including Arabs — particularly along with her technological and financial successes — set her apart? Make her “the Other?” Might it be that Islamic nations, hugely represented at the U.N. and sadly deficient in freedom, democracy and technological prowess, reject Israeli freedom and democracy while envious of Israel’s technological success? They have substantial wealth, but it is largely based on oil and the technology of others. Little of the resulting wealth is shared with their masses.
Islam
That brings us to Islam, the “religion of peace.” According to Obama and other luminaries, the Islamic State is not Islamic. According to Obama no religion — least of all Islam — countenances the violence in which the Islamic State and other comparable Islamic terrorist groups engage. Remember His Eid-al-Fitr message?
While Eid marks the completion of Ramadan, it also celebrates the common values that unite us in our humanity and reinforces the obligations that people of all faiths have to each other, especially those impacted by poverty, conflict, and disease. [Emphasis added.]
In the United States, Eid also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy. That is why we stand with people of all faiths, here at home and around the world, to protect and advance their rights to prosper, and we welcome their commitment to giving back to their communities. [Emphasis added.]
Interfaith tolerance and respect? The “very fabric of our nation?” “Strengthening the core of our democracy?”
Let’s have an honest discussion about Islam
In Islam, peace can come only after all other religions have been destroyed or subjugated. That Islamic belief now plagues Israel and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Islamic Palestinians who murder Jews are seen as heroes and more are encouraged to do more of the same.
Many Muslims adhere also to the view that the Peace of Islam can come only after other Muslims who profess variant religious doctrines — Sunni vs. Shia for example — have been destroyed or subjugated and become “true” Muslims. Sect vs. sect violence was common throughout the centuries and now seems to be worse and increasing.
That is to be expected, but why do many nations which do not yet have Muslim majorities tend to ignore these Islamic actions and view Islamic slaughter as not characteristics of Islam? Are they merely ignorant about Islam? Have they been fatally infected with multiculturalism and political correctness? Might they even view adherents to Islam as subhumans, whose violence and other depredations are best ignored or tolerated?
Conclusions
It seems reasonable to conclude that the world is spiraling ever deeper into insanity. Until leaders of “the international community,” academia and the mass media revise their views and act on the basis of facts instead of fictions, and on logic rather than on raw emotion coupled with pandering to those blinded by confirmation bias against “the Others,” sanity will continue to be increasingly rare. Insanity will continue to be manifested through violence as it persists and worsens because perceptions drive actions.
These are not optimistic conclusions, because it seems unlikely that “the international community,” academia or the mass media — which tend to proceed in tandem — will reform anytime soon.
Is it the end of Christianity in the Middle East? Could be, he says, at least so far as Iraq is involved:
What is a Christian life there now? The Bishop of Mosul said recently that for the first time in 2,000 years there was no church in Nineveh [an ancient city that is now part of Mosul]. That’s the reality.
It is indeed the reality, and not just in Iraq. And “the West” is silent, as it has been so often when it faces evil far from its own boundaries. Meanwhile, [Anglican Canon Andrew White] has moved on, to the one country in the Middle East that provides its citizens with religious freedom and the security to practice their faith. He’s in Jerusalem, trying to achieve reconciliation between Muslim and Jewish religious leaders. It’s not an altogether new venture for him; in his last days in Baghdad, he was the “rabbi” for the city’s remaining six Iraqi Jews. And back at that conference in Copenhagen, the guest of honor at the closing banquet was the former chief rabbi of Denmark. [Emphasis added.]
Guess what? During the week, all the Iraqi religious leaders arranged for private meetings with said rabbi. Why? They’d looked at the map, and they knew that if things were going to be ok for them, they’d need help from the Jews in Israel. Andrew knew it too. He still knows it. That’s no doubt why he’s working in Jerusalem. [Emphasis added.]
(Leftists, long enamored of Jonathan Gruber’s techniques, depict Israel as Nazi Germany reincarnated. The characterization has metastasized far beyond academia.
— DM)
“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”
The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.
In reflecting on the current trend he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament, Irwin Cotler, once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state—and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism—but as a Nazi one.”
Most important for the anti-Israel cause, Cotler contended, once Israel had been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state had been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought. “These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi’ supply the criminal indictment,” said Cotler. “No further debate is required. The conviction that this triple racism warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a ‘racist, apartheid, Nazi’ state should not have any right to exist today?”
What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the long-suffering Palestinians. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism.
One of the early academic voices to have assigned the Nazi epithet to Israel was heard in a November 2000 speech by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois and one of the principal promoters of the global Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In that speech, Boyle made the exact linkage to which Cotler alluded, conflating Israel’s alleged racism with apartheid-like behavior and suggesting, even more ominously, that the ongoing “genocide” against the Palestinians had parallels with the Nazi’s own heinous offenses. “The paradigmatic example of a crime against humanity is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People,” Boylesaid. “This is where the concept of crime against humanity was formulated and came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission is now saying that Israel is doing to the Palestinian People. A crime against humanity.”
That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”
In the morally-defective pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel, perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, the most vitriolic and widely-followed character in an inglorious retinue as Norman Finkelstein, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something he has called an “outright extortion racket;” in fact, he blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safe borders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel, fearing moderate Arab foes who will force it into peace, is obdurate, conniving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein suggested, Israel is collectively going mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearns for Middle Eastern peace: “I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. . . In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.”
If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact, his spiritual mentor, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics Noam Chomsky, has inhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widely-known, eagerly-followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.
While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on their Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters. The rogue state of “Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment,” Chomsky wrote, and yet, even in the face of this hideous, Nazi-like behavior by Israel, “nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response.”
In January of 2009, a tenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent an odious email to the 80 students in his “Sociology 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization” course with the explicit message that Israelis are the new Nazis. Under the heading “Parallel images of Nazis and Israelis,” the email displayed a photo-collage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest an historical equivalence between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its occupation of Gaza and the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the email without supplying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance to or connection with the course’s content.
At Columbia University’s department of Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), an academic division with a long history of anti-Israel, anti-American bias and politicized scholarship, Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, regularly espouses his loathing of Israel in fringe, anti-Semitic publications like Counterpunch and The Electronic Intifada, or in the Arab press, and never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy. In his perfervid imagination, Israelis, as he never tires as mentioning, have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009 when Israel was defending itself against some 6000 rockets attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on . . , and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad obscenely suggested that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”
It is Israel’s actions alone―that and the support of the United States―which are the root cause of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the Jewish state’s behavior is murderous, unethical, and brutal, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program. Israel, she wrote, “speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security,” and “Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.”
This summer, while the Gaza incursion was raging, Dr. Julio Pino, associate professor of history at Kent State University, published a vitriolic open letter in which he chastised the “academic friends of Israel” who have “chosen to openly work for and brag about academic collaboration with a regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism . . . I curse you more than the Israelis,” he told his academic colleagues, “for while The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth . . . Lest you think this is a personal attack I swear it applies equally to all who engage in collaboration with fascism, and we both know the fate of collaborators. In the same manner, only with more zeal, than you have sworn to the Jewish State I pledge to you, and every friend and stooge of Zionism.”
Occasionally, when an academic makes public his loathing of the Jewish state, and continues to demonize and libel Israel beyond the bounds of what would be considered acceptable scholarly discourse, there are consequences—though rarely. This summer, for instance, Steven Salaita, author of Israel’s Dead Soul and perennial critic of Zionism, had an employment offer from the University of Illinois withdrawn once the school’s president was made aware of some of Salaita’s virulent Twitter posts about Israel. During the widely-criticized Gaza incursion, Salaita tweeted that “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” He also blamed anti-Semitism on Jews themselves, as many anti-Semites do, by asserting that Israel’s behavior causes the hatred of Jews, that “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.”
As grotesque and distorted as these calumnies against Israel are, as perverse and inaccurate the comparisons drawn between Nazism and Zionism and between Nazis and Israelis are, and as wildly hateful these libels are to the point of being, as defined by the State Department’s own working definition, anti-Semitic in nature—the branding of Israel as the Nazi of nations by these academics serves to reinforce, and give credibility to, similar hatreds and biases expressed outside the university walls.
This is a lethal narrative because when it is believed the world naturally asks itself, as Cotler warned: if Israel is a Nazi-like, apartheid regime, standing in opposition to everything for which the civilized community of nations stands, who cannot hold Israel accountable and judge it harshly for its transgressions? That against all historical evidence and the force of reason the calumny against Israel that it is a murderous, sadistic, and genocidal regime has been successfully promoted and continues to gain traction indicates that Israel’s academic defamers have been successful in inverting history as part of the modern day incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.
Sultan Abu Al-Einein, a Fatah Central Committee official (screen capture: MEMRI, YouTube)
Einein, who also serves as an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told the Iranian Arabic-language TV channel Al-Alam that “anyone who sells even an inch of our Palestinian land must be killed in the streets and hanged on an electric pole.
**************
Fatah official praises Yehudah Glick’s shooter, calls for public killings of those who engage in property transactions with Jews.
Fatah Central Committee member Sultan Abu Al-Einein said Palestinians who sell their land to Jews should be publicly executed.
Einein, who also serves as an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told the Iranian Arabic-language TV channel Al-Alam that “anyone who sells even an inch of our Palestinian land must be killed in the streets and hanged on an electric pole.”
The October 31 interview was posted and translated Friday by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a US-based watchdog group.
Under Palestinian law, land sales to Israelis are illegal and a crime punishable by death. The PLO’s Revolutionary Penal Code (1979) applies the death penalty both to “traitors” and to those accused of “transferring positions to the enemy.” Since the late 1990s, Palestinian courts have been dealing out death sentences to convicted land dealers, though Abbas has not authorized the implementation of executions since his election in 2004.
In response to recent Israeli acquisition of apartments in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods last month, Abbas issued an executive order amending the penal code to establish punishments for those who sell land to “hostile countries.”
Abbas’s new punishments for Palestinians who engage in property transactions with Israelis include hard labor and life imprisonment.
In the interview, Einein also praised Mutaz Hijazi, a member of Islamic Jihad who attempted to assassinate Temple Mount activist Rabbi Yehudah Glick last month, saying “the way to defeat the Israeli occupation is the way of the martyr Mutaz Hijazi.”
“If the people do not fight the Israeli occupation in the way they see fit, in order to liberate their land, they do not deserve to live,” he said.
European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini (L) attends a media conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/Jim Hollander)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has devoted special efforts in recent weeks to stop the diplomatic erosion of Israel’s stand in Europe’s capitals. As noted by Uri Savir in his latest Al-Monitor article on Nov. 9, there are growing indications that if the leading European states decide to take off their gloves in the fight against Israel’s right-wing government policies, the Barack Obama administration will not rush to use its long-standing veto weapon. Netanyahu’s weapon in the defensive battle he is waging for Europe’s soul is epitomized in the crushing question that he fires at guests from the neighboring continent: “Tell me, please, on which state in this region can you truly rely? On Syria? Iraq? Jordan? Egypt?”
The answer is obvious and also fairly correct: Israel is the most stable country in the Middle East and the only one that espouses Western democratic values. In the speech Netanyahu delivered at the annual memorial ceremony for former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 5, he portrayed Israel as a bubble of Judeo-Christian well-meaning normalcy, which finds itself in a hostile Middle Eastern Muslim environment. “We were always proud of our democracy, which is unusual in the landscape that surrounds us,” waxed poetic the man who took part in the incitement against Rabin that preceded his murder.
He added, “Indeed, the State of Israel is not a violent country. We see this clearly in light of what is occurring around us — beheadings, throats being cut, firing squads, executions and so on. Israel’s exceptional nature in this landscape is remarkable.”
Indeed, if one measures it on a Middle Eastern scale, next to the Islamic State, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and even the Egyptian administration of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Israel’s democracy is a dazzling beacon. But, when Israel demands that Europeans judge it by Western standards, it must take into account that their values do not include prolonged occupation, the end of which is nowhere in sight. Europe never accepted the claim that Netanyahu made on Nov. 7 to European Union High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Federica Mogherini that settlements are not an obstacle to peace.
The correct question is not which country is the most wonderful in the Middle East, as Netanyahu asked, but which country that presumes to be a standard bearer of democracy and human rights would take the liberty, in 2014, of confiscating lands from foreigners to settle its citizens on them. What Western state withholds basic rights from millions of people living under its rule? What would the European Union do with a member state that conducts itself toward its Jewish minority the way Israel does toward its Arab minority?
In Netanyahu’s defense, it must be said that he does not have a copyright on the condescending and righteous attitude toward Israel’s surroundings. In an interview with The New York Times at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Theodor Herzl promised that establishing a Jewish state in the Land of Israel would provide Europe with a “new frontline bastion against Asian barbarism.” Max Nordau, Herzl’s close aid, claimed in his speech at the same congress that the peoples of Asia are “degenerates.” More than 20 years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel as “a villa in the jungle,” and subsequently upgraded the analogy to “an oasis in the middle of the desert” surrounded by a “turbulent world.”
Nonetheless, Barak stressed that while one hand must always have a finger on the trigger, the other must always be feeling its way toward the possibility of an arrangement with the neighbors.
In his book “Political Rhetoric: Israeli Leaders in Stressful Situations,” Nadir Tsur of the political science department at Hebrew University describes Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, in his second term, as “formative leaders.” In addition to providing for the basic needs of the general public, Tsur explains, these men left their mark by adopting change and improving Israel’s lot. At the memorial ceremony for Rabin, Netanyahu said that “we all share” the slain prime minister’s hope that the political moves he made would create “an island of peace inside this violent ocean.” Nonetheless, he immediately added, “We all share this hope, but we are not averting our gaze and ignoring what is happening around us.” What diplomatic move of Netanyahu’s created “an island of peace”? Indeed, he does not ignore events around us; there is nothing he does better than warn against “the heaving ocean” around us.
On the day Netanyahu delivered this speech, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was laying out his credo to members of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“[A]ny decision in foreign policy must begin with an analysis of the situation. And it must answer the question, where are we?” the noted statesman suggested. “The next question is, where are we going? Where we are going no matter what we do? And where should we be going?” After you answer these two questions, you have to define the limitations of what is possible, Kissinger explained, and warned that setting targets that the system cannot handle will cause it to explode.
“A great statesman operates at the outer limit of what is possible on the basis of a correct analysis and the difference between greatness and mediocrity,” Kissinger said.
Netanyahu’s rhetoric, deeds and misdeeds prove that based on his analysis of Israel’s situation, he has come to conclude that the best move is stepping in place and scaring people away from any change. But Netanyahu’s ultimate goal — perpetuating the occupation and bringing the Palestinians to heel — deviates from a long list of external limitations: starting with the demographic problem, through the state of Israeli democracy and up to the danger of losing the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, withdrawal of the Arab Peace Initiative and a weakening of US and European support.
According to Kissinger’s diagnosis, Netanyahu is, at best, a mediocre statesman. Or, as was well put by Amir Peretz, who resigned on Nov. 9 from his job as minister of environmental protection, ”Netanyahu is not the solution — he is the problem.”
This is a guest post by Imam Mohamed allah-Dork, chairman of the Washington Islamist Coalition for Peace and Prosperity (WICPAP). Although it might appear to be satire it is not, because he articulates, far more candidly than most, the objectives of the “progressive” Obama Administration. I found him with the assistance of (another) imaginary “friend,” the Highly Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the Great State of Confusion Utopia, where happy unicorns frolic endlessly in the service of Obama.
********************
Hatred of Israel is among our Dear Leader Obama’s most effective weapons against those who oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He has made heroic efforts to encourage and use it, with help from the progressive media and His other friends.
Because of the wise efforts of Our Dear Leader and His brilliant Secretary of State, hatred of Israel has increased in recent years. This has been due, in large part, to Israel’s continuing and patently unreasonable refusals to commit national suicide by agreeing to all of the righteous demands of Palestinian Authority President Abbas, as Obama and Kerry have also demanded. Peaceful Palestinians have responded to Israel’s malicious refusals through non-violent protests resulting in the death or injury of Jewish terrorists, accidentally run over, stabbed or shot.
Jewish Terrorists
The beautiful song embedded above was recently augmented by a new Palestinian musical offering including wholesome family-oriented lyrics.
I am so proud of the composers, singers and musicians that I cry whenever I watch the video!
According to a specious article at a right-wing propaganda site called PJ Media,
That is absurd. They were no more “murdered,” than are filthy dogs which are righteously slaughtered because they are dangers to society at large.
Unless Israel’s refusal to commit national suicide is condemned world-wide, undue attention will focus on the peace loving Islamic Republic of Iran and its legitimate goal of having nuclear weapons to bring Islamic peace to all who desire it. Israel opposes Iran’s quest for Islamic peace through nukes and therefore selfishly rejects it.
Hatred is irrational and bad, except that directed at genocidal, apartheid Israel and others who fail to embrace Islam. Hatred of them is rational and good. Just as hatred of Israel must be encouraged to the extent possible, so must the stupidity great credulity of the American people be fed and used for Progressive purposes, as it was fed and used to give them the blessings of superior health care.
Lies, obfuscation and secrecy for good purposes as praised by our Dear Leader’s consultant Jonathan Gruber, such as the passage of ObamaCare, are good because they are necessary. Leading the way, our Dear Leader promised to have the most transparent administration in history.
It was all diversionary symbolism, of course, because truth, clarity, transparency and accountability in pursuit of bad objectives — such as defeat of our Dear Leader’s policies — are intolerable because it is racist to oppose Him. Also, they might succeed.
That brings us to our Dear Leader’s dominant role in the P5+1 negotiations with The Islamic Republic of Peace Everlasting, Iran.
It is more than simply unfortunate that Western policymakers look at Iran and appear to see only what they want to see. They heap praise on progress in the nuclear negotiations without looking at the actual content. They tune into televised smiles and reasonable-sounding public statements from the Rouhani administration and tune out the bombastic threats, insults and anti-Western rhetoric that invariably accompanies them. They push for large-scale rapprochement with Iran on the apparent assumption that its crimes will disappear if we somehow pretend they don’t exist. [Emphasis added.]
But these wishful thinkers are in the corridors of power in Washington and Westminster. Although ISIS has grown stronger thanks to the sectarian conflict that Iran has helped create, these unrealistic optimists would imply that somehow Iran is our best hope for defeating this menace. So they give in to Iranian intransigence in the nuclear talks by senselessly giving away more and more leverage. [Emphasis added.]
Make no mistake, Tehran’s theocratic rulers are very well aware of this “pie-in-the-sky” illogicality. Indeed, they are counting on it. The regime’s officials are so confident in our diplomatic vulnerability that they have been trying to use the crisis in Iraq not only to obtain unearned concessions in the nuclear domain, but also to pressure the U.S., the U.K. and their allies to modify their stance against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad in Syria. [Emphasis added.]
Nonsense! Iran needs nuclear weapons to pursue its peaceful, humanitarian goals and, with our Dear Leader’s help, will get (or keep) them! Life will then be better for everyone who matters.
No deal with Iran will be finalized unless all of Iran’s righteous demands are met. Unless ample lies and obfuscations are spoon-fed to the American public to minimize the consequences of Iran’s victory, the deal may well be opposed. Lies and obfuscation were needed to pass ObamaCare, even with solid Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress. A deal with Iran is even more important. Our Dear Leader’s wise consultant, Jonathan Gruber, knows this very well and so does our Dear Leader.
Fortunately, a Washington think tank is taking the lead to counter the silly stuff spouted by racists.
A leading liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has begun enlisting its associates in an “all-hands-on-deck effort to support” the Obama administration as it seeks to ink a nuclear deal with Iran by the end of the month, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Truman National Security Project, a nonprofit think tank with ties to the administration, is assembling a “crack team of writers” to flood national and local media outlets with articles supporting the White House’s efforts before the details of a final nuclear deal have even emerged, according to internal emails sent by the organization to its listserv. [Emphasis added.]
“Our community absolutely must step up and not cede the public narrative to neocon hawks that would send our country to war just to screw the president,” Graham F. West, Truman’s writing and communications associate, wrote in a recent email to the organization’s listserv. [Emphasis added.]
Pay no attention to insane mumblings by the editor of this subversive blog. He has long opposed what he refers to as the Iran Scam and recently wrote this racist diatribe against our own Dear Leader and His quest for peace everlasting. If this sick cartoon isn’t racist, then I don’t know what is.
Our Dear Leader has already accomplished countless wonderful things to establish His magnificent legacy. Here are just a few:
He is the first African American President of the United States.
The award of His Nobel Peace Prize on October 9, 2009, a mere nine months after He became the President of the United States. No other President has accomplished that.
He compelled passage of the Affordable Care Act during His first term in office.
He has already issued more crucial executive decrees than any former President.
He has consistently condemned the apartheid, illegitimate state known as Israel.
Miller even contends, speciously, that Iran’s alleged human rights abuses and alleged support for world-wide terrorism should be considered by the esteemed P5+1 negotiators under our Dear Leader’s helpful guidance. That, like all of his other suggestions, would elevate facts, transparency and accountability for a bad purpose over lies, obfuscation and non-accountability for a good purpose. What great sage once wrote “the truth shall make you flee?” He was right. Truth would make many Americans flee from a deal with Iran, and we need their unthinking support to show that, despite recent election results, they reject racism and therefore still love, respect and have unbounded confidence in our Dear Leader.
********************
Editor’s comments
In an effort to help Imam Mohamed allah-Dork present his ideas most candidly and therefore effectively, I was pleased to provide the You Tube videos.
I agree with allah-Dork’s thesis that lies and obfuscation are as necessary to secure public approval of a nuke deal with Iran as they were to secure passage of ObamaCare. A nuke deal with Iran would be even worse than ObamaCare.
It will be very difficult, if not impossible, for Congress to repeal ObamaCare outright if for no reason other than that Obama would veto any bill repealing it. However, it is possible that the Supreme Court may deal ObamaCare a fatal blow if it finds that subsidies for customers of ObamaCare exchanges were clearly intended, and stated by the Congress, to be available only for customers of State, not Federal, exchanges.
Once Iran gets (or keeps) nukes, there will be no way for Congress to repeal the agreement, no way for the Supreme Court to overrule it and no way to force Iran to get rid of its nukes. That Iran may get rid of some of them voluntarily — by using them — offers no comfort at all.
Israel, the only free and democratic nation in the Middle East, has served as a useful distraction from the violation of even the most basic of human rights throughout the rest of the region. She continues to respect and implement those rights despite the Obama Administration’s increasing rejection of them and its refusal to take them into account when dealing with other nations. Iran is perhaps the worst human rights violator in the region as well as the most prolific sponsor of Islamic terrorism. As the Obama Administration ignores blatant human rights violations by other nations, it fantasizes that Israel is a gross violator and amplifies its fantasies at every opportunity.
Obama and His cohorts have learned the lessons taught by Mr. Gruber very well and have used them with success. Here is an excerpt from an article by Jonathan Turley, a liberal in the old fashioned sense of the word. He has often supported the ends which Obama has sought to achieve while opposing the methods He has used and continues to use.
In fairness to Gruber, he is again being honest about what happened in the passage of ACA and speaking as an academic. However, such machinations are rarely confirmed by high-level consultants or officials. The ACA was pushed through by a muscle vote on a handful of votes while the Administration made claims that he later had to admit were misleading at best, such as the President’s repeated assurance that citizens could keep your current insurance policy if you liked it. There was a great deal of cynicism and misleading representations made during the ACA debates — reflecting a deep-seated contempt for the intelligence of the American voter. Gruber however seems to celebrate the success in using what he viewed as the stupidity of citizens, to quote his earlier comments, to secure passage of the ACA. It is the triumph of the ends over the means — the mantra of Beltway denizens who view more principled actors as naive chumps. What is shocking for many outside of the Beltway is of course the moral relativism and cynicism reflected in such comments, but Gruber is the norm in Washington. He is the face of the consequentiality morality that has long governed this city. [Emphasis added.]
What is different is that he admits it.
Obama, et al, have consistently applied Gruber principles to the Iran Scam and will continue to do so in seeking public support for any nuke deal with Iran. They will also continue to obfuscate and lie about the Israeli situation to distract attention from what they are doing, relying on their perceptions of the “stupidity” of the American public.
Both Turkey’s President Erdogan and its Prime Minister Davutoglu have declared countess times that Gaza and Jerusalem (in addition to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, and the Maghreb) are Turkey’s “domestic affairs.”
In truth, there is no mention of any city’s name in the Qur’an.
Turks have a different understanding of what constitutes an occupation and a conquest of a city. The Turkish rule is very simple: The capture of a foreign city by force is an occupation if that city is Turkish (or Muslim) and the capture of a city by force is conquest if the city belongs to a foreign nation (or non-Muslims).
For instance, Turks still think the capture of Istanbul in 1453 was not occupation; it was conquest.
In a 2012 speech, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (then Prime Minister) said: “Just like Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul are cities of the Qur’an.” In truth, there is no mention of any city’s name in the Qur’an. Never mind.
“Conquest,” Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Professor Mehmet Gormez, declared in 2012, “is not to occupy lands or destroy cities and castles. Conquest is the conquest of hearts!” That is why, the top Turkish cleric said, “In our history there has never been occupation.” Instead, Professor Gormez said, “in our history, there has always been conquest.” He further explained that one pillar of conquest is to “open up minds to Islam, and hearts to the Qur’an.”
It is in this religious justification that most Turkish Islamists think they have an Allah-given right to take infidel lands by the force of sword — ironically, not much different from what the tougher Islamists have been doing in large parts of Syria and Iraq. Ask any commander in the Islamic State and he would tell you what the jihadists are doing there is “opening up minds to Islam, and hearts to the Qur’an.”
Both President Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have declared countless times that Gaza and Jerusalem (in addition to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia and the Maghreb) are Turkey’s “domestic affairs.”
In reality, with or without the normalization of diplomatic relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, the Turks have never hidden their broader goals in the Arab-Israeli dispute: that Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state; and that Israel should be pushed back to its pre-1967 borders. Until then, it will be ‘halal’ [permitted in Islam] for Erdogan to blame Israel for global warming, the Ebola virus, starvation in Africa and every other misfortune the world faces.
As if to confirm this whimsical view, Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan has blamed Israel for democratic failings in the Arab world. “Israel works with [undemocratic] regimes and keeps its ship afloat.” So, it is because of Israel that Arab nations have never established democratic culture — before or after 1948; or before or after the Arab Spring revolts. But fortunately, Palestinians have a new “protector.”
From Prime Minister Davutoglu’s public speech on November 7:
Al-Aqsa [mosque in Jerusalem] will one day be liberated. The Israelis should know that the oppressed Syrians have a protector. The oppressed Palestinians too have a protector. That protector is Turkey. Just as Bursa [the Turkish city where he spoke] ended its occupation, the honorable Palestinians, honorable Muslims will end the [Israeli] occupation. Just as Osman Gazi [a sepulchre in Bursa] was liberated, al-Aqsa too will be liberated. Al-Quds [Jerusalem] is both our first prayer direction and has been entrusted with us by history. It has been entrusted with us by Hazrat Omar. The last freedom seen in Jerusalem was under our [Ottoman] rule. Al-Quds is our cause. It is the occupying, oppressive Israeli government that has turned the Middle East into a quagmire.
Echoing that view, President Erdogan said that protecting Islamic sites in the Holy Land is a sacred mission (for his government), and bluntly warned that any attack against the al-Aqsa mosque is no different than an attack on the Kaaba in the holy city of Mecca.
Spot the difference: In the eyes of Turkey’s political and religious leadership, Istanbul and its Hagia Sophia (once a Greek Orthodox Basilica) were legitimately “conquered” by the Muslim Ottomans, while Jerusalem and its al-Aqsa mosque (built atop the ruins of the Jewish Temples) are illegally “occupied” by Israel. (Images source: Wikimedia Commons)
No doubt, after Gaza, al-Aqsa (and Jerusalem) has become a powerful Turkish obsession, and a treasure-trove of votes, especially in view of Turkey’s parliamentary elections next June. And do not expect the Turkish leadership only to corrupt facts. Plain fabrication is a more favored method. All the same, someone, sometimes, would unwillingly reveal the truth often when trying to corrupt other facts.
Since Davutoglu claimed that “Jerusalem has been entrusted with the Turks by Hazrat Omar,” it may be useful to refresh memories. Hazrat Omar is Omar bin Al-Khattab (579-644), one of the most powerful and influential Muslim caliphs in history. Within the context of “conquest vs. occupation,” he was referenced by the top cleric, Professor Gormez in a 2012 speech:
After Hazrat Omar conquered al-Quds [Jerusalem], he was invited to pray at a church [as there were no mosques yet in Jerusalem]. But he politely refused because he was worried that the [conquering] Muslims could turn the church into a mosque after he prayed there.
Since medieval historical facts cannot have changed over the past two years, the top Turkish ulama [religious scholar], referencing a most powerful Muslim caliph, is best witness that when the Muslims had first arrived in Jerusalem there was not a single mosque in the city. Why? Because Jerusalem was not a Muslim city. Why, then, do Turkish Islamists claim that it is Muslim? Because it once had been “conquered.” Would the same Turks surrender Istanbul to the occupying forces that took the city after World War I because its capture in 1920 made it a non-Turkish city? No, that was not conquest, that was occupation!
Had Messrs Erdogan and Davutoglu been schoolchildren, such reasoning might have been called bullying and cheating.
The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.
***************
Chaya Zissel Braun was murdered on her first trip back from the Western Wall where the indigenous Jewish population of Israel continues to pray in the shadow of the shrine established there by the Muslim conquerors from which the racist Muslim settlers rain down rocks on the Jewish worshipers.
The three-month old baby girl died when a Muslim terrorist rammed a car into a crowd hurtling her into the air and headfirst onto the pavement. Her death did not take place in isolation. It was not caused by a tiny minority of extremists. Her blood was spilled on the street for the Islamization of Jerusalem.
The Islamization of Jerusalem is an international cause. It does not just come out of Gaza City or even Ramallah. Nor Doha or Istanbul. The politicians and diplomats of every major country demand the Islamization of Jerusalem. When they talk about a Palestinian State with its capital in Jerusalem what they are really demanding is the restoration of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948.
They demand it with words and boycotts, but the Muslim settlers on whose behalf they cry for the Apartheidization of Jerusalem are writing their murderous demands with the blood of little girls.
The baby girl was murdered to Islamize a city. She died as the Israeli soldiers had died reunifying Jerusalem after the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed the Jewish population and as ordinary Jerusalemites had died at the hands of Jordanian snipers searching the city for Jewish and Christian targets. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house, and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.
Like Chaya, I was born in Jerusalem. Like Yaffa, I lived in a building targeted by Muslim snipers. But the Six Day War had ended the reign of Muslim snipers over the city. The building where my parents made their home had been cheap once because living there could mean instant death for anyone looking out of a window at the wrong time. The liberation and reunification of Jerusalem had made it a place where Jewish children could play on balconies and Christians could repair churches without being murdered.
Under Muslim occupation, while Jordanian snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as put up an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local Jewish residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.
It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.
Muslim outrage over Jewish outhouses mattered more than the Muslim murder of Jewish children. It still does. Today the State Department calls the murder of that little girl a traffic incident while warning that Jews living in Jerusalem will end any possibility of peace.
Hillary Clinton spent 45 minutes shrieking at Netanyahu over the phone after a planning committee allowed new housing in Jerusalem to advance to the public comment stage, and told the media that the proposal that Jews live in a part of Jerusalem that she believes should belong to Muslims is “insulting” to the United States.
The latest firestorm exploded over seven Jewish families moving into homes that they had bought legally in an area from which Jews had been ethnically cleansed by racist Muslim violence in the twenties and thirties. Earlier the State Department and White House had warned that Israel was alienating “even its closest allies” by proposing to build houses on Airplane Hill, a place mainly known for having an Israeli plane crash there during the Six Day War that had formerly hosted temporary housing for Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.
Meanwhile when Chaya was murdered, the State Department urged “all sides to maintain calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of this incident.” It wasn’t as if anything important had happened. Just an Israeli-American baby murdered in pursuit of their shared goal of Islamizing Jerusalem.
Secretary of State John Kerry did not call President Abbas, the unelected president of the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, to berate him when one of his advisers called the murderer of that child a “heroic martyr”. Hillary Clinton did not come out of retirement to shriek at him over the phone when his party suggested that the killer would be receiving his 72 virgins in paradise.
If only something more important had happened than a presidential advisor to an Obama-backed terror state calling the murderer of an American child a hero; like planning for new housing “advancing”.
No one objects when Muslim settlers build houses in Jerusalem or anywhere else. But the objections pour in when the indigenous Jewish population builds so much as a house or an outhouse.
What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers.
“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”
In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”
Life magazine published photos of the atrocity writing that, “Muslim censors, not only in Palestine but in neighboring Arab countries which have major communication outlets, tried for a fortnight to keep the news from leaking out.”
The Life photographer who took the photos was sentenced to death by the Arab High Committee.
This ethnic cleansing is what Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have been defending. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the thrust of all the peace plans put forward.
The entire phony “Palestinian” narrative in which the regional Sunni Arab Muslim majority that is busy slaughtering Christians, Kurds, Shiites acts as if it’s the victim because its racist ethnic cleansing plans were frustrated when its Jewish victims fought back and won.
The Muslim occupiers have added insult to injury by pretending to be the indigenous population to aid in their attempts at displacing the indigenous Jewish population through terror and lies.
Abdullah el-Talal said, “I have seen in this defeat of the Jews the heaviest blow rendered upon them, especially in terms of morale, since they were evicted from the Western Wall and from the Jewish Quarter, for the first time in fifteen generations.”
Every politician denouncing Jews for building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.
The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.
Too many governments still stand with those who wave the sword of Mohammed and cry death to the Jews. They encourage them, defend their agenda and issue weak rebukes when blood is spilled in the name of Islamizing Jerusalem.
Those politicians who endorse the Islamization of Jerusalem cannot escape responsibility for the crimes of the Islamizers.
Israel’s vile actions, completely out of Obama’s control, have greatly imperiled heroic Palestinian efforts to advance His peace process. Accordingly, Obama has asked neutral and moderate Iran to act as an impartial mediator.
Statement of President Obama
Good morning, My fellow citizens of the world. This morning I must talk with you about the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East and, indeed, the entire world.
The racist apartheid Israeli regime remains obstinate in the face of justifiably severe criticism from the International Community. Israel recently murdered an innocent Palestinianchild for his peaceful protests against the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and other areas of what must, and will, become a free and democratic Palestine for, by and of the Palestinian people. I of course promptly sent condolences to the family of that innocent victim of Israel’s murderous regime, but even My act of compassion failed to soften Netanyahu’s heart of stone.
Similarly, Israeli goons responded to a traffic accident by murdering a Palestinian driver in Occupied Jerusalem. That, like other Israeli murders — including the thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians (many of them little children) murdered by Israel in Gaza — is Islamophobic genocide gone wild. With all of the sincerity I have, I commend the brave Palestinians who stand up to Israel’s murders, illegal construction and other actions contrary to international law in occupied areas and elsewhere, even at the cost of their own precious lives. They are true martyrs for peace, and our hearts are with the families of all such innocent victims of Israeli aggression.
Rather than halt Jewish construction projects in occupied territories, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recently proclaimed his intention to build even more Jewish housing.
“I heard the claim that our building in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem makes peace more distant, but it is the criticism itself that makes peace more distant,” Netanyahu said of criticism that poured in following his announcement of plans to develop 660 more units in Ramot Shlomo in the northern part of the city and 400 in the southern neighborhood of Har Homa.
He is of course wrong, as usual. Were the building of illegal settlements neither happening nor planned at all, there would be no criticism of it. However, it is not only happening, it is accelerating. As the situation Neanderthal, of course I refer to Netanyahu, has created now stands, criticism is not just completely justified. It is absolutely necessary.
Despite the massive but sadly rejected conciliatory efforts, and fruitless attempts at compromise, frequently offered by the duly elected Palestinian Authority President Mohamed Abbas — a man of true Islamic peace, truth, justice and compassion — the situation continues to worsen because of Netanyahu’s senseless intransigence.
The situation is beyond My control — despite My countless great successes in domestic and foreign policy as the President of all of My people and universally acknowledged leader of the International Community. It has passed well beyond the point at which the impartial leaders of Turkey and Qatar can deal with it. Even pro-Israel Egypt, under its disgraced coup leader, dictator and Islamophobic “President” Sisi, has struck out.
Iranian President Rouhani, My esteemed friend and colleague in the pursuit of peace, is now the only world leader capable of dealing with Netanyahu’s senseless obstinacy. He did so in the past and will do so again in dealing with Israel, the cause of most if not all turmoil in the Middle East. A final solution is needed. President Rouhani knows what it is, how to arrange it and how to implement it.
He is a true moderate — in many respects perhaps more moderate than even I am. During his tenure, President Rouhani has taken heroic steps to improve Iran’s respect for the human rights which we should all hold dear but which Israel, under Netanyahu’s dictatorial hand, repeatedly ignores. This photo reveals Israel’s continued execution of innocent Arabs guilty only of adherence to the Religion of Peace:
Only recently, Israel executed this young Muslim woman, to the disgust and sorrow of human rights advocates everywhere, falsely blaming the travesty on Iran:
As soon as the P5+1 negotiators and Iran arrive at a mutually beneficial deal under which Iran can continue its peaceful pursuit of nuclear weapons energy, President Rouhani will be able to undertake the heavy burdens I have asked him to bear. I hope and prey pray that the P5+1 negotiations, long stalled by complaints from Israel and other right wing fear mongers who spout catastrophic nonsense, will succeed in the very near future, indeed soon after November 4th.
Thank you and Allah God Damn Bless America.
********************
By His peace process address and recitation of Iran’s proper place in the International Community as a peace maker, Obama has shown the path He will take as a true citizen of the World and its undisputed leader during the remainder of His term in office.
“We pledge cooperation in proud fulfillment of a great, noble call.” Long may will He rain upon us as our exalted Commander in Chief! The time between now and January 20, 2017 will certainly be, or at least seem to be, very long.
Would General Allen — or any other general today — recommend contracting out his country’s defenses if it were his country at stake? Of course not.
The Iranian regime remains dedicated to undermining and ultimately destroying the State of Israel. The Islamic State also has Israel in its sights and would certainly use the West Bank as a point from which to attack, if it were open to them.
There can be no two-state solution and no sovereign Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan, however desirable those things might be. The stark military reality is that Israel cannot withdraw its forces from the West Bank.
Fatah leaders ally themselves with the terrorists of Hamas, and, like Hamas, they continue to reject the every existence of the State of Israel.
If Western leaders actually want to help, they should use all diplomatic and economic means to make it clear to the Palestinians that they will never achieve an independent and sovereign state while they remain set on the destruction of the State of Israel.
When in 1942 American General Douglas MacArthur took command of the defense of Australia against imminent Japanese invasion, one of the plans he rejected was to withdraw and fight behind the Brisbane line, a move that would have given large swathes of territory to the Japanese.
Instead, he adopted a policy of forward defense: advancing northwards out of Australia to attack the Japanese on the island of New Guinea. MacArthur then went on to play a pivotal role in the defeat of the Japanese empire.
At the end of last year, during the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations involving U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, another extremely able and widely respected American General, John Allen, drew up a plan progressively to withdraw Israeli forces from the West Bank and hand over Israel’s forward defense to a combination of Palestinian Arab forces, international monitors and technology.
Given the range of existential threats emanating from, or through, the West Bank today, known and unknown threats that will develop tomorrow, and the exceptional geographical vulnerability of the State of Israel, such a proposal is blatantly untenable. No other country would take risks with the lives of its people and the integrity of its territory by contracting out their defenses in this way — nor should it.
General Douglas MacArthur (left) strongly believed in forward defense. General John Allen (right) also believes in forward defense — but for U.S. forces only, not for the Israel’s military defending its borders.
Britain, for example, where no such existential threats exist, even refuses to adopt the EU’s Schengen arrangements, which would hand over the security of UK borders to Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, Italy and its other European neighbors. It is a long-standing opt-out that looks wiser by the day as international jihadist aggression against the West increases.
General MacArthur would never have recommended the “Allen Plan.” MacArthur, however, was not then under the same political pressure as General Allen. If he had been, he would have repulsed it. In 1934, as Army Chief of Staff, he argued against President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intention to cut drastically the Army’s budget with such vehemence that he vomited on the steps of the White House as he was leaving.
Would General Allen – or any other general today – recommend a similar plan to his own president, if it were not Israel’s security, but the security of the United States, that was at stake? Of course he would not.
Indeed, U.S. generals unsuccessfully argued the opposite course of action when U.S. President Barack Obama decided on a total withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011, a move that made inevitable the resurgence of large-scale violent jihad.
General Allen is now leading the American and allied forward defensive operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq [ISIS]. In the face of what he has defined as a “clear and present danger to the US,” he is not recommending withdrawal of American forces back into the continental United States and reliance on Arab forces, peacekeepers and technology to protect U.S. interests. The reverse, in fact, is true.
The reverse is also true for the forward defensive operations of the U.S. and its Western allies against violent jihad in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere. All are significant threats to the West, yet none is as immediate and dangerous as the threat to Israel from an undefended West Bank.
Despite the determination of so many in the West erroneously to view the Israel-Palestine conflict as a mere territorial dispute that could be settled if only the so-called “occupation” ended, the forward defensive measures necessary for other Western nations are necessary for Israel as well. The stark military reality is that Israel cannot withdraw its forces from the West Bank — either now or at any point in the foreseeable future.
For those willing to see with clarity and speak with honesty, that conclusion has been obvious for many years. It is even more obvious, perhaps, for leaders with direct responsibility — such as General MacArthur had in Australia in 1942 — than for those who do not have to live with the consequences of their actions — such as General Allen in Israel in 2013.
Recent events have made this reality even more certain. Through incessant rocket fire and the construction of a sophisticated tunnel system to abduct and massacre Israeli civilians on a large scale, Hamas has just delivered another powerful object lesson in the consequences of IDF withdrawal.
Fatah leaders may take a somewhat different stance for international consumption, but they ally themselves with the proscribed terrorists of Hamas. And, like Hamas, in reality they continue to reject the very existence of the State of Israel. They apparently continue to want only a one-state solution: Arab rule from the river to the sea, with the ethnic cleansing of the Jews that would follow.
They are consistently encouraged in this intent, both wittingly and unwittingly, by Western nations, particularly in Europe. Not least by Sweden’s commitment in September to support a unilateral Palestinian state, the UK Parliament’s recent vote for the same thing, and similar moves across Europe that are likely in the coming weeks and months.
Especially with such encouragement, there is no possibility that Palestinian Arab political leaders’ rejection of the Jewish State will modify in the foreseeable future. The launch pad that an IDF-free West Bank would provide for attacks against Israel is so dangerous it makes even Gaza look about as threatening as Switzerland.
The external threats are at least as serious as those from within the West Bank. Despite the wishful thinking of many Western leaders and the alluring grins from Tehran, the Iranian regime remains dedicated to undermining and ultimately destroying the State of Israel. By funding and fomenting violence, Iran’s leadership will continue to exploit the Palestinian Arab populations in both Gaza and the West Bank to these ends.
Those who are currently arguing for Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of a sovereign state must have missed the war General Allen is fighting against the Islamic State [IS] and their jihadist bedfellows across the border in Syria. The Islamic State also has Israel in its sights and would certainly use the West Bank as a point from which to attack, if it were open to them. In the hands of international monitors and Palestinian Arab forces, the West Bank would be wide open to them.
We have only to look at the reaction to aggression of almost all international peacekeepers over the decades to know they would not last five minutes. And we have only to look at the performance of the battle-hardened Syrian and Iraqi armies when confronted by Islamic State fighters to know how long Palestinian Arab forces would withstand such aggression, whether by infiltration or frontal assault.
Whatever happens to the Islamic State in the future, this resurgent Islamist belligerence is not a flash in the pan. On the contrary, it has been building for decades, and President Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and other world leaders acknowledge it as a generational struggle.
This means that for Israel, as far as the West Bank is concerned, both the enemy within and the enemy without are here to stay. And if the IDF has no choice but to remain in the West Bank to defend Israel, there can be no two state solution and no sovereign Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan, however desirable those things might be.
Nor can there be a one-state solution with democratic rights for all because that would spell the end of the one and only democratic and Jewish state and the beginning of a new autocracy and the next exodus of the Jews.
For those who do not want that to happen, the harsh reality is continuation of the status quo. But the status quo can be significantly improved, by gradual and progressive increases to PA autonomy in the West Bank, to the point where a state exists in virtually all aspects other than military security. That progress can only be achieved through low-key bilateral negotiations with concessions from both sides. It cannot be achieved by Kerry-like peace processes that demand big sweeping strokes to deliver groundbreaking, legacy-delivering announcements.
Nor can such progress be achieved in the face of a Western world that reflexively condemns every move Israel makes and encourages the Palestinian Arabs to believe that the fantasy of a two-state solution or a one-state solution on their terms can become a reality in the foreseeable future.
As so often in the paradoxical world of geopolitics, the well-meaning actions and words of national leaders and international organizations have unintended consequences. For the Israel-Palestine situation, the unintended consequences of Western actions are to deprive Palestinian Arabs of increased freedom and prosperity and to undermine the security of the only stable, liberal democratic state in the Middle East. If the West actually wants to help, its leaders need to face up to this unpalatable truth rather than continue to delude the Palestinian people as well as themselves.
Instead, Western leaders should use all available diplomatic and economic means to make it clear to the Palestinians that they will never achieve an independent and sovereign state while they remain set on the destruction of the State of Israel and while they continue to brainwash future generations to believe in that goal.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments