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Time to wake up

December 19, 2014

Time to wake up, Israel Hayom, Dror Eydar, December 19, 2014

(Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

— DM)

Who is responsible for most of the terrorist acts around the world today? Mother Theresa? What percentage of Muslims support militant Islamist organizations? These are not “lone-wolves” — this is a serious phenomenon with grave implications on the free world. It is something that needs to be confronted, rather than ganging up on anyone who points it out.

Isn’t it time to wake up?

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1. They haven’t woken up yet. Certainly not in Australia. Even after the deadly terrorist attack at a cafe in Sydney, parts of the institutionalized Australian media are still trying to delude their audience, maintaining that it was a “lone-wolf” who perpetrated the horrific assault. The Australian prime minister “took comfort” in the knowledge that the assailant had a history of mental illness.

A European court decided this week that Hamas is not a terrorist organization — it is a charity group with some “lone-wolf” members. The West’s basic instincts have become dull, after decades of suppressing its own survival mechanism by self-imposing a stern “politically correct” regime. Most of the leading figures in the West (and in Israel) are more concerned with how they are perceived by the community, and that they say the “correct” words that they are allowed to say, than they are with actually confronting the truth.

Who is responsible for most of the terrorist acts around the world today? Mother Theresa? What percentage of Muslims support militant Islamist organizations? These are not “lone-wolves” — this is a serious phenomenon with grave implications on the free world. It is something that needs to be confronted, rather than ganging up on anyone who points it out.

In February 2007, Professor Raphael Israeli — an international expert on Islam and professor at Hebrew University — was interviewed by an Australian newspaper. In the interview, Israeli warned that the Muslim minority living in the continent posed a real threat to the Australians. His studies suggest that life can become unbearable when the Muslim population of a Western country reaches critical mass (in one study he even attached a number to this idea of critical mass: 10 percent of the general population). It is a rule of thumb, he said, and if it applies everywhere, it certainly applies in Australia.

As an example, he cited the riots in Paris in 2006. Israeli suggested that the Australians ban the entry of Muslim radicals and adopt a preventative approach to avoid flooding the continent with immigrants from Indonesia. Muslim immigrants, he argued, have a reputation of taking advantage of Western tolerance and hospitality to advance their own ends. Trains in London and in Madrid were not blown up by Christians or Buddhists. They were blown up by Muslims. Precautions must be taken, he warned.

Not too far from Australia, in Bali, Islamist organizations perpetrated two horrifying terrorist attacks in 2002 and in 2005. Bali bomber Amrozi bin Nurhasin, who was charged with causing the deaths of more than 200 people, stood up in court in front of the global media and cried out “Jews! Remember Khaibar. The army of Muhammad is coming back to defeat you.” Not one of the 200 victims was Jewish. The Australians watched, read the warnings, and went back to what they were doing.

When Israeli was interviewed, the Bali attacks were still fresh, but the regime political correctness made sure to take the string out. Israeli became the target of a Bolshevik-style witch hunt. He was accused of racism, xenophobia, and was called a plethora of derogatory names. He received death threats. In response, the Middle East expert told the Australians to wait and see what happens. This week, one would hope that the Australians recalled Israeli’s cautionary words. Maybe some of them wondered why they didn’t heed his warning. Maybe.

2. On Monday, radio personality Tali Lipkin-Shahak interviewed Professor Israeli. It wasn’t the interview that was notable, but the style in which it was conducted — a style shared particularly by many Israeli journalists, and Western journalists in general. “You were ahead of your time,” she said to him. Israeli replied that he had been investigating the Muslim “diaspora” in Western countries for over a decade, and that in that time the Muslim population has grown to alarming proportions.

“But why do you attribute violent intentions to the immigration process?” the interviewer asked him. “Joseph also immigrated to Egypt,” she remarked, evoking the Book of Genesis.

True, the professor answered, remarking that he had written five books on the subject, “but Joseph’s family had not proclaimed that it planned to conquer Egypt or to convert Egypt to become Israelite.”

“The Muslims explicitly say that they did not come to Europe in order to become European, but to Islamize Europe.” They have vowed that a Muslim flag will wave over 10 Downing Street in England and over Versailles Palace in France within 25 years, he explained.

Lipkin-Shahak then said that “one can always [always!] talk about those people in terms of a negligible, extremist minority, including the terrorist attackers.” Even ISIS, she said, “has no more than several thousand members.”

Israeli insisted that these atrocities are nothing new. In the past, Muslims who immigrated to Australia, Scandinavia and Germany, as well as other places, have perpetrated very serious attacks.

The overly concerned interviewers rushed to protect the ears of her tender listeners, saying “I have to be the one to tone things down, or at least present the opposing view,” she said. “What you are saying, it is very serious. You are vilifying an entire population; you are contributing to the process of hatred and counter-hatred, which only causes harm and intensifies the violence.”

Israeli was not surprised. “That is exactly what they told me in Australia, until they became the victims of a catastrophe…This is my job. Anyone who wants to listen can listen. Anyone who doesn’t, they can wait for the next catastrophe.”

Lipkin-Shahak stuck to her guns: “We listened, but we voiced a skeptical opinion. We disagree.”

“What are you basing your opinion on?” Israeli wondered in desperation. “I am basing my opinion on thirty years of research, studying Islam, and you are basing yours on a trend, on the fact that it is not nice to say these things. We are talking on two completely different planes.”

Indeed, two completely different worlds. Facts vs. beliefs. Reality vs. fantasy. Make love not war; imagine there’s no countries, and no religion too. A very special kind of liberal fundamentalism. The moment the truth comes knocking, they retreat into their politically correct shells and refuse to recognize the facts. There is no such thing as Muslim terrorism. The terrorists come from outer space. Islam is a religion of peace and we mustn’t link it to all these terrible acts perpetrated in its name. Sadly, the people who think this way — the politically correct — have the microphone. The researcher with the facts is only a momentary guest.

3. The politically correct mechanism that launders the language that we use makes it very hard to express doubt in these John Lennon-esque fantasies, like the Oslo Accords for example. It may be hard to believe, but the principles of the Oslo Accords are still being marketed, under new names, to this day. Case in point: The recent empty declarations made by newfound partners Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog regarding their ability to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For our own good, we need to examine the remarks made by the late Arab-Palestinian minister Ziad Abu Ein, who, in 1979, murdered Boaz Lahav of Tiberias and David Lankri of Beit Shean and seriously wounded five others when he detonated an explosive device inside a trash can on a busy Tiberias street.

In July, 2006, Abu Ein told Al-Alam Iranian television that “the Oslo Accords are not the dream of the Palestinian people. However, there would never have been resistance in Palestine without Oslo. Oslo is the effective and potent greenhouse whish embraced the Palestinian resistance.”

“Without Oslo, there would never have been resistance. In all the occupied territories, we could not move a single pistol from place to place. Without Oslo, and being armed through Oslo, and without the Palestinian Authority’s A areas, without the training, the camps, the protection afforded by Oslo, and without the freeing of thousands of Palestinian prisoners through Oslo — this Palestinian resistance and we would not have been able to create this great Palestinian Intifada.”

Isn’t it time to wake up?

Categories: Europe, Fatah, Foreign policy, Hamas, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jihad, Political correctness, Terrorism
Tags: Europe, Fatah, Foreign Policy, Hamas, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jihad, Political correctness, Terrorism

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Jihadists Using Liberalism Against Itself

December 19, 2014

Jihadists Using Liberalism Against Itself, Commentary Magazine, Tom Wilson, December 19, 2014

This of course is the war that Israel has been fighting for years, ever since its creation in fact. Most recently there have been feverish blood libels about the IDF harvesting Palestinian organs, of summary executions during the 2010 flotilla incident, and of a supposed massacre and mass graves in Jenin during the Second Intifada. With all of these accusations Israel is obliged to investigate the conduct of its military, and so it does. That was what was so outrageous about the UN’s Goldstone investigation and indeed the subsequent attempt to have a Goldstone II following the war in Gaza this summer. Such international inquiries are only supposed to be mandated where a state has failed to adequately investigate itself first–but in Israel’s case the international community simply steps in and puts on its own investigation regardless, usually with the conclusion having been written at the outset.

The problem is that while many of them may now realize that the Islamists their armies encounter are unreasonable fanatics, they are equally convinced that the Islamists Israel faces have a legitimate grievance and a just cause.

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While the West’s enemies become ever more unrestrained in the barbaric nature of their attacks, Islamist militants are increasingly pursuing tactics aimed at limiting what the West can do in its own defense. As a recent case in Britain has demonstrated, jihadists and their supporters are more than happy to fabricate the most outlandish allegations in an often successful attempt to hinder the fight against them. This is the kind of thing that Israel has been having to deal with for decades, and at some point other Western states need to comprehend that they are all up against the same enemy, one which is willing to employ the same underhanded tactics against all of us.

In May 2004, British troops became embroiled in a three-hour gun battle with insurgents of the Mahdi Army at Al Amara, Iraq. Following the battle it was alleged that British soldiers tortured, executed, and then mutilated the bodies of twenty Iraqi detainees. These accusations have dragged on for a decade now and in response the UK government commissioned the al-Sweady Inquiry, an investigation which has cost the British taxpayer almost $49 million, with the accusers having been able to claim financial assistance from the British state to fund their case against it.

And what did the tribunal discover? The al-Sweady Inquiry has stated unequivocally that the allegations made against the British soldiers are “without foundation,” and that those making these accusations had given evidence that was “unprincipled in the extreme” and “wholly without regard for the truth.”

So after years of investigation, and tens of millions in public money spent (much of it having been used to assist those bringing claims against the British army), the soldiers have at long last had their names cleared while the jihadi militants have been exposed as liars. Hardly surprising; it’s simply delusional to imagine that those who are so unprincipled as to use terrorism to achieve their aims would suddenly become upstanding and honest witnesses once stood before a war-crimes investigation. What these people are, however, is mendacious and calculating in the extreme, and regardless of what al-Sweady may have concluded, by using public money to advance these outrageous allegations the jihadists have won by hijacking the West’s liberalism and respect for the rule of law for their own advantage.

Quite apart from the tremendous financial cost that this investigation and many more like it have carried, the decade that these allegations circulated for have been an outstanding public-relations victory for the insurgents. The media–large parts of which were eager to see Western forces fail in Iraq and Afghanistan–were all too ready to believe the stories spun by the militants and to think the worst of our soldiers. By parroting these lies ad nauseam, the Western media assisted the militants in undermining public morale at home, eroding belief in the rightness of the cause we were fighting for and convincing many that intervention overseas is rarely a defensible or admirable undertaking. In Europe particularly, these tales provide the recruiting fodder that radicalizes young Muslims into believing that their host societies are evil and that they too must join the war against the West. If nothing else, the constant fear of these damaging war crimes allegations persuade Western governments and militaries to be still more restrained in the tactics that they feel able to use in the increasingly muted attempt to counter our enemies.

This of course is the war that Israel has been fighting for years, ever since its creation in fact. Most recently there have been feverish blood libels about the IDF harvesting Palestinian organs, of summary executions during the 2010 flotilla incident, and of a supposed massacre and mass graves in Jenin during the Second Intifada. With all of these accusations Israel is obliged to investigate the conduct of its military, and so it does. That was what was so outrageous about the UN’s Goldstone investigation and indeed the subsequent attempt to have a Goldstone II following the war in Gaza this summer. Such international inquiries are only supposed to be mandated where a state has failed to adequately investigate itself first–but in Israel’s case the international community simply steps in and puts on its own investigation regardless, usually with the conclusion having been written at the outset.

Israel, like Britain and America, does undertake costly and time-consuming investigations where there are allegations of war crimes. But as we have seen so many times before, within hours the international media will have beamed the most tarnishing accusations against Israel around the world several times over. Months later when investigators have established the allegations as baseless, no one is listening anymore and the damage is done.

The debacle of the al-Sweady Inquiry has naturally caused some outrage in Britain, and so one hopes that some lessons will have been learned. But if observers have been reminded that jihadists are readily prepared to use war crimes accusations as a second front in the war against the West, they should also recognize the same tactic when they see it being deployed against Israel. The problem is that while many of them may now realize that the Islamists their armies encounter are unreasonable fanatics, they are equally convinced that the Islamists Israel faces have a legitimate grievance and a just cause.

Categories: Europe, Fairy tales, Foreign policy, Freedom, Ideology, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Palestinians
Tags: Europe, Fairy tales, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Ideology, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Palestinians

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Chutzpah redefined

December 18, 2014

Chutzpah redefined, Israel Hayom, Sarah N. Stern, December 18, 2014

(When reality is unpleasant, as it often is, those not personally experiencing reality make decisions based on pleasant fantasies. — DM)

[T]his is supposed to be a “peace process.” The operative word here is “peace.” How dare we dictate anything to the Israelis, who are forced to live with the deadly consequences of this obviously flawed foreign policy paradigm? How can we presume to know better than they what it is that the Israelis can actually live with?

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In September 1993, when Yasser Arafat was recast from the role of “granddaddy of terrorism” to that of “peacemaker,” the Oslo Accords were marketed to the Israeli public and to world Jewry wrapped in the package of “reversibility.” I remember clearly when a friend of mine, a leftist television personality, assured me: “Don’t worry, Sarah. We will be watching Arafat very closely. It all depends on his compliance with our strict guidelines. He has to stop all the incitement and all the terror. It’s only Gaza and Jericho first. If it doesn’t work, we can always go back and retrieve it.”

That was 21 years ago. Since then, not a day goes by without another fiery Palestinian Authority incident of incitement (painstakingly documented and broadcast to the world by the good work of Palestinian Media Watch). This hatred has metastasized like a cancer and an entire generation has grown up steeped in it. The horrific result is the vast number of Israelis murdered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists.

This past week Khalil Shikaki from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a poll which indicated that a full 80 percent of Palestinians support stepping up violent attacks against Israelis, including random stabbings and traffic attacks. Over 86 percent believe that Haram al-Sharif (or the Temple Mount, where Al-Aqsa mosque is located) is in danger.

That comes as no surprise because 93 percent of Palestinians consider themselves to be religious Muslims, and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority has been constantly stirring up hysteria that “the Jews are desecrating Haram al-Sharif.”

Although the Oslo Accords were presented as conditional, successive Israeli governments have upheld them, despite the steady stream of constant, daily incitement and increasing number of what the Left used to euphemistically call “korbanot shel shalom” (“victims of peace”).

We Jews seem to have gotten ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole. And many of our leaders do not seem to understand the basic philosophy that “when you are in a hole, you should stop digging.”

American presidents, politicians and diplomats have consistently argued that “Israeli-Palestinian negotiations should be left up to parties themselves.”

Which brings us to Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett’s spirited debate with Martin Indyk at the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum last week. Bennett courageously uttered the words: “We’re stuck in the conventional directions that we’ve been working on over the past three decades. There’s only one game [foreign policy paradigm] in town and that is a Palestinian state in the heart of Israel. Now, regardless of whether you support it or not, the reality is, it’s not working. It’s not working.”

The outcry from American journalists and officials, who have based their careers on the success of the peace process and the two-state paradigm, was so intense one would have thought Bennett had said something highly irresponsible, such as that Arabs are the descendants of apes and pigs (a remark that official Palestinian Authority media frequently uses to describe Jews).

After all, this is supposed to be a “peace process.” The operative word here is “peace.” How dare we dictate anything to the Israelis, who are forced to live with the deadly consequences of this obviously flawed foreign policy paradigm? How can we presume to know better than they what it is that the Israelis can actually live with?

The premise of “land for peace,” which has dominated American foreign policy and the its attitude toward Israel over the last two decades, might well work in the West when dealing with a land dispute between the United States and Mexicans or Canadians. But it is patently obvious, when listening to the inflammatory rhetoric that comes directly out of the mouths of Palestinian Authority officials, that they have never laid down the societal groundwork for peace, but rather for its very opposite.

This has been going on for over a generation. Words and ideas matter. These hateful words have seeped deep into the consciousness of an entire generation of Palestinians. They lead to tragedies like the recent attack at the Har Nof synagogue in which four Israelis were killed while reciting morning prayers (and a Druze policeman was killed coming to their aid); or earlier this week, when an Israeli family of five stopped to pick up a hitchhiker in Judea and Samaria and was subjected to an acid attack; or in October when a three-month-old, the first child for a couple who had endured years of infertility, was murdered when a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into a group of Israelis waiting at a light rail station in Jerusalem.

For some, in America, this is merely a statistic. But for Israelis and Jews, this was somebody’s father, somebody’s mother, somebody’s brother, sister or child. Israel is a tiny country. By now there is hardly anyone in the country who does not personally know someone wounded or murdered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists.

If this were a scientific experiment, we would have reached the null hypothesis a long time ago, and realized it was time to go back to the drawing board.

Whether or not one agrees with Bennett, it is impossible not to admire his moral courage and intellectual honesty for publicly declaring something every Israeli and every Palestinian already knows. He is like the little boy in the story who, in front of everyone, points to the naked monarch and declares: The emperor wears no clothes!

As Bennett said, “Let’s stop looking at perfection, the ideal dream of two states living side by side in peace and democracy. Let’s stop talking perfection that has led us to disaster.”

Yet Indyk, who has made a career out of the peace process industry, had the audacity to tell him, “You are talking pure mythology. … You live in another reality. … You live in what Steve Jobs called ‘a distorted reality.'”

Bennett responded with, “This is quite a sentence. I have been through the First Intifada, the Second Intifada. You attend conferences. I have been on the ground there. How many missiles have to fall on Ashkelon until you wake up? How many people need to die before you wake up from this illusion? When will you say you were wrong?”

Bennett deserves high praise for injecting a bit of reality into the fantasy world that exists inside the beltway, where everyone continues to cling to the illusions of 1993. So many of our think tanks, diplomats and scholars look at the Taliban attack in a school in Pakistan or the hostage crisis in a cafe in Australia as a deplorable acts of terrorism, but when it comes to Palestinian terrorists taking the lives of Israeli citizens, our State Department officials say, “Both sides have to try harder,” as Secretary of State John Kerry said at a press conference in London this week.

This is a hypocritical double standard that no one but Israel would be expected to endure. When people impose a standard on Israel, the Jewish state, that they would never impose on themselves, we have one word for it and that word is anti-Semitism.

Sometimes this anti-Semitism comes directly out of the mouths of Jews. Two thousand years of living in the Diaspora has had an indelible effect on our collective psyche. Many Jews are self-conscious of their Judaism, and want the love of the world so desperately that they have to prove to the world how liberal and broad minded they are … at the expense of their own Israeli brothers and sisters.

I could never understand how anyone sitting in a comfortable living room on this side of the Atlantic, never knowing what it is like to constantly fear for their lives and never worrying about having 60 seconds or less to gather the entire family and hide from incoming missiles, can claim to know better than the Israelis about what is good for them.

This gives new meaning to the definition of the term “chutzpah.”

Categories: Abbas, Europe, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, Ideology, Islam, Israel, Leftists, Moral equivalence, Obama administration, Palestinians, Peace process, Terrorism, Two state solution
Tags: Abbas, Bennett, Europe, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Hamas, Ideology, Islam, Israel, Leftists, Moral equivalence, Obama Administration, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians, Peace Process, Terrorism, Two state solution, Yasser Arafat

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The Middle East realists: Old and new

December 14, 2014

The Middle East realists: Old and new, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, December 14, 2014

America, according to Friedman and the Israel Lobby professors ‎should also ignore Israeli concerns and push forward with a nuclear ‎deal with Iran. A successful negotiation, even one which leaves Iran ‎with nuclear breakout capability in a few months, is certain to ‎change Iran’s pattern of international behavior, as it becomes a ‎regular member of the “community of nations” and gets back to ‎enjoying more robust economic relations with many other nations. ‎Iranian aid to Hezbollah, Hamas, Assad in Syria, Yemeni Shiite ‎rebel groups, Iraqi Shiites, all of these aggressive efforts will soften ‎or go away once Iran becomes America’s latest and greatest strategic ‎partner.‎

Friedman has been one of the great lap dogs for the Obama ‎administration, and his loyalty cost the president very little.

A touch of realism would be welcome in the White House at this ‎point. But it won’t happen because the self-styled realists are ‎wearing the blinkers, and think they know all there is to know.‎

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Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of ‎Government and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago like to ‎call themselves foreign policy realists. Realists are, in their minds, people who can ‎assess international situations without any ideological blinders or bias. Walt and ‎Mearsheimer co-authored “The Israel Lobby,” originally as a lengthy article in the ‎London Review of Books in 2006, and then as a much longer book version in 2007. In both ‎the article and book, the professors argued that America’s very tight relationship ‎with Israel was strategically unsound for the United States. The authors claimed ‎that the closeness between the two countries was a product of the behavior of the ‎Congress of the United States, which they believe had been unduly influenced by ‎the political power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and ‎other supporters of the Jewish state, such as evangelical Christians. ‎

In less academic, and blunter terms, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman ‎welcomed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his address to a joint session ‎of Congress in 2011, writing that the applause for Netanyahu reflected the fact that the ‎Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”‎

Of course, Friedman had been out ahead of Walt and Mearsheimer, with a similar ‎themed comment in a column in The New York Times in February 5, 2004:‎

‎”Israel’s prime minister has had George Bush under ‎house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. ‎Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded ‎by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice ‎president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. ‎Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the ‎president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election ‎year all conspiring to make sure the president does ‎nothing.”

Friedman styles himself as an “eminence grise,” sitting high up in ‎New York Times land, a platform from where he can speak as an ‎equal with the likes of academic intellectuals such as Mearsheimer ‎and Walt, but also foreign leaders too numerous to name, and ‎American presidents, all of whom understand the significance of ‎receiving a favorable column from Tom Friedman. As a presumably ‎great strategic thinker and realist like Walt and Mearsheimer, ‎Friedman has come to the same conclusions as the professors on ‎where America’s strategic interests lie in the Middle East. America ‎must challenge Israel and force a two-state solution with the ‎Palestinians. This is in Israel’s interests as well, of course, since the ‎absence of peace creates so much ill will for both Israel and its ally ‎America among other nations in the region and around the world. ‎Friedman always claims he has Israel’s real interests at heart, while ‎their elected government digs deeper holes. Clearly, if Israel were ‎only to be more forthcoming, the deal with the Palestinians could ‎finally get done this time (next time, some time, whenever…). ‎

America, according to Friedman and the Israel Lobby professors ‎should also ignore Israeli concerns and push forward with a nuclear ‎deal with Iran. A successful negotiation, even one which leaves Iran ‎with nuclear breakout capability in a few months, is certain to ‎change Iran’s pattern of international behavior, as it becomes a ‎regular member of the “community of nations” and gets back to ‎enjoying more robust economic relations with many other nations. ‎Iranian aid to Hezbollah, Hamas, Assad in Syria, Yemeni Shiite ‎rebel groups, Iraqi Shiites, all of these aggressive efforts will soften ‎or go away once Iran becomes America’s latest and greatest strategic ‎partner.‎

Friedman has been one of the great lap dogs for the Obama ‎administration, and his loyalty cost the president very little. In his ‎case, the president revealed that he reads Friedman’s columns, and ‎then followed it up by inviting Friedman into the Oval Office to ‎offer up his invaluable insights. With all that respect and notoriety, ‎nothing could possibly stop the love coming from the Times ‎columnist for everything Obama. Friedman’s latest service to President Barack ‎Obama was to trash the critics of the president’s Iran policy:‎

‎ ‎‎”Never have I seen Israel and America’s core Arab allies ‎working more in concert to stymie a major foreign policy ‎initiative of a sitting U.S. president, and never have I seen ‎more lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — more ‎willing to take Israel’s side against their own president’s. ‎I’m certain this comes less from any careful consideration ‎of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many ‎American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks ‎them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign ‎donations. “‎

Friedman and Walt and Mearsheimer are locked into an old and ‎predictable thesis that America’s real strategic interest in the region ‎is securing its oil supplies, and cozying up with the oil-rich nations ‎of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Improving relations with Iran fosters ‎a new climate where American is not so isolated as a result of its ‎support for Israel. And if Israel and the Palestinians make peace, ‎there will be a warm glow everywhere, improving the atmospherics ‎to address other regional issues.‎

There is however a new realism which has overtaken some of those ‎countries who have been patronized by the American realists for ‎decades. For years, many oil rich nations subsidized the efforts of ‎Islamists in schools, universities, mosques, and in politics. They ‎believed they had bought them off to a large extent in their own ‎countries, but could tip the scales against Israel by aiding Hamas ‎and could satisfy the aggressive demands for Islamist expansion in ‎other places. ‎

The new realism, demonstrated most prominently by Egypt, but ‎also by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all Sunni Arab states, is that ‎Iran, in particular a nuclear Iran, will become more assertive, not ‎less, and represents the biggest threat to their own regimes. Sunni ‎Islamists are also a threat to stability — witness Iraq, Libya, Syria, the ‎Sinai in Egypt. Increasingly, Turkey and Qatar are now grouped ‎with Iran as advancing an agenda that is unhelpful to the Saudis, ‎Egypt, and the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt will not vote with ‎Israel at the United Nations, and they will continue to sign onto the ‎usual collection of resolutions condemning Israeli human rights ‎violations against the Palestinians. But it is Egypt that has gone to ‎war with jihadists in Sinai, and effectively shut its border with ‎Gaza. Egyptian soldiers and civilians are being murdered by Hamas ‎and other allies of the Muslim Brotherhood. Defeating this threat is ‎as important to Egypt, as defeating Hamas is for Israel.‎

Caroline Glick makes the argument this way:‎

‎”But the alliance that emerged this summer between Israel and ‎Egypt, with the participation of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, is ‎also a highly significant strategic development. For the first time, ‎a major regional power is basing its strategic posture on its ‎understanding that the threats against itself and against Israel ‎stem from the same sources and as a consequence, that the ‎war against Israel is a war against it.‎

“Israelis have argued this case for years to their Arab neighbors ‎as well as to the Americans and other Western states. But for ‎multiple reasons, no one has ever been willing to accept this ‎basic, obvious reality.‎

“As a consequence, everyone from the Americans to the ‎Europeans to the Saudis long supported policies that empower ‎jihadist forces against Israel.‎

‎‎ ‎“[Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah] Sissi is the first major leader to break with this consensus, as a ‎result of actions Hamas took before and since his rise to power. ‎He has brought Saudi Arabia and the UAE along on his ‎intellectual journey.‎

‎ ‎“Sissi’s reassessment of the relationship between the war against ‎Israel and the war against Egypt has had a profound impact on ‎regional realities generally and on Israel’s strategic posture ‎specifically.‎

‎”From Israel’s perspective, this is a watershed event.‎

‎ ‎“The government must take every possible action, in economic ‎and military spheres, to ensure that Sissi benefits from his ‎actions.”‎

Of course, the Obama administration seemed enthralled with the ‎Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, and both threatened ‎and for a time carried out an aid suspension when Sissi and his supporters engineered the ‎overthrow. There have been rumors, denied of course, that the White House has entertained similar notions for Israel due to its ‎‎”unconstructive” policy on settlement construction. More likely, ‎the administration may be trying to intervene in a none too ‎subtle fashion with the upcoming Israeli elections, to signal how ‎much better relations would be between Israel and America if ‎only Netanyahu were gone. If that is the White House strategy, it is not, ‎to use a word, realistic. Most Israelis expect nothing but the ‎back of the hand from Obama at this point, and Obama’s ‎blessing will not enhance the candidates of the Left in the ‎election.

A touch of realism would be welcome in the White House at this ‎point. But it won’t happen because the self-styled realists are ‎wearing the blinkers, and think they know all there is to know.‎

Categories: Egypt, Europe, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, Iran, Iran scam, Israel, Multiculturalism, Netanyahu, Obama, Palestinians, Peace process
Tags: America, Egypt, Europe, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Hamas, Iran, Iran Scam, Israel, Israel lobby, Multiculturalism, Netanyahu, Palestinians, Peace Process

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Op-Ed: Going from Bad to Worse

December 14, 2014

Op-Ed: Going from Bad to Worse, Israel National News, Ted Belman, December 14, 2014

(Please see also Caroline Glick tells off Danish ambassador and Preacher at Al-Aqsa Mosque to the Jews: “We Shall Slaughter You Without Mercy” — DM)

From the point of view of Obama, the more pressure on Israel, the better. Europe agrees. The European parliaments, one after another, have favoured the recognition of Palestine in non-binding resolutions.

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The world is totally committed to the two-statesolution. European country after country is passing non-binding resolutions to recognize Palestine in principle. The parameters of the deal which have been set in stone, notwithstanding that all issues are to be decided by negotiations, are the ’67 lines plus swaps and the division of Jerusalem.

Never mind that such a deal is not good enough for the Arabs. Hamas rejects it outright. Mahmoud Abbas, as President of the PA, is still clamoring for the so called right of return and is unwilling to recognize Israel as the home of the Jews while at the same time insisting that “Palestine” be yudenrein.

The EU has already put a boycott on goods from Judea and Samaria and is drafting legislation imposing sanctions on Israel. It is even rumored that the US is contemplating doing the same. That’s ironic considering that both want to ease sanctions on Iran.

Israel, for its part is going along to get along, at least that is, to a degree. Netanyahu has agreed to negotiate the two-state solution subject to three pillars, “One, genuine mutual recognition; two, an end to all claims, including the right of return; and three, a long-term Israeli security presence.” This is according to his remarks to the Saban Conference. He did not mention borders. Would he accept ’67 lines plus swaps? He didn’t say but I think it is implied. Even so, there are no takers.

The Palestine Authority (PA) has turned its back on negotiations which would require it to accept these pillars and instead is getting ready to ask the UN Security Council to recognize the state of Palestine and to call for Israel to evacuate the territories calling for a full Israeli withdraw to the pre-1967 lines by November 2016.

The Obama administrations is working to prevent this but at the same time is considering the implications of not vetoing it. From the point of view of Obama, the more pressure on Israel, the better. Europe agrees. The European parliaments, one after another, have favoured the recognition of Palestine in non-binding resolutions.

Congress, on the other hand, in their spending bill, provides as follows, according to the Washington Post, “The bill stops assistance to the Palestinian Authority if it becomes a member of the United Nations or UN agencies without an agreement with Israel. It also prohibits funds for Hamas.” and provides “$3.1 billion in total aid for the country (Israel) plus $619.8 million in defense aid”. It has yet to pass.

Meanwhile the PA continues its incitement and lies. A recent poll of Palestinians showed that 80 percent supported individual attacks by Palestinians who have stabbed Israelis or rammed cars into crowded train stations and 59.6 percent supporting rocket fire at Israel. Is this a partner for peace? This poll may have been intended to promote the resistance.

At long last Israel is mounting certain responses. 1) Greater police presence in Jerusalem with fewer restrictions on them, 2) Greater penalties, like longer sentences, for any violent rioters and 3) Enacting zero tolerance laws prohibiting incitement. The Bill, not yet passed into law, states, “A call to an act of violence or terror deserves condemnation in the criminal realm as well, even if it is insufficient to lead to violence or terror. It does not deserve to be protected by the principle of freedom of expression.”

Wednesday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon attributed the building freeze in Judea and Samaria to pressure from the Obama administration and suggested Israel has to wait him out.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that objection to “settlements” was longstanding and would not change after President Barack Obama leaves office in 2017 and said “Our policy has been consistent for quite some time,”

I am not so sure. Besides, she misses the point. While all administrations, from President Reagan on have considered settlements, while not illegal, to be an “obstacle to peace”, none of them forced Israel to freeze construction and even planning for construction and certainly not in Jerusalem.

The US and the EU continually allege that ‘settlements’ are an obstacle to peace. Have you ever heard them claim the same about PA incitement, or its support of terror or its refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or its unwillingness to forego the “right of return”? Maybe, a little bit in passing, but they have done nothing to change their position and hardly condemned them.

Furthermore, Obama’s decision to back negotiations based on borders along the ’67 lines plus swaps was a big mistake. Doing so was contrary to his often stated position that any settlement must come through direct negotiations. He has forever repeated the mantra that neither side should take any unilateral moves which pre-determine the outcome. He himself, by predetermining the borders, is pre-determining the outcome.

Had he not pre-determined the borders of the final settlement, then Israel would have been entitled to build everywhere at its peril, meaning that when borders are agreed upon, if ever, the housing on Israel’s side would remain and the housing on the Palestinian side would have to be vacated if the PA insists on the Nazi doctrine of making the land yuden frie (Jew free) and the West supports such a doctrine.

The only unilateral moves proscribed by the Oslo Accords and all subsequent agreements, are those which change the status of the land. By this is meant, claiming sovereignty. So Israel can’t annex the land andthe PA can’t go to the UN and ask them for sovereignty, not so long as the Oslo Accords have not been formally abrogated. The construction of housing by Israel in no way changes the status of the land. And neither does land use planning.

And if you think that Israel will agree to divide Jerusalem, their eternal capital, think again. Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem, when addressing the JPOST Diplomatic Conference attended by over three hundred of diplomats, gave a very upbeat assessment of the transformation of Jerusalem that is taking place and will continue to take place. He stressed the commitment by him and the government to maintain the status quo between all religions. He ended by disabusing the audience of any thoughts they might have about dividing Jerusalem. It will never happen, he said, and I believe him.

Israel is consumed with the issue of whether to pass the nation-state bill which essentially declares that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. To do so, claims the left in Israel, is to diminish it as a democratic state. But there is no evidence to support this.

Eugene Kontorovich wrote a two part article in the Washington Post onThe legitimacy of Israel’s nation-state bill in which he said the bill was unremarkable when compared to many European constitutions with similar, and stronger, national homeland provisions.

He also argued that:

“The proposed measure must also be understood in the context of Israel’s diplomatic situation. Israel’s biggest diplomatic issue is the status of Jerusalem and the West Bank, and international pressure to create a new Arab state there and in Gaza. The major argument by proponents of territorial withdrawal (including President Obama and Sec. Kerry) is that despite the serious security risks, Israel must retreat in order to maintain a “Jewish state.” Indeed, even foreign leaders, like President Obama and Secretary Kerry have both justified their pressure on Israel by invoking the preservation of the Israel’s Jewish identity.”

And went further:

“Thus supporters of Israel leaving the West Bank believe having a Jewish state is worth security risks, surrendering historical homeland and religious sites, and expelling over 100,000 Jews. That suggests a Jewish state is not merely a legitimate thing, but one that is worth a great deal. Yet the same voices calling for Israel to undertake dangerous diplomatic concessions in the name of preserving the state’s Jewish identity balk at legislation declaring that the state in fact is what they claim they want it to remain.”

According to a Israel Democracy Institute recent Poll, 75% of Israeli Jews see no contradiction between Israel being Jewish and being dermcratic.

MEMRI, the NGO that for years has translated the Arab media to document what the Arabs including the PA say among themselves as opposed to what they say in English to the West, prefaced their latest report with this:

“Preacher At Al-Aqsa Mosque In Jerusalem Tells Jews: ‘We Shall Slaughter You Without Mercy’ and ‘I Say To [You] Loud And Clear: The Time For Your Slaughter Has Come’; Says Koran Depicted Jews ‘In The Most Abominable Images,’ Allah Turned The Jews ‘Into Apes And Pigs’; Calls To ‘Hasten The Establishment Of The State Of The Islamic Caliphate’”

Is there any making peace with these people?

Categories: Abbas, Antisemitism, Europe, Fatah, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, International Community, Israel, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Netanyahu, Obama, Palestinians, Peace process, Temple Mount, Two state solution, United Nations
Tags: Abbas, Antisemitism, Europe, Fatah, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Hamas, International Community, Israel, Jerusalem, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Netanyahu, Palestinians, Peace Process, Temple Mount, Two state solution, United Nations

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ISIS’s Stay-at-Home Radicals

December 9, 2014

ISIS’s Stay-at-Home Radicals, Abigail R. Esman, December 9, 2014

(Could there be some in Israel? In the United States?– DM)

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[A]n analysis by Italian academics of more than 2 million Arabic-language posts online found that “support for Islamic State among Arabic-speaking social media users in Belgium, Britain, France and the US is greater than in the militant group’s heartlands of Syria and Iraq.”

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Across Europe and America, governments and intelligence officials are struggling to address the problem of Western Muslims who join the jihad in Syria – and then come back home again. But in the process, they may be missing the bigger threat: the ones who never left.

Counterterrorism experts agree that the danger posed by returning jihadists is significant: already radicalized before they joined groups like the Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), they are now well-trained in the practice of terrorist warfare. Unlike most Westerners, they have overcome any discomfort they may have previously felt about killing or confronting death. Chances are, they’ve already done it.

And their numbers are increasing: already an estimated 3,000 westerners have made the move to join the Islamic State and similar terrorist groups. Hence many countries, including the Netherlands and England, have determined to revoke the passports of any Syrian fighter known to carry dual nationality (many second-generation Turkish and Moroccan immigrants carry passports from their family’s land of origin. Similar bills have also been proposed in the U.S., such as one put forward by U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. The UK has also considered confiscating the passports of all British citizens who join the jihad, but such measures have been rejected on the basis of concerns about leaving individuals stateless.

But now some experts – and returning jihadists – say ISIS “sleeper cells” are already embedded in the West. So-called “Jihadi Hunter” Dimitri Bontinck told the UK’s Mail Online last month that “influential sources” had informed him of such cells, and warned that they were “preparing to unleash their war on Europe.” And an ISIS defector reportedly told a Scandinavian broadcaster of similar sleeper cells in Sweden which were, he said, “awaiting orders.”

The presence of these cells should not come as much of a surprise. More surprising is that Europe’s intelligence agencies hadn’t spotted them earlier. In part, this could be blamed on the intense focus on dealing with returnees, a problem that has left some intelligence and law enforcement agencies stretched thin: in June, for instance, Dutch intelligence agency AIVD admitted it “could no longer keep up” with the jihadists in the Netherlands. By October they were forced to bring in police teams to assist, especially in following the 40 or so jihadists who had returned. (An estimated 130 Dutch, including both returnees and those killed, have joined the Syrian fight.)

But if the AIVD and other intelligence agencies can barely follow the ones they know, this leaves countless other radicalized Muslims in Europe easy prey for Islamic State recruiters, who have already turned Europe’s efforts to block returnees to their advantage. With videos online and with extraordinary social media prowess, IS agents are increasingly encouraging Western supporters to work from home: spread the word, motivate others to make the trip (known as “making Hijrah”), or prepare to attack the infidel on Western soil.

And attack they have, as in the beheading of Fusilier Lee Rigby on a London street in 2013, the killing of a Canadian soldier, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, in Ottawa on Oct. 22, and the hatchet attack on NYPD officers in Queens, N.Y. only two days later. Other assaults have been thwarted, such as the alleged plot by three British men who, prosecutors say, were inspired by ISIS calls for attacks on unbelievers. The men were arrested Nov. 6 in London on charges of planning to behead civilians.

But ISIS’s propaganda has been successful in other ways. Recruiting for jihad is on the rise in the Netherlands, according to a recent AIVD report, which further notes that “the number of Dutch jihadists traveling to Syria to join the conflict there has increased substantially since late 2012.” And overall support for the terrorist group is growing even faster – as thousands made clear during pro-ISIS demonstrations last summer. “Several thousand” people in the Netherlands alone support IS, the AIVD claims, while another recent Dutch report concluded that nearly 90 percent of Dutch Turkish youth considered IS members “heroes.” (That latter report has since come under fire, but its researchers stand by their findings.)

In Germany, ISIS support has grown so threatening that in September, the government passed a law to ban it outright. That legislation includes “a ban on activities that support the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including any displays of its black flag, as part of an effort to suppress the extremist group’s propaganda and recruitment work among Germans,” the New York Times reported. On Dec. 5, officials used the law to close a Bremen mosque; sermons there allegedly encouraged young Muslims to make Hijrah – to migrate – and join in the jihad.

In France, where an estimated 700 people have made Hijrah – the highest number in Europe – an ICM poll conducted last summer for Russian news agency Rosslya Segodnya found that one in six people support ISIS. Among those aged 18-24 – the age of most of the country’s Muslim population –27 percent indicated a “positive opinion” of the terrorist group.

These are not just mathematical figures. They represent people: tens of thousands of young men and women. In fact, the Guardian observes, an analysis by Italian academics of more than 2 million Arabic-language posts online found that “support for Islamic State among Arabic-speaking social media users in Belgium, Britain, France and the US is greater than in the militant group’s heartlands of Syria and Iraq.”

Why?

This is exactly the question Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb –a Muslim of Moroccan origin – is asking. Despite his own hard stance against Islamic radicalization, the number of youths in Rotterdam suspected of radicalizing has increased by 50 percent over the past year. While attending the trial of one suspected jihadist, Dutch daily AD reports, Aboutaleb wondered aloud “why such youths, well-educated and full of promise commit themselves to the jihad.”

“The question is,” he is quoted as saying, “who are the people who go? Why do they make this step? Because they feel discriminated? Because they’re unemployed? Rejected by society? I don’t get that. Doubtless, that would maybe push someone over the edge, but there have to be other arguments that play a role.”

Ultimately, these are the questions everyone should be asking – intelligence and law enforcement agencies most of all. Because as the number of Western jihadists rises, and the support for ISIS grows, one thing is becoming clear: that until we have the answers to the basic queries, nothing else we do will matter.

Categories: Iraq, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihad, Multiculturalism, Syria
Tags: Europe, Iraq, Islam, Islamic State, Stay-at-home Islamic jihadists, Syria

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Israel Amb. Prosor addresses UNGA debate on the Question of Palestine

November 29, 2014

Amb. Prosor addresses UNGA debate on the Question of Palestine”

Mr. President,I stand before the world as a proud representative of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. I stand tall before you knowing that truth and morality are on my side. And yet, I stand here knowing that today in this Assembly, truth will be turned on its head and morality cast aside.The fact of the matter is that when members of the international community speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a fog descends to cloud all logic and moral clarity. The result isn’t realpolitik, its surrealpolitik.

The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.

How many resolutions did you pass last week to address this crisis? And how many special sessions did you call for? The answer is zero. What does this say about international concern for human life? Not much, but it speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of the international community.

I stand before you to speak the truth. Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, less than half a percent are truly free – and they are all citizens of Israel.

Israeli Arabs are some of the most educated Arabs in the world. They are our leading physicians and surgeons, they are elected to our parliament, and they serve as judges on our Supreme Court. Millions of men and women in the Middle East would welcome these opportunities and freedoms.

Nonetheless, nation after nation, will stand at this podium today and criticize Israel – the small island of democracy in a region plagued by tyranny and oppression.

Mr. President,

Our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state.

Sixty seven years ago this week, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Simple. The Jews said yes. The Arabs said no. But they didn’t just say no. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon launched a war of annihilation against our newborn state.

This is the historical truth that the Arabs are trying to distort. The Arabs’ historic mistake continues to be felt – in lives lost in war, lives lost to terrorism, and lives scarred by the Arab’s narrow political interests.

According to the United Nations, about 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in the war initiated by the Arabs themselves. At the same time, some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee from Arab countries.

Why is it, that 67 years later, the displacement of the Jews has been completely forgotten by this institution while the displacement of the Palestinians is the subject of an annual debate?

The difference is that Israel did its utmost to integrate the Jewish refugees into society. The Arabs did just the opposite.

The worst oppression of the Palestinian people takes place in Arab nations. In most of the Arab world, Palestinians are denied citizenship and are aggressively discriminated against. They are barred from owning land and prevented from entering certain professions.

And yet none – not one – of these crimes are mentioned in the resolutions before you.

If you were truly concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people there would be one, just one, resolution to address the thousands of Palestinians killed in Syria. And if you were so truly concerned about the Palestinians there would be at least one resolution to denounce the treatment of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps.

But there isn’t. The reason is that today’s debate is not about speaking for peace or speaking for the Palestinian people – it is about speaking against Israel. It is nothing but a hate and bashing festival against Israel.

Mr. President,

The European nations claim to stand for Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – freedom, equality, and brotherhood – but nothing could be farther from the truth.

I often hear European leaders proclaim that Israel has the right to exist in secure borders. That’s very nice. But I have to say – it makes about as much sense as me standing here and proclaiming Sweden’s right to exist in secure borders.

When it comes to matters of security, Israel learned the hard way that we cannot rely on others – certainly not Europe.

In 1973, on Yom Kippur – the holiest day on the Jewish calendar – the surrounding Arab nations launched an attack against Israel. In the hours before the war began, Golda Meir, our Prime Minister then, made the difficult decision not to launch a preemptive strike. The Israeli Government understood that if we launched a preemptive strike, we would lose the support of the international community.

As the Arab armies advanced on every front, the situation in Israel grew dire. Our casualty count was growing and we were running dangerously low on weapons and ammunition. In this, our hour of need, President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, agreed to send Galaxy planes loaded with tanks and ammunition to resupply our troops. The only problem was that the Galaxy planes needed to refuel on route to Israel.

The Arab States were closing in and our very existence was threatened – and yet, Europe was not even willing to let the planes refuel. The U.S. stepped in once again and negotiated that the planes be allowed to refuel in the Azores.

The government and people of Israel will never forget that when our very existence was at stake, only one country came to our aid – the United States of America.

Israel is tired of hollow promises from European leaders. The Jewish people have a long memory. We will never ever forget that you failed us in the 1940s. You failed us in 1973. And you are failing us again today.

Every European parliament that voted to prematurely and unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state is giving the Palestinians exactly what they want – statehood without peace. By handing them a state on a silver platter, you are rewarding unilateral actions and taking away any incentive for the Palestinians to negotiate or compromise or renounce violence. You are sending the message that the Palestinian Authority can sit in a government with terrorists and incite violence against Israel without paying any price.

The first E.U. member to officially recognize a Palestinian state was Sweden. One has to wonder why the Swedish Government was so anxious to take this step. When it comes to other conflicts in our region, the Swedish Government calls for direct negotiations between the parties – but for the Palestinians, surprise, surprise, they roll out the red carpet.

State Secretary Söder may think she is here to celebrate her government’s so-called historic recognition, when in reality it’s nothing more than an historic mistake.

The Swedish Government may host the Nobel Prize ceremony, but there is nothing noble about their cynical political campaign to appease the Arabs in order to get a seat on the Security Council. Nations on the Security Council should have sense, sensitivity, and sensibility. Well, the Swedish Government has shown no sense, no sensitivity and no sensibility. Just nonsense.

Israel learned the hard way that listening to the international community can bring about devastating consequences. In 2005, we unilaterally dismantled every settlement and removed every citizen from the Gaza Strip. Did this bring us any closer to peace? Not at all. It paved the way for Iran to send its terrorist proxies to establish a terror stronghold on our doorstep.

I can assure you that we won’t make the same mistake again. When it comes to our security, we cannot and will not rely on others – Israel must be able to defend itself by itself.

Mr. President,

The State of Israel is the land of our forefathers – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is the land where Moses led the Jewish people, where David built his palace, where Solomon built the Jewish Temple, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace.

For thousands of years, Jews have lived continuously in the land of Israel. We endured through the rise and fall of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman Empires. And we endured through thousands of years of persecution, expulsions and crusades. The bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land is unbreakable.

Nothing can change one simple truth – Israel is our home and Jerusalem is our eternal capital.

At the same time, we recognize that Jerusalem has special meaning for other faiths. Under Israeli sovereignty, all people – and I will repeat that, all people – regardless of religion and nationality can visit the city’s holy sites. And we intend to keep it this way. The only ones trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount are Palestinian leaders.

President Abbas is telling his people that Jews are contaminating the Temple Mount. He has called for days of rage and urged Palestinians to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount using (quote) “all means” necessary. These words are as irresponsible as they are unacceptable.

You don’t have to be Catholic to visit the Vatican, you don’t have to be Jewish to visit the Western Wall, but some Palestinians would like to see the day when only Muslims can visit the Temple Mount.

You, the international community, are lending a hand to extremists and fanatics. You, who preach tolerance and religious freedom, should be ashamed. Israel will never let this happen. We will make sure that the holy places remain open to all people of all faiths for all time.

Mr. President,

No one wants peace more than Israel. No one needs to explain the importance of peace to parents who have sent their child to defend our homeland. No one knows the stakes of success or failure better than we Israelis do. The people of Israel have shed too many tears and buried too many sons and daughters.

We are ready for peace, but we are not naïve. Israel’s security is paramount. Only a strong and secure Israel can achieve a comprehensive peace.

The past month should make it clear to anyone that Israel has immediate and pressing security needs. In recent weeks, Palestinian terrorists have shot and stabbed our citizens and twice driven their cars into crowds of pedestrians. Just a few days ago, terrorists armed with axes and a gun savagely attacked Jewish worshipers during morning prayers. We have reached the point when Israelis can’t even find sanctuary from terrorism in the sanctuary of a synagogue.

These attacks didn’t emerge out of a vacuum. They are the results of years of indoctrination and incitement. A Jewish proverb teaches: “The instruments of both death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

As a Jew and as an Israeli, I know with utter certainly that when our enemies say they want to attack us, they mean it.

Hamas’s genocidal charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide. For years, Hamas and other terrorist groups have sent suicide bombers into our cities, launched rockets into our towns, and sent terrorists to kidnap and murder our citizens.

And what about the Palestinian Authority? It is leading a systemic campaign of incitement. In schools, children are being taught that ‘Palestine’ will stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In mosques, religious leaders are spreading vicious libels accusing Jews of destroying Muslim holy sites. In sports stadiums, teams are named after terrorists. And in newspapers, cartoons urge Palestinians to commit terror attacks against Israelis.

Children in most of the world grow up watching cartoons of Mickey Mouse singing and dancing. Palestinian children also grow up watching Mickey Mouse, but on Palestinians national television, a twisted figure dressed as Mickey Mouse dances in an explosive belt and chants “Death to America and death to the Jews.”

I challenge you to stand up here today and do something constructive for a change. Publically denounce the violence, denounce the incitement, and denounce the culture of hate.

Most people believe that at its core, the conflict is a battle between Jews and Arabs or Israelis and Palestinians. They are wrong. The battle that we are witnessing is a battle between those who sanctify life and those who celebrate death.

Following the savage attack in a Jerusalem synagogue, celebrations erupted in Palestinian towns and villages. People were dancing in the street and distributing candy. Young men posed with axes, loudspeakers at mosques called out congratulations, and the terrorists were hailed as “martyrs” and “heroes.”

This isn’t the first time that we saw the Palestinians celebrate the murder of innocent civilians. We saw them rejoice after every terrorist attack on Israeli civilians and they even took to the streets to celebrate the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center right here in New York City.

Imagine the type of state this society would produce. Does the Middle East really need another terror-ocracy? Some members of the international community are aiding and abetting its creation.

Mr. President,

As we came into the United Nations, we passed the flags of all 193 member States. If you take the time to count, you will discover that there are 15 flags with a crescent and 25 flags with a cross. And then there is one flag with a Jewish Star of David. Amidst all the nations of the world there is one state – just one small nation state for the Jewish people.

And for some people, that is one too many.

As I stand before you today I am reminded of all the years when Jewish people paid for the world’s ignorance and indifference in blood. Those days are no more.

We will never apologize for being a free and independent people in our sovereign state. And we will never apologize for defending ourselves.

To the nations that continue to allow prejudice to prevail over truth, I say “J’accuse.”

I accuse you of hypocrisy. I accuse you of duplicity.

I accuse you of lending legitimacy to those who seek to destroy our State.

I accuse you of speaking about Israel’s right of self-defense in theory, but denying it in practice.

And I accuse you of demanding concessions from Israel, but asking nothing of the Palestinians.

In the face of these offenses, the verdict is clear. You are not for peace and you are not for the Palestinian people. You are simply against Israel.

Members of the international community have a choice to make.

You can recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, or permit the Palestinian leadership to deny our history without consequence.

You can publically proclaim that the so-called “claim of return” is a non-starter, or you can allow this claim to remain the major obstacle to any peace agreement.

You can work to end Palestinian incitement, or stand by as hatred and extremism take root for generations to come.

You can prematurely recognize a Palestinian state, or you can encourage the Palestinian Authority to break its pact with Hamas and return to direct negotiations.

The choice is yours. You can continue to steer the Palestinians off course or pave the way to real and lasting peace.

Thank you, Mr. President.

A important link

http://embassies.gov.il/un/statements/Pages/Question-of-Palestine-Debate.aspx

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Europe, European Union, IDF, Islam, Israel, Jerusalem, Jihad, Middle East War, Palestinians, UN, United Nations, USA

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The world’s illogical rush to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian State

November 28, 2014

The world’s illogical rush to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian State | Anne’s Opinions, 27th November 2014

Dry Bones’ excellent political insight into the Two State Solution

Following the brouhaha over Israel’s declaration of the country as “the Jewish State“, and the international and domestic opposition to such a law, despite the Prime Minister’s vow to uphold democracy and minority rights, you would think that there would be similar opposition to unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State, especially one that has specifically stated will not allow a single Israeli to reside there. But you would be wrong.

Last month Sweden became the first country to officially recognize the State of Palestine. The UK has already voted last month to “recommend recognizing the State of Palestine” – albeit solely a “recommendation” rather than actual recognition; last week Spain voted – symbolically – to recognize Palestine – davka on the day of the Jerusalem synagogue massacre; and a similar vote is going to take place in France, though there are doubts it will pass, and in Denmark. And while the Germans, of all nations, object to the recognition of the Palestinian State, the EU have been debating the issue today.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented on Israeli opposition to unilateral recognition of Palestine after the Spanish vote:

Speaking Sunday with Germany’s foreign minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called similar resolutions that passed the British and Irish parliaments this fall counterproductive, saying the “the calls… to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state pushed peace backwards.”

“They don’t tell the Palestinians that they have to make their peace with a nation-state for the Jewish people,” he said. They just give the Palestinians a nation-state.”

Today’s debate at the EU was a bitter one:

New EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini called on Israel and the Palestinians Wednesday to resume direct peace talks, as the European Parliament debated whether to recognize a Palestinian state.

“The sense of urgency is getting higher and higher in the absence of a political context,” Mogherini told lawmakers at the start of what she said was a “timely” debate. “There has to be a direct dialogue.”

I have yet to hear a reasoned explanation for the sense of urgency in recognizing what will be in essence a terrorist state. I also eagerly await an explanation of how such recognition will enable negotiations. Surely recognition of a Palestinian state will bring a full stop to any negotiations, for after all, what will be left to negotiate?

In Wednesday’s debate, European Parliament members appeared sharply divided on what policy to endorse. One lawmaker branded Israel “a state of child killers and land robbers,” while another likened a Palestinian state to the Islamic State terrorist group.

If the Europeans can’t agree amongst themselves how to define Israel and the Palestinians (and what antisemitic terms they use to describe Israel!), how can they possibly expect Israel and the Palestinians to be able to negotiate existential questions?

But the sort of good news:

A vote, originally expected Thursday, was put off until December.

A month is a long time in politics.

As for Germany’s objections to unilateral recognition, thank goodness for Angela Merkel’s steady hand at the wheel:

Germany, Israel’s closest European ally and the EU’s most powerful member, is a leading opponent of recognizing Palestinian statehood before Israel does. To do so, German officials say, would do more harm than good.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday it was better to focus on getting Israel-Palestinian talks going again, although “that appears very difficult in the current conditions.” She added that “we also believe that unilateral recognition of the Palestinian state won’t move us forward.”

A partial answer to my questions above about the urgency of unilateral recognition comes here:

There has been international alarm over a spate of deadly terror attacks carried out by Palestinians inside Israel along with rioting in East Jerusalem and the deadlock over peace talks that are fueling fear of another flareup after the Israel-Hamas war earlier this year.

But that still does not make sense. 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. As Israeli ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor said in his reproof of the Europeans’ behaviour:

European parliaments voting to recognize Palestine are “giving the Palestinians exactly what they want — statehood without peace,” Prosor told the UN General Assembly.

“By handing them a state on a silver platter, you are rewarding unilateral actions and taking away any incentive for the Palestinians to negotiate or compromise or renounce violence,” he added.

Regarding the upcoming French vote, not everyone in France is for recognizing a Palestinian State. Former President Nicholas Sarkozy voiced his objections:

Sarkozy was quoted as asking fellow UMP party members on Tuesday to vote against the resolution.

“I will fight for the Palestinians to have their state. But unilateral recognition a few days after a deadly attack and when there is no peace process? No!” he said, in reference to last week’s terrorist attack at a synagogue in the capital’s Har Nof neighborhood that killed five Israelis.

The renowned French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy also heartily opposes such unilateral recognition, as he writes, “He who would act the angel acts the brute“:

One does not recognize, even symbolically, a state in which half of the government denies another state’s right to exist.One does not recognize, especially not symbolically, a government in which half of the ministers dream of annihilating that state.

…One day, perhaps, a majority of Israelis may come to believe that the least bad form of protection against this situation is a clean break. But that will be their decision, not the decision of a Spanish, English, Swedish, or, now, French parliament improvising a hasty, ill-founded, and, above all, inconsequential resolution.

One cannot be horrified at the decapitations in Iraq and then dismiss murders with knives and hatchets in Israel.

…No honest observer can ignore the fact that both sides have a long way to go.

…

But that is precisely what the proponents of unilateral recognition deny.

It is very precisely what they forget when they go around saying “we can’t take anymore of this” and “it is urgent that things move forward,” or that a “strong gesture” is needed in order to “apply pressure” and “unblock the situation,” and that no better “strong gesture” can be found than to impose on Netanyahu a non-negotiated Palestinian state.

And that points to the last critique to be laid against them: Their reasoning presupposes that there is only one blockage (the Israeli one) and only one party that needs to be pressured (Israel), and that nothing needs to come from the Palestinian camp—literally nothing: Stay put; take no initiative; whatever you do, do not demand the revocation of a Hamas charter that drips with hate for Jews and contempt for international law—because, hey, now you have your state.

Whilst I take issue with Levy’s implicit equating Israel’s settlements policy with Palestinian violence, I heartily agree with all the rest.

I would refer you back to an earlier post of mine (from 2 years ago) where I linked to an Algemeiner article explaining “Why I don’t want a Palestinian State” It states clearly and politically incorrectly why a Palestinian State would be a terrible idea, and only strengthens my puzzlement at the world’s eagerness to do so.

And it is interesting to note the timing of these votes, and also the original date of the Palestinians vote at the UN – 29th November, known in Israel as “Kaf-Tet beNovember”. On this date 67 years ago, 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, “the Partition Plan”, partitioning Palestine into two entities: a state for the Jews and one for the Arabs. Yes, in those days Palestinians were the Jews. The “Palestinians” of today were simply “Arabs”.

The Arabs rejected Resolution 181 unanimously, and they have been trying ever since to overturn their stupid rejectionism. And in the typical Palestinian fashion of co-opting, aka stealing, Jewish history, they choose to hold these votes on the day that Israel was granted de-facto recognition in the Partition Plan. See my posts from 2011 and 2012 for examples of their attempts on 29th November.

And here they are again today, 67 years later, still trying to undo the results, with the eager connivance of the UN and the Europeans. The Palestinians have asked the Security Council to demand that Israel pull out of Judea and Samaria within two years. Since world attention has been distracted by the on-again off-again nuclear talks with Iran, the Palestinians decided to delay the vote. They always were attention-seekers, like 3 year old children. But now “chief negotiator” Saeb Erekat, denies the deferral. The more likely cause for the deferral of the vote, if it is indeed is deferred, is that despite their bombastic claims, the Palestinians have not been able to guarantee 9 Security Council votes. (h/t Israel Matzav).

Only the Palestinians are ever allowed to turn back the clock of history and get a do-over of the wars they started, each time hoping for a different result.

Categories: Israel, Israel, Palestinians
Tags: Europe, Jewish State, Knesset, Palestinian state, UN

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Israel and the West’s Submission to Islam

October 25, 2014

Israel and the West’s Submission to Islam, American Thinker, Mordechai Nisan, October 25, 2014

(The Islamic problem cannot easily be resolved and to disparage the “religion of peace” would be wickedly un-multicultural. Yet there is a need to attack someone and/or something. Israel and the demon “climate change” are the easiest available targets. — DM)

Are we not passing through a very momentous period of history: with signs of the political decline and social decadence of Europe and the West, the clash between Israel and Islam, between Islam and Christianity, and with attendant results that could change the political — and religious — map of the world? The cutting edge of history is the crossroads we now face.

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There is a striking contrast today in world politics between the West’s submission to Islam and its assault upon Israel; this, ironically enough, occurs while we witness an Islamic assault upon Europe.

Unable to contend with Islam’s massive penetration of the continent, or to deal effectively and morally with its barbaric warfare against peoples in the Middle East, Europe has chosen to stalk Israel, embattled and attacked on many fronts.

The abandonment of the Jews in 1939-1945 in Europe and the murder of six million of them by the Germans represent a historical theme and modern chapter of the old hatred. Europe is not cleansed of this madness and fury; and it is incapable of seeing the justice and reasonableness in Israel’s existence and policies, bashing her over Jerusalem, settlements, human rights, and military operations. Nietzsche said that Europe would be a boring place without the intellectual ferment and cultural contributions of the Jews, but it would apparently be a happy place for some Europeans.

Now, with the blatant eruption of a reinvigorated anti-Semitism in Europe, the political campaign against Israel acquires its explicit racial underpinnings. The more vitriolic the attacks on Israel, running the spectrum from censure, defamation, to delegitimization, the more transparent the European culprit aflame with concentrated racist hatred of the Jews and their Jewish state.

The political backlash against Israel from the summer war in Gaza testifies to the moral bankruptcy of Europe and the loss of any equitable sense of justice. Now the Palestinian aggressor, undefeated and unrepentant, is to be rewarded with Gaza’s reconstruction. Mahmoud Abbas, unwilling to recognize the Jewish state of Israel, is to be rewarded with his own Palestinian state, according to sentiments in Sweden, Britain, and no doubt elsewhere.

The discourse of peace surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum remains as divorced from morality and reality as could ever be imagined in this lopsided political universe. The laws of sociology and the lessons of history make the two-state solution a non-starter. After 47 years, the settlement map of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, their size and spread, preempt an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice lines. The idea of a Palestinian state over all of the territory is not in the demographic and geographic cards. Moreover, the embedded friction between the Jews and the Arabs, after so much bloodshed, enmity, and mistrust, is a visible obstacle to a mutually satisfactory agreement between them on all outstanding issues – borders and refugees, water and security, and Jerusalem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intractable and unsolvable according to the current modalities of proposed peace-making.

A frenzied Muslim fanaticism has galvanized the dormant emotional energies of an Islam bedeviled by old memories (like the Caliphate) and sectarian (Sunni-Shiite) divisions, always with a profound disdain for non-Muslims unworthy of life and dignity. The swirl of Islamic warfare began in Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed through Khomeini’s Iranian Islamic theocracy, penetrated northern Iraq and threatens Baghdad, took hold in eastern Syria, already with appeal and a foothold in Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel.

Meanwhile Europe lives in denial, paralyzed by multiculturalism and national self-immolation, hypnotized by the dogma of human rights, guilt-ridden by its colonial past, and hoping to mollify Muslims on their streets and neighborhoods by offering up the sacrifice of Christians and Jews in the Middle East to the Islamic god of wrath. But Islam seeks world conquest that includes the West as well.

What the Europeans ignore about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the long war is the precedent of 1948. When the Arabs attacked, and the West militarily embargoed Israel, the Zionists yet won a compelling victory in their ancient homeland; and a half a million Arabs became refugees, never to return. In 1967, the Arabs again declared their goal to be the annihilation of Israel; but Israel won, and another quarter of a million Arabs fled the country.

In 2014 the same scenario is unfolding. Pushed to the wall by Europeans who overlook and justify escalating domestic Arab violence and provocations, Israel will sooner or later need to unleash a severe response against the Muslims in the country who deny the right of Israel to exist, at all, and certainly as a Jewish and Zionist state. Newton’s political physics teach us that an action produces a reaction, and Hegel’s dialectics charted how a thesis leads to an antithesis, culminating in a new, rarely anticipated, synthesis. All this fondling of the Palestinians and coddling of Islam is putting in place a horrific threat to Israel, which may however evoke a welcome opportunity for deliverance and triumph.

Are we not passing through a very momentous period of history: with signs of the political decline and social decadence of Europe and the West, the clash between Israel and Islam, between Islam and Christianity, and with attendant results that could change the political — and religious — map of the world? The cutting edge of history is the crossroads we now face.

Categories: Antisemitism, Gaza, Hamas, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Israel, Palestinians, Jerusalem, Jews, juden ist verboten, Middle East, Multiculturalism, Terrorism
Tags: Antisemitism, Europe, Gaza, Hamas, Islam, Israel, Jews, PLO

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Jihad Comes To Europe

September 1, 2014

Jihad Comes To Europe, The Gatestone Institute, Guy Millière, September 1, 2014

(An very powerful article. It brings to mind Britain and Europe during the mid 1930’s when Hitler gained control over Germany’s Government and antisemitism became common. Restrictions on German rearmament were lifted while apathetic Britain and Europe disarmed in the interest of the “equality of nations.” Churchill’s The Gathering Storm lays it all out in gruesome detail. We and much of the rest of the “free, democratic and civilized” world are again going down the same suicidal path as we again reject the lessons of history.– DM)

Belgian security services have estimated that the number of European jihadists in Syria may be over 4000.

European leaders have directed their nastiest comments against the Jewish state, none of them has asked why Palestinian organizations in Gaza put their stockpiles of weapons in hospitals, homes, schools and mosques, or their command and control centers at the bottom of large apartment buildings or underneath hospitals. None of them has even said that Hamas is a terrorist organization despite its genocidal charter.

The majority of them are wedded to the idea of redistribution. Their policies are anti-growth, do not afford people any economic opportunity, and are what caused these economic crises in Europe in the first place. The United States seems to be following these thoroughly failed policies as well.

“Europe could not stay the same with a different population in it.” — Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

Europe is heading towards an increasingly uncertain future. Debates on the impact and dangers of Islam are even less possible today than five years ago. Demographic trends are irrepressibly moving in a direction that is Muslim. Radical Islam in the Middle East and in Europe is rising ever more rapidly, with no one lifting a finger to stop it

****************

A few months before murdering four people at a Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24th, a French Muslim named Medhi Nemmouche had been released from prison and had already joined the Islamic State (at the time, called ISIS).

Nemmouche had left the Museum unmolested and was identified only by images from surveillance cameras. He was arrested two days later in Marseille during an anti-drug check, where it was discovered that he was about to take a boat to Algeria. He had with him his weapons and a black flag of the Islamic State.

The French police knew exactly who he was. Despite everything, he had not been placed under close surveillance.

Nemmouche will be tried in Belgium, where he faces a sentence of life imprisonment — but life imprisonment in Belgium and France means a maximum of twenty-two years. He will not spend twenty-two years in prison. He will likely earn an early release for good behavior. Almost all prisoners in Belgium and France are released for good behavior. That he is a repeat offender and has been convicted seven times for robbery and assault will not be held against him: in Belgium or France, recidivism is theoretically considered an aggravating circumstance but is almost never taken into account in the judgments issued by courts.

In prison, he will join the company of people who share his ideas, and he will be able to join jihadi networks.

In Belgian and French prisons, a large majority of the inmates are Muslims, many of whom are radical; and jihadi networks are ubiquitous.

When he leaves prison, he will most likely join the Islamic State again, if he wants, and if the Islamic State still exists.

Nemmouche’s path resembles that of another French Muslim, Mohamed Merah, who killed three French soldiers and four Jews in the Southwest of France in March, 2012. Merah, like Nemmouche, had also served several sentences in prison and had joined Islamic organizations, although in Afghanistan, not Syria. He, too, came back ready to kill, and he killed.

The French police also knew who Mohamed Merah was. And he was also not placed under close surveillance.

The main difference between Merah and Nemmouche is that Merah chose to die in a police shootout. Because of the way he died, Merah became a hero for many young European Muslims.

At the time of the Merah case, against all evidence, the French government had put forward the “lone wolf” theory and officially dismissed the idea of jihad, although there were arrests in Islamist circles.

When Nemmouche was arrested, the French Interior Minister used more courageous words: he spoke of “jihadi networks” and of “problems” in the French prison system. He added that 700 French youths were in training camps in Syria, and could come back at any moment. The Belgian authorities used similar words.

These mentions of jihad and “problems” in the prisons were steps in the right direction. The problem is that there will almost certainly be no further steps.

Gilles de Kerchove, the EU Counter-terrorism Coordinator, recently said that there are, in fact, more than 700 French Muslims presently waging jihad in Syria. Available data show that there are also many Belgian Muslims, and many Muslims going to Syria from the rest of Europe. Belgian security services have estimated that the number of European jihadists in Syria may be over 4,000. Entire European fighting units seems to have been created.

The leaders of the French and Belgian do not have any real ways of implementing and managing better security or keeping track of suspects — even those likely to take action. These leaders do not even try to restore order in prisons. Government leaders currently preside over financially battered countries, mired in sclerosis, stagnation, wretchedly controlled immigration, and the perverse effects of redistributive social welfare systems that only multiply the poor and destroy jobs — the side effects of multiculturalism. They have neither the will nor the resources to cope with all the costs that would be involved.

They know that if they tried to do something, they would soon be faced with riots in the (mostly Muslim) “no-go zones” scattered throughout the outskirts of most cities.

They know that they would have to hire thousands of police and to consider using the army.

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French politicians fear mass riots in the violence-prone suburban “no go zones” that surround major cities. In this photo, a car burns in Sèvres, France, during the 2005 riots. (Source: WikiMedia Commons)

They know that they would soon face extremely reluctant and extremely hostile judges: judges in Belgium and France are permanent and irremovable civil servants, and the majority of them are wedded to economic ideas based on the redistribution of wealth. Their policies are anti-growth, do not afford people any economic opportunity, and are what created these crises in Europe in the first place. The United States seems to be following these thoroughly failed policies as well. The main union of magistrates in France, “Syndicat de la magistrature”, is close to a neo-communist organization, “le Front de Gauche”.

The governments’ leaders know that they would have to confront “anti-racist” organizations fully dedicated to the fight against “Islamophobia”: powerful and well financed Islamic lobbies, imams in key mosques, and most journalists in the mainstream media.

The governments’ leaders also know that they would have to run the risk of losing elections. In the major cities of Belgium and France, the Muslim vote has an increasing weight. Brussels, the city where Medhi Nemmouche murdered, is now 30% Muslim. Roubaix, the city where he was born, is 60% Muslim. The number of cities where the Muslim population is a majority continues to rise.

The governments’ leaders know that what is happening in France and Belgium can be found to varying degrees in all European countries, and that the problem that overwhelms them is really a European problem.

Government leaders in all major European countries know that hundreds of well-trained European jihadists are in Syria and that some of them will return. They do not ignore that some are already back in Europe and that attacks are likely. They do not ignore that if European jihadists are in the hundreds, those who support jihadism in Europe are probably in the tens of thousands. In recent demonstrations in support of the “Palestinian cause” all over Europe, flags of Hamas, Hizbullah and the Islamic State were abundant, and slogans explicit.

Governments in all major European countries do not ignore that many of the countries they lead are in financial dire straits, faced with sclerosis, stagnation, wretchedly controlled immigration, policies that retard economic growth, and the results of multiculturalism.

They do not ignore that many prisons in Europe are jihadi hotbeds, and that (mostly Muslim) no-go zones are proliferating.

They do not ignore that risks of riots are very real, and that judges under the influence of ideas that for a hundred years have been proven not to work — in Russia, Cuba and everywhere — nevertheless still serve everywhere in Europe.

They cannot ignore the existence in every European country of “anti-racist” organizations and Islamic lobbies, imams and journalists, almost exactly similar to those which exist in France and Belgium.

They cannot ignore the growing weight of Muslim votes in many parts of Europe.

They can break up some networks, thwart some attacks, symbolically strip some jihadists of their citizenship.

They know they are largely hostage to a situation they no longer control.

Their attitude is dictated by the fear of being confronted with more serious problems than murders: some European counter-terrorism services say that a Mumbai-style armed attack in Europe is possible, even probable.

The attitude of governments can be defined by a word often used to describe the attitude of Daladier and Chamberlain in 1938: appeasement.

The victims of Merah and Nemmouche were Jews. European politicians say they are ready to protect Jews living in Europe, but they are scared of offending those who attack Jews. They enunciate verbal condemnations of “anti-Semitism”, but they deliberately ignore the Islamic nature of almost all anti-Semitic acts in Europe today.

European politicians see that those who commit anti-Semitic acts closely associate hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel. They seem to think that if they say that “what happen in the Middle East has to stay in the Middle East”, that it will. They deludedly seem to think that if they harshly criticize Israel while saying that the Jews of Europe have nothing to do with Israel, they will avoid outbursts that are even worse. They seem unable to see that social media exist and that what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. It leads them to make implicit distinctions between “good” European Jews who see nothing, hear nothing, shut their mouths and behave as “genuine European citizens”, and “bad” European Jews who dare to speak of Islamic hatred, express sympathy for Israel and behave as “troublemakers.”

Articles denouncing “bad” Jews may be found in major newspapers and magazines. Christophe Barbier, director of the French weekly L’Express recently wrote that French Jews who are worried about the rise of Islamic anti-Semitic acts are “paranoid”. He added, a bit surreally, that those Jews who leave France are “traitors” and followers of “Beelzebub”. In another article in the same magazine, French Jewish organizations were recentlyaccused of playing an important part in the rise of anti-Semitism in France by being “too close to Israel”. Does anyone ever get criticized for being “too close” to North Korea, Russia or Iran?

Since the beginning of the Gaza conflict, European leaders have directed their nastiest remarks against the Jewish State. None of them has asked why Palestinian organizations in Gaza put their stockpiles of weapons in hospitals, homes, schools and mosques, or their command and control centers at the bottom of large apartment buildings or underneath hospitals. None of them has even said that Hamas is a terrorist organization, despite its genocidal charter. Faced with the horrors in northern Iraq, only three European countries — France, the United Kingdom, and Germany — decided to provide limited humanitarian aid and deliver military supplies to Kurdish forces. The other countries cautiously abstained.

A few days ago, British PM David Cameron expressed concern that the Islamic State could become strong enough to “target people on the streets of Britain”, but added that he was not considering military intervention. That the man who savagely beheaded James Foley on camera spoke with an East London accent prompted British authorities to search for his identity: the beheading was immediately considered a criminal case, not a barbaric act of war.

The murder of Lee Rigby, on May 22, 2013, was considered a simple criminal case: the judge who sentenced the two killers said that the “extremist views” they both expressed during the trial were a “betrayal of Islam”. In the European media, the Islamic State is now defined as a “terrorist organization”, never as an Islamic organization. Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti recently said that “the Islamic State is the enemy of Islam”. Many European newspapers immediately ran headlines obediently repeating what he said. In mainstream European newspapers, Hamas is never defined as Islamic or even terrorist; and is called a “resistance movement”.

European Jews perceive the smell in the air, and many of them are packing their bags. Seeing that journalists may call them “traitors” and followers of “Beelzebub” does not inspire them to change their minds.

Europeans who are neither Jewish nor Muslim perceive that the situation is rapidly becoming extremely unsafe and unstable. They also feel, with good reason, that their political leaders are not telling the truth.

Recent polls show that in almost every European country, a large majority of the people is pessimistic, expects the worst, and feels a deep lack of trust in politicians, governmental institutions and the media. Recent polls also show that in most European countries, an even larger majority of the people rejects and loathes Islam. Xenophobic parties are on the rise.

In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, published in 2009, Christopher Caldwell noted that “Europe could not stay the same with a different population in it”. He added that any debate in Europe on the impact and dangers of Islam is impossible because “violent Islamists intimidate and threaten”. He also added that the demographic trends and the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East do not indicate that the situation will improve. Five years later, it is clear that he was right.

Europe is heading towards an increasingly uncertain future. Debates on the impact and dangers of Islam are even less possible today than five years ago. Demographic trends are irrepressibly moving in a direction that is Muslim. Radical Islam in the Middle East and in Europe is rising ever more rapidly, with no one lifting a finger to stop it.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Europe, Islam, Jihad

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