6 Months of Terror in Israel, IDF via You Tube, April 4, 2016
Posted tagged ‘Israel’
6 Months of Terror in Israel
April 4, 2016Netanyahu’s dilemma: Détente with Turkey or recognition of Syrian Kurds
April 4, 2016Netanyahu’s dilemma: Détente with Turkey or recognition of Syrian Kurds, DEBKAfile, April 4, 2016
They were once good friends
Last Friday, April 1, President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan had his first encounter with a group of American Jewish leaders, at his request. The full details of its contents were hard to sort out because the Turkish translator censored his master’s words with a heavy hand to make them more acceptable to his audience. But Erdogan’s bottom line, DEBKAfile’s New York sources report, was a request for help in explaining to the Obama administration in Washington and the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem why they must on no account extend support to the Syrian Kurdish PYD and its YPG militia or recognize their bid for a separate state in northern Syria.
The Turkish president did not spell out his response to this step, but indicated that a Turkish invasion to confront the Kurdish separatists was under serious consideration in Ankara. His meaning was clear: He would go to war against the Kurds, even if this meant flying in the face of President Barack Obama’s expectation that Turkey would fight the Islamic State.
Relations between the Turkish and US presidents have slipped back another notch in the last two weeks. When he visited Washington for the nuclear summit, Erdogan was pointedly not invited to the White House and his request for a tete a tete with Obama was ruled out. The US president even refused to join Erdogan in ceremonially honoring a new mosque built outside Washington with Turkish government funding.
At odds between them is not just the Kurdish question, but Erdogan’s furious opposition to Obama’s collaboration with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Syrian conflict, and the two presidents’ tacit accord to leave Bashar Assad in power indefinitely until a handover becomes manageable.
On Feb. 7, on his return for a Latin American tour, the Turkish president warned Obama that he must choose between Ankara and the Kurds, whom he called “terrorists.” By last week, the US president’s choice was clear. It was the Kurds.
When Erdogan arrived home from Washington last week, he discovered that the roughly four million Syrian Kurds dwelling in three enclaves touching on the Turkish border had taken important steps to advance their goal for self-rule: They were drafting a plan for establishing a “Federal Democratic System” in their three enclaves – Hassakeh-Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin – and had announced the amalgamation of their respective militias under the heading the “Syrian Democratic Forces”.
Cold-shouldered in Washington as well as Moscow (since Turkish jets shot down a Russian fighter last November), Erdogan found himself let down by the Jewish leaders whom he tried to woo. They refused to support him or his policy on the Kurdish question for three reasons:
1. Ankara had for years consistently promoted the radical Palestinian Hamas organization. To this, Erdogan replied by denying he had backed Hamas only acted to improve the lives of the Gaza population. And, anyway, he said he had reacyed understandings with Israel on this issue..
2. His hostility towards Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi. Erdogan’s response to this was a diatribe slamming the Egyptian ruler.
3. No clear reply had been forthcoming from Jerusalem by that time on Israel’s relations with Turkey or its policy towards the Kurds, despite the Turkish leader’s positive presentation of mended fences.
The current state of the relationship is laid out by DEBKAfile’s sources:
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is caught on the horns of multiple dilemmas: While reluctant to respond to Ankara’s suit for warm relations with a leader who is shunned by Obama and Putin alike, Turkey is nonetheless offering to be Israel’s best client for its offshore gas.
Israel’s friendship with the Kurdish people goes back many years. The rise of an independent or autonomous state in Syria and its potential link-up with the semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq would create an important new state of 40 million people in the heart of the Middle East.
Israel has no wish to make enemies of its longstanding friends by disowning them in favor of Turkey.
Already, Israel’s evolving ties with the Syrian Kurds have given Israel’s strategic position in Syria a new positive spin, upgrading it versus the Assad regime in Damascus and its Hizballah and Iranian allies, who are avowed enemies of the Jewish state. Those ties offer Israel its first foothold in northern Syria.
And finally, Erdogan is not the only opponent of Kurdish separatism; so too are important Sunni Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. By promoting the Kurds, Israel risks jeopardizing its rapidly developing ties with those governments.
Why Are Christians Leaving the Holy Land?
April 3, 2016Why Are Christians Leaving the Holy Land? Gatestone Institute, Lawrence A. Franklin, April 3, 2016
People who reflexively blame the wrong party for criminal acts are either misinformed or disingenuous.
♦ The sad truth is that in the Palestinian territories, Christians are forced to live like dhimmis — second-class citizens who survive largely by the protection-money they are required to pay to buy their daily safety. These barely-tolerated citizens exist only at the whim and pleasure of the ruling Muslim majority. Muslim Arab discrimination against non-Muslims includes economic and socially prejudicial behavior that makes it difficult or impossible for Christian Arabs to run a profitable business or for their families to be fully integrated into society.
♦ It is also appropriate for Catholics to raise with Vatican authorities the issue of Father Twal’s continued representation of the Faith in the Holy Land: Who is he serving first, God or man?
♦ No one of good will, especially Catholics, wants to accuse a prominent member of his faith of being knowingly untruthful. The truth rarely is found in the Palestinian public narrative. But in case of the latest repetition of Father Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, falsely blaming Israel for the ongoing spate of Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, it appears certain from his consistent record of non-nuanced criticism of Israel, that he is motivated by a political bias.
Twal proclaimed that Israel’s alleged “occupation” of “Arab Palestine” is the cause of the murderous violence visited on Israeli civilians by Arab attackers — apparently “forgetting” that the Jews have lived in the region for nearly 4000 years. He was also apparently forgetting that the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) have been glorifying such “acts of resistance” since the autumn of 2014. How can Twal ignore the reality that Palestinian media has been glorifying these knife attacks as “glorious feats.” In Palestinian schools, in fact, the attackers are hailed as heroes.
Outright lies are also part of the PA and Hamas propaganda campaigns. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmud Abbas, for instance, has claimed that a Palestinian boy, who was hit by a car after stabbing an Israeli child, was executed by Israeli troops, when it was well known that the perpetrator was alive and being cared for in an Israeli hospital.
Twal’s position is one that appears driven by ideological loyalty to a political cause, rather than that of a shepherd who attends to the spiritual needs of his flock. Even if Twal were concerned merely with the physical needs of his faithful, one would think that his focus would be on the real primary concern of his Catholic communities in the Holy Land — which is security. Twal also “forgets” the basic reason for the accelerating departure of Christians from Palestinian areas: the principal cause for this negative pattern is Islamic intolerance of religious minorities, not the Israeli occupation of Arab Palestinian territory.
Twal will be hard pressed to find many Palestinian Christians ready to accuse Israel or the actions of Israel Defense Force (IDF) personnel as the reason for Christian emigration. Many have already have voted with their feet by settling in Israel, where they can practice their faith without restriction. Thousands of Catholics now work in Israel, where they enjoy complete religious liberty. One has only to see how difficult it is to find a seat in the crammed Catholic Churches at Sunday Masses in Tel Aviv.
The sad truth is that in the Palestinian territories, Christians are forced to live like dhimmis — second-class citizens who survive largely by the protection-money they are required to pay to buy their daily safety. These barely-tolerated citizens exist only at the whim and pleasure of the ruling Muslim majority.[1] Muslim Arab discrimination against non-Muslims includes economic and socially prejudicial behavior that makes it difficult or impossible for Christian Arabs to run a profitable business or for their families to be fully integrated into society. Why has not Twal, as President of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinances in the Holy Land, felt an obligation publicly to denounce this record of intolerance by political Islamic extremists? If Twal does not, it appears that he places in jeopardy his role as guardian of the rights of Catholic Christians in the Holy Land. Consequently, the Israeli government is likely to be more dismissive of his legitimate concerns such as the defacement of Church property by anti-Christian Jewish youth.
It is also appropriate for Catholics to raise with Vatican authorities the issue of Twal’s continued representation of the Faith in the Holy Land. The instances involve Twal himself, which may help Catholics to discern whom Twal serves first: God or man. There was no hint of gratitude from Twal after IDF personnel rescued him from a jeering mob of Muslim Palestinians who hurled rocks at his car on the way to Bethlehem last Christmas. And there is no acknowledgement from him that the only reason these Christian holy sites are safe for pilgrims to go to and worship in is that they are protected by the State of Israel, and not by the Palestinian Authority. All we have to do is to observe how Christian holy sites are being demolished throughout the Middle East, to realize that without the Israel protecting Jerusalem’s and Bethlehem’s Christian holy places, there would, at some point, be no Christian holy places, period.
Father Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem (right), consistently defames Israel, whose soldiers rescued him when he was attacked by rock-throwing Muslim Palestinians on the way to Bethlehem in December 2015. Pictured at left: Muslim Palestinians in the Bethlehem area, among them men dressed in Santa Claus costumes, hurl stones at Israeli soldiers while yelling “Allahu Akbar,” on Dec. 18, 2015.
There are many examples of why Christian leaders have a duty publicly to express gratitude to Israeli security personnel. For example, during the 2002 occupation of the Church of the Nativity by more than 200 armed Palestinian terrorists in the now-Muslim-dominated city of Bethlehem, Israel Defense Force (IDF) personnel conducted themselves with impressive restraint, rather than risk damaging a holy site sacred to Christians. After the 39-day occupation of this holy site, the Israeli government acceded to the Vatican’s desires, permitting the occupiers safe passage out of Bethlehem.[2] After the departure of the terrorist-occupiers from the vicinity and their hostages released, booby-trapped explosive devices were discovered in the Church. Further, altars, religious objects, and furniture were discovered fouled by urine, cigarette butts and human excrement.
Just last month, there were a series of incidents involving Palestinian terrorists just inside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. After one such incident, on February 14, Israeli border guards killed two terrorists from Nablus who had infiltrated Jerusalem. The target of the terrorists was probably a group of affluent American Christian pilgrims enjoying “happy hour” as they milled about the lobby of the Notre Dame Pilgrim Complex, unaware of the danger just a short distance from them. These Christian pilgrims might well have been grateful to the thin line of Israelis that protected them.
How grateful are you, Father Twal?
________________
[1] Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “The Beleaguered Christians of Palestinian-Controlled Areas” by David Raab, 1-15 January 2003. Also see “Why Are Christians Really Leaving Bethlehem?” by Julie Stahl, CBN News, 8 May 2012; and “Why are Palestinian Christians Fleeing?” by Robert Nicholson, Providence, 1 March 2016.
[2] PBS Frontline, “The Siege of Bethlehem“, 13 June 2013.
The unfair media bias
April 3, 2016The unfair media bias, Israel Hayom, Steven Emerson, April 3, 2016
The willful blindness of the Western media and intellectual elites to Palestinian incitement and their hyper-focus on any incident they can use to portray Israel in a negative light were on abundant display last week when footage emerged of an Israel Defense Forces soldier shooting a wounded and disarmed Palestinian terrorist.
Since then, The New York Times and The Washington Post have run no fewer than 16 stories about the incident. This volume of coverage reinforces the patently mendacious Israel-is-evil “narrative” promoted by the mainstream media, the liberal elites in bed with Palestinian and jihadist killers, the demonstrably one-sided United Nations, and the sanctimonious rants of several congressional leaders who claim they are speaking out in the name of human rights.
Meanwhile, these same news outlets consistently fail to speak out against the massive and ongoing denial of human rights, suppression of basic freedoms and daily torture meted out to any Palestinian dissident by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Many of these violations have been investigated and documented in horrific detail by the courageous Palestinian human rights advocate Bassam Eid.
No, the “narrative” does not allow mainstream news outlets to file negative reports on Palestinian human rights violations, their rampant corruption, and most importantly, their massive incitement to terrorist violence, which is being promoted by the very leadership of the Palestinian Authority. This includes vile lessons in how to kill Jews, taught in U.S.-sponsored Palestinian schools and universities, and instructional videos on stabbing and murdering Jews being shown to thousands of Palestinian schoolchildren.
The latest incident to manifest the “narrative” took place on March 24, when two Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron stabbed an Israeli soldier. Soldiers then shot them in self defense, killing one and leaving the other critically wounded and lying on the ground. Video of the incident taken by an activist belonging to the left-wing group B’Tselem showed an IDF soldier shooting the wounded Palestinian in the head, in clear violation of military rules. The IDF says it intends to seek manslaughter charges.
The shooting took place in the midst of a six-month wave of terrorist attacks by Palestinians, who have been attacking Israeli civilians at random, not just in the West Bank, but throughout Israel. Palestinians have slaughtered at least 34 Israelis — stabbing them to death in stores, in synagogues, in their apartments and on the street, and ramming them to death with their cars. Daring to step out onto the street almost anywhere in Israel has become a game of Russian roulette these days.
The B’Tselem footage went viral and sparked a major debate in Israel. The attention that the two newspapers have given to this story rivals the attention they have given to major, far more lethal, terror attacks, clearly demonstrating their anti-Israel bias. They have disproportionately played up the support for the soldier among the Israeli public, minimizing the significant number of Israelis who, according to polls, condemn this soldier’s actions. More egregiously, they have disproportionately underreported the massive anti-Israeli incitement that the Palestinian Authority government, educational institutions and media have engaged in for years — especially these last six months — that helped incite these terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
Make no mistake. This is the real scandal: the deliberate suppression of this news that is vital to an informed public.
Contrary to what the Western media would have us believe, particularly in light of the torrent of stories in the Post and Times, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF unreservedly condemned the soldier’s actions from the moment it was reported to them.
“What happened in Hebron does not represent the values of the Israel Defense Forces,” Netanyahu said on the day of the shooting. “The IDF expects its soldiers to behave level-headedly and in accordance with the rules of engagement.”
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon likewise condemned the shooting: “Even when our blood is boiling, we must not allow such a loss of sense, such a loss of control. … Woe to us if we act contrary to our moral values and our conscience.”
IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Moti Almoz stated: “The chief of staff [Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot] views the incident with severity and has ordered a full probe. This is not the IDF, these are not the values of the IDF and these are not the values of the Jewish people.”
Yet instead of giving equal attention to these condemnations, the Times and Post have continued to play up the support within Israel for the soldier, who has claimed in his defense that he feared the wounded Palestinian was wearing a suicide vest and still posed a threat. Worldwide media coverage — led by the two newspapers — has faithfully followed the “narrative” in portraying Israel as violating all the norms of civilized nations regarding warfare.
In reality, the IDF is one of the most moral armies in the world, a fact attested to in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge by the widely respected former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, retired Col. Richard Kemp.
“No army in the world acts with as much discretion and great care as the IDF in order to minimize damage,” he stated after studying Israeli tactics, which included warnings to civilians in advance of airstrikes. “The U.S. and the U.K. are careful, but not as much as Israel.”
Between March 24 and March 30, the Times and the Post published a total of 12 stories focusing on this one episode, twice as many as they published on the suicide bombing in Pakistan last week that killed 70 civilians. That’s four times the number of stories the two papers published on the massive Palestinian incitement during the six months of the latest terror wave, involving knifings, shootings and other terrorist killings.
In contrast to the Times’ and Post’s obsessive interest in the story of the Israeli soldier, it is important to note what happens when a Palestinian terrorist kills an Israeli civilian. How do the New York Times and Washington Post cover such incidents? The answer is simple: They barely cover them, and when they do, they are sure to assert with equal weight the Palestinian rationalization for such terrorism. Say, if the Post and Times were held to equal journalistic standards covering terrorism, why don’t we read about Islamic State’s justification of beheadings and massive executions?
In the past six months alone, the veteran and highly regarded organizations Middle East Media Research Institute and Palestinian Media Watch have documented scores of incidents of official Palestinian governmental and institutional incitement to carry out terrorism against the “Jew” and the “infidel.” Both MEMRI and PMW have recorded and translated dozens of videos and Palestinian media recordings of Palestinian leaders, reporters, Islamic leaders, school teachers, and schoolchildren glorifying horrific acts of terrorism, wildly celebrating the murders of Israeli mothers, teaching 10-year-olds how to fatally stab Jews, allowing mosques and schools to be staging grounds for acts of terror, or simply making one incendiary accusation after another, such as accusing Israel of being behind the Brussels terror attacks.
None of these stories received any coverage in the New York Times or Washington Post:
• A Palestinian Authority columnist claimed that Israel carried out the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels in order to punish Europe. Muwaffaq Matar, a columnist for the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote: “I do not want to point fingers, but why is it that ISIS’s crimes and massacres in France and Brussels coincided with Europe’s first attempt to liberate itself from Israel’s blackmail and from the [guilt] complex over the persecution of the Jews in Europe? [Why did they coincide] with the European parliaments supporting the Palestinians’ right [to a state], for the first time?” He concluded: “ISIS does not have the ability to strike wherever and however it pleases. Some element or elements have infiltrated it to the core, and are using it as their current tool to take revenge on Europe and rip out its heart” (MEMRI, March 28).
• Ramallah District Governor Laila Ghannam met with the family of one of the murderers of 16-year-old Israeli Ofir Rahum; Ramallah’s Facebook page later praised the killer as a “heroic prisoner” (PMW, March 20).
• The Palestinian Authority’s message on International Women’s Day was that the female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who was responsible for murdering 37 Israelis, was “one of the fighting sisters, and it may be that she paved the way so the sisters could continue. She was a source of pride for the Palestinian woman” (PMW, March 10).
• Fatah, which is controlled by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, lavished praise on the murderers of Taylor Force, an American tourist, West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran who was stabbed to death on a trip to Israel with an American university, and numerous other victims who were slashed to death (PMW, March 9).
• Palestinian Authority TV news dubbed Force, a decorated American war hero, a “settler” and hailed his murderer as a “holy martyr” (PMW, March 9).
• Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV featured two Hamas-affiliated clerics, Yunis Al-Astal and Wael Al-Zard, saying that the Jews were the “enemies of mankind” who “wallow in the shedding of blood” (MEMRI, Feb. 25).
• Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, whose bombs murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in suicide bombings on buses and in malls and cafes, was killed in 1996 but is remembered as a hero among Palestinians. In February, Palestinians praised him on social media as “the first to arrange free collective death rides for the Zionists.” Another claimed: “He embarrassed the enemy with his actions, and was the first figure to pave the way to liberation and the arrival in Jerusalem. May his soul rest in Paradise, and may his students endure and be victorious” (PMW, Feb. 12).
• Fatah hailed the three Palestinian terrorists who murdered 19-year-old Israeli police cadet Hadar Cohen as “role models” (PMW, Feb. 4).
The Times and Post also ignored Israeli Arab terrorist Nashat Milhem’s plan to slaughter Israeli children in kindergarten. Milhem, who brutally murdered three Israelis in Tel Aviv on New Year’s Day, was recently discovered to have plotted to enter a Tel Aviv kindergarten and kill the children inside. Coverage of it in the Western media noted that “while The Washington Post chose to write about Hamas’ hacking attack, no mainstream U.S. media outlet, including The New York Times, saw fit to report on a terrorist’s plan to massacre Israeli schoolchildren.”
Milhem’s premeditated plan to slaughter civilians got nothing approaching the attention given to the IDF shooting in the Western media. As we have noted in the past, imagine the headlines if the roles had been reversed, and an Israeli had been discovered to be plotting an attack on Palestinian youngsters. The coverage would have continued for days. Storylines would have included detailed examinations of the Israeli public’s reaction and what the incident meant about the wellbeing of Israeli society.
We are seeing that very dynamic play out in response to the shooting episode.
The irony is acute. Hundreds of Palestinians have brutally murdered innocent Israelis in terrorist attacks, only to be praised as “martyrs” by the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian society, with their families even being paid stipends. But none of this praise and glorification of the Palestinian terrorist attacks — which goes on all the time in Palestinian media and society — draws the attention of the Western media the way this shooting by an IDF soldier has.
Yet we never see anything parallel to these condemnations in Palestinian society when it comes to killing Israelis. Instead, Palestinians pass out candy and celebrate in the streets when Israeli civilians are murdered. But these facts are little known in the West because of the viciously biased reporting of the Times, the Post and the rest of the mainstream media. We rarely see any of the Palestinian glorification of terrorism in the Western media.
This bias has a devastating effect. Ten Democratic Party lawmakers, led by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), formally requested that the State Department investigate Israel for human rights violations. In a letter explaining their request, they referred to media reports claiming that Israeli forces were torturing and killing Palestinians. Netanyahu responded with a reminder of the truth that has been obscured by the media double standard: “The [IDF] and the Israel Police do not engage in executions. Israel’s soldiers and police officers defend themselves and innocent civilians using the highest moral standards against bloodthirsty terrorists who come to murder them. Where is the concern for the human rights of the many Israelis who’ve been murdered and maimed by these savage terrorists?”
Not in The New York Times or The Washington Post. “This letter,” Netanyahu continued, “should have been addressed instead to those who incite youngsters to commit cruel acts of terrorism.” He is right; but Leahy would never have been able to read about such people in the United States’ leading newspapers.
The American media, led by The New York Times and The Washington Post, is not just grossly negligent and dishonest. It is complicit in Palestinian terrorism when it ignores Palestinian incitement. This indirectly exonerates Palestinian terrorists of all responsibility for their acts.
By ignoring Palestinian culpability for terrorism and deliberately not reporting on the massive Palestinian incitement to carry out terrorism, The Washington Post and The New York Times have essentially become co-conspirators with the Palestinians, letting them get away with murder.
Fatah Official Jamal Muhaisen: The U.S. Is No. 1 Enemy of the Palestinians and Arab-Islamic Nation
March 31, 2016Senator Leahy and 10 House Democrats call to Investigate Israel for Killing Terrorists
March 30, 2016Senator Leahy and 10 House Democrats call to Investigate Israel for Killing Terrorists, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 30, 2016
Senator Leahy (D-Time Warner) heading this up is not a surprise. His pro-terrorist and anti-Israel views are well known. There’s a long and ugly history there. And Leahy is once again trying to defund the Israeli military.
The Leahy letter to Kerry though is blatantly Muslim Brotherhood inspired. It classes together Israel and Egypt, accusing Israel of “extrajudicial” killings of Islamic terrorists and broadcasting the Muslim Brotherhood’s claims of victimhood in Egypt.
The claims about “human rights violations” in Egypt lists Muslim Brotherhood figures who were killed by Egyptian police in a shootout with the Islamic terror group after it was removed from power by political protests, including Osama al-Husseini, Hisham Khifagy and Ibrahim al-Sisi, the Brotherhood’s “defense minister”.
The Leahy letter never mentions the Muslim Brotherhood though making it not only a pro-terrorist letter, but a dishonest one.
Leahy and other Democrats also complain about Israel killing some of these Islamic terrorists…
Fadi Alloun stabbed a 15-year-old in Jerusalem in early October, 2015, moderately wounding him. The attacker fled and was killed by police fire after they noticed the knife in his hand.
Saad Al-Atrash was killed by soldiers in late October, 2015, after he had attacked them with a knife near a pedestrian checkpoint down the street from the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
Hadeel Hashlamoun was shot after attempting to stab an Israeli soldier at an IDF check point in Hebron in September, 2015.
This is what Leahy is defending. Also signing on is Jim McDermott and James McGovern, who are in the same pro-terrorist category as Leahy. Also on board is radical leftist Chellie Pingree backed by the anti-Israel group, J Street, and retiring Rep. Sam Farr. Also signing on are career progressive caucusers Betsy McCollum and Raúl Grijalva who would just happily sign on to a letter proposing Stalin for a posthumous Model of Freedom award.
Andre Carson, a Muslim convert who has a history of appearing at Islamist pro-terrorist events and anti-Israel activism, is not a surprising signature.
But there are also a number of Congressional Black Caucus members here, Hank “Guam will tip over” Johnson, Eddie Bernice Johnson and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
This is not just an anti-Israel letter. It’s a pro-terrorist letter. It covertly advocates on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood and its contents were no doubt formed and shaped by Brotherhood activists in America.
The Gaza Time Bomb
March 30, 2016The Gaza Time Bomb, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Yaakov Lappin, March 30, 2016
On the surface, the Gaza Strip looks relatively calm, with few security incidents occurring since the end of the protracted 2014 summer conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Behind the scenes, pressure within the Islamist-run enclave is gradually building again, just as it did prior to the 2014 war.
Gaza’s civilian population is hostage to Hamas’s dramatically failed economic policies, and its insistence on confrontation with Israel, rather than recognition of Israel and investment in Gaza’s economic future.
Ultimately, the civilian-economic pressure cooker in Gaza looks likely to explode, leading Hamas to seek new hostilities with Israel, for which it is preparing in earnest.
Right now, Hamas remains deterred by Israel’s firepower, and is enforcing its part of the truce. Hamas security forces patrol the Strip’s borders to prevent Gazans from rioting, to stop them from trying to escape Gaza into Israel, and to stop ISIS-affiliated radicals who fire rockets at Israel.
Hamas is using the current quiet to replenish its rocket arsenal, dig its combat tunnel network, and build up sea-based attack capabilities. It is investing many resources in cooking up new ways to surprise Israel in any future clash. These efforts have not gone unnoticed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Hamas has not fired a single rocket into Israel since August 2014, but it encourages violence in the West Bank as part of a strategy to destabilize its Palestinian rival, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. Hamas in Gaza also works remotely to set up and orchestrate terrorism cells in the West Bank, while plotting way to overthrow Fatah from power. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, has successfully foiled nearly all of these efforts thus far, saving many Israeli lives, and the PA’s rule, too.
A deeper look at processes under way in Gaza reveals why the status quo seems untenable in the long run. Thirty percent (910,000) of Gaza’s population of 1.85 million are aged 15 to 29, and out of these, 65 percent are unemployed. This represents one of the highest unemployment rates for young people in the world. Many are university educated and deeply frustrated. The overall unemployment rate in Gaza is 38.4 percent, and rising steadily. Eighteen thousand Gazan university students graduate every year. Most of them have nothing to do with their degrees, and return home to a life of idle unemployment. Many Gazans dream of leaving. The suicide rate is growing. Under Hamas’s rule, these young people see no change on the horizon.
Out of the total population of Gaza, 1.3 million receive assistance from United Nations aid workers, without which, a humanitarian crisis would likely ensue.
Those who dare complain, such as Gazan bloggers, find themselves whisked away into Hamas police custody, where they receive firm warnings to remain silent, or else.
Meanwhile, the Gazan population is growing at an unsustainable rate. Since Israel pulled out all of its soldiers and civilians in 2005, 600,000 Gazans have been born. This is a generation that has never been to Israel (unlike the older Gazans), and its only experience of Israel is through air force missiles fired at Hamas targets following clashes sparked by the jihadist regime’s military wing.
Many of these young people are exposed to the propaganda of Hamas’s media outlets, like the Al-Aksa television station, which is a major source of incitement. Some are also exposed to the wider world through the Internet, and are aware that life can be different for them.
By 2020, Gaza’s population will hit 2.3 million people. It could run out of drinking water. This might prompt a civilian revolt, which could push Hamas into starting a new war with Israel to distract attention.
To try to relieve the pressure, Hamas leaders make promises that they cannot keep, such as the setting up of a sea port, and the opening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, which the anti-Hamas Egyptian government opened just 18 times in 2015 for fear of allowing jihadists in Gaza to pour into the restive Sinai Strip.
A Hamas delegation traveled to Egypt earlier this month to try to mend relations with the Cairo government. The effort resulted in failure, after Egyptian officials accused Hamas of failing to acknowledge its collaboration with the ISIS-affiliated Sinai Province insurgents.
Changes are underway within Hamas itself, which are causing the Izzadin Al-Qassam Brigades military wing to gain power at the expense of the political wing, which is led by Ismael Haniyeh.
Yiyhe Sinwar is a senior Hamas member with growing power, operating in the gray zone between both wings. He is close to military wing chief Muhammed Def, and to Haniyeh. Sinwar’s power represents the rise of military wing’s influence, where many members are finding their way into political elite positions in Gaza.
Marwan Isa is another senior Hamas member, influential to both wings. While the political wing has, behind closed doors, been hesitant to support the military wing’s disastrous adventures against Israel, its ability to veto future attacks may vanish.
Additionally, Hamas is running out allies as it did before the 2014 war.
Iran continues to fund its military wing, as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Yet Tehran’s ability to traffic weapons into Gaza has been ruined by Egypt’s tunnel demolition drive.
Iran’s overall influence on Gaza, therefore, is limited.
The Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Qatar has also stepped back from Hamas, limiting its funding projects in Gaza to civilian reconstruction only, building a modern highway in Gaza and a fancy new neighborhood in Khan Younis. However, no Qatari funds go to Hamas’s military build-up. Turkey’s assistance to Hamas is limited, too. It paid for a new Gaza hospital and 11 mosques, but beyond that, its support is mostly rhetorical.
The Arab world is indifferent to Gaza, meaning that Hamas is in strategic distress.
ISIS-inspired ideology is penetrating Gaza, and a few thousand former Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad members have defected to small Salafist-jihadist groups there. These groups have been responsible for all rocket fire into Israel since the summer of 2014.
In fact, the only state that makes major efforts to care for Gaza’s civilians is Israel. Israel provides 60 percent of Gaza’s electricity (30 percent is locally produced and Egypt provides the remaining 10 percent).
In 2015, Israel allowed 104,000 Gazans through the Erez border crossings to assist traders and humanitarian journeys. At the Kerem Shalom vehicle crossing, 900 trucks pass each day from Israel into Gaza, carrying all manner of goods, from fuel, to construction materials and commercial goods.
For Gaza civilians, the only ray of light seems to shine from the reconstruction mechanism, which Israel quietly set in motion after Hamas cynically used Gazan civilian areas as rocket launching zones and urban combat bases.
Israel set up a computerized reconstruction system that closely monitors and enables the rebuilding, while preventing the use of concrete and dual use items from falling into Hamas’s hands. Gaza contractors who cannot account for their materials on the computerized systems are immediately removed from their positions, a heavy price to pay in the unemployment-rife Gaza Strip.
Funded by international donors and the Palestinian private sector, the mechanism, which Israel pushed to set up, has repaired 80,000 of the 130,000 housing units damaged during the conflict. Another 20,000 are currently being repaired.
Of the 18,000 homes completely destroyed in 2014, nearly 11,000 have already been rebuilt, and material for nearly 2,000 more homes has been bought and paid for.
The reconstruction program is providing jobs and a little hope for Gazans. But it is unlikely to be sufficient to stave off an economic collapse. Again, the rebuilding effort is funded almost entirely by outside sources while Hamas invests tremendous resources into terrorism-guerilla capabilities and denies the Gazan people the opportunity of economic development by refusing to recognize Israel.
Until Gaza is run by people with different priorities, its residents have little hope their lives will improve.
Op-Ed: Self-destruct: Us or them
March 29, 2016Op-Ed: Self-destruct: Us or them, Israel National News, Leonie Ben-Simon, March 29, 2016
Strange. After Belgium there is a kind of silence. Those continuous Facebook posts blaming Israel and the Jews for everything have mostly gone underground, as journalists lie low, their opinions shattered into smithereens.
The War of Civilizations is well and truly here, right on our doorstep, for the entire world to see. These are not terror attacks. This is World War III in its incarnation of the enemy within: an asymmetric war that if not halted has the potential to go nuclear as Iran tests its long-range missiles with their leaders proclaiming “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel.”
Time has a way of blunting the past. Hitler was not a madman when he marshalled his people to carry out his plans. He had a carefully thought-out agenda which we later labelled the personification of evil. But before the Second World War politicians, intellectuals and decision-makers world-wide did not believe that he could possibly carry out his plans. No, appeasement was the solution until millions upon millions lay dead on the ground, burnt in ovens and even burnt and buried alive.
Then there were the genocides that the world ignored in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur. And the current war in Syria with millions dead, injured or displaced. Life is simply not valued.
Until now massive amounts of money have financed terror in all of its stages of growth.
Many madrassas are financed to promulgate a particular form of Wahhabism that teaches whole populations not to accommodate values that are not their own.
UNRWA finances millions who call themselves Palestinian refugees but are residents of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza who were mostly born there. Most of this money is used for buying military materiel, training troops for warmongering and sending rockets into Israeli civilian areas, not for resettlement.
Part of the Arab minority in Israel are also financed by UNRWA with money used to brainwash whole generations in UN schools to hate Jews and Israel.
Then there is the Iranian nuclear industry now helped by a United States agreement with financing that is increasing the risk of nuclear war. There are millions being made in so many of these corrupt societies by those in control who stir up the pot, encouraging everyone except for their own children to die for their cause.
Now that the West is paying the price, the story is quite different. The West has the tools to stop this war in its tracks and allow the enemy to self-destruct. These tools are simply the control of money, the control of gold and the control of resources. Can large-scale murderous activities continue without money? Of course not. Even trading oil for black money can be stopped when the buyers are nations.
The average human being in most societies, we would like to hope, just wants to live out their life peacefully, not to be forced into a war situation. But either way, remove the money and most of the warmongering will self-destruct.
The world’s powers have obviously forgotten the mantra after World War Two and the Holocaust – “Never Again.” Or was it after the First World War – the Great War – The War to End All Wars?
This is the choice: Call it the War that it is, take action to cut the head off the snake by throttling its money and the resource supplies that it lives on. The alternative is that the West will be responsible for its own self-destruction.
Changing the mindset of its young resident enemy through re-education and tracking killers and their associates after events, as the West honestly believes is should do, is not the solution.
It is the weakness of the West.
Cartoons of the Day
March 29, 2016
You can’t make it up. UN names democratic Israel as world’s top human rights violator
March 29, 2016You can’t make it up. UN names democratic Israel as world’s top human rights violator, Fox News, Anne Bayefsky, March 29, 2016
FILE — A woman walks past the Human Rights Council at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
According to the United Nations, the most evil country in the world today is Israel.
On March 24, 2016, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) wrapped up its annual meeting in New York by condemning only one country for violating women’s rights anywhere on the planet – Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women.
On the same day, the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded its month-long session in Geneva by condemning Israel five times more than any other of the 192 UN member states.
There were five Council resolutions on Israel. One each on the likes of hellish countries like Syria, North Korea and Iran. Libya got an offer of “technical assistance.” And countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and China were among the 95 percent of states that were never mentioned.
No slander is deemed too vile for the U.N. human rights bodies that routinely listen to highly orchestrated Palestinian versions of the ancient blood libel against the Jews.
Asylum-Seekers from Israel by Country in 2015 | FindTheData
(Map at link — DM)
In Geneva, Palestinian representative Ibrahim Khraishi told the Council on March 24, 2016: “Israeli soldiers and settlers kill Palestinian children. They shoot them dead. They will leave them to bleed to death.” And in New York, Palestinian representative Haifa Al-Agha told CSW on March 16, 2016: “Israel…is directing its military machinery against women and girls. They are killing them, injuring them, and leaving them bleeding to death.”
Operating hand-in-glove with governments and the U.N. secretariat are the unelected, sanctimonious NGOs, to which the UN offers free facilities and daily advertisement of “side-events.” In theory “materials containing abusive or offensive language or images are not permitted on United Nations premises.”
In practice, in Geneva the UN permitted handouts that claimed Israel “saw ethnic cleansing as a necessary precondition for its existence.” A film accused Israel of sexual violence against children and “trying to exterminate an entire Palestinian generation.” Speeches focused on the 1948 “catastrophe” in which a “settler colonial state” was established on Palestinian land.
The New York CSW-NGO scene included a film set in in the context of Israeli “oppression” and the “tear gas of my childhood,” and statements analogizing the experiences of Palestinians to today’s Syrian refugees.
Picture these real-life scenes:
In Geneva’s grand U.N. “Human Rights” Council chamber, 750 people assembled, pounced on the Jewish state, broadcast the spectacle online, and produced hundreds of articles and interviews in dozens of languages championing the results.
On the ground, Israelis are being hacked to death on the streets, stabbed in buses, slaughtered in synagogues, mowed down with automobiles, and shot in front of their children.
At the New York’s UN headquarters, 8,100 NGO representatives gathered from all corners of the globe, in addition to government delegates, and watched the weight of the entire world of women’s rights descended on only one country.
On the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honor, Saudi women can’t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so-called “adultery,” Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being Christian.
Isn’t it about time that people stopped calling the U.N. a harmless international salon or a bad joke?
The poison isn’t simply rhetorical. One of the Council resolutions adopted last week launches a worldwide witch-hunt for companies that do business with Israel – as part of an effort to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield. The resolution casts a wide net encompassing all companies engaged in whatever the U.N. thinks are business “practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises.”
And the toxicity is self-perpetuating. Acting at the beck and call of Islamic states and their conduit – French Ambassador Elizabeth Laurin and Council President Choi Kyonglim selected Canadian law professor Michael Lynk as the newest U.N. “independent” human rights investigator on Israel.
Lynk’s qualifications? He has likened Israelis to Nazis, and challenged the legitimacy of the state of Israel starting in 1948 as rooted in “ethnic cleansing.”
All of this played out in the same week that Europe was reeling from the Belgian terror attacks. Petrified or already vanquished, no European state voted against this onslaught of U.N. resolutions against Israel. Germany and the United Kingdom occasionally abstained, while France voted with Arab and Islamic states on all but one Council resolution.
Here we are just 70 years after World War II and Europeans believe that they can license this vitriol against the Jewish state – the only democracy on the front lines of an Islamist war against human decency – and the consequences can be contained to the Jews.
Even as the converse stares them in the face. Two days after the Brussels attacks, Islamic states rammed through a Council resolution slyly labeled “Effects of terrorism on the enjoyment of all human rights” that was actually so anti-human rights even Belgium was forced to vote against it.
As for the United States, the Obama administration has been the Human Rights Council’s most important supporter. Though the U.S. is currently in a mandatory one-year hiatus — after serving two consecutive terms — President Obama plans to bind his successor by running again in the fall for another three-year term that starts January 1, 2017.
Memo to Americans who are mad as hell: It’s time to elicit a promise from our would-be leaders to refuse to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council or to legitimize the United Nations.
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