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Column One: From Yemen to Turtle Bay

October 14, 2016

Column One: From Yemen to Turtle Bay, Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, October 13, 2016

sana-yemen

As far as Obama is concerned, Iran is a partner, not an adversary.

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Off the coast of Yemen and at the UN Security Council we are seeing the strategic endgame of Barack Obama’s administration. And it isn’t pretty.

Since Sunday, Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have attacked US naval craft three times in the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow straits at the mouth of the Red Sea. The Bab al-Mandab controls maritime traffic in the Red Sea, and ultimately controls the Suez Canal.

Whether the Iranians directed these assaults or simply green-lighted them is really beside the point. The point is that these are Iranian strikes on the US. The Houthis would never have exposed themselves to US military retaliation if they hadn’t been ordered to do so by their Iranian overlords.

The question is why has Iran chosen to open up an assault on the US? The simple answer is that Iran has challenged US power at the mouth of the Red Sea because it believes that doing so advances its strategic aims in the region.

Iran’s game is clear enough. It wishes to replace the US as the regional hegemon, at the US’s expense.

Since Obama entered office nearly eight years ago, Iran’s record in advancing its aims has been one of uninterrupted success.

Iran used the US withdrawal from Iraq as a means to exert its full control over the Iraqi government. It has used Obama’s strategic vertigo in Syria as a means to exert full control over the Assad regime and undertake the demographic transformation of Syria from a Sunni majority state to a Shi’ite plurality state.

In both cases, rather than oppose Iran’s power grabs, the Obama administration has welcomed them. As far as Obama is concerned, Iran is a partner, not an adversary.

Since like the US, Iran opposes al-Qaida and ISIS, Obama argues that the US has nothing to fear from the fact that Iranian-controlled Shiite militias are running the US-trained Iraqi military.

So, too, he has made clear that the US is content to stand by as the mullahs become the face of Syria.

In Yemen, the US position has been more ambivalent. In late 2014, Houthi rebel forces took over the capital city of Sanaa. In March 2015, the Saudis led a Sunni campaign to overthrow the Houthi government. In a bid to secure Saudi support for the nuclear agreement it was negotiating with the Iranians, the Obama administration agreed to support the Saudi campaign. To this end, the US military has provided intelligence, command and control guidance, and armaments to the Saudis.

Iran’s decision to openly assault US targets then amounts to a gamble on Tehran’s part that in the twilight of the Obama administration, the time is ripe to move in for the kill in Yemen. The Iranians are betting that at this point, with just three months to go in the White House, Obama will abandon the Saudis, and so transfer control over Arab oil to Iran.

For with the Strait of Hormuz on the one hand, and the Bab al-Mandab on the other, Iran will exercise effective control over all maritime oil flows from the Arab world.

It’s not a bad bet for the Iranians, given Obama’s consistent strategy in the Middle East.

Obama has never discussed that strategy.

Indeed, he has deliberately concealed it. But to understand the game he has been playing all along, the only thing you need to do listen to his foreign policy soul mate.

According to a New York Times profile published in May, Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is the president’s alter ego. The two men’s minds have “melded.”

Rhodes’s first foreign policy position came in the course of his work for former congressman Lee Hamilton.

In 2006, then-president George W. Bush appointed former secretary of state James Baker and Hamilton to lead the Iraq Study Group. Bush tasked the group with offering a new strategy for winning the war in Iraq. The group released its report in late 2006.

The Iraq Study Group’s report contained two basic recommendations. First, it called for the administration to abandon Iraq to the Iranians.

The group argued that due to Iran’s opposition to al-Qaida, the Iranians would fight al-Qaida for the US.

The report’s second recommendation related to Israel. Baker, Hamilton and their colleagues argued that after turning Iraq over to Iran, the US would have to appease its Sunni allies.

The US, the Iraq Study Group report argued, should simultaneously placate the Sunnis and convince the Iranians of its sincerity by sticking it to Israel. To this end, the US should pressure Israel to give the Golan Heights to Syria and give Judea and Samaria to the PLO.

Bush rejected the Iraq Study Group report. Instead he opted to win the war in Iraq by adopting the surge counterinsurgency strategy.

But once Bush was gone, and Rhodes’s intellectual twin replaced him, the Iraq Study Group recommendations became the unstated US strategy in the Middle East.

After taking office, Obama insisted that the US’s only enemy was al-Qaida. In 2014, Obama grudgingly expanded the list to include ISIS.

Obama has consistently justified empowering Iran in Iraq and Syria on the basis of this narrow definition of US enemies. Since Iran is also opposed to ISIS and al-Qaida, the US can leave the job of defeating them both to the Iranians, he has argued.

Obviously, Iran won’t do the US’s dirty work for free. So Obama has paid the mullahs off by giving them an open road to nuclear weapons through his nuclear deal, by abandoning sanctions against them, and by turning his back on their ballistic missile development.

Obama has also said nothing about the atrocities that Iranian-controlled militia have carried out against Sunnis in Iraq and has stopped operations against Hezbollah.

As for Israel, since his first days in office, Obama has been advancing the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations. His consistent, and ever escalating condemnations of Israel, his repeated moves to pick fights with Jerusalem are all of a piece with the group’s recommended course of action. And there is every reason to believe that Obama intends to make good on his threats to cause an open rupture in the US alliance with Israel in his final days in office.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call with Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday night made this clear enough. In the course of their conversation, Netanyahu reportedly asked Kerry if Obama intended to enable an anti-Israel resolution to pass in the UN Security Council after the presidential election next month. By refusing to rule out the possibility, Kerry all but admitted that this is in fact Obama’s intention.

And this brings us back to Iran’s assaults on US ships along the coast of Yemen.

Early on Sunday morning, the US responded to the Houthi/Iranian missile assaults by attacking three radar stations in Houthi-controlled territory. The nature of the US moves gives credence to the fear that the US will surrender Yemen to Iran.

This is so for three reasons. First, the administration did not allow the USS Mason destroyer to respond to the sources of the missile attack against it immediately. Instead, the response was delayed until Obama himself could determine how best to “send a message.”

That is, he denied US forces the right to defend themselves.

Second, it is far from clear that destroying the radar stations will inhibit the Houthis/Iranians.

It is not apparent that radar stations are necessary for them to continue to assault US naval craft operating in the area.

Finally, the State Department responded to the attack by reaching out to the Houthis. In other words, the administration is continuing to view the Iranian proxy is a legitimate actor rather than an enemy despite its unprovoked missile assaults on the US Navy.

Then there is the New York Times’ position on Yemen.

The Times has repeatedly allowed the administration to use it as an advocate of policies the administration itself wishes to adopt. Last week for instance, the Times called for the US to turn on Israel at the Security Council.

On Tuesday, the Times published an editorial calling for the administration to end its military support for the Saudi campaign against the Houthis/Iran in Yemen.

Whereas the Iranian strategy makes sense, Obama’s strategy is nothing less than disastrous.

Although the Iraq Study Group, like Obama, is right that Iran also opposes ISIS, and to a degree, al-Qaida, they both ignored the hard reality that Iran also views the US as its enemy. Indeed, the regime’s entire identity is tied up in its hatred for the US and its strategic aim of destroying America.

Obama is not the only US president who has sought to convince the Iranians to abandon their hatred for America. Every president since 1979 has tried to convince the mullahs to abandon their hostility. And just like all of his predecessors, Obama has failed to convince them.

What distinguishes Obama from his predecessors is that he has based US policy on a deliberate denial of the basic reality of Iranian hostility. Not surprisingly, the Iranians have returned his favor by escalating their aggression against America.

The worst part about Obama’s strategy is that it is far from clear that his successor will be able to improve the situation.

If Hillary Clinton succeeds him, his successor is unlikely to even try. Not only has Clinton embraced Obama’s policies toward Iran.

Her senior advisers are almost all Obama administration alumni. Wendy Sherman, the leading candidate to serve as her secretary of state, was Obama’s chief negotiator with the Iranians.

If Donald Trump triumphs next month, assuming he wishes to reassert US power in the region, he won’t have an easy time undoing the damage that Obama has caused.

Time has not stood still as the US has engaged in strategic dementia. Not only has Iran been massively empowered, Russia has entered the Middle East as a strategic spoiler.

Moreover, since 2001, the US has spent more than a trillion dollars on its failed wars in the Middle East. That investment came in lieu of spending on weapons development. Today Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft missiles in Syria reportedly neutralize the US’s air force.

US naval craft in the Bab al-Mandab have little means to defend themselves against missile strikes.

The US’s trillion-dollar investment in the F-35 fighter jet has tethered its air wings to a plane that has yet to prove its capabilities, and may never live up to expectations.

Israel is justifiably worried about the implications of Obama’s intention to harm it at the UN.

But the harm Israel will absorb at the UN is nothing in comparison to the long-term damage that Obama’s embrace of the Iraq Study Group’s disastrous strategic framework has and will continue to cause Israel, the US and the entire Middle East.

Categories: Houthi, Iran - world power, Iran and Israel, Iran in Yemen, Iranian proxies, Israeli security, Middle East, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel, Obama and Russia, Obama and Yemen, Obama's foreign failures, Saudi Arabia, UN Security Council, Yemen
Tags: Houthi, Iran - world power, Iran and Israel, Iran in Yemen, Iranian proxies, Israeli security, Middle East, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel, Obama and Russia, Obama and Yemen, Obama's foreign failures, Saudi Arabia, UN Security Council, Yemen

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Jerusalem on high alert for next terror strike

October 11, 2016

Jerusalem on high alert for next terror strike, DEBKAfile, October 11, 2016

Police at a scene of a terror attack at the National Police Headquarters in Jerusalem on October 9, 2016. A Palestinian man drove by and shot civilians injuring about g people before being shot by police when he got to the Sheikh Jarah neighborhood in Jerusalem. Photo by Hadas Parush/Flash90 *** Local Caption *** ????? ??? ???????

Police at a scene of a terror attack at the National Police Headquarters in Jerusalem on October 9, 2016.

Israeli security and police authorities fear that the drive-by shooting attack in Jerusalem Sun. Oct. 9 was planned as the opening shot of a round of major Palestinian terror assaults, most likely in Jerusalem, over the Jewish High Holidays.DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources report information received of more than one group of terrorists heading for an attack, in the wake of the Silwan gunman, who murdered Yosef Kirma and Levana Malichi Sunday. They are fired up to avenge his death in a shootout with Israeli police, which cut short his shooting spree.

Police, Border Guards and elite police units are fanned out wide to forestall any attacks, over and above the regular reinforcement of manpower, including volunteers, for Yom Kippur, especially at the Western Wall which sees a mass intake of worshippers for the annual Day of Repentance.

Community leaders at the Palestinian Al-Ram village in north Jerusalem were warned to put a stop to the celebrations that hailed the gunman as a hero and martyr or face a curfew. The villagers would then be prevented from going out to their jobs in the city. While the investigation into the shooting is under a gag order, it is already evident that the perpetrator did not act alone. His accomplices are now targeted.

The detention a month ago of a Palestinian terrorist in the Shuafat district of Jerusalem thwarted a row of terror attacks planned by him on behalf of Hamas for the Jewish High Holidays in Jerusalem. He was charged with forming a Hamas cell and plotting attacks, including laying explosive devices in shops, an attack on crowds at the Malcha Mall, and preparing a suicide attack in a Pisgat Zeev bus.

Read earlier DEBKA reports.

Details of the inquiry into the deadly Palestinian shooting spree that claimed two Israeli lives and injured 6 others in Jerusalem Sunday, Oct. 9, are under a court gag order. However, this attack was clearly different from the run-of-the-mill terror plaguing Israel for the last two years, which its security services have usually prevented in good time or cut short before the damage spread.

The two victims were Police Elite Unit (Yasam) officer Yosef Kirma, 29, who was survived by his wife, parents and two brothers, and Levana Malichi, 60, who was mourned by a husband, three daughters and 6 grandchildren.

The gunman was not an anonymous knife-wielding lone youth, but well known to the police and security authorities as Musabah Abu Sabit, 39, from Silwan, who fitted the classical profile of a hardened terrorist.

Abu Sabit had been in and out of Israeli courts and prisons, charged with grievous bodily harm to police officers, taking illegal military training, torching vehicles and other violent acts.

He was due to start serving another four-month jail sentence on the day of his shooting rampage in Jerusalem. This terrorist was also prominent in extremist Palestinian circles as “the Lion of Jerusalem.” He was photographed marching with the flag of the Hamas terrorist group and caught as a activist for the outlawed violent anti-Israel Islamist Murabatun movement.

Abu Sabit did not operate underground. His hate-filled inflammatory messages with self-images appeared in Facebook, the latest one two days ago.

Homeland Security Minister Gilead Erdan’s stated to the media after the attack that no specific warning had preceded the attack and charged Facebook with responsibility for reopening its pages to Palestinian incitement.

Neither claim accounted for the security authorities having missed the vital clue to the coming attack.

That miscue will not doubt be uncovered by the inquiry. But the questions remain.

Abu Sabit moved between three sites of attack, shooting an MI6-type automatic rifle, a feat demanding the aptitude of a commando or special operations fighter. Where was he trained? Did he pause between attacks, or did he have an accomplice at the wheel? If he did, what happened to him? Is he the object of a manhunt? The weapon was worth roughly $10,000. How did he obtain it and the ammo he used?

A terorist operation of this kind would be hard to conduct by a lone killer. It would be typically aided and abetted by a group, each member of which would have a special function. So was this the work of a network which the Shin Bet Security Service missed?

After he was banned from Jerusalem, the gunman was able to return. How come? Were there no tabs on his movements?

The bravery, speed and enterprise demonstrated by the special police and border police officers in reaching and tackling the gunman minutes into his attack were exceptional. They offer a classical model for any anti-terror force anywhere. But Yosef Kirma paid the price.

DEBKAfile reported earlier Sunday.

Two of the eight injured victims of a Palestinian gunman’s attack Sunday, Oct. 9 in Jerusalem have died of their injuries. He conducted a shooting rampage from a moving car through three sites in northern Jerusalem: the light rail station opposite French Hill, the Shimon Hatzadik Tomb and a main Jerusalem thoroughfare, ending in a shootout at the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrach. There, he was surrounded by police and an elite counter-terror force. In the ensuing shootout, he was killed, after injuring two police officers, one of whom has since died. The gunman was a 39-year old resident of Silwan, a district opposite the Old City of Jerusalem.

This was the most serious attack in the latest upsurge of Palestinian terror starting ahead of the Jewish High Festivals. He was able to drive between three sites near National Police Headquarters, shooting all the way, without being stopped. In the final shootout, residents at Sheikh Jerrach were heard shouting Allahu Akhbar! from their windows.

Israeli Police Commissioner Ronnie Alsheich described the attack as serious with multiple victims – but not a surprise. Palestinian terrorists are wont to strike when Jewish festivals are at hand. The attack Sunday came three days before Yom Kippur Eve. He called on the public to carry on with their normal lives while remaining vigilant and informing the police of anything out of the way.

Nothing has changed, he said, but security forces operate day and night to prevent the ever-present terror menace. There is no reason to cancel visits to Jerusalem. Commissioner Alsheich praised the way the police handled the terrorist shooting rampage at three sites, noting that from beginning to end, the incident took no longer than 3-4 minutes.

At the same time, DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources note that two weeks ago, the same gunman, suspected of plotting a terrorist attack, was issued with an order distancing him from Jerusalem.

Although the police commissioner said no advance warning of a terror attack had been received, DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources report that the same gunman, known to the police as Mussabah Abu Sabit, 39, from Silwan, a Hamas follower and activist in the anti-Israel Muslim Al Aqsa campaign, was given an order two weeks ago banning his presence in Jerusalem.

This raises three questions:

1. How was he able to reach Jerusalem for his murderous shooting spree?

2. Did the police fail to execute the ban?

3. After being expelled from Jerusalem, wouldn’t he have presented the same terror threat from his next destination in another part the country?

4. Were any devices employed to keep track of the potential terrorist’s whereabouts?

Categories: Israeli security, Law enforcement, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Yom Kippur
Tags: Israeli security, Law enforcement, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Yom Kippur

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Palestinians: Abbas “The Jew”

October 7, 2016

Palestinians: Abbas “The Jew”, Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, October 7, 2016

The unprecedented outcry over Abbas’s participation in the funeral of an Israeli leader is further proof of the degree to which Palestinians have been radicalized.

This is what happens when you unleash a tidal wave of hate against Israel and its leaders in the media, mosques and public rhetoric. In light of this brainwashing, how do you expect your people to respond when you, in any way, associate with an Israeli leader?

If attending the funeral of an Israeli leader, especially one who devoted the past two decades of his life to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, draws such condemnation, it is easy to imagine the result of a Palestinian leader making a peace overture to Israel.

Even if the current condemnation eventually dies down, it will have sent a message to future Palestinian leaders: “No peace with Israel, not in our time, and not in any time.”

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is facing a barrage of criticism for attending the funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. The fury directed towards Abbas comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with the unrelenting campaign of anti-Israel incitement that has been taking place for many years in Palestinian society.

If attending the funeral of an Israeli leader, especially one who devoted the past two decades of his life to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, draws such condemnation, it is easy to imagine the result of a Palestinian leader making a peace overture to Israel.

President Abbas is now receiving a dose of his own medicine. This is what happens when you unleash a tidal wave of hate against Israel and its leaders in the media, mosques and public rhetoric. This is what happens when you inform your people that Israeli leaders are “war criminals” who ought to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court. This is what happens when you drive into your people that Jews are desecrating with their “filthy feet” Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem. This is what happens when you accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing”, “extra-judicial executions” and “poisoning” Yasser Arafat.

In light of this brainwashing, how do you expect your people to respond when you, in any way, associate with an Israeli leader?

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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the funeral of Shimon Peres, a former president of Israel, on September 30. Abbas is facing a barrage of criticism for attending the funeral, with members of his own party calling it “treason.” (Image source: Ruptly video screenshot)

It is hard to believe that Abbas and his cronies were surprised by the current wave of reprobation. But the degree of vitriol was perhaps not predicted.

Abbas is now getting it from all quarters. The denunciations are coming not only from his political foes in Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), but also from groups and figures belonging to his ruling Fatah faction.

Palestinians say that the 81-year-old Abbas, who is now in his 11th year of his four-year term in office, is facing his most serious challenge to leadership. And there are no signs that the recriminations are subsiding. On the contrary, each day brings with it yet another flood of reproof, prompting Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah to issue a stiff warning to those who are exploiting the situation to “incite” against Abbas. However, the threats have failed to deter his critics from proceeding with their attacks on him and calling on him to step down.

One of those who have already paid a price for criticizing Abbas’s attendance of the Peres funeral is Lieutenant Colonel Osama Mansour, who holds a senior position in the PA’s Military Liaison Apparatus. In a post on Facebook, the PA officer strongly condemned Abbas’s move:

“If you alone decided to participate in the funeral of the killer of our sons, then you erred. And if you took the decision on the basis of what you were told by your advisors, then they have misled you.”

Hours after the post appeared on Facebook, Mansour was suspended from his job. Later, he was arrested by PA Military Intelligence Service officers who raided his house and conducted a search, during which they destroyed furniture, according to his family. A PA court has since ordered Mansour remanded into custody for fifteen days.

The suspension and subsequent arrest of the officer sparked a new wave of rage against Abbas and his security forces. Palestinians took to social media to protest the crackdown on the officer, hailing him as a hero and denouncing Abbas as a “dog” and Israeli “collaborator.” Some suggested that the officer was worthy of being appointed as a minister in the PA Cabinet for his courageous remarks.

But the move against the senior officer did not deter many Abbas loyalists from coming out against him for going to the funeral of Peres.

Fatah’s “Youth Movement,” known in Arabic as Al-Shabiba, issued a statement calling on Abbas to “apologize” to the Palestinians for committing a “grave mistake.” Abbas’s participation in the funeral was “humiliating and degrading” for the Palestinians and a form of “treason,” according to the statement. The group pointed out that Abbas’s move was in violation of Fatah’s regulations, which envisage the “full liberation of Palestine and eliminating Israeli occupation economically, politically, militarily and culturally.” Addressing Abbas, the group stated:

“Mr. President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas. You have committed a crime against our people by equating the executioner with the victim. We will not allow treason to become a viewpoint.”

Several senior Fatah officials sought to distance themselves from Abbas’s decision to attend the funeral of Peres by claiming that they had not been consulted beforehand.

One of them, Tawfik Tirawi, who previously served as commander of the Palestinian Authority’s General Intelligence Service in the West Bank, announced that he was personally opposed to Abbas’s gesture. He clarified that Abbas did not seek the opinion of the Fatah leadership before he went to the funeral:

“Had I been personally consulted as a member of the Fatah Central Committee, I would have made it clear that I am against participation in principle, because this is a funeral of a Zionist who wallowed, from head to toe, in the blood of our people and other Arabs.”

Tirawi went on to describe Peres as the “engineer of the Israeli nuclear project which is designed to foil any plan to retrieve our land.”

The widespread protests against Abbas’s decision to participate in Peres’s funeral took a violent turn on October 3, when PA policemen used force to break up a peaceful demonstration in Ramallah. Organized by the PFLP, the protest was yet another sign of the strong sentiments many Palestinians harbor not only against Abbas, but also Israel.

Palestinian lawyer Muhanad Karajeh, who works for a Ramallah-based human rights organization, reported that he was asked by the organizers to be present in order to document the event. The lawyer stated he was severely beaten by PA security officers during the protest. “I was repeatedly beaten in the face and different parts of the body,” he recounted. “I know some of the officers personally. They tore my suit although I told them I am a lawyer. They humiliated me and cursed me and my profession.”

In a desperate act to counter the spreading protests, Abbas’s aides organized impromptu marches in support of the Palestinian Authority president. The PA leadership summons Fatah activist-thugs to take to the streets whenever it feels the heat. Carrying photos of Abbas and the yellow Fatah flags, scores of Fatah members marched in the streets of Ramallah in a show of force and as a message of warning to those who would censure Abbas. “We stand behind our historic leadership and President Abbas,” declared top Fatah activist Osama Qawassmeh. “Fatah is a red line and it is facing a conspiracy.”

On social media, the attacks on Abbas were quite ruthless. Palestinian activists circulated cartoons ridiculing Abbas. One of them depicted Abbas as a rabbi in Israeli military uniform and a Jewish skullcap weeping next to Peres’s grave. Another cartoon featured an Arab laying a wreath on a boot next to Peres’s photo.

On Twitter, activists launched hashtags called, “Offering Condolences On the Death of Peres is Treason” and “Normalization is Treason.”

Hamas was not silent about Abbas’s “treason.” Mahmoud Zahar, one of the leaders of the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip, opined that according to Islamic teachings, Abbas qualifies as a Jew. “We hope that he will join Peres in Hell,” Zahar said. “Abbas is an Israeli product. The man who claims to represent all the Palestinian people has stood up against all Palestinians and Arabs.”

A large group of Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists and political activists signed a petition calling on Abbas to apologize for attending the Peres funeral, characterizing the move as an “historic and political mistake.” At least 150 Palestinians and Arabs signed the petition, which stressed that Abbas’s decision came as a “shock” to Palestinians.

The protests have, meanwhile, spread to Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and neighboring Arab countries. At the Balata refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus, thousands of Palestinians chanted slogans calling for the removal of Abbas from power. The protest came during a funeral of a Palestinian man who had been shot dead a week earlier by Palestinian Authority policemen.

The unprecedented outcry over Abbas’s participation in the funeral of an Israeli leader is further proof of the degree to which Palestinians have been radicalized. Frustration with Abbas and his policies is not new. More and more Palestinians have in recent years expressed rage over his “lenient” policies towards Israel. A particular bone in their throat is the continued security coordination between PA security forces and Israel. They perceive this cooperation with the Israelis as “treasonous”. Many Palestinians are also angry with Abbas for his refusal to share power and pave the way for the emergence of new leaders.

The blame for the radicalization of the Palestinian people lies squarely at the feet of Abbas and the rest of the PA. If you promote boycotts of Israel, expect to be attacked when you break that boycott by associating with any Israeli, alive or dead. Protests tend to subside, but even if the current condemnation eventually does die down, it will have sent a message to future Palestinian leaders. The message is: “No peace with Israel, not in our time, and not in any time.”

Categories: Abbas, Antisemitism, Israel, Israeli security, Israeli settlements, Isreal - Jewish state, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian state, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Shimon Peres, Two state solution
Tags: Abbas, Antisemitism, Israel, Israeli security, Israeli settlements, Isreal - Jewish state, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian state, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Shimon Peres, Two state solution

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Israel’s Resilient Decency Despite Extreme Terrorism

October 5, 2016

Israel’s Resilient Decency Despite Extreme Terrorism, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Noah Beck, October 5, 2016

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[I]n 2015, Israelis suffered about 10 terrorist attacks every day.

Adjusted for population size, the violence would equate to a staggering 150,160 attacks in a year in the United States (roughly 411 per day).

[S]tories of Israeli decency and the relative prosperity of Israel’s Muslims rarely appear in the mainstream media or get acknowledged by the EU, the UN, or human rights organizations.

The next time Western politicians, human rights groups, and journalists feel tempted to critique Israeli conduct, or demand more restraint from Israelis, they should ask themselves: “How would we respond if there were 411 jihadi terrorist attacks per day here? Would we also provide medical treatment to terrorists and their relatives? Would our society be nearly as tolerant and kind towards Muslims? Would our laws similarly protect Muslim rights and allow Muslim political groups to support organizations that want to destroy our country? How often would our headlines and coverage present a neutralized terrorist as a victim?”

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U.S. citizens got a small taste of the Islamist terror threat that hounds Israelis on Sept. 17, with four bombings or bombing attempts in the New York metropolitan area and a Minnesota stabbing attack.

Israel, a country about the size of New Jersey, endured eight terrorist attacks in a four-day period overlapping the American incidents. Even that frightening frequency does not represent “the scale of the attacks during the previous wave” of terror, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an Israeli think tank.

Israel’s experience shows that the war against Islamist terror is a long and difficult one, but it can be managed while maintaining a democracy’s core values.

Whereas the U.S. experienced about a dozen attacks during the 21 months from the start of 2015 through last month, an Israeli government list of terror attacks covering 12 months from 2015-16 totaled 407 attacks, including 165 stabbings, 87 attempted stabbings, 107 shootings, 47 vehicular (ramming) attacks, and one bus bombing. Those attacks killed 40 people and injured 558 others.

The Israeli government statistics don’t include stone throwing, petrol bombs, riots, IEDs, arson, stun grenade attacks, rocket attacks, and other types of attacks. When those are included, Israelis endured 3,754 terrorist attacks (including 3,635 by Palestinians and 119 by Israeli Arabs) from Jan. 1, 2015 to Jan. 5, 2016, according to a meticulously documented list compiled by analyst Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho.

Thus, in 2015, Israelis suffered about 10 terrorist attacks every day.

Adjusted for population size, the violence would equate to a staggering 150,160 attacks in a year in the United States (roughly 411 per day).

Of course, demographic, geographic and historic differences mean the U.S. is unlikely ever to experience that much Islamist terrorism.

Despite those differences, jihadi attacks in the United States during the last year have been enough to inject proposals like banning all Muslims from entering the country into the national political debate. No such proposals have ever been publicly discussed by any mainstream political parties in Israel.

By contrast, Israeli democracy is immensely tolerant of diverse opinions – to the point that the Arab party in the Knesset publicly supports terrorist organizations bent on destroying Israel. Last March, two Arab-Israeli political parties condemned Gulf Arab states for designating the Lebanese-based Iranian proxy Hizballah a terror organization. Hizballah openly seeks Israel’s destruction, and has more than 100,000 rockets and missiles aimed at the Jewish state. Could a parliamentary party in the EU or U.S. ever openly support an enemy terrorist group?

Remarkably, Israel spares no expense when providing medical help to the very terrorists attempting to murder Israelis.

Last December, at the height of the “Stabbing Intifida” – a series of seemingly spontaneous knife attacks by Palestinians on Israelis – the Israeli Medical Association issued a ruling requiring that the wounded be aided in order of injury severity, even if that means helping assailants before victims. Israeli medics treat Palestinian terrorists and murderers better than their Palestinian counterparts treat Israeli victims of Palestinian terror, such as the Palestinian medics who ignored an Israeli terror victim’s plea for help last November.

Another example of Israel’s incredible humanism despite extreme terrorism is the Israeli mother who was happy to donate the kidney of her son, who was murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber, to save the life of a Palestinian girl.

The Israeli non-profit “Heart for Peace” is staffed by Israeli and Arab cardiologists who have saved the lives of more than 610 Palestinian children since 2005. Outrageously, in 2014, a Gazan mother whose young son’s heart was saved by Israeli doctors said that she hoped he would grow up to be a suicide bomber.

Israel has even provided medical services to the relatives of those seeking its destruction. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh may encourage ordinary Palestinians to embrace martyrdom for the sake of killing Israelis, but his mother-in-law, daughter, and granddaughter have all been treated by Israeli hospitals. During the last war with Hamas in 2014, Israel reportedly provided medical treatment to two Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated the country through a tunnel. Every year, Israel treats thousands of Gazans.

Examples of public generosity and decency may be rare in conflict zones, but they abound in Israel. When an Arab Israeli was wrongly beaten by police in May, the Israeli public raised money for the victim’s college tuition and legal fees, a story that went totally unreported by the mainstream media. Last August, a Palestinian girl whose bicycle was taken and broken by Israeli border police received a new bicycle donated by an Israeli man.

The EU routinely criticizes Israel for its relations with Muslims, yet Europe is far less tolerant of Islam in many respects. Last summer, three French cities – Corsica,Cannes, and Villeneuve-Loubet – banned “burkinis” from the beach. Germany’s interior minister called for a partial ban on burkinis, and a German public swimming pool reportedly prohibited them. By contrast, Israel allows burkinis, a fact highlighted in a New York Times video that went viral.

Four European countries – France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and now Bulgaria – ban full face veils in most public places. Israel imposes no such restrictions on Muslims.

Last summer provided an even more positive testament to how Israeli Muslims are treated, when Israel’s smartest high-school student was an Arab named “Mohammed” and the captain of Israel’s goalball team at the Rio Paralympics was a 26-year-old, Muslim woman. (Goalball is a sport created for blind athletes.)

But stories of Israeli decency and the relative prosperity of Israel’s Muslims rarely appear in the mainstream media or get acknowledged by the EU, the UN, or human rights organizations. World leaders routinely call for Israeli restraint, as if Israelis weren’t already exercising extraordinary restraint, a fact demonstrated by this graph showing how each of Israel’s last three wars with Hamas (in 2008, 2012, and 2014) was preceded by hundreds, and more often thousands, of Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. What country would tolerate thousands of deadly projectiles being fired on its civilians before responding with enough force to stop the attacks?

Similarly, when it comes to stabbings, car rammings, bombings, and other forms of Palestinian terrorism, world opinion reflexively calls for Israeli restraint and/or attempts to justify the attacks.

Last October, EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini called for Israeli restraint after four Israelis had been murdered in a total of 19 terrorist attacks during the first 12 days of the month. Secretary of State John Kerry tried to blame that wave of Palestinian terrorism on Israeli settlements. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tried to justify Palestinian terrorism as a rational response to “occupation. “Such reactions would be unthinkable in response to similar terrorist attacks in the EU or U.S. World leaders and the global media seem unaware that Arab Muslims have been killing Jews for more than a century – long before any occupation, settlements, or even a Jewish state.

Palestinian terror attacks don’t reflect some miserably unfair existence – they are the product of raw hatred and incitement. Dozens of Israeli Arab Muslims have committed terrorist attacks even though they are not under occupation and enjoy better freedoms and living standards than most of the Arab world has. Like so many Palestinian terrorists, they are driven by the same hateful incitement that rejects any state for the Jews.

The next time Western politicians, human rights groups, and journalists feel tempted to critique Israeli conduct, or demand more restraint from Israelis, they should ask themselves: “How would we respond if there were 411 jihadi terrorist attacks per day here? Would we also provide medical treatment to terrorists and their relatives? Would our society be nearly as tolerant and kind towards Muslims? Would our laws similarly protect Muslim rights and allow Muslim political groups to support organizations that want to destroy our country? How often would our headlines and coverage present a neutralized terrorist as a victim?”

Categories: Foreign policy, Human rights organizations, Israel and human rights, Israeli security, Media and Israel, Palestinian terrorists, United Nations
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Column One: The New Middle East

September 29, 2016

Column One: The New Middle East, Jerusalem Post, Caroline B. Glick, September 29, 2016

aleppo-mess

A RED CRESCENT aid worker inspects scattered medical supplies after an air strike on a medical depot in Aleppo on Saturday.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

So Obama let Syria burn. He let Iran and Hezbollah transform the country into their colony. And he let Putin transform the Mediterranean into a Russian lake.

A new Syria is emerging. And with it, a new Middle East and world are presenting themselves. Our new world is not a peaceful or stable one. It is a harsh place.

The new Syria is being born in the rubble of Aleppo.

The eastern side of the city, which has been under the control of US-supported rebel groups since 2012, is being bombed into the Stone Age by Russian and Syrian aircraft.

All avenues of escape have been blocked. A UN aid convoy was bombed in violation of a fantasy cease-fire.

Medical facilities and personnel are being targeted by Russia and Syrian missiles and barrel bombs to make survival impossible.

It is hard to assess how long the siege of eastern Aleppo by Russia, its Iranian and Hezbollah partners and its Syrian regime puppet will last. But what is an all but foregone conclusion now is that eastern Aleppo will fall. And with its fall, the Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis will consolidate its control over all of western Syria.

For four years, the Iranians, Hezbollah and Bashar Assad played a cat and mouse game with the rebel militias.

Fighting a guerrilla war with the help of the Sunni population, the anti-regime militias were able to fight from and hide from within the civilian population. Consequently, they were all but impossible to defeat.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to join the fight, he and his generals soon recognized that this manner of fighting ensured perpetual war. So they changed tactics. The new strategy involves speeding up the depopulation and ethnic cleansing of rebel-held areas. The massive refugee flows from Syria over the past year are a testament to the success of the barbaric war plan. The idea is to defeat the rebel forces by to destroying the sheltering civilian populations.

Since the Syrian war began some five years ago, half of the pre-war population of 23 million has been displaced.

Sunnis, who before the war comprised 75% of the population, are being targeted for death and exile. More than 4 million predominantly Sunni Syrians are living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. More than a million have entered Europe. Millions more have been internally displaced. Assad has made clear that they will never be coming home.

At the same time, the regime and its Iranian and Hezbollah masters have been importing Shi’ites from Iran, Iraq and beyond. The process actually began before the war started. In the lead-up to the war some half million Shi’ites reportedly relocated to Syria from surrounding countries.

This means that at least as far as western Syria is concerned, once Aleppo is destroyed, and the 250,000 civilians trapped in the eastern part of what was once Syria’s commercial capital are forced from their homes and property, the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah and their Syrian fig leaf Assad will enjoy relative peace in their areas of control.

By adopting a strategy of total war, Putin has ensured that far from becoming the quagmire that President Barack Obama warned him Syria would become, the war in Syria has instead become a means to transform Russia into the dominant superpower in the Mediterranean, at the US’s expense.

In exchange for saving Assad’s neck and enabling Iran and Hezbollah to control Syria, Russia has received the capacity to successfully challenge US power. Last month Putin brought an agreement with Assad before the Duma for ratification. The agreement permits – indeed invites – Russia to set up a permanent air base in Khmeimim, outside the civilian airport in Latakia.

Russian politicians, media and security experts have boasted that the base will be able to check the power of the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet and challenge NATO’s southern flank in the Mediterranean basin for the first time. The Russians have also decided to turn their naval station at Tartus into something approaching a fullscale naval base.

With Russia’s recent rapprochement with Turkish President Recip Erdogan, NATO’s future ability to check Russian power through the Incirlik air base is in question.

Even Israel’s ability to permit the US access to its air bases is no longer assured. Russia has deployed air assets to Syria that have canceled Israel’s regional air superiority.

Under these circumstances, in a hypothetical Russian-US confrontation, Israel may be unwilling to risk Russian retaliation for a decision to permit the US to use its air bases against Russia.

America’s loss of control over the eastern Mediterranean is a self-induced disaster.

For four years, as Putin stood on the sidelines and hedged his bets, Obama did nothing. As Iran and Hezbollah devoted massive financial and military assets to maintaining their puppet Assad in power, the Obama administration squandered chance after chance to bring down the regime and stem Iran’s regional imperial advance.

For his refusal to take action when such action could have easily been taken, Obama shares the responsibility for what Syria has become. This state of affairs is all the more infuriating because the hard truth is that it wouldn’t have been hard for the US to defeat the Iranian- Hezbollah axis. The fact that even without US help the anti-regime forces managed to hold on for four years shows how weak the challenge posed by Iran and Hezbollah actually was.

Russia only went into Syria when Putin was absolutely convinced that Obama would do nothing to stop him from dislodging America as the premier global power in the region.

As Michael Ledeen recalled earlier this week, Obama chose to stand on the sidelines in Syria because he wanted to make friends with Iran. Obama began his secret courtship of the mullahs even before he officially took office eight years ago.

After the war broke out in Syria, midway through his first term and in the following years, the Russians and the Iranians told the obsessed American president that if he took action against Assad, as strategic rationality dictated, he would get no nuclear deal, and no rapprochement with Tehran.

So Obama let Syria burn. He let Iran and Hezbollah transform the country into their colony. And he let Putin transform the Mediterranean into a Russian lake. Obama enabled the ethnic cleansing of Syria’s Sunni majority, and in turn facilitated the refugee crisis that is changing the face not only of the Middle East but of Europe as well.

And as it turns out, the deal with Iran that Obama willingly sacrificed US control of the Mediterranean to achieve has not ushered in a new era of regional moderation and stability through appeasement as Obama foresaw. It has weakened US credibility with its spurned Sunni allies. It has undermined the strategic position of Israel, the US’s only stable and reliable regional ally. It has financially and strategically fueled Iran’s hegemonic rise throughout the region. And it has facilitated Iran’s development of a nuclear arsenal.

Far from causing the Iranian to become more moderate, the nuclear deal has radicalized the regime still further.

On Wednesday Ray Takeyh wrote in The Washington Post that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is now grooming Ibrahim Raisi, a fanatic who makes Khamenei look moderate, to succeed him in power.

On Monday night, for the first time, Israel Air Force jets flying over Syria were shot at by Syrian anti-aircraft ordnance.

Air force sources told the media that the aircraft were never in danger and the munitions were only shot off after the aircraft had returned to Israel and were in the process off landing.

The fact that no one was hurt is of course reassuring.

But the fact that Russia targeted the planes makes clear that Putin has decided to send Israel a very clear and menacing message.

He is now the protector of the Iranian-Hezbollah colony on our northern border. If Israel decides to preemptively attack targets belong to that colony, Russia will not stand by and watch. And with the US no longer well-positioned to challenge Russian power in the region, Israel will have to deal with Russia on its own.

To face this challenge, Israel needs to look beyond its traditional reliance on air power.

There are two parts of the challenge. The first part is Iran.

As far as Israel is concerned, the problem with the Russian- Iranian takeover of Syria is not Putin.

Putin is not inherently hostile to Israel, as his Soviet predecessors were. He is an opportunist. Obama gave him the opportunity to partner with Iran in asserting Russian dominance in the Middle East and he took it. Israel is threatened by the alliance because it is threatened by Iran, not by Putin. To neutralize the alliance’s threat to its own security, Israel then needs to degrade Iran’s power, and it needs to emphasize its own.

To accomplish these goals, Israel needs to operate in two completely separate arenas. To weaken Iran, Israel should take its cue from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and from its own past successful military ties to the Kurds of Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s.

Israel needs to deploy military trainers beyond its borders to work with other anti-Iranian forces. The goal of that cooperation must be to destabilize the regime, with the goal of overthrowing it. This may take time. But it must be done. The only way to neutralize the threat emanating from the new Syria is to change the nature of the Iranian regime that controls it.

As for Russia, Israel needs to demonstrate that it is a power that Putin can respect in its own right, and not a downgraded Washington’s sock puppet.

To this end, Israel should embark on a rapid expansion of its civilian presence along its eastern border with Syria and with Jordan. As Russia’s air base in Syria undermines Israel’s air superiority and reliance on air power, Israel needs to show that it will not be dislodged or allow its own territory to be threatened in any way. By doubling the Israeli population on the Golan Heights within five years, and vastly expanding its population in the Jordan Valley, Israel will accomplish two goals at once. It will demonstrate its independence from the US without harming US strategic interests. And it will reinforce its eastern border against expanded strategic threats from both the Golan Heights and the new Jordan with its bursting population of Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

It is ironic that the new Middle East is coming into focus as Shimon Peres, the failed visionary of a fantasy- based new Middle East, is being laid to rest. But to survive in the real new Middle East, Israel must bury Peres’s belief that peace is built by appeasing enemies along with him. The world in which we live has a place for dreamers.

But dreams, unhinged from reality, lead to Aleppo, not to peace.

Categories: Aleppo Syria, Foreign policy, Hezbollah, Iran - Middle East, Iranian military, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Israeli security, Middle East prospects, Obama and Middle East, Putin, Russia - Middle East, Russia - Syrian war
Tags: Aleppo Syria, Foreign Policy, Hezbollah, Iran - Middle East, Iranian military, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Israeli security, Middle East prospects, Obama and Middle East, Putin, Russia - Middle East, Russia - Syrian war

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Ending the Palestinian Exception

September 27, 2016

Ending the Palestinian Exception, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, September 27, 2016

palestinian_demonstration_against_demolish_of_the_village_susya-e1433517117362

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

Ahead of Monday night’s first presidential debate, Rudolph Giuliani – former New York mayor and Republican nominee Donald Trump’s current adviser – spoke at the Israeli American Council’s annual conference. Four days of intense debate preparation with Trump preceded the talk. Giuliani insisted the time has come for the US to “reject the whole notion of a two-state solution in Israel.”

It can only be hoped that regardless of who prevails in November, Giuliani’s statement will become the official position of the next US administration.

In his speech before the UN General Assembly last week PLO and Fatah chief and unelected Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said many things to drive home the basic point that he is not interested in peace with Israel. He is interested in destroying Israel. But one particular demand stands out.

It stands out not because it is new. It isn’t new.

Abbas says it all the time and his advisers say it all the time. They say it to Palestinian and international audiences alike, and it always is met with support or at least sympathy.

Abbas demanded that Israel stop arresting Palestinian terrorists and release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons. That is, he demanded that Israel allow thousands of convicted terrorists to walk free and refrain from doing anything to interfere with terrorists engaged planning and carrying out the murder of its citizens.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians support this demand. And so does the US government.

During US Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed peace process in 2013-14, President Barack Obama and Kerry embraced Abbas’s demand that Israel release 104 terrorist murderers from its prisons as a precondition for agreeing to negotiate with the Jewish state.

Bowing to US pressure, Israel released 78 terrorists from its jails in three tranches. Ahead of the fourth scheduled release, Abbas and his advisers bragged that they would cut off talks with Israel as soon as the last group of terrorist murderers were released.

That is, they admitted that the negotiations, such as they were, were nothing more than a means to achieve the goal of freeing murderers.

Rather than condemn Abbas and his colleagues for their cynical bad faith and repulsive immorality, the Obama administration chastised Israel for refusing to play along. When Israel responded to their statements by refusing to release the last group of 26 convicted terrorists, the administration accused Israel of breaching the terms of the negotiations.

Obama, Kerry and their advisers held Israel responsible for the talks’ failure.

It’s important to consider what Abbas’s demand for free-range terrorists says about him. It is important to ponder what the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are partners in this demand says about them as a society.

And it is worth pondering as well the strategic rationality and moral stature of a US government that supports this position.

As far as Abbas and the Palestinians are concerned, their refusal to view mass murderers as criminals tells us a great deal about who they are and what they want.

The Palestinian national movement they have come to embody was never about a deep-seated desire for national liberation. It was never about building “Palestine.”

From the time it was created by Amin el-Husseini in 1920, Palestinian identity has been about the negation of the Jewish national liberation movement – Zionism. And since Israel achieved independence in 1948, the Palestinians have defined themselves by their collective dedication to annihilating the Jewish state – hence their support for terrorists who kill Jews.

Husseini’s heir Yasser Arafat shared his view that terrorism was a both strategic goal in and of itself and a means to achieve the ultimate end of the Palestinian movement – that is, the violent eradication of Israel.

As the heir to both men, Abbas, like his sometimes partners and sometimes rivals in Hamas, has never been interested in building anything. And indeed, he hasn’t.

Consider what is loosely referred to as the “Palestinian economy.”

In an article published this week by the Hebrew-language online journal Mida, economist Uri Redler showed that the Palestinian economy isn’t actually an economy. It is an extortion racket.

Using World Bank data, Redler showed that the Palestinian economy is an optical illusion. In its 22 years of existence, the PA has almost entirely destroyed the private sector in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Seventy-five percent of its tax income comes from indirect taxes that Israel collects for it on imports. Forty percent of its budget comes from donors. Only 18% of it income comes from direct taxation. And most of that comes from deduction at source of PA employees.

Since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, only 15% of foreign aid toward the reconstruction of Gaza has been used for reconstruction projects. The rest of the money has been used as discretionary funds by Hamas. Seventy percent of the funds have come from American and EU taxpayers. This means that the US and the EU have been directly funding Hamas terrorists.

It is not surprising that the aid has been diverted.

And it is not surprising that the US and the EU have continued to provide money they know is being diverted by Hamas.

Hamas, like Fatah, has no interest in developing a Palestinian economy. Economic development doesn’t bring in the money. Terrorism does. Palestinians with economic freedom won’t be dependent on the likes of Abbas and his Hamas counterparts for their livelihoods. So they block all independent paths to prosperity.

Rather than build roads, the PA and Hamas pay people to kill Jews. The more Jews you kill, the more money you receive.

They can maintain this policy because the US and Europe pay them to do so. The more terrorism they commit, the more headlines the Palestinians receive. And the more headlines they receive, the more money they are paid by the UN and Western governments – to advance the cause of the “twostate solution.”

This then brings us to the US and Europe, and their unstinting support for Palestinian demands for the release of terrorists. What are they thinking? Earlier this month Prof. Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University Law School and the Kohelet Forum published a paper on the international community’s general interpretation of paragraph 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Protocol from 1949. The relevant clause states that an “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

As Kontorovich noted, this clause the forms the basis of the international community’s constant refrain that Israeli communities built beyond the 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are illegal.

In other words, it forms the basis of the West’s case against Israel and, by extraction, for the Palestinians’.

Just last week during his speech before the UN General Assembly, Obama attacked Israel for its continued settlement activity.

Kontorovich investigated the same international community’s view of communities built by citizens of a dozen other states in lands occupied by their governments in armed conflicts.

He noted that the activities of Moroccans in the Western Sahara, of Turks in Northern Cyprus, of Indonesians in East Timor and of other nationals in multiple other territories are legally indistinguishable from Israel’s activities in the areas it took control over from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israel war.

In none of these other cases, however, has the US, EU, UN or any other international or national authority ever invoked the Fourth Geneva Convention or otherwise claimed that those activities are a breach of international law. In other words, the legal basis for the criminalization and political condemnation of Israel in relation to the Palestinians is entirely specious and discriminatory.

In other words, US support for the so-called two state solution, like the international community’s support for it, is really just a means of discriminating against Israel. It does not advance the cause of peace or justice, for Israelis or for Palestinians. It merely empowers terrorist gangsters to kill Israelis and extort both the Palestinians and the international community.

So again, Giuliani is absolutely right.

Categories: Abbas, Fatah, Israel - release of Palestinian terrorists, Israel and human rights, Israel settlements, Israeli security, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian economy, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Two state solution, United Nations
Tags: Abbas, Fatah, Israel - release of Palestinian terrorists, Israel and human rights, Israeli security, Israeli settlements, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian economy, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Two state solution, United Nations

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Contrasting PA Reactions To Latest Terror Wave – Abbas: Children Take Up Knives Of Their Own Volition To Carry Out Stabbings; PA Foreign Ministry: Israel Executing Palestinians Without Cause

September 22, 2016

Contrasting PA Reactions To Latest Terror Wave – Abbas: Children Take Up Knives Of Their Own Volition To Carry Out Stabbings; PA Foreign Ministry: Israel Executing Palestinians Without Cause, MEMRI, September 22, 2016

(Obama’s “peace partners” for Israel. — DM)

The past week has seen a sharp increase in armed Palestinian attacks on Israelis that included stabbings, vehicular attacks and stone throwing. Among the incidents were the stabbing on September 19, 2016 of two police officers near Herod’s Gate outside Jerusalem’s Old City, in which a policewoman was severely wounded, and an attempted stabbing carried out on September 16 by a Jordanian national near Damascus Gate outside the Old City.

A review of the responses to these events by Fatah and PA officials and institutions reveals a stark contrast between the reaction of Palestinian President and Fatah Chairman Mahmoud ‘Abbas, who acknowledged that Palestinians were carrying out stabbings against Israelis, and the reactions of other PA and Fatah institutions and officials, who categorically denied that violent attacks were taking place, and consistently described the incidents as executions of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces.

Fatah’s official Facebook page, like ‘Abbas, did not deny that attacks were taking place. It posted an obituary for one of the attackers that called him a “martyred hero” and praised his “bold vehicular operation.”

The following are excerpts from the statements by ‘Abbas, from the obituary on Fatah’s official Facebook page, and from responses by other Palestinian officials and bodies.

‘Abbas: Children Are Taking Up Knives To Carry Out Stabbings

In a September 17, 2016 meeting in Venezuela with representatives of the Palestinian community there, ‘Abbas stated that Palestinian children were carrying out stabbings out of despair: “Children are carrying knives of their own volition. Do not believe those who say that certain elements are pushing and inciting them. These are children who have lost hope and are taking up knives to carry out stabbing attacks.”[1]

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Abbas in Venezuela (image: Maannews.net, September 18, 2016)

Official Fatah Facebook Page Mourns “Heroic” Perpetrator Of “Bold Vehicular Operation”

Fatah’s official Facebook page featured an obituary for Firas Al-Khadour, killed on September 16 while trying to run down a group of Israelis in Kiryat Arba. The obituary, released on September 18 by Fatah’s north Hebron branch, described the attacker as a “martyred hero” and the attack as a “heroic vehicular operation.” It stated: “The Palestinian national liberation movement Fatah, north Hebron-Bani Na’im branch, announces [the nuptials of] its martyred hero Firas Moussa Al-Birawi Al-Khadour (Al-Manasra) [to the 72 virgins of Paradise].[2] He was martyred while carrying out a heroic vehicular operation in the settlement of Kiryat Arba… Fatah: action, revolution and revenge.”[3]

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The obituary on the Fatah Facebook page

PA, Fatah Officials, Institutions: Israel Executing Palestinians In Cold Blood, Although They Pose No Threat

Unlike ‘Abbas, who acknowledged that Palestinian were carrying out attacks against Israelis, and unlike the Fatah obituary that glorified the vehicular attack carried out by Firas Al-Khadour, other PA institutions and officials denied that such attacks were taking place, describing the events as “Israeli terror” and accusing Israel of “executing unarmed Palestinian civilians.”

A September 20, 2016 announcement by the PA Foreign Ministry read: “In recent days, the Israeli government headed by Binyamin Netanyahu escalated its field executions of unarmed Palestinians, especially in the districts of Jerusalem and Hebron, although [these Palestinians] did not pose any threat to the soldiers of the occupation or its settlers.”[4]

One day earlier, PA Justice Minister ‘Ali Abu Diak addressed an attempted stabbing by Muhannad Al-Rajabi (21) and Amir Al-Rajabi (17) in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, in the course of which they were shot and killed. He said: “The crime of executing the boy Amir Jamal Al-Rajabi and the martyr Muhannad Jamal Al-Rajabi near Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi [the Cave of the Patriarchs] in Hebron today… is a [an act of] state terrorism and further proof that Israel continues to perpetrate war crimes and to violate international and humanitarian law. The world must hold Israel to account and prosecute it for its hideous crimes against our people… Israel is waging a one-sided war against our people and escalating its crimes of killing and aggression…”[5]

Similar statements were made by official Fatah institutions and officials. In a communique it issued, Fatah’s Recruitment and Organization Commission spoke of “Israeli terrorism,” saying: “The level of fascism and terror that Israel has reached indicates that it does nothing competently except execute Palestinians in cold blood – at checkpoints, on the roads, and at the gates of the blessed Al-Aqsa mosque. We face a wave of Israeli terror that is developing into another [campaign of] daily killing operations that devour [our] children even more than [our] adults, under the sponsorship and according to the instructions of the corrupt Netanyahu government [whose policy] is based on killing Palestinians everywhere, regardless of their age.”[6]

Fatah spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmeh likewise referred to the violent events as “Israel’s execution of Palestinians at the checkpoints,” and claimed that “this is nothing but the faithful implementation of orders emanating from the politicians and rulers in Tel Aviv.”[7] In a communique issued by Fatah’s Jerusalem branch, the branch’s secretary-general, ‘Adnan Gheith, said that “the occupation forces are targeting Palestinians and permitting their blood directly and deliberately, which will lead to catastrophic consequences… Our Palestinian people has become a direct target of field executions and cold blooded murder by the occupation forces, who commit their crimes in front of the whole world, yet nobody acts to put a stop to these racist crimes.”[8]

Endnotes:

[1] Maannews.net, September 18, 2016.

[2] On the association between a martyr’s funeral and his nuptials to the virgins of Paradise, see MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 61, The Joy of the Mothers of Palestinian ‘Martyrs,’ June 27, 2001.

URL: http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/472.htm –

[3] Facebook.com/Official.Fateh.1965, September 18, 2016.

[4] Wafa.ps, September 20, 2016; facebook.com/mofa.pna, September 20, 2016.

[5] Wafa.ps, September 19, 2016.

[6] Wafa.ps, September 20, 2016.

[7] Alwatanvoice.com, September 19, 2016.

[8i] Amad.ps, September 19, 2016.

Categories: Abbas, Fatah, Israel, Israel and human rights, Israeli security, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian child terrorists, Palestinian incitement, Two state solution
Tags: Abbas, Fatah, Israel, Israel and human rights, Israeli security, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian child terrorists, Palestinian incitement, Two state solution

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Column One: Obama’s greatest achievement

September 1, 2016

Column One: Obama’s greatest achievement, Jerusalem Post, Caroline B. Glick, September 1, 2016

Obama lies on Iran scam

U.S. President Barack Obama and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (not pictured) speak during a press conference at the White House in Washington, U.S., August 2, 2016. (photo credit:REUTERS)

The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran.

“It worked,” he insisted.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

Hours later, the Defense Ministry issued a stinging rebuke of Obama’s claim, parroted more diplomatically by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Obama’s press conference took place the day after The Wall Street Journal reported that in January 2016, the US sent an unmarked plane to the Tehran airport filled with $400 million in cash, on the same day Iran released four US hostages.

Obama angrily rejected allegations that the cash payment was a ransom payment for the hostages’ release. He insisted that the US had made the payment as the first installment of a $1.7b. payment the administration made to settle an Iranian government lawsuit against America.

Obama claimed that the administration agreed to the settlement at the urging of the Justice Department.

He said his administration was able to settle the dispute only due to the nuclear deal which placed US officials in direct contact with their Iranian counterparts for the first time in decades.

Within a day, Obama’s claims were exposed as lies. It turns out that Justice Department lawyers opposed the cash payout to Iran.

One of the hostages released in January told the media that the Iranians refused to allow the hostages to leave Iran until the airplane with the cash landed in the airport.

The Iranians, for their part, contemptuously mocked Obama, and stated openly that the $400m.

was a ransom payment for the hostages.

Two weeks later, Obama’s State Department admitted that the $400m. was a payment for the hostages.

Obama’s principle claim is that due to his deal, Iran no longer has a short-term nuclear breakout capacity. He also says that in accordance with the deal, Iran has shipped its nuclear materials out of the country. These claims are both untrue and misleading.

On Thursday Reuters reported that Iran did not ship the quantities of low-enriched uranium out of the country in the quantities the deal required.

Last January, when the deadline arrived for Iran to comply with the deal’s clauses calling for it to move its uranium enriched to 3.5 percent and 20 percent out of the country and so enable the US and its European colleagues to cancel UN sanctions against it, it worked out that Iran had failed to comply.

Rather than acknowledge Iran’s failure and maintain the sanctions in accordance with their deal, the Americans and Europeans decided to move the goalpost closer to Iran.

They secretly decreased the amount of uranium the Iranians were required to part with. They then announced triumphantly that they were canceling UN sanctions because Iran had complied with the agreement.

Reuters reported that much of the low-enriched uranium Iran did remove from its territory wasn’t actually removed from its possession. Instead it was transferred to neighboring Oman, where it is held under Iranian guard and control.

Obama of course knows all of this. So his claims that the agreement “worked” are nothing more than a card trick meant to trick the American public.

Obama’s assertion that Iran’s breakout time to a nuclear arsenal has been slowed as a result of his deal is similarly a stretch of the imagination. The Iranians have suspended much of their prior centrifuge spinning. But that is only because they are now directing their efforts to developing and deploying more advanced centrifuges that will be able to enrich uranium to bomb grade material far more rapidly than the centrifuges they were required to retire.

Experts have already placed Iran’s post-deal nuclear breakout time at a mere six months. And Iran can leave the agreement – which it never actually signed or officially agreed to – anytime it wants.

While developing their next generation centrifuges, the Iranians are expanding the range and precision of their ballistic missiles, deploying them and increasing the size of their arsenals. Despite the fact that these actions are prohibited under US law and breach what was initially claimed about the ever-changing nuclear deal, the Obama administration has refused to impose sanctions against Iran, insisting that its actions merely breach the spirit, rather than substance, of the deal.

The administration has had a similar response to Iran’s recent deployment of Russia’s S-300 missile defense battery around its military nuclear site at Fordo. On Sunday Iranian television showed footage of the missiles being set up around the formerly secret site.

As Omri Ceren of the Israel Project noted this week, Iran’s deployment of the S-300 system places it in breach of three US sanctions laws. Despite this, the White House announced on Wednesday that it has no intention of enforcing US law and applying sanctions on Iran. The S-300 missiles can be used both as a defensive system and as an offensive one.

On Tuesday, Tehran announced that it will be launching three satellites in the coming months.

Satellite launches are widely viewed as a means through which Iran is covertly developing a longrange ballistic missile capability. Rather than censure Iran for its actions, the Obama administration insists that such actions, as well as Iran’s recent longrange rocket tests, do not violate the nuclear deal or warrant US action.

Taken separately and together, Iran’s actions since the nuclear deal was officially concluded make clear that it continues to pursue its nuclear program, and indeed, has become more brazen in its nuclear operations than it was before the agreement was announced last year.

In other words, not only has the deal not worked, contrary to Obama’s claims, it has been a colossal failure on every level. The deal’s opponents were entirely right about the dangers it posed and Obama was entirely wrong.

This is true as well in relation to the administration’s qualified promises that the deal would lead to better relations between the US and Iran. As Shoshana and Stephen Bryen noted last week following the Iranian naval assault on the USS Nitze in the Strait of Hormuz, with its repeated harassment of US naval ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is clearly practicing its tactic of swarming US naval craft as a preparation for a real strike against them.

The main reason that Iran’s nuclear program is such a grave concern for Israel and for other Middle Eastern states is that the Iranian regime has hegemonic ambitions. It seeks to destroy Israel and dominate the entire region.

Since it concluded the deal with Washington, Iran has surged its forces and massively expanded its power projection throughout the region.

On Thursday the Daily Mail reported that the commonly held belief that Iran commands 16,000 troops in Syria is wrong. According to the National Council of Resistance in Iran, the regime actually commands 60,000 forces in Syria, deployed throughout the country. The entire Syrian army today numbers a mere 50,000 men.

On August 4, Obama mocked claims that Iran would spend its windfall profits of $100b.-$150b.

from the sanctions relief the nuclear deal offered to fund terrorism. Yet, according to the Daily Mail report, to date Iran has spent $100b. on the war in Syria.

The implications of the report are blood curdling.

They mean that despite Obama’s denials, the funds Iran has received as a result of the sanctions relief he brought about through his nuclear deal have paid for Iran’s war in Syria. That war has caused the death of nearly half a million people and forced more than 11 million people to flee their homes.

Obviously, it is important for Americans to know the truth about the Iran deal and its consequences as they consider their votes for Obama’s replacement.

One of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s top candidates for secretary of state is Wendy Sherman.

Sherman was the chief negotiator of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

For Israel, the question of what to do about Iran now is far more urgent than it is for Americans.

Today more and more commentators are voicing concern over the prospect that Obama will support an anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council as a parting shot at Israel.

But any such resolution will be small potatoes in comparison to the strategic devastation his nuclear deal, which is his main foreign policy legacy, has caused.

The rapidity of Iran’s advance makes clear that there is no justification for waiting to act until Obama has left office. If it doesn’t act soon, Israel is on the fast track to waking up one morning and discovering it has no means of thwarting the threat.

Indeed, with each passing month, its options for action become more and more limited.

After Israel’s security leadership undermined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear installations in 2010 and 2012, Netanyahu settled on a strategy of blocking Obama’s moves to appease Tehran.

That strategy of course failed last summer. Since then, Netanyahu has worked to build an anti-Iranian alliance with the Sunni Arab states. His efforts in this area have clearly met with some measure of success, as witnessed by public statements from prominent Saudis and others.

Whatever that success may be, and whatever the status of that burgeoning alliance of spurned US allies, the fact is that it’s time Israel and its new allies do something more than send signals. Time is a-wasting.

Last spring Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said, “Today the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are more present than ever before.”

Thanks to Obama, he may be right.

It is time for Israel to make him eat his words.

Categories: Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Israeli security, Obama and Iran, Obama and Iran scam
Tags: Iran and Israel, Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Israeli security, Obama and Iran, Obama and Iran scam

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IDF bulldozers with tanks enter Golan DMZ

July 13, 2016

IDF bulldozers with tanks enter Golan DMZ, DEBKAfile, July 13, 2016

GolanIsrael_Zone

Israeli military bulldozers backed by tanks have crossed into the demilitarized zone dividing the Israeli and Syrian Golan borders. They are building a line of fortifications and anti-tank trenches 300-500 meters inside the DMZ.

This is the first time in the six-year Syrian war that the IDF has openly operated on the Syrian side of the border. The force has not so far run into opposition- or indeed any word of protest – or even mention – by Assad regime officials in Damascus.

The sole reference to Israeli military movements in the DMZ has come from a small Syrian rebel group which described them.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the IDF operation was still going forward Wednesday, July 12, on a patch of terrain facing the Israeli Golan village of Ein Zivan, on the one hand, and the Syrian town of Quneitra, on the other.

The enclave splitting the Golan between Syria and Israel is defined in the 1974 armistice agreements as a demilitarized zone under the military control of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) and Syrian civilian administration. It is bounded by two strips of land around 10km deep where each side is permitted to maintain diluted military strength. No ground-to-air missiles may be deployed inside a 25km radius from the DMZ.

It was agreed that Syrian nationals forced by the October 1973 war and its aftermath to leave their homes would be able to return. Ruined Quneitra was later handed back to Syria against a commitment by its government to repopulate the town and ban terrorist activity and infiltrations of Israel from the Golan sector.

Both commitments were given orally to the US government.

However, the Syrian war as it unfolded in the last two years turned the deal on its head. The UN observers abandoned their posts, leaving behind a void that was partly filled by Syrian troops and a motley assortment of rebel groups.

But the DMZ was left mostly unoccupied as both Israel and Syria tried to preserve at least the semblance of the deal intact. However, Assad’s allies Iran and Hizballah have repeatedly attempted to plant a forward military and terrorist presence opposite Israel’s Golan defense lines – with avowed hostile intent.

The silence from Damascus on Israel’s military steps on the Golan may be no more than a respite as the Syrian ruler waits for Tehran’s endorsement of joint Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah counteraction.

Our sources add that IDF military steps on the ground were accompanied by unusual Israeli Air Force movements over Syria and Lebanon, and elevated preparedness on the 10^th anniversary this week of the Lebanon war fought between Hizballah and Israel.

It was noted that Hizballah refrained from celebrating the occasion and omitted its customary boasts of a “great victory” – thereby intensifying the sense in Israeli military circles that Iran’s Lebanese proxy may be cooking up a surprise operation.

Categories: Golan, IDF, Israel borders, Israeli security, Syria, Syria war
Tags: Golan, IDF, Israel borders, Israeli security, Syria, Syria war

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How Anti-Semitism Became Respectable Again

June 11, 2016

How Anti-Semitism Became Respectable Again, PJ Media, David P. Goldman, June 10, 2016

On most university campuses the majority of young brainwash victims take it for granted that Israeli nastiness is the source of the endemic Jew-hatred in the Muslim world. That mindset prevails from Berkeley to the Vatican Secretariat. A billion and half people cry from the bottom of their hearts: For us to live, they must die, or at least be driven from their homeland. The wretchedness and despair of this great mass of humanity, a tiny fraction of which has turned up on Europe’s doorstep, is too great to ignore. Surely the Jews must in some way be responsible. It is enough to turn some liberal Jews into functional anti-Semites.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

The world was anti-Semitic in 1944, when Ben Hecht wrote A Guide for the Bedevilled. The majority of educated, civilized, and rational people believed that the Jews in some fashion had brought their own problems upon themselves. Hecht began fighting anti-Semitism after an unsettling exchange with a New York hostess, who explained to him that Jews had to acknowledge their own responsibility in the matter of their persecution. This polite Gentile lady explained:

The Jews complain. They suffer dreadfully, and they accuse. But they never stop to explain or to reason or to figure the thing out and tell the world what they, and only they, know…They are–how shall I put it–collaborative victims, a thing they refuse to see…The Germans are not a race of killers, fiends, of a special and different sort of sub-humans.

Not that she approved of Nazi genocide, to be sure; she may not have known the extent of the butchery, but she knew that dreadful things were happening to Europe’s Jews. But she thought that the Germans must have had some kind of provocation to hate the Jews so deeply. Why else would the Germans hate Jews so much?

When did the old anti-Semitism return? For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. What Hecht’s interlocutor believed in 1944, most liberals believe today, not to mention the vast majority of Europeans. Yes, the Arabs hate Jews, and express this hatred in a barbaric way, they will allow, but that is because Israel has provoked the hatred.

Tripwires that once seemed taboo are being crossed every day. One was triggered in the new action film “Triple 9,” which portrays a gang of ruthless Russian mafia killers operating under the cover of a kosher meat business. There are some violent Jewish criminals, but I have not been able to find a single example of an observant Jew among them. The filmmakers have invented a stereotype that has no instantiation in the real world.

As Debbie Schlussel writes:

The movie, “Triple 9,” in theaters today, is one of the most blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel movies I’ve seen in a very long time. And it’s also anti-police and anti-U.S. military. Plus it’s an incredibly violent, bloody movie whose message is that American military men and police officers are just as bad as ISIS. And so are Jews and Israelis. On top of that, the movie employs anti-Semitic terms, approvingly.[Corrupt cops] murder, torture, and kill for an Orthodox Jewish Israeli Russian mafia family headed by Kate Winslet…There isn’t a single Russian mafia figure who is an Orthodox Jew, but why be concerned with facts when you’re director John Hillcoat or writer Matt Cook who made this Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion cinematic “masterpiece.”…Orthodox Jews don’t behead and kill people and don’t preside over tortured, bloodied bodies in real life. That’s the domain of Muslims. Except in this movie.

Anti-Semitic caricatures used to be off limits. When Dickens created the far less offensive character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, he atoned by inventing the saintly Jewish figure of Rina in Our Mutual Friend. One finds unflattering portrayal of Jews here and there in English fiction (including some despicable poems by T.S. Eliot) but nothing like this filth. It’s become acceptable to hate Jews.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu touched another tripwire this week by nominating mass-murderer Marwan Barghouti for the Nobel Peace Prize, an act hailed by the Arab press. “Barghouti is currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in leading terrorist activities during the first and second intifadas that included dozens of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. He is a former leader of the Tanzim, a militant faction of the Fatah party currently headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that took credit for many of the murders during the bloody Second Initfada in the early 2000’s. In 2014, he called for the launch of a third intifada,” the Jewish Press reported.

It is one thing to excuse Arab terrorism against Israeli civilians–the Left has done that throughout–and it is quite another to propose to reward murderers with the world’s most respected humanitarian honor. The world of enlightened opinion has no tears for the half million dead Syrian civilians, the tens of thousands of Kurds murdered by Turkish security services, or the countless dead in the Iraqi civil war now unfolding between ISIS and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias. But it cries a river for suicide bombers who murder Israelis, because the Israelis in some way were asking for it.

On most university campuses the majority of young brainwash victims take it for granted that Israeli nastiness is the source of the endemic Jew-hatred in the Muslim world. That mindset prevails from Berkeley to the Vatican Secretariat. A billion and half people cry from the bottom of their hearts: For us to live, they must die, or at least be driven from their homeland. The wretchedness and despair of this great mass of humanity, a tiny fraction of which has turned up on Europe’s doorstep, is too great to ignore. Surely the Jews must in some way be responsible. It is enough to turn some liberal Jews into functional anti-Semites.

This is not a new thought. Before and during the Second World War it was the conventional wisdom. Authors whom I abhor like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot said it openly. An author whom I love, J.R.R. Tolkien, said it allegorically: in The Hobbit, the Dwarves (whom he explicitly identified with the Jews) bring the calamity of Smaug upon themselves through their own obsession with gold in their miner’s kingdom at the Lonely Mountain. Tolkien was not an anti-Semite, not at least in the canonical definition (someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary). On the contrary, he was something of a philo-Semite (he famously rebuked a German publisher who asked him to prove his Aryan heritage with the thought that he was sorry that he had no descent from “that talented people,” the Jews). But he wrote in a period when everyone knew that the Jews were in some measure responsible for their own troubles.

Tolkien, to be sure, compensated for his earlier ambivalent portrayal of the Dwarves/Jews in The Hobbit by portraying an Elven-Dwarvish friendship in The Fellowship of the Ring, deservedly the most beloved English-language novel of the 20th century. He was a man of his times who at length rose above his times. Those who did not rise above their times included G.K. Chesterton, who conjectured that there must be some truth to the medieval allegation that the Jews made Passover matzoh from the blood of Christians, and Hilaire Belloc, who wrote a book entitled “The Jews” calling for the “elimination” or “segregation” of “the alien.”

Islam, as Bernard Lewis wrote in his seminal essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” “has given dignity to drab and impoverished lives.” What is that dignity? It is the consoling belief that despite the humiliation of the Muslims during the past two centuries, the Umma still possesses God’s revelation and divine favor. The Christian West, from the White House to the Vatican to the Elysee Palace to the Kanzleramt, sustains this conviction by its courtship of Muslim good will. There is one great cognitive dissonance in the mix, and that is the transformation of the Jews from a despised, dependent and vulnerable minority to a Middle Eastern superpower. The return of the Jews to Zion threatens the belief that Islam is the seal of prophecy: how could God favor the Jews, who perverted the original revelation that Mohammed restored? That is why the Temple Mount remains a radioactive issue on the Muslim street. Merely by being there, Israel offers an existential challenge to Muslim identity. Conservative Muslim regimes, to be sure, may make a temporary accommodation with Israel when it is in their interest to do so; apocalyptic regimes like Iran’s never will.

Muslim civilization is crumbling, as I warned in my 2011 book “How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too).” The human cost of this crumbling will be horrific, ranking among the worst humanitarian disasters in human history, and a disaster that we will watch in real time in high-definition video. The West is sickened by the spectacle and indifferent to its causes; if the Jews madden the Muslims, enlightened opinion thinks, let them go away.

Ich, ich dulde dass du rasest, Du, Du duldest dass ich atme, wrote Heinrich Heine of the relationship between Gentiles and Jews in 19th century Europe: I tolerate your rage, and you tolerate my breathing. Things have changed. The crime of the Jews today is to breathe, and especially to breathe the air of their own country. As the body count rises, enlightened opinion once again will blame the Jews for breathing. Muslims will continue to engineer humanitarian disasters (as in the last Gaza War) to solicit Western sympathy, and European governments will attempt to placate their growing Muslim populations by blaming Israel.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

Categories: Antisemitism, Israel, Israeli security, Jewish left
Tags: Antisemitism, Israel, Israeli security, Jewish left

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