Posted tagged ‘West Bank’

When Palestinians Die in Jail

July 6, 2015

When Palestinians Die in Jail, The Gatestone InstituteKhaled Abu Toameh, July 6, 2015

  • Like the mainstream media in the West, the UN chooses to look the other way when Palestinians torture or kill fellow Palestinians.
  • The Palestinian Authority and Hamas claim that the three men committed suicide.
  • When three detainees die in less than a week, this should sound an alarm. But pro-Palestinian groups and human rights activists do not care about the human rights of Palestinians if Israel cannot be held responsible. Their obsession with Israel has made them blind to the plight of Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority.

Three Palestinian men were found dead in their jail cells in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this past week.

But their stories did not attract the attention of the international media or human rights organizations in the U.S. and Europe. Nor was their case brought to the attention of the United Nations or the International Criminal Court (ICC).

By contrast, the case of 17-year-old Mohamed Kasba, who was shot dead north of Jerusalem by an Israeli army officer as he attacked the officer’s car with stones, received widespread coverage in the Western media.

The UN even rushed to condemn the killing of Kasba, and called for an “immediate end” to violence and for everyone to keep calm. “This reaffirms the need for a political process aiming to establish two states living beside each other safely and peacefully,” said UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Maldenov.

The UN official, needless to say, made no reference to the deaths that occurred in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas jails. He did not even see a need to express concern over the deaths or call for an investigation. Like the mainstream media in the West, the UN chooses to look the other way when Palestinians torture or kill fellow Palestinians.

The reason the case of the three detainees will not interest anyone in the international community is because the men did not die in an Israeli jail. Instead, the three men died while being held in Palestinian-controlled jails.

Had the three men died in Israeli detention, their names would have most likely appeared on the front pages of most leading Western newspapers. The families of the three men would have also been busy talking to Western journalists about Israeli “atrocities” and “human rights violations.”

But no respected Western journalist is going to visit any of the families of the three detainees: they did not die in an Israeli jail.

The same week that the three Palestinian men were found dead in jail, the UN Human Rights Council decided to adopt a resolution condemning Israel over the UN report into last year’s Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip. Again, the UN Human Rights Council chose to ignore human rights violations by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, who deny detainees basic rights and proper medical treatment.

Two of them died in PA security installations in Bethlehem, while the third was found dead in a Hamas-controlled jail in the Gaza Strip.

The two detainees who were found dead in their jail cells in Bethlehem are Shadi Mohamed Obeidallah and Hazem Yassin Udwan. The man who died in the Gaza Strip jail was identified as Khaled Hammad al-Balbisi.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas claim that the three men committed suicide.

In the case of Obeidallah, the Palestinian Authority police said he hanged himself with a piece of cloth inside the jail restrooms. He was taken into custody on suspicion of committing a murder three years ago.

The second man, Udwan, died a few days later in another Bethlehem police facility. According to police officials, he too committed suicide.

The detainee in the Gaza Strip, al-Balbisi, was being held by Hamas authorities for allegedly assaulting his wife.

But al-Balbisi, 43, apparently did not commit suicide. He was very ill when he was arrested by the Hamas security forces, and did not receive proper medical care while in detention.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a Gaza-based non-profit group dedicated to protecting human rights, promoting the rule of law and upholding democratic principles in the Palestinian territories, called for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the detainees.

“PCHR stresses that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for the lives of prisoners and detainees under its control and is thus responsible for treating them with dignity, including offering them medical care,” the group said in a statement.

1143The Palestinian Authority police on parade, January 2015.

When three detainees die in less than a week in Palestinian detention, this should sound an alarm bell, especially among so-called pro-Palestinian groups and human rights activists in different parts of the world.

But these folks, like the UN and mainstream media, do not care about the human rights of the Palestinians if Israel cannot be held responsible. Their obsession with Israel has made them blind to the plight of Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, as well as to the horrific crimes committed every day by Muslim terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The story of the three men who died in Palestinian jails is yet another example of the double standards that the international community and media employ when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Palestinians: Why Salam Fayyad Lacks Popular Support

July 1, 2015

Palestinians: Why Salam Fayyad Lacks Popular Support, The Gatestone InstituteKhaled Abu Toameh, June 30, 2015

  • It is no secret that several senior Palestinian officials see themselves as potential successors to Abbas. Like his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, Abbas has stubbornly refused to share power with anyone. And like Arafat, he continues to run the Palestinian Authority as if it were his private fiefdom.
  • In Palestinian culture, it is more important if one graduates from an Israeli prison than from the University of Texas in Austin. A Palestinian who carries out an attack on Israel has more credentials among his people than one who studied at Harvard or Oxford universities.
  • It took Salam Fayyad too long to realize that no matter how many good things he does for his people, in the end he will be judged on the basis of his contribution to the fight against Israel, and not how much humanitarian and financial aid he provides.

In a surprise move, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has frozen the bank account of a non-profit organization headed by former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The decision is seen in the context of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s effort to undermine and discredit Fayyad. Abbas believes that Fayyad, who resigned in 2013, is seeking to replace or succeed him as president.

Following his resignation, the US-educated Fayyad established a Ramallah-based group called Future For Palestine. According to Fayyad, the group’s mission is to “enhance the resilience of Palestinian citizens in their homeland, especially in marginalized and severely impacted areas, by providing the basic development requirements.”

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership did not like the idea from the beginning. Ever since Future For Palestine was established in August 2013, they have been working toward undermining the group and its founder, Fayyad.

The PA leadership is convinced that Fayyad is using the group to advance his own political goals and establish bases of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

During the military confrontation between Israel and Hamas last year, Fayyad’s group launched acampaign to aid the residents of the Gaza Strip. The campaign included the purchase of tens of thousands of bottles of mineral water that were supposed to be dispatched to the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority thwarted the campaign.

To justify the crackdown on Fayyad back then, the PA said that the former prime minister was part of a “conspiracy” to overthrow the Abbas regime. Some reports even suggested that Abbas had ordered his security forces to detain Fayyad for interrogation, but backtracked after threats from the US and several European governments.

Later, Abbas sent security officers to raid the offices of Future For Palestine and conduct a thorough search of its files. Some of Fayyad’s top aides were taken into custody and questioned about the sources of the group’s funding.

Last week, the campaign against Fayyad reached its peak when the Palestinian Authority announced that it has seized the assets of Future For Palestine, and accused the former prime minister of “money laundering.”

PA officials claimed that Fayyad’s group had received $10 million from the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf country that supports Abbas’s political enemy, ousted Fatah leader Mohamed Dahlan. The officials accused Dahlan and Fayyad of working together to topple the Abbas regime. Dahlan fled the West Bank several years ago after falling out with Abbas, who accused him of attempting to stage a coup against the Palestinian Authority leadership.

1135Former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, pictured on January 25, 2013 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (Image source: World Economic Forum)

Fayyad said this week that he is planning to take legal measures to cancel the decision to freeze his group’s assets. Denying the charge of “money laundering,” Fayyad added that Future For Palestine was operating within the framework of the law and did not commit any offense.

The decision to freeze the bank account of Future For Palestine came in the wake of increased talk about a behind-the-scenes power struggle to succeed the 80-year-old Abbas. The name of Fayyad has repeatedly surfaced as a potential successor to Abbas — a suggestion that has clearly enraged the Palestinian leader and his senior officials in Ramallah.

It is no secret that several senior Palestinian officials see themselves as potential successors to Abbas. These include, besides Dahlan, the chief of the PA’s General Intelligence Security Force in the West Bank, Majed Faraj, Palestinian Football Association Chairman Jibril Rajoub and Chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat.

Abbas believes that he has thus far succeeded in sidelining and discrediting at least two candidates: Fayyad and Dahlan. The charges made by Abbas against the two men are designed to depict them as agents of foreign countries who are plotting against him and the entire Palestinian people.

Like his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, Abbas has stubbornly refused to share power with anyone. And like Arafat, he continues to run the Palestinian Authority as if it were his private fiefdom.

Fayyad’s chances of succeeding Abbas are, anyway, very slim, if not non-existent. Fayyad is an independent figure who does not belong to Fatah, Hamas or any other political group. When he ran in the January 2006 parliamentary election at the head of the Third Way list, his group received two seats out of 132.

The reason most Palestinians did not vote for Fayyad is because he had not played any role in the “revolution” against Israel. In this culture, it is more important if one graduates from an Israeli prison than from the University of Texas in Austin. Fayyad did not participate in any armed attack on Jews and never supported the armed struggle against Israel. Nor did he send his son to throw stones or firebombs at Israelis. That is the real reason why people like Fayyad lack popular support.

If and when Abbas steps down, the only candidate who has a good chance of replacing him is one who was part of the “revolution.” A Palestinian who carries out an attack on Israel has more credentials among his people than one who studied at Harvard or Oxford universities. It took Salam Fayyad too long to realize that no matter how many good things he does for his people, in the end he will be judged on the basis of his contribution to the fight against Israel, and not how much humanitarian and financial aid he provides.

State Department Report Minimizes Palestinian Incitement to Violence

June 19, 2015

State Department Report Minimizes Palestinian Incitement to Violence, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Jume 19, 2015

These blatant omissions from the report leave create a sense that examples of Palestinian incitement to violence and glorification of terrorists are sporadic occurrences. In reality, the Palestinian Authority institutionalizes a systematic campaign of violent incitement and continues to praise terrorists for killing Jews and Israelis, while encouraging other Palestinians to follow in their footsteps.

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The U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2014 issued Friday minimizes official Palestinian incitement to violence against Israel and completely overlooks Palestinian glorification of terrorists.

The annual report lists major terrorist incidents worldwide and outlines each country’s counterterrorism efforts and legislation. Terrorism attacks and their resulting deaths spiked last year, the report found, an increase largely driven by attacks by the Islamic State and Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist groups.

With respect to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the report praises the PA for taking “significant steps to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank that fall under its control do not create content that leads to incitement to violence.” The report acknowledges that “some instances of inciting taking place via official media” still occur, listing only three examples. However, the report diminishes the fact that incitement to violence is a systematic and institutionalized PA phenomenon.

Click here for an Investigative Project on Terrorism comprehensive outline of Palestinian violent incitement focused only on incidents last fall.

The State Department assessment also ignores the direct participation of senior PA officials in praising terrorists and inciting violence against Israelis and Jews.

For example, the report does not mention PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ call last October for Palestinians to prevent Jews from going to the Temple Mount compound “in any way.” The video clip of Abbas’ Oct. 17 speech was shown 19 on PA television times in three days, implicitly calling for Palestinians to use violence against Israelis.

Instead, the report described PA efforts “to ensure” Friday sermons in more than 1,800 mosques controlled by the PA “do not endorse incitement to violence … the guidance is that no sermon can discuss political or lead to incitement to violence.”

In February, however, the PA Minister of Religious Affairs and other prominent religious officials resorted to an age-old blood libel accusing Jews of attacking Muslims sites and that Israel is trying to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports. Such accusations are baseless and encourage Palestinians to conduct terrorist attacks against Israel.

The State Department report also omits any reference to official Palestinian glorification of terrorists.

For example, after the October shooting of Rabbi Yehuda Glick, Abbas sent a condolence letter to the family of terrorist Mutaz Hijazi who was killed by Israeli authorities in a firefight during a raid for his capture. In the letter, Abbas called the terrorist a “Shahid,” a martyr, who “rose to Heaven while defending our people’s rights and holy places,” PMW reported.

Moreover, a senior Fatah official claimed that Hijazi was a Fatah operative and expressed pride in his actions, a PMW translation shows.

These blatant omissions from the report leave create a sense that examples of Palestinian incitement to violence and glorification of terrorists are sporadic occurrences. In reality, the Palestinian Authority institutionalizes a systematic campaign of violent incitement and continues to praise terrorists for killing Jews and Israelis, while encouraging other Palestinians to follow in their footsteps.

Islamic State at Israel’s Gate

June 12, 2015

Islamic State at Israel’s Gate, Front Page Magazine, June 12, 2015

(According to Israel National News

Late on Thursday night “color red” rocket sirens were sounded in the southern coastal city of Ashkelon, as well as throughout the Ashkelon Coast regional council.

At least one rocket was identified as having been fired from Gaza, but IDF officials said it is believed the rocket exploded inside Gaza. No rockets were found in Israeli territory.

— DM)

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All this is happening while the Obama administration, by the president’s own admission, has no clear strategy to defeat ISIS. At the same time, President Obama’s “strategy” to deal with Iran is to make concession after concession in order to secure any nuclear deal he can, including the possibility of providing Iran with relief from sanctions that were imposed for non-nuclear related reasons such as Iran’s support for terrorist activities

In short, Israel is facing Iran-backed Hamas from the south, Iran-backed Hezbollah from the north, and an expanding Islamic State presence north and south of Israel and within Israel itself. And that is before Iran gets its hands on a nuclear bomb and the Islamic State has enough radioactive material to build its own weapons of mass destruction.

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Jihadists affiliated with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) are carrying on the rocket war against Israeli civilians from where Hamas left off. Following several rocket attacks in the last several weeks for which the Islamic State has taken credit, rockets launched from Gaza Thursday night exploded in the Ashkelon area.

Israel is still holding Hamas responsible for the attacks as the governing authority in Gaza.

“The IDF understands that Hamas wants quiet and is making an effort to prevent the shooting, but the State of Israel still sees Hamas as responsible for what happens in Gaza,” said Sami Turgeman, head of IDF’s Southern Command.

The Israeli military responded with measured attacks on Hamas facilities, while at the same time trying to avoid setting off a wider war at this time.  But Israel’s hand is being forced by the Islamic State, which is evidently working assiduously to supplant Hamas as the authoritative Islamic power in Gaza. The Gaza branch calls itself the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade. It is cooperating with another ISIS-affiliated group operating in the Sinai Peninsula, which calls itself Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis.

According to a June 8th report by Debkafile, “Islamic State operatives in the Gaza Strip have been helping themselves to Hamas rockets in recent weeks after furtively penetrating the factory teams operating the group’s production and assembly lines… The jihadis then secretly passed the stolen rockets to their squads for launching against Israel.”

On June 7th Debkafile noted in more general terms Hamas’s loss of control in Gaza in the face of Islamic State infiltration: “The terror infrastructure Hamas built over many years in Sinai has been taken over by ISIS, and its control of the Gaza Strip is slipping, as yet more radical and violent organizations eat away at its authority and seize control of the rocket offensive against Israel.”

Thus, even as Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel and is trying to re-build its arms stockpiles with Iran’s help, it is engaged simultaneously in its own battles with the Islamic State. Hamas has arrested some ISIS supporters and bulldozed a Sunni mosque believed to have been used by ISIS affiliated jihadists, while Hamas’s own facilities have come under attack by ISIS affiliated jihadists. Hamas also claimed in a message to Israeli authorities, routed through an Egyptian intermediary, that jihadists affiliated with the Islamic State were deliberately trying to spark a renewed war between Israel and Hamas.

The Islamic State is also trying to position itself to challenge Israel from the north. Israeli TV Channel 2 reported last week that the Islamic State is moving forces in the direction of the Golan Heights and the Israeli border.

Moreover, ISIS is developing an increasing presence within Israel itself. Recruits, influenced by ISIS’s slick social media promotions, are attracted to ISIS’s self-declared purer Islamic ideology. Hamas is apparently too “moderate” for these jihadists’ tastes.

“Dozens of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join insurgent groups.” Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency said in a statement released last January 4th. Israel had announced that it managed to crack one Islamic State cell on its soil and arrested its alleged members. An Israeli security official described the cell as “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Last July, the Islamic State previewed its intentions in a statement that it issued regarding jihad against Israel:

As for the massacres taking place in Gaza against the Muslim men, women and children, then the Islamic State will do everything within its means to continue striking down every apostate who stands as an obstacle on its paths towards Palestine. It is only [a] matter of time and patience before it (Islamic State) reaches Palestine to fight the barbaric Jews and kill those of them hiding behind the gharqad trees – the trees of the Jews.

Arutz Sheva reported that a spokesperson for the Islamic State, Nidal Nuseiri, urged patience as the Islamic State wanted first to consolidate its control over Arab Muslim lands, but “reaffirmed that conquering ‘Bayt el-Maqdis’ (Jerusalem) and destroying the State of Israel is central to the group’s jihad.” Thanks to President Obama’s dithering, the Islamic State is well on its way to achieving such consolidation in Iraq and Syria, while spreading to Libya.

At least three questions arise from the emergence of ISIS as a direct threat to Israel. Will Israeli military and security forces, either on their own or in concert with Jordan and Egypt, take on ISIS directly, including going after ISIS’s command and control centers with far more firepower than the Obama administration has used thus far?

To what extent will Israel be willing to outsource military operations against ISIS affiliates in Gaza to Hamas, much as it has outsourced some security operations to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank? Major-General Turgeman tried to cast Hamas as the lesser of two evils, since, he claimed, “Israel and Hamas have shared interests, including in the current situation, which is quiet and calm and growth and prosperity.” Hamas “does not want global jihad,” he added. This is a truly incredible assertion coming from an Israeli military leader about a group willing to put its own citizens and their homes in harm’s way in order to launch their own thousands of rockets against Israel. What happened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s concise description of Hamas and the Islamic State as “branches of the same poisonous tree?” This just further demonstrates how completely insane the Middle East has become.

Finally, how successful will Iran be in exploiting the chaotic situation in Gaza, positioning itself as it has in Iraq as an enemy of ISIS, while further bolstering Hamas to Israel’s detriment?

All this is happening while the Obama administration, by the president’s own admission, has no clear strategy to defeat ISIS. At the same time, President Obama’s “strategy” to deal with Iran is to make concession after concession in order to secure any nuclear deal he can, including the possibility of providing Iran with relief from sanctions that were imposed for non-nuclear related reasons such as Iran’s support for terrorist activities.

In short, Israel is facing Iran-backed Hamas from the south, Iran-backed Hezbollah from the north, and an expanding Islamic State presence north and south of Israel and within Israel itself. And that is before Iran gets its hands on a nuclear bomb and the Islamic State has enough radioactive material to build its own weapons of mass destruction.

Exiled Fatah Terrorist Amna Muna on PA TV: We Will Continue Until Our Entire Land is Liberated

May 26, 2015

Exiled Fatah Terrorist Amna Muna on PA TV: We Will Continue Until Our Entire Land is Liberated, MEMRI TV via You Tube, May 26, 2015

(The Palestinian Authority is Israel’s “partner for peace” and its titular leader, Abbas, can be an angel of peace according to the Pope. Some angel; some peace.– DM)

In a May 15 interview on the official Palestinian Authority TV channel, Amna Muna, a Palestinian terrorist who was freed in the Shalit prisoner swap and exiled to Turkey, said: “Nothing will break our resolve – not imprisonment, not exile, and not martyrdom… We shall continue on our path until our entire land is liberated.” Muna, who was speaking to PA TV over the Internet, was imprisoned for her involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenager Ofir Rahum in 2001.

 

The Pope and the Palestinians

May 20, 2015

The Pope and the Palestinians, Front Page Magazine, May 20, 2015

(The article also deal with Islam in general, as to which the Pope’s fantasies reflect those of the Obama Administration and others. — DM)

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Perhaps the ultimate expression of this faith in Islam was Pope Francis’ assertion in Evangelii Gaudium that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

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Contrary to reports in the mainstream press, Pope Francis did not call Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas “an angel of peace.” The correct translation of the pope’s words is “I have thought of you: that you could be an angel of peace.”

Why, then, was it so easy to believe the initial reports? Perhaps because the initial reports seemed to align with previous papal overtures to Palestinian leaders. Pope Francis had previously called Abbas a “man of peace,” he has shown sympathy for Palestinian grievances, and other popes have given the appearance of lending legitimacy to the Palestinian cause. For example, Pope John Paul II is reported to have received PLO leader Yasser Arafat on twelve different occasions.

Arafat was a terrorist. One would think that the Vatican would have wanted to limit its contacts with him. The same goes for Abbas. He has repeatedly honored and praised Palestinian “martyrs” who have slaughtered innocent Jews. There is evidence that he helped fund the 1972 operation that killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Why is he accorded such a cordial reception at the Vatican?

Although the Church has often declared its spiritual bond with Jews, it has had a less harmonious relationship with the nation where approximately half the world’s Jews now reside. The Vatican was the last Western government to accord diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel (in 1993). In addition, on several occasions, prominent prelates have likened Israel to King Herod, the murderer of innocents; and others have accused Israel of being an apartheid state. Meanwhile, Catholic NGOs such as Pax Christi and Trocaire have been major players in the boycott, divest, and sanctions campaign against Israel.

Of course, the BDS campaign directly impinges on Israeli security. So do the calls by numerous Christian leaders to tear down the security barrier that divides Israel from the West Bank. On his trip to the Holy Land a year ago, Pope Francis allowed himself to be photographed in prayer at a section of the wall where a large graffiti message compared Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto. In a naïve gesture of solidarity with Palestinians, the pope was unwittingly lending credence to the idea that the Israelis could be compared to the Nazi occupiers of Poland.

The wall was constructed to prevent suicide attacks against Israeli citizens. It’s estimated that its construction has saved thousands of lives. To suggest that the wall is offensive, as many Christians have done, is to suggest that Jewish lives don’t matter. Moreover, such judgments betray an entirely lopsided view of the situation. Take the Gaza conflict. The Catholic hierarchy typically had little to say about the daily rocket barrages launched against Israeli citizens from Gaza, but it was quick to condemn Israel on those occasions when it finally retaliated. In a similar vein, Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, blamed last year’s Gaza war on the Israeli embargo which, he said, had turned Gaza into “a factory of desperate people, designed to easily turn into extremists.”

In short, many Catholic leaders have shown a tendency to blame Israel for defending itself. The implication, of course, is that there would be no need for defense if Israel would only go to the peace table and make the concessions demanded of it by the Palestinians. The Vatican’s recent recognition of the “State of Palestine” reflects this naïve view of the situation. The supposition is that the Palestinians only want to be left in peace, whereas there is abundant evidence that the deepest desire of Palestinian leaders is for the extermination of Israel. Have Vatican officials never seen the photos of Abbas holding up a map of Palestine that encompasses all of the territory currently known as Israel? Are they unaware that he has personally called for a Palestine that is Judenrein? Didn’t they notice that when Israel gambled on disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Gaza soon turned into a terrorist state governed by an obsession to destroy Israel?

From the Israeli point of view, the call to cooperate with the Palestinian “peace” agenda is a call to cooperate in its own demise. Whenever I hear a UN representative or a Vatican spokesman call for peace talks between Israel and Palestine, I think of that scene from Goldfinger in which James Bond is about to be sliced in two by a laser beam. “Do you expect me to talk?” he asks. “No, Mr. Bond,” replies Goldfinger, “I expect you to die.” The Vatican hasn’t yet grasped the point that the Palestinian leadership doesn’t want the Israelis to talk, it wants them to die.

By words and by actions, the Vatican continues to suggest that there is a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This policy not only does a disservice to Jews, it also does a disservice to Catholics and other Christians. The main effect of the moral equivalence stance is to sow confusion among Catholics at a time when they need to be clear and unconfused—clear about Islam, that is. The Vatican policy toward Palestine reflects it overall stance toward the Islamic world. In other words, let’s overlook the dark side—the terrorism, the anti-Semitism, the oppression of Christians and other minorities—and let’s put the best face on the Mohammedan faith. For the sake of peace. And also for the sake of maintaining the threadbare narrative that Islam is a close cousin of Catholicism and, therefore, a religion of peace. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this faith in Islam was Pope Francis’ assertion in Evangelii Gaudium that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

How well has this policy worked? Not very. Catholics and other Christians who lived in Muslim lands and who took seriously the Catholic version of “this has nothing to do with Islam” soon found that the tiny minority of misunderstanders were legion and had murder on their minds. Many found out too late. Years of indoctrination in the myth of Islam’s pacific nature had left them unprepared for the violence. Not that the Church was the only culprit. The secular opinion-makers had been preaching the same gospel. The irony is that the Church wants Israel to adopt the same policy of make-believe about Islam that has contributed to the death and displacement of millions of Christians.

The policy requires an almost total denial of facts. In the case of the Arab-Israeli crisis it means ignoring the terrorist ties of the Palestinian government, its unity coalition with Hamas, the massive state-sponsored indoctrination of Palestinian children, and the oft-stated goal of eliminating Israel. Ironically, it also necessitates that one ignore the ongoing persecution of Christians in the Palestinian territories.

The Palestinian leaders do a good job of hijacking Christian themes and imagery in order to gull Christians into thinking that they are, indeed, brothers in Christ. Thus, Palestinians have milked the massacre-of-the-innocents meme for all its worth. They also like to claim that Jesus was the first Palestinian. Another favorite theme is that the Palestinian people are the “new Jesus” who is being crucified by the Israelis.

Many in the Catholic hierarchy seem to fall for the ruse, but the steady exodus of Christians from the Palestinian territories tells a different story. The overall population of Christians in the Palestinian areas has declined from 15 percent in 1950 to 2 percent today. After the Palestinian Authority took control over Bethlehem in 1995, the Christian population there declined by half. In the Gaza Strip, only a few hundred Christians remain. That’s because Christians in Palestine, like Christians in most Muslim-majority societies, are treated as second-class citizens—subject to rape, intimidation, and legalized theft.

Meanwhile, the Christian population of Israel continues to grow. Palestinian Christians want to live there and so do persecuted Christians in other parts of the Middle East. Despite years of propaganda to the contrary, they have come to realize that Israel is a safe haven in a world of Islamic chaos.

Do Christians who migrate to Israel know something that the Vatican doesn’t know? The facts are there for everyone to see, but not everyone sees them. Why do Catholic leaders persist in assigning moral equivalence when there is no moral equivalence? Normally, a belief in moral equivalence grows out of a relativistic outlook. But presumably we can rule that out in the case of Catholic prelates. A more likely cause of their moral neutrality is a misapplication of the principle of “judge not.” Christians today are highly conscious of the sins of Western civilization and are therefore reluctant to judge those who lie outside it—in this case, Muslims. However, the principle is meant to apply to judgments about the state of an individual’s soul, not his behavior. And it was never meant to apply to withholding judgments about ideologies and belief systems.

The reluctance to see the mote in the other’s eye can eventually slide over into willful blindness. There are numerous warnings in the New Testament about spiritual blindness and they apply to those within the Church as well as to those without. The big danger for Church leaders is not that they will be seen as judgmental in the eyes of the world, but that they will be seen as foolishly naïve in the eyes of history.

“First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday” is a well-known slogan in the Middle East. It means that after the Islamists finish with the Jews, they will come after the Christians. The fate of the Saturday people and the Sunday people is intertwined. And the fate of both is put in jeopardy when Christian leaders insist on holding on to a fantasy-based picture of Islam.

Liberating Our Jerusalem

May 18, 2015

Liberating Our Jerusalem, Sultan Knish Blog, Daniel Greenfield, May 17, 2015

[T]here are still Jews in the West Bank and they have to be gotten rid of. Once enough Jews have been expelled, there will be peace. That’s not a paragraph from Mein Kampf, it’s not some lunatic sermon from Palestinian Authority television– it is the consensus of the international community. This consensus states that the only reason there still isn’t peace is because enough Jews haven’t been expelled from their homes. The ethnic cleansing for peace hasn’t gone far enough.

There will be peace when all the Jews are gone.

Jerusalem Day is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will we be free of the Joe Bidens and the Peter Beinarts, the Jimmy Carters and Barack Obamas, the Gilad Atzmons and Jeremy Ben Amis. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.

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When Jordan’s Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city– the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.

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Since then, the annexation and ethnic cleansing has become an international mandate. It would be absolutely inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into a city where they had lived. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as “settlers” living in “settlements,” and describe them as an “obstruction to peace.” Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.

Describing Jewish homes in Jerusalem, one of the world’s oldest cities, a city that all three religions in the region associate with Jews and Jewish history, as “settlements” is a triumph of distorted language that Orwell would have to tip his hat to. How does one have “settlements” in a city older than London or Washington D.C.? To understand that, you would have to ask London and Washington D.C., where the diplomats insist that one more round of Israeli compromises will bring peace to the region.

They say that there are three religions in Jerusalem, but there are actually four. The fourth religion is the true Religion of Peace, the one that demands constant blood sacrifices to make peace possible, that insists that there will be peace when the Jews have been expelled from Judea and Samaria, driven out of their homes in Jerusalem, and made into wanderers and beggars once again. Oddly enough, this religion’s name isn’t even Islam– it’s diplomacy.

Diplomacy says that the 1948 borders set by Arab countries invading Israel should be the final borders and that, when Israel reunified a sundered city in 1967, it was an act of aggression, while, when seven Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, it was a legitimate way to set boundaries. When Jordan ethnically cleansed East Jerusalem, it set a standard that Israelis are obligated to follow to this day by staying out of East Jerusalem.

Vice President Biden was so upset that the Jerusalem municipality had partially approved some buildings in the city during his visit that he threw a legendary hissy fit. Hillary Clinton stopped by MSNBC to tell Andrea Mitchell that, “It was insulting. And it was insulting not just to the Vice President who didn’t deserve that.” David Axelrod browsed through his thesaurus and emerged on the morning shows calling it an “affront” and an “insult.” Two for the price of one.

Editorials in newspapers denounced the Israeli government for this grave insult to the Obama Administration.”Israel’s Provocation”, the Chicago Tribune shrieked in bold type, describing it as a “diplomatic bomb” that went off in Biden’s face. The Atlantic, eager to get in on the action metaphors, described Israel slapping Biden in the face. A horde of other columnists jumped in to depict the Israelis kicking and bashing the poor Vice-President, while holding his head in the toilet.

Whether Joe Biden was the victim of the Jews or the Jews were the victims of Joe Biden is all a matter of perspective. The Hitler Administration was quite upset to find that Jewish athletes would be competing in the 1936 Munich Olympics. When you ethnically cleanse people, they are supposed to stay ethnically cleansed. It’s in poor taste for them to show up and win gold medals at the Olympics or rebuild their demolished synagogues. It’s insulting to the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices.

That sounds like a harsh accusation, but it’s completely and undeniably true.

bauernfeind-mur-lamentation-jerusalem

When Muslims move into a Jewish town, poor Joe doesn’t come crying that he’s been bombed with a diplomatic affront and slapped with a Menorah. When Muslim countries fund Muslim housing in Israel, there are no angry statements from Clinton and no thesaurus bashing from David Axelrod. Muslim housing in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel is not a problem. Only Jewish housing is. The issue is not Israel. If it were, then Arabs with Israeli citizenship would get Biden to howl as loudly. It’s only the Jews who are the problem.

The entire Peace Process is really a prolonged solution to the latest phase of the Jewish Problem. The problem, as stated by so many diplomats, is that there are Jews living in places that Muslims want. There were Jews living in Gaza before 1948, but they were driven out, they came back, and then they were driven out again by their own government in compliance with international demands. Now only Hamas lives in Gaza and it’s as peaceful and pleasant without the Jews as Nazi Germany.

But there are still Jews in the West Bank and they have to be gotten rid of. Once enough Jews have been expelled, there will be peace. That’s not a paragraph from Mein Kampf, it’s not some lunatic sermon from Palestinian Authority television– it is the consensus of the international community. This consensus states that the only reason there still isn’t peace is because enough Jews haven’t been expelled from their homes. The ethnic cleansing for peace hasn’t gone far enough.

There will be peace when all the Jews are gone. That much is certainly undeniable. Just look at Gaza or Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan, which has a grand total of two Jews, both of them in their seventies. Or Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria where peace reigns now that the Jews are gone. Some might say that violence seems to increase proportionally with the number of Muslims, but we all know that would be a racist thing to say. On the other hand suggesting that violence increases with the number of Jews living on land that Muslims want, that’s just diplomacy. A common sense fact that everyone who is anyone in foreign policy knows to be true.

How will we know when the Muslims have gotten all the land that they want? When the violence stops. Everyone knows that agreements mean nothing. No matter how many pieces of paper are signed, the bombs and rockets still keep bursting; real ones that kill people, not fake ones that upset Vice Presidents. The only way to reach an agreement is by groping blindly in the dark, handing over parcel after parcel of land, until the explosions stop or the Muslims fulfill their original goal of pushing the Jews into the sea.

That’s the wonderful thing about diplomacy if you’re a diplomat and the terrible thing about it if you are anyone else without a secure way out of the country when diplomacy fails. And diplomacy in the region always fails. Camp David and every single agreement Israel has signed with Muslim countries aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. The only peace treaty that counts is the one made by tanks and rifles. It’s the one made by Israeli planes in Egyptian skies and Israeli soldiers walking the border. It’s the one made by Jewish farmers and ranchers, tending their sheep and their fields, with rifles strung over their backs. The only peace that’s worth anything is the peace of the soldiers and settlers.

In 1966, Jerusalem was a city sundered in two, divided by barbed wire and the bullets of Muslim snipers. Diplomacy did not reunite it. Israel pursued diplomacy nearly to its bitter end until it understood that it had no choice at all but to fight. Israel did not swoop into the fight, its leaders did their best to avoid the conflict, asking the international community to intervene and stop Egypt from going to war. Read back the headlines for the last five years on Israel and Iran, and you will get a sense of the courage and determination of the Israeli leaders of the day.

When Israel went to war, its leaders did not want to liberate Jerusalem, they wanted Jordan to stay out of the war. Even when Jordan entered the war, they did not want to liberate the city. Divine Providence and Muslim hostility forced them to liberate Jerusalem and forced them to keep it. Now some of them would like to give it back, another sacrifice to the bloody deity of diplomacy whose altar flows with blood and burnt sacrifices.

As we remember Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. The greatest triumph of the modern state happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless and useless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six-Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War fought with 1948 borders– and Israel very likely would not exist today.

Jerusalem-Scopus

Even as Jews remember the great triumph of Jerusalem Day, the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices are busy searching for ways to drive Jews out of Jerusalem, out of towns, villages and cities. This isn’t about the Arab residents of Jerusalem, who have repeatedly asserted that they want to remain part of Israel. It’s not about peace, which did not come from any previous round of concessions, and will not come from this one either. It’s about solving the Jewish problem.

As long as Jews allow themselves to be defined as the problem, there will be plenty of those offering solutions. And the solutions invariably involve doing something about the Jews. It only stands to reason that if Jews are the problem, then moving them or getting rid of them is the solution. The bloody god of diplomacy always assumes that they are the problem. There is less friction in defining Jews as the problem, than in defining Muslims as the problem. The numbers alone mean that is so.

Jerusalem Day is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will we be free of the Joe Bidens and the Peter Beinarts, the Jimmy Carters and Barack Obamas, the Gilad Atzmons and Jeremy Ben Amis. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.

Only then will we have liberated our Jerusalem. The Jerusalem of the soul. It is incumbent on all of us to liberate that little Jerusalem within. The holy city that lives in all of us. To clean the dross off its golden gates, wash the filth from its stones and expel the invaders gnawing away at our hearts until we look proudly upon a shining city. Then to help others liberate their own Jerusalems. Only then will we truly be free.

Palestinian forces detain 500 Hamas West Bankers, to thwart coup and Abbas assassination plot

March 10, 2015

Palestinian forces detain 500 Hamas West Bankers, to thwart coup and Abbas assassination plot, DEBKAfile, March 10, 2015

security_forces_in_the_West_Bank_Hamas__10.3.15Palestinian security forces detain Hamas activists

[O]ur sources also reveal that the PA chairman has asked Netanyahu through back-channels for a secret rendezvous somewhere in Europe. He proposed avoiding prominent capitals like London, Paris or Berlin, but meeting at a smaller venue for the sake of confidentiality.

Abbas also insisted that this meeting must be concealed from Washington, especially from Secretary of State John Kerry.

The Israeli prime minister has turned him down – and not just because the Palestinian request finds him in the middle of a tough race for re-election.

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

Acting on direct orders from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian special forces raided the nine PA-ruled towns of the West Bank in the past 48 hours and detained 500 Hamas suspects, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Abbas ordered the operation after discovering that Hamas had been hatching a plot for some weeks to stage an armed insurrection against the Palestinian Authority, starting in one of the Palestinian towns – possibly even the PA capital of Ramallah. They would assassinate him in the process of the coup.

Of late, Abbas has kept his distance from Ramallah and his seat of government and spends most of his time traveling in foreign countries, especially Arab capitals, where he feels safer under the protection of foreign security services than he does at home.

The wave of detentions from Sunday to Tuesday (March 9-10) is the most extensive the Palestinian Authority has ever conducted against Hamas’ West Bank cells. Not only prominent figures and known terror activists were taken into custody but also new figures.

Abbas ordered the operation amid a serious dilemma over his personal security.

Before him were reports presented by Palestinian Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Majed Faraj revealing the preparations in train for his assassination, an event that would signal mass riots orchestrated by Hamas and Jihad Islami, leading up to the seizure of government from the Palestinian Authority – much as they did in the Gaza Strip.

At the same time, Abbas does not entirely trust Palestinian security services or their ability to safeguard him and his regime in Ramallah.

He therefore turned to Israel, touching off an IDF response that had nothing to do with Israel’s forthcoming general election on March 17 – as government opponents have claimed.

The 3,000 IDF soldiers plus 10,000 reservists called up this week were not posted on the West Bank to practice anti-riot tactics for putting down Palestinians disturbances against Jewish settlements – as reported. They were placed on the ready in case it was necessary to go into Palestinian towns and save them from being overrun by the radical Hamas and Jihad Islami.

The Israeli troops also rehearsed a possible scenario that might ensue from the murder of Mahmoud Abbas.

In view of the highly sensitive security situation on the West Bank, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accompanied by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, paid a rare visit to the IDF’s Judea-Samaria command headquarters Tuesday, March 10, to inspect these preparations.

It was the Hamas conspiracy to seize power in Ramallah that prompted Ya’alon’s enigmatic remark that were it not for preemptive military operations, central Israel might now be under missile and mortar attack.

DEBKAfile’s military sources add that way the Palestinian issue has become a football for kicking around Israel’s election campaign, making it hard to penetrate the fog of anti-government propaganda and establish what is really going on.

For example, Netanyahu is being presented by his rivals as having agreed at a former stage in US-brokered peace negotiations with the Palestinians to withdraw to behind the 1967 lines. They have picked out one of the many papers drawn up by the Americans and discarded in the course of the negotiations – this one was written by a Shiite Iraqi academic in Oxford University and was never approved either by Israel or the Palestinians.

Turning to the real events afoot today, our sources also reveal that the PA chairman has asked Netanyahu through back-channels for a secret rendezvous somewhere in Europe. He proposed avoiding prominent capitals like London, Paris or Berlin, but meeting at a smaller venue for the sake of confidentiality.

Abbas also insisted that this meeting must be concealed from Washington, especially from Secretary of State John Kerry.

The Israeli prime minister has turned him down – and not just because the Palestinian request finds him in the middle of a tough race for re-election.

EU undermining Israeli sovereignty. Again

February 9, 2015

EU undermining Israeli sovereignty. Again | Anne’s Opinions, 9th February 2015

(The perfidy and hypocrisy of the European Union in building illegal “settlements” for the Palestinians in the West Bank while denouncing Israeli housing is both outrageous and breathtaking in its scope.– anneinpt)

 

A map of the West Bank produced by Regavim, an Israeli group, shows the EU-funded Palestinian settlements represented by stars. The yellow part is Area C, which was placed under Israeli control during the Oslo Accords. The pink and red parts are Areas A and B, which are Palestinian (Click to enlarge)

I have written about the European Union’s perfidy towards Israel several times before, and it has evidently never gone away. In fact their latest act of treachery is simply the realization and expansion of their declaration 3 years ago that they intend to build infrastructure in the West Bank, thereby undermining Israel’s sovereignty over the Green Line in Judea and Samaria.

Their latest activity (h/t Margie in Tel Aviv) has been building houses in what they call the West Bank.

One could be forgiven for blinking one’s eyes in astonishment at this seeming act of Zionism – until one realises that the housing that the EU is building over the Green Line is intended for Palestinians only. The Daily Mail reports:

The EU is acting illegally by funding unauthorised Palestinian building in areas placed under Israeli control by international law, say an NGO, international lawyers and MEPs.

More than 400 EU-funded Palestinian homes have been erected in Area C of the West Bank, which was placed under Israeli jurisdiction during the Oslo Accords – a part of international law to which the EU is a signatory.

The Palestinian buildings, which have no permits, come at a cost of tens of millions of Euros in public money, a proportion of which comes from the British taxpayer.

This has raised concerns that the EU is using valuable resources to take sides in a foreign territorial dispute.

Official EU documentation reveals that the building project is intended to ‘pave the way for development and more authority of the PA over Area C (the Israeli area)’, which some experts say is an attempt to unilaterally affect facts on the ground.

Locally, the villages are known as the ‘EU Settlements’, and can be found in 17 locations around the West Bank.

They proudly fly the EU flag, and display hundreds of EU stickers and signs. Some also bear the logos of Oxfam and other NGOs, which have assisted in the projects.

Questions have also been asked about the conduct of EU workers in the region, after a picture emerged of a man in EU uniform threatening soldiers and bystanders with a rock outside a settlement in 2012. An EU spokesperson declined to comment on the picture.

A man in EU uniform threatens Israeli soldiers and bystanders with a rock on the West Bank in 2012

Do go to the Daily Mail website and look at the detailed pictures and maps to get the full impression of what has been going on there.

Maja Kocijancic, a Brussels-based EU spokesperson, denied that this was happening.

‘The EU’s funding will provide training and expertise, to help the relevant Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministries to plan and build new infrastructure and enable people to reclaim and rebuild their land there,’ she said.

‘To date, no construction has started yet under these programmes. The EU is not funding illegal projects.’

When shown sequences of photographs showing construction taking place, she declined to comment. She also did not comment on an EU-Oxfam sign stating that the ‘main activities’ of construction work are ‘rehabilitation and reclamation’ of land.

However, her statement appeared to be contradicted by Shadi Othman, a spokesman for the EU in the West Bank and Gaza. Speaking on the telephone from the West Bank, he accepted that the construction was taking place.

‘We support the Palestinian presence in Area C. Palestinian presence should not be limited Areas A and B. Area C is part of the occupied Palestinian territory which eventually will be Palestinian land.

But Area C is Israeli controlled territory intended for Israelis under the Oslo Accords! Who do the Europeans think they are, undermining the Accords? And if they are invalidated for them, then Israel too can consider itself free of the constraints of those awful Accords, and should therefore be permitted to build anywhere it wants.

An Oxfam spokesperson acknowledged that unauthorised construction was taking place, but said that it was justified on humanitarian grounds.

‘In recent years, around 97 percent of Palestinian permit applications for building in the Occupied Palestinian Territory have been rejected by the Israeli Government.’ he said.

‘This means many Palestinian communities in Area C, which is under full Israeli Government control, are being prevented from building basic, essential structures such as homes and schools.

Ari Briggs, International Director of Regavim and principal author of the report, claimed that humanitarian projects are being used by the EU and Oxfam as a ‘Trojan horse’ for political aims.

‘Area C has been identified by the anti-Israel “humanitarian community” as a hot spot to push Israel.

‘These organisations with EU funding are encouraging and actively aiding the illegal attempt to take over public land. This has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with taking advantage of less privileged nomadic societies for political goals.’

At least two Members of the European Parliament are raising the matter with EU policymakers.

On 1 February, James Carver, a British MEP for the West Midlands region, wrote a strongly-worded letter to the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs.

‘The structures all bear the name and flag of the EU and official EU agents have been photographed participating in overseeing the construction, so the active involvement of the EU can hardly be denied,’ he wrote.

‘I kindly call upon you to do your utmost to bring an end to these illegal and destructive activities,’

Michael Theurer, a German MEP who is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, shares his concerns. ‘I am taking these allegations seriously and will thoroughly investigate them,’ he said.

An Israeli government source said that the Palestinian settlements demonstrate ‘the double standards of the EU’, which ‘deplores’ Israeli settlements while funding illegal building of its own for Palestinians.

‘If Israel started building houses in the middle of Hyde Park, the British government would immediately take them down,’ he said. ‘The EU is doing things that would never be acceptable in Europe.’

The Israeli politician Yariv Levine, Chairman of the House Parliamentary Committee in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, added:

‘It is hypocritical of the EU to criticise Israeli construction while at the same time actively supporting and practically taking part in illegal Palestinian settlement construction on Israeli land.’

Alan Baker, an international lawyer who took part in drafting the Oslo Accords in the Nineties, said that the EU’s actions were illegal.

‘The EU is a signatory to the Oslo Accords, so they cannot pick and choose when they recognise it,’ he said.

According to international law, all building in Area C must have permission from Israel, whether it is temporary or permanent.

‘The same principle applies anywhere in the world. If you want to build, you need planning permission.

‘The EU is ignoring international law and taking concrete steps to influence the facts on the ground.’

Professor Eugene Kontorovich, an international lawyer from the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, said: ‘There’s no question, the EU is openly in violation of international law.’

Accepted terminology and Double standards

The EU in their smug self-righteousness defend themselves by saying:

The Office of the European Union Representative in Jerusalem said in a statement: ‘The European Union is deeply dismayed by and strongly opposes Israeli plans to expand settlements in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and in particular plans to develop the E1 area.

‘The E1 plan, if implemented, would seriously undermine the prospects of a negotiated resolution of the conflict by jeopardizing the possibility of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state and of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states.

‘It could also entail forced transfer of civilian population. In the light of its core objective of achieving the two-state solution, the EU will closely monitor the situation and its broader implications, and act accordingly.’

“Could entail forced transfer of civilian population” – but it won’t because Israel has never done that until now and has no intention of doing so in the future. And again, it is up to Israel to decide what to do with E1, and not the Europeans. They should butt out of Israel’s business and if they are so worried about the Palestinians’ welfare they should investigate where their billions of dollars in aid are disappearing to – and you can be sure it is not into housing, schools or infrastructure, not to mention paying the salaries of Palestinian civil servants. Those billions are most likely to be found deep in the pockets of senior PA officials who are quite happy to let the EU do their dirty work.

Emily Amrousi explains how the European Union is building Palestine and why this poses a huge danger for Israel:

The network of Bedouin outposts in the Adumim region looks like a flagship Palestinian Authority-European Union initiative. Why there? The strategic importance of this specific area stems mainly from the narrow corridor that runs along one of Israel’s main routes — the road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea.

In any war scenario, that road would become a vital artery, delivering vehicles, weapons and supplies to the eastern border. The battle is for control over that corridor. The Palestinians are trying to create territorial contiguity between Nablus, Ramallah and Jericho east of Jerusalem, and between Bethlehem and Hebron to the south. Israel claims contiguity between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim and eastward to the Jordan Valley.

One line runs east to west between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The other line runs north to south from Ramallah to Bethlehem. The intersection between these two lines is a fateful point: It is either an Israeli barrier preventing Palestinian contiguity or the other way around. The race is on. The point where these two lines meet is called E1. In the outdated zoning plans it is called Mevaseret Adumim. It is a range of round hills that have swelled with too many promises over the years. As of today, there is no Israeli construction there, but there is plenty of Palestinian-European construction — about 200 houses, all built in violation of the law.

The European Union mission in east Jerusalem confirmed to us that “the European Union is very frustrated with the Israeli plans to build in the E1 zone, which will jeopardize the possibility of establishing a contiguous and viable Palestinian state. We are monitoring the situation and taking appropriate action.”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Europe is facing the Jewish state with facts on the ground: contiguous and permanent Palestinian housing in sovereign Israeli territory. Take that.

The publicity that this Regavim report has engendered has finally embarrassed the government into taking action, and this being election season has only strengthened the government’s resolve. The Prime Minister has now ordered the demolition of the EU-funded structures over the Green Line.

I shall however not hold my breath, but will reserve judgement until I see for myself that those structures have actually been taken down. From bitter experience we Israelis know that our government is very big on talk and very reluctant to take action, especially against a hostile entity like the EU who has had the temerity to threaten sanctions against Israel for building in the West Bank while reserving that right for itself – but only for the enemy side.

And if by some miracle the government follows through, how long do you think it will take for cries of “apartheid”, “repression” or “war crimes” to ring throughout the EU and UN?

Islamic State Deepens Grip in Future Palestine

January 23, 2015

Islamic State Deepens Grip in Future Palestine, The Gatestone InstituteKhaled Abu Toameh, January 23, 2015

According to Israeli security forces, dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank have defected to the Islamic State in recent months. Their main goal, according to sources, is to topple the Palestinian Authority and launch terror attacks on Israel.

Some 200 supporters of the Islamic State, who held up Islamic State flags, took to the streets of Gaza City to protest the latest cartoons published by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. They also chanted slogans that called for slaughtering French nationals, and burned French flags. Attempts by Hamas to impose a news blackout on the protest failed, as photos and videos found their way to social media.

The glorification of terrorists and jihadists by the Palestinian Authority, and the ongoing anti-Israel incitement by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, is driving many Palestinians into the open arms of the Islamic State.

Hamas and other Palestinian groups are continuing to deny the obvious, namely that the Islamic State terror group has managed to set up bases of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians do not feel comfortable talking about the fact that Islamic State is working hard to recruit Palestinians to its ranks.

The presence of Islamic State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is an embarrassing development for both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

For Hamas, the fact that Islamic State has long been operating in the Gaza Strip is something that it does not want the world to know about.

Hamas cannot afford a situation where another Islamist terror group poses a challenge to its exclusive control over the Gaza Strip. Since it seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has successfully suppressed the emergence of rival forces, first and foremost the secular Fatah faction headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

But if until recently it was Fatah that posed a challenge and threat to Hamas’s rule, now it is the Islamic State and its supporters in the Gaza Strip are openly defying the Islamist movement’s regime.

When the first reports about Islamic State’s presence in the Gaza Strip emerged last year, Hamas and other Palestinians were quick to dismiss them as “false.”

Salah Bardaweel, a senior Hamas official, said in February 2014 that the Islamic State “does not exist” in the Gaza Strip.

This week, however, it became evident that Hamas was lying when it denied the presence of Islamic State in the Gaza Strip.

Some 200 supporters of the Islamic State, who held up Islamic State flags, took to the streets of Gaza City to protest the latest cartoons published by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.

The protesters tried to storm the offices of the French Cultural Center in Gaza City. They also chanted slogans that called for slaughtering French nationals, and burned the French flag.

899Palestinians waving Islamic State flags attempt to storm the French Cultural Center in Gaza City. Some in the crowd carried posters glorifying the terrorists who carried out this month’s attacks in Paris. (Image source: ehna tv YouTube screenshot)

The protest apparently caught Hamas by surprise. Hamas security forces that were rushed to the scene dispersed the protesters and arrested seven Islamic State supporters.

Attempts by Hamas to impose a news blackout on the Islamic State protest failed, as photos and videos of the demonstration found their way to social media. Needless to say, Hamas-affiliated media outlets ignored the protest. They were hoping that the world would also not see the Islamic State demonstrators on the streets of Gaza City.

Hamas’s biggest fear is that scenes of Islamic State supporters marching in the heart of Gaza City will scare international donors and dissuade them from providing badly needed funds for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Hamas is also afraid that Western officials working with the United Nations and relief agencies will stop visiting the Gaza Strip after watching the footage of Islamic State supporters.

In recent weeks, it has also become evident that Islamic State has some kind of a presence in the West Bank — a fact that poses a serious threat to Abbas’s Palestinian Authority [PA].

Just last week, Israel announced arrests of members of an Islamic State terror cell in the West Bank city of Hebron. The three Palestinian members of the cell confessed during interrogation that had planned to launch a series of terror attacks against Israel. The three suspects were identified as Waddah Shehadeh, 22, Fayyad al-Zaru, 21 and Qusai Maswaddeh, 23.

Until recently, Hamas was considered the number one threat to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Now, however, it has become evident that Islamic State is also trying to set up bases of power in the West Bank. According to Israeli security sources, dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank have defected to Islamic State in recent months. Their main goal, the sources, said, is to topple the PA and launch terror attacks on Israel.

Abbas is lucky that the Israeli security forces are still operating in the West Bank, including inside cities and towns controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Were it not for the IDF and various branches of the Israeli security establishment, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Islamic State would have toppled the Palestinian Authority and beheaded Abbas and his officials a long time ago.

Still, Abbas does not feel comfortable acknowledging the fact that a growing number of Palestinians in the West Bank are joining Islamic State. Abbas fears is that if he admits that Islamic State is already operating in the West Bank, this could dissuade many Western countries from supporting his effort to persuade the world to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Like Hamas, Abbas also fears that Westerners would stop visiting Ramallah and other West Bank Palestinian cities once they learn about Islamic State’s presence in these areas.

Although Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are continuing to bury their heads in the sand and deny what is there, they cannot avoid responsibility for the emergence of Islamic State in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The glorification of terrorists and jihadists by the PA and the ongoing anti-Israel incitement by both the PA and Hamas, are driving many Palestinians into the open arms of the Islamic State.

This is something that the UN Security Council members will have to consider the next time they are asked to vote in favor of the establishment of a Palestinian state. Otherwise, they will be voting for the creation of an Islamic, and not a Palestinian, state.