Sunday, May 08, 2016

  • Sunday, May 08, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon

After my takedown of Noura Erakat's lies on Friday she made a series of tweets aimed at (but not addressing) me. I found this one fascinating:




Here is an expansion on my response.

Is the right side of history the one that sided with Hitler, Nasser, the Assads, and Saddam Hussein?

Is the right side of history the one that cheered as thousands of Americans burned to death?

Is the right side of history the one that continued to support Osama Bin Laden years after other Arab regimes realized he is not a hero?

Is the right side of history the one that has consistently supported terrorism against Jewish civilians for a hundred years up until today?

Is the right side of history the one that has consistently rejected peace offer after peace offer?

Is the right side of history the one that insists that people whose entire lives are defined by their murdering children are heroes?

Is the right side of history the one that exerts all its energy into destroying a state rather than building one?

I can come of with lots of ways that the first democracy in the Middle East is on the right side of history, but it is bizarre to argue that Palestinians have been  anything but on the wrong side of everything.




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  • Sunday, May 08, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
A day after meeting with a key Iranian adviser to Iran;'s Ayatollah Khamanei, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech Friday where he characterized Hezbollah's fighting in Syria as just another way to show "resistance" to Israel.

Responding to biting criticism within Lebanon about how Hezbollah has dragged that country into the Syrian civil war, Nasrallah tried to spin it as "resistance" against the "US-Israel axis."

Creating his own history, Nasrallah claimed that Israel and the US have targeted Syrian "resistance" groups which have been an "incubator of support" for Palestinians, and Hezbollah is merely defending Syria against this aggression.

He also decried Saudi Arabia's reported ties to Israel, especially recent meetings between the two sides such as the debate between Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal and retired IDF general Yaakov Amidror in Washington last Thursday night.

Nasrallah railed against the transfer of the two islands of Tiran and Sanafir from Egypt to Saudi Arabia will open a door for declared coordination between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

He also proved yet again that he is an Iranian puppet rather than a Lebanese leader by parroting Iranian claims on Yemen, which have nothing to do with the country he resides in that he is helping to destroy.

Nasrallah is clearly feeling the pressure from Saudi Arabia declaring Hezbollah a terrorist group.

On Thursday, Nasrallah met with Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign affairs' adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader, along with the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, in his secret underground hideout.

As he laid a wreath at the grave of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, Velayati said, "God willing, and through the blood of martyrs, the Islamic resistance will carry on with its resistance against the Zionist entity whether in the region or the entire world."

This is a thinly veiled call for terrorist attacks worldwide against Israeli and Jewish targets - attacks of the type that Hezbollah has already enthusiastically performed.


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Saturday, May 07, 2016

  • Saturday, May 07, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
Last month I noted that the number of terror attacks in Israel have steadily decreased since October.

That trend continued in April.

In April, there were 3 attacks from Gaza versus 4 in March. (That number has already been surpassed in May, unfortunately.)

There were 110 attacks in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, compared to 117 in March.

There were 2 attacks within the Green Line in April - one stabbing and one firebomb thrown at a synagogue in Jaffa. March also saw 2 attacks, both stabbings.

There was one killed and 26 injured in March, versus none killed and 19 injured in April.

Things are largely back to what passes for "normal" in Israel - which would be unacceptable anywhere else.




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From Ian:

A President Who Learned Nothing
Most of the initial reaction has focused on the revelations about how Rhodes has manipulated the facts to sell the Iran deal. Samuels notes, for example, that the administration claimed that the nuclear talks got under way in 2013 because of the election of a supposed moderate, Hassan Rouhani, as Iran’s president. This “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal,” he writes. The reality is that Obama was “eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency.”
Moreover, the administration claimed that the deal would help “moderates” in Iran to oppose a “hard-line” faction even though Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA director and secretary of defense, is quoted as saying that the CIA analysis did not support the contention that the “Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between ‘hard-line’ and ‘moderate’ camps.”
There is much more along these lines in the article, including Rhodes’ boasts about how he feeds the White House propaganda line to Washington journalists who faithfully parrot his talking points.
But what really struck me about the article is the supreme arrogance that grips this White House.
That is an occupational hazard in any White House, of course, but Obama and his closest aides take it to a new level. Samuels repeatedly notes that Rhodes has “contempt” and “aggressive contempt” for “anyone or anything that stands in the president’s way” and for “the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press.”
The story notes that Rhodes “referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”
7 Shocking Revelations in NY Times’ Profile of Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru
The New York Times’ nearly 10,000-word profile of President Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is filled with insider details on White House policy and administration strategy.
Here are the seven most surprising tidbits, enumerated in no particular order.
1 – The White House expects “message discipline” from the media.
2 – The Times describes Rhodes as “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy,” yet writer Samuels concedes it is “startling” that Rhodes is lacking “conventional real-world experience.”
3 – The Times describes Rhodes as an almost ventriloquist who shapes the news media.
4 – The Obama administration utilized a narrative that was “often misleading or false” to sell the Iran nuclear deal to the public.
5 – Rhodes himself reveals some of the motivation for the Iran nuclear deal – that the agreement advances Obama’s general academic foreign policy philosophies.
6 – The timing of the effort to declassify the contents of redacted sections of the government’s 9-11 report on the eve of Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia last month may not have been coincidental. The Times does not report anything specific on the matter, but it’s phraseology makes clear the peculiarities of the story and Rhodes’ relationship to his brother, CBS News President David Rhodes. CBS News helped to revive the 9-11 document effort.
7 – The use of social media to parrot Obama’s agenda.
White House blames allegations of Iran nuclear deal deceit on 'sour grapes'


Top Obama Aides: Childhood in Muslim Nation Influenced His Worldview
The details were contained in the Times’ profile of Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” Jarrett is Obama’s senior adviser.
The Times cited Rhodes explaining:
Obama’s particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia.
Continues the Times, quoting Rhodes:
“Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.”

Friday, May 06, 2016

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: More than is absolutely necessary
Corbyn’s moves to discipline Shah, Livingstone and an additional 50 party members for their expressions of anti-Jewish bigotry also indicate that he has no intention of fighting anti-Semitism.
Corbyn suspended their party membership. He didn’t expel them from the party. He didn’t bar them from serving in leadership positions in the future. The duration of their suspensions is undefined.
And there is little reason to believe that it will extend beyond the headlines. Once this story is forgotten, they will likely be reinstated.
When London residents set out to vote for their next mayor on Thursday morning, it worked out that polling places in north London, home to the largest concentration of Jews in the city, were sent the wrong voter lists. As a result, hundreds of people, including Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and his wife, Valerie, were prohibited from voting.
All the relevant authorities insisted that it was simply a technical mistake. Two-and-a-half hours later, the proper voter rolls arrived and residents were permitted to vote.
Maybe they were telling the truth.
But with Britain’s second largest party, the largest party in London, embracing Jew-hatred and deliberately undermining the ability of British Jewry to freely defend its Zionist values, there is no reason to take their statements at face value.
Pat Condell: I Vote Against You - Israel 3:10 - (h/t Yenta Press)


Anne Bayefsky: The UN on Holocaust Remembrance Day: Where's the 'never' in the 'never again'?
Thursday, May 5 is Holocaust Remembrance Day or “Yom Hashoah,” an occasion to remember and mourn the unique horror that resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews including one million children – unfathomable numbers that still shock the conscience of humankind. Except at the United Nations. Though the UN was built on the ashes of the Jewish people, in our time this organization plays a disturbing role in advancing antisemitism.
Antisemitism works in many ways. Devotees deny or minimize its very existence. Instead, they appropriate the suffering of their targets and invert the genuine victim and the actual perpetrator. The U.N. of the 21st century does all of this.
On April 27, 2016, the Palestinian’s UN representative Riyadh Mansour, held a press conference at UN headquarters in New York.
He said: “If you throw a stone…if you throw it at a moving car of the army or the terrorist settlers, they send you to jail for 20 years, and yet their representative in the Security Council…he paints them as terrorists. Guess what. All colonizers, all occupiers including those who suppressed the Warsaw uprising labelled those who were resisting them as terrorists.”
Jewish victims of Palestinian rock-throwers have been maimed for life with catastrophic brain injuries or have died as their cars careened out of control. According to the Palestinian spokesman, however, Israelis are like Nazis and Palestinians are their victims.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been asked to condemn Mansour’s comments and to remove them from the UN website where they are now broadcast around the world 24/7 – because, for starters, these comments contradict the essence of the U.N. Charter. But the Secretary-General has refused to do so.

  • Friday, May 06, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
The beginning and ending of a story in the Egyptian Vetogate news site:

Israel is currently celebrating the anniversary of the alleged "Holocaust", and as is the case every year Tel Aviv exploits this occasion for the prosecution of anti-Semitism to justify the crimes that violate the right of unarmed Palestinians. ...The Holocaust, according to the Israeli claim, is the memory of the six million Jews killed in World War II by the Nazis and their collaborators. Israel has exploited this lie on a large scale as a means of blackmail, political and material gain, and they inflate and dramatize the subject, using the most despicable types of intellectual and physical terrorism against those who counter their myths and historical lies.

...Seventy years have passed while Israel uses the Holocaust, relying on lies, to convince the world that Jews were burned in the gas chambers at the hands of "Adolf Hitler", so that they may gain international sympathy to bring them more gains.

Vetogate is the 14th most popular site in Egypt, and in the top 1000 websites in the world, with an estimated 1.2 million views daily.






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  • Friday, May 06, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon

UNRWA tweeted this week:


It is certainly true that Palestinians in Lebanon are living in squalor and treated like dirt by the government. Plus they are exposed to regular outbreaks of violence between various factions in the camps. They cannot move away from the overcrowded camps and they cannot build new buildings within the camps.

There are only two ways out for them.

One is to leave and go to Europe or Gulf states - and over 200,000 of them have done exactly that, even though UNRWA still counts them as being "registered" in Lebanon so they can raise more money. (UNRWA doesn't have a way to un-register Palestinians.)

The other chance is for them to become Lebanese citizens so they can gain full rights.

If a Palestinian can prove that his or her paternal ancestors were Lebanese citizens in 1921, and then further prove that they are not a danger to Lebanon (and Lebanon suspects all Palestinians of being dangerous), then they can become citizens.

This is a very difficult task. Even though many of them are descendants of people who lived in Lebanon a hundred years ago (the reason so many fled in 1948 to Lebanon is because their families were still there) it takes time and money to prove that one is really Lebanese to the satisfaction of the Lebanese authorities.

To do this, Palestinians in Lebanon need lawyers.

But does UNRWA provide legal services for that purpose?

Of course not. Because UNRWA doesn't exist to actually help so-called "refugees" become citizens of their host countries, but to keep them and their descendants refugees forever, or until Israel is destroyed, whichever comes first.

UNRWA indeed provides legal services that are needed by Palestinians whose few rights in Lebanon are always being reduced, to the absolute silence of the Arab world and Palestinian leadership. But the one service that could solve the problems of thousands of these so-called "refugees" whose great-grandfathers lived in Lebanon is not provided.

Imagine what a great investment it would be to provide those legal services. For probably the cost of feeding and housing a Palestinian for a couple of years, they could get off the dole and have jobs and rights. Everyone would win.

Except for UNRWA and the many others who are vested in the idea of keeping Palestinians miserable and teaching them it is all Israel's fault.



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From Ian:

Christian Zionist Leader: UNESCO Temple Mount Resolution Worse Than Holocaust Denial
In honor of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, leading pro-Israeli Christian groups are heading to the United Nations to condemn UNESCO’s effort to deny Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, calling it “tantamount to Holocaust denial.”
Laurie Cardoza-Moore, Special UN Envoy for the World Council of Independent Christian Churches (WCICC) and President of Proclaiming Justice to The Nations (PJTN), slammed UNESCO for only recognizing the Temple Mount -Judaism’s holiest site – as a Muslim holy site.
“Denying the Jewish people’s connection to the Temple Mount is tantamount to denying the existence of the Jewish people and is therefore even more grave than Holocaust denial,” Cardoza-Moore said.
The controversial resolution refers to what is arguably the most contested spot in the Middle East only by it’s Arabic name, Haram al-Sharif.
Cardoza-Moore, whose organization represents more than 40 million Evangelical Christians worldwide, called on UNESCO to condemn the Jordanian Waqf’s strategic and deliberate destruction of ancient Jewish artifacts on the Temple Mount for the past decade for what she avers is a blatant attempt to erase Jewish history.
“This message is particularly important on Holocaust Remembrance Day, because we cannot afford to standby as Jewish history is publicly denied by an organization of the United Nations,” she said.
Cardoza-Moore also warned that by denying the connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount, UNESCO is undermining its own stated mission which is “to contribute to the building of peace,” as its denial increases violence and violates the human rights of Jews and Christians who support the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and all Israel.
UNESCO’s denial of Jewish heritage also breaches its obligations to promote religious tolerance, she added.
“Christians recognize the historic Jewish connection to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and all of the ancient biblical sites in Israel. Christians also recognize that if we do not defend Israel’s biblical and historic connection to the Land, Christians will ultimately lose their historic connection as well,” said Cardoza-Moore.
Douglas Murray: How Recep Erdogan became the most powerful man in Europe
Update: Since this article was published Ahmet Davutoglu has resigned as Turkey’s Prime Minister. Reports suggest this comes as a result of a rift with President Erdogan caused by the increasingly ‘Presidential’ nature of Turkey’s politics.
Is Turkey part of Europe? For most of our civilisation’s history, to have even asked such a question would have been to invite derision. The Ottomans were kept out of Europe not by some early-onset prejudice, but by the armies of Europe having to beat back their repeated invasions. The question became slightly more plausible a century ago with the rise of Ataturk and the modern Turkish state (one of the only successful efforts to reconcile the Islamic religion with state power). For a brief period around the turn of the millennium, some serious people (including the British government) supported Turkey joining the EU.
But today, the question has become academic — first because Turkey’s liberal trajectory long ago halted and began rolling backwards. And secondly because the country is now coming into Europe anyway. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, has persuaded the EU to grant visa-free travel to his 75 million countrymen inside Europe’s passport-free Schengen area. In so doing, he has made more progress than any of his predecessors. Using a combination of intimidation, threats and blackmail, he has succeeded in opening wide the doors of Europe.
Erdogan’s success matters, because it says much about the EU — and the idea that it exerts ‘soft power’. This was the theory in 1999 when the EU declared Turkey to be ‘a candidate State, destined to join the Union’ so long as it fulfilled the standard criteria for membership. Its state should have ‘achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for and protection of minorities’. Four years later, the EU announced that Turkey had ‘taken important steps’ to ensure effective implementation, particularly in allowing Turkish citizens to ‘enjoy fundamental freedoms and human rights in line with European standards’.
Turkish PM’s Resignation Casts Shadow on Israel Reconciliation
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday announced that he will resign from his post, opening up the possibility for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to solidify and consolidate his power, and placing a question mark on a possible reconciliation between Turkey and Israel.
“We thought that we would have a four-year relationship,” Davutoglu said. “That this lasted shorter is, rest assured, not of my choosing, but because of necessities that have emerged.”
The upheaval in Turkey’s government seems to be the result of a failure of the two highest ranking leaders to resolve ongoing disputes, which has culminated in intense “crisis talks” on Wednesday. Haaretz reported that Davutoglu has not strongly supported the presidential system that Erdogan wants in order to strengthen his power in lieu of the current parliamentary system. Erdogan has also opposed resuming reconciliation talks with Kurdish rebels in Turkey, while the prime minister was open to the idea if the rebels were willing to withdraw fighters from Turkey.
Davutoglu, who was known as Erdogan’s more moderate counterpart, recently also announced that the reconciliation process with Israel had advanced greatly, saying an agreement would be reached if Israel agreed to resolve the electricity and water crises in Gaza. With his exit the future of the reconciliation is not clear. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) will hold an emergency convention later this month to choose a new party leader who will replace the prime minister, likely someone loyal to Erdogan who wants to centralize government control.

It's been less than a week since we saw an absolute lie from Noura Erakat, who teaches law at George Mason University and has taught at Georgetown and Temple U as well, according to her webpage.

Here's her latest:


While her last lie came from her quoting a thoroughly unreliable source, this one she made up from scratch.

Literally no one, even the most vehement anti-Israel sources, claim that Israel killed 100 members of the Samouni family in the 2008-2009 Gaza war.

The event she is referring to happened in January 2009. For reasons that are unclear, Israel bombed a house with over 20 members of the Samouni family after they were told to go there by Israeli forces.
One of the Samouni "civilians" killed

Several members of the Samouni family were Islamic Jihad Al Quds Force members, and Arabic sources at the time of the battle in Zaytoun bragged that their fighters barricaded themselves in civilian houses before attacking Israeli soldiers.

It seems unlikely that the Israelis who ordered the airstrike were aware of the number of civilians in the house; UAV images indicated that there were armed fighters in the house and the order was given to bomb it but there doesn't seem to have been proper communications with the ground forces who gathered the family into the house to begin with.  There was active fighting in the neighborhood at the time.

Regardless, Erakat is wrong on the date, overtly lying about the casualties, and ignoring the fact that there were valid military targets in the house.

If she lies so easily in public where she can be fact-checked, imagine how much she lies to her students in private!

UPDATE: In response to my calling her out on her lies, Erakat tweeted




And then tweeted (twice)



It's really funny how things that might sound intelligent in the university environment look so stupid when taken out of that bubble.

Of course there are different ways of looking at events, but Erakat is justifying making up facts to "create space for the narrative of the oppressed."

And if she needs to lie to support her narrative, it is probably because the truth doesn't do a good enough job for her purposes.

Which means that what she calls "narrative" is more accurately characterized as "propaganda."


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  • Friday, May 06, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
An attendee at the Women in Parliament Global Forum in Amman, Jordan, reported to me some details from within after reading my posts about how Jordan banned any Israeli participation - and how the organizers were complicit with this discrimination.

One of the welcoming speeches came from the head of the Jordanian House of Representatives, Atef Tarawneh, the person who bragged to the Arabic media to begin with that Israel was forbidden to attend the summit held at his parliament. In his speech he discussed his country's challenges, saying that Jordan is facing terrorists at all borders: in Syria in the north, Iraq in the East and "Zionist terrorists who occupied Palestine" in the West. The translator, however, changed his words and just said something like "and Israel to the West." (That speech is unfortunately not archived at the WIP Facebook page.)

Delegates at the conference had no idea that Israel was banned from attending and were surprised by its absence. (The US did not attend but I don't think it has ever participated.)

The Palestinian representative tried to give a speech against Israel during a Q&A on the first day, but was cut off by the moderator and was not allowed to speak on the second day.

My correspondent asked Alexandra Rosen, the head of WIP, about the Israel ban. She said that she couldn't comment but the communications manager would get back to her. So far, there has been no word, and it seems likely that she was blowing her off.

The project manager for the event, when asked about the ban, said that he was not aware of it.

One of the sessions at the event that banned Israel was called "Promise of peace: women's role in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and finding solutions."

Yesterday, Israel lodged an official protest against Jordan for Tarawneh's earlier comments on banning Israel from the forum, where he said "We will not allow those who kill our youth and our daughters and who usurped our land to enter the Dome of the Jordanian Parliament." But as far as I can tell there has been no Israeli reaction to the banning of Israel from the conference itself.

I tweeted to a number of Israeli female MKs to comment on the ban but did not hear anything back.

I have a guess that Israel made a deal with WIP to tacitly allow this ban in exchange for a major meeting that the organization held in Israel last year. WIP badly wanted to hold a conference in an Arab country to make a statement. But that is only a guess, and that is the only way I can understand Israel's complete official silence on this matter.



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  • Friday, May 06, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
(Yes, the title is clickbait.)

From New York Racked, February 24:
There Are Super-Naked Supermodels Superimposed on Fifth Avenue Right Now

If you've strolled down Fifth Avenue lately, you may have noticed some impressively large signage. Just before you hit 54th Street, Coach's massive wraparound advertisement designates its future flagship at 685 Fifth Avenue, signaling the brand's aim to be viewed as more upscale. The ad starts on Fifth Avenue and stretches to the middle of 54th Street, advising passersby of its fall 2016 opening.

But no one's going to blame you for missing all of this because you're too busy looking back at the three super-naked supermodels right next door (shown above). Gigi Hadid, Lily Aldridge, and Joan Smalls are fronting the construction facade of the future Stuart Weitzman at 675 Fifth Avenue, which dedicated fashion fans will recognize this as the brand's spring 2016 statuesque ad campaign titled "Nearly Nude."
Sorry, I pixelated the good parts. But the original link is above.

Gigi Hadid's father is Palestinian Arab - but that is not why I am bringing this up.

The signs are about 4 stories tall, which is about 40 feet (12 meters.)

The two Hamas tunnels that Israel discovered in recent weeks are about 30 meters deep.

So imagine two and a half sets of these super-nude supermodels, stacked up one above the other - the height of a ten story building.

That's how deep these Hamas terror tunnels are.




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Thursday, May 05, 2016

From Ian:

The Case for Israeli Sovereignty on the Golan
The purpose of international law is to protect the international order, one in which states exist within secure and recognized borders. When the law provides no clear answers, it should be interpreted in the spirit of bolstering this international order. If the international community wishes to do this, nothing can legally stop it. The only way to bolster this international order and resolve the open question of the Golan is to recognize Israeli control over the territory.
From the Israeli perspective, this is obvious. Realistically speaking, there is no longer any incentive for Israel to return the Heights to Damascus. Until recently, some in Israel hoped to offer the Golan in order to seduce Syria away from the Iranian axis, a bold gamble to thwart Tehran’s push for regional hegemony. But with Iran emboldened by the recent nuclear deal and Syria now firmly under its domination, that possibility is foreclosed.
The process by which the world might recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Heights, however, will not be easy. The world needs not wait until the official collapse of Syria, but these scenarios may still be a way off, as the world powers resist recognizing the inevitable. Iran and Russia have every interest in maximizing Assad’s control over Syria, and would only write off the country as an absolute last resort. Recognizing breakaway states would raise uncomfortable questions about what is to be done about ISIS. And the current areas of control by various parties to the Syrian civil war do not neatly divide into separate, coherent entities that could be viable states.
But as surrounding states collapse further into a war of all against all, international recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan would be a bold statement in defense of the international order. Should the world fail to make such a statement, the Middle East could yet pay a heavy price for the world’s failure to let an anachronistic policy fall into desuetude.

Matti Friedman: The Peculiar Language of Soldiers
“We have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.” Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone following America’s present-day wars. “Vegas is in a TIC,” says a U.S. infantryman in Afghanistan in Sebastian Junger’s book War. What does it all mean?
Anyone seeking to understand the world needs to understand soldiers, but the language of soldiers tends to be bizarre and opaque, an apt symbol for the impossibility of communicating their experiences to people safe at home. The language isn’t nonsense—it means something to the soldiers, of course, but it also has something to say about the army and society to which they belong, and about the shared experience of military service anywhere. The soldiers’ vernacular must provide words for things that civilians don’t need to describe, like grades of officers and kinds of weapons. But it has deeper purposes too.
I was drafted into the Israeli army in 1997, when I was 19, having moved to Israel from Canada a few years before. I served until 2000. In those years Israel controlled a strip of Lebanese land along the Israeli border and fought a long war there with guerrillas from Hezbollah—a war which involved IEDs, videotaped hit-and-run attacks, and the wearing down of a modern military by Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed state. It was thus a prologue of sorts to the kind of warfare Americans have seen in the 21st century. (I just spent a few years writing a book about it.) When I happened to land in this conflict after high school, I found a hazardous reality described not just with the usual acronyms and numbers—“APC,” “81 mm”—and with the energetic obscenities one would expect, but with a language that seemed drawn from a horticultural handbook.
In Their Own Words: An Invented Palestinian Nation
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas will begin issuing “State of Palestine” passports this year. The made-up “Palestinians” now have a made-up people and a made-up state, fly a made-up flag, and carry passports confirming the ruse.
To promote the fiction of a uniquely Palestinian indigenous population, Abbas pursues a simple strategy begun by Yasser Arafat. Disregarding Biblical, archeological and other well-substantiated facts, the Arabs have rewritten the past to deny the 3,000-year-old connection of Jews to the Land of Israel, supplanting it with a fabricated “Palestinian” narrative. They learned the Nazi lesson well — if you tell big lies and repeat them often enough, people start to believe you. You steal Jewish history and then inherit their homeland.
To promote its goal of eliminating Israel, the PA portrays modern Israelis as lacking any connections to the ancient Hebrews.
“Zionism is the invention of robbers who stole Palestine from its inhabitants… whose lies are not supported by any archeological remnants…. Israel has no right to exist…. The stories of Jewish prophets are a sick invention,” reported the PA newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, recently. In that same official PA newspaper, columnist Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul remarked, “Religious, historical, and even biblical facts deny any connection between the Jews and Jerusalem” or to “historic Palestine.” Fatah Commissioner Nabil Shaath stated in January, Israel is “a ‎colonialist project on our land.”
The widely accepted Jewish connection to Palestine is substantiated by the Old and New Testaments, the Quran, academic scholarship, archeological evidence, historical records and genetic genealogical research. Jews have a distinct ancient language, culture, and religion that are inextricably linked to the area. There have always been Jews in Jerusalem, a place mentioned in the Bible more than 400 times. The Quran makes no reference either to “Palestinians” or to Jerusalem.
The fabricated “Palestinian” narrative makes claims of Canaanite descent. There is neither genealogical nor genetic evidence connecting Arabs to these peoples, who ceased to exist 2,800 years ago.
There are no ancient Palestinian archaeological sites, monuments, literature, heroes, or coins and no Palestinian language. Most of the newly minted “Palestinians” are descended from Arabs migrating to the area in the early 20th century for economic reasons. Their ethnicity is common with their origins: Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, Lebanese, and Saudi. As Hamas Minister Fathi Hammad recently admitted, “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

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