Purim and natural hate

As I was reading the megillah this Purim, it occurred to me that the most resonant part of the story today is that Haman's hate for Jews was so irrational, although he pretended to justify it using weak arguments that people are more than willing to swallow to justify their own bigotry.

It is exactly the same today, as the Israel-haters are completely irrational. Their hate comes first, and their justifications come later. Answer their points and they will come up with others, because the entire basis of their antipathy to Jews is baseless, irrational hate.

The biggest lie they say is that they are "pro-Palestinian."

It just occurred to me that people who claim to be "pro-Palestinian" - like the entire staff at Electronic Intifada - are against any Palestinian being naturalized in any Arab country, and in fact they will say they are against Palestinians becoming citizens of any other country until they can "return" to destroy Israel. To these supposed lovers of all things Palestinian, they demand that millions of Arabs with Palestinian ancestry remain stateless, indefinitely.

What love they show!

But there is one recent exception where they fought mightily for a Palestinian to be a  citizen of another country.

Terrorist Rasmea Odeh, as they fought hard to allow her to remain an American citizen. And even that they tried to justify on the basis of whatever crazy legal arguments they could find to hang their love for a murderer of Jews on.

Purim teaches us that the haters of Jews and Israel aren't ever going to go away. All we can do is win, over and over again.

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"Palestine:" The only "state" that wants its people to move to an enemy state

Qalandia "refugee" camp in the West Bank

From Times of Israel on Tuesday:

Responding to a reporter’s question on whether the US will continue to provide funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to millions of Palestinian refugees, in light of a non-binding UN General Assembly resolution last month condemning the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, [Nikki] Haley said Trump was prepared to cut aid to UNRWA if the Palestinians refuse to return to peace talks.

“I think the president has basically said that he doesn’t want to give any additional funding until the Palestinians are agreeing to come back to the negotiation table,” Haley said. “We’re trying to move for a peace process but if that doesn’t happen the president is not going to continue to fund that situation.”

“The Palestinians now have to show their will — they want to come to the table. As of now they are not coming to the table but they ask for aid. We’re not giving the aid,” added Haley. “We’re going to make sure they come to the table and we want to move forward with the peace process.”

An article in Palestine Today says in Arabic what the  Palestinians try not to say in English.

If UNRWA cannot get funded, then the  "refugee" issue would fall to the UNHCR.

The UNHCR would not consider the vast majority of the people under UNRWA's mandate to be refugees.

As the article says, the entire point of UNRWA, from the Palestinian perspective, is to artificially keep the "refugee" issue alive - until the descendants of the refugees from 1948 are allowed to "return" to Israel.

Why would any self-respecting state, as the Palestinians consider themselves, want their own people to move to an enemy state? A state that they claim has an apartheid system against them, no less?

Absurdly, the demand for Arabs of Palestinian descent to move to Israel doesn't only apply to those who languish in "refugee" camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, but also to every single resident of the camps in the West Bank and Gaza - under Palestinian control!

Nothing makes the goals of Palestinian nationalism as clear as their demands to perpetuate and fund the fake "refugee" status of their people until they can "return."

UNHCR tries to resettle refugees in other countries so they can rebuild their lives in peace and security. UNRWA wants to keep their "Palestine refugees" to be stateless until they "return" to Israel.

The goal is not to build a state for Palestinians but to destroy Israel. And it always has been.

Everyone knows that "return" is a demand to destroy Israel from the inside. But the international community won't say this out loud. The claim that Israel is somehow obligated to adhere to a tortured reading of a part  of a single paragraph of a non-binding General Assembly resolution is still considered a cogent argument from the world that is still frightened of Arab terror. They pretend that the unique UNRWA definition of "refugee" has the same legal weight that the real definition of refugee has. (Not one European or even Arab country will accept asylum applications from UNRWA's "Palestine refugees" unless they are real refugees from Syria, for example.)

The entire UNRWA ecosystem has been subverted and repurposed since the 1950s  with the single goal of destroying Israel - by keeping Palestinian Arabs in stateless misery - under the pretense of human rights.

The goals of Mahmoud Abbas' PA, of Fatah and Hamas, of the "pro-Palestinian" agitators, are all the same. And the "refugee" issue is all the proof you need.

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The Economist reveals the extent of Jordanian apartheid against Palestinians

From The Economist:

...Surely, Western officials say, for the right price, currently estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, the Jordanians will help John Kerry, America’s secretary of state (pictured above with King Abdullah) to fix a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by absorbing the 4.5m Palestinians who live in the kingdom, including the 3.5m who are now Jordanian citizens.

Or will they? Indigenous Bedouin from Jordan’s East Bank, who number about 3m, worry that America’s plans to persuade Palestinian leaders to strip generations of refugees of their claimed “right of return” to what is now Israel would reduce Jordan’s original inhabitants to a permanent minority. Tribal leaders fret that the refugees, barred from Israel, would campaign for full rights in Jordan, over time turning the kingdom into a second Palestinian state. The Bedouin would lose their preferential access to government jobs. They might also be deprived of the skewed electoral system that has hitherto ensured that they control Jordan’s parliament. “Kerry is destroying our home,” says a Jordanian analyst. “He is trying to solve one conflict by creating another.”

Parliamentarians from Jordan’s East Bank (ie, non-Palestinians) intent on scuppering Mr Kerry’s plan say the Palestinians must uphold their right to return to Israel. Campaigners are denounced as American collaborators for calling for more rights for those 1m Palestinians resident in the kingdom who still do not have Jordanian nationality. When Mustafa Hamarneh, a Jordanian MP of Palestinian origin, suggested giving the children of Palestinian refugees access to Jordanian state education, health care and a driving licence, he was labelled a Zionist agent.

Here we see in plain English that the only reason Jordanians say they support the "right or return" is because they want to kick out their Palestinian citizens!

The Economist is wrong when it ways that some 1 million Palestinian Jordanians do not have citizenship - the number I have seen, which makes far more sense, is about 165,000, only comprising those who came from Gaza after the 1967 war. It is clear that the Bedouin want to discriminate not only against the relatively few non-citizens, who have next to no rights already, but against the Jordanians of Palestinian origin who have been full citizens for over six decades!

Notice also how even handed The Economist is in reporting on Jordanian apartheid against Palestinians - a discrimination that the Jordanian political leaders are quite open about and proud of. None of the rancor that accompanies stories about Israel shows up here, even though the alleged victims are the same.

It sure seems like The Economist is only "pro-Palestinian" when that position happens to also be anti-Israel.

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Now, Arabs claim the Magna Carta provides the "right to return"

In the UN on Wednesday:

The Palestine refugees would not disappear into thin air, the representative of Lebanon stated, urging that they be given the right to return. That right was acknowledged in the Magna Carta in 1215 and codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, implementing international humanitarian law and resolutions seemed to be inconvenient for Israel, but acting according to law and normality was not a matter subject to convenience.

The Magna Carta? This was a new one on me.

Since Lebanese representatives to the UN tend to simply parrot talking points, I found the likely source for this idea that the Magna Carta discusses a "right to return" all the way back from 1979.

It was mentioned in a document prepared for the UN's "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People." And the text there shows that duplicity by the "pro-Palestinian" crowd is hardly a recent phenomenon.

The document, called "An international law analysis of the major United Nations resolutions concerning the Palestine question" by William Thomas Mallison and Sally V. Mallison, states:

Historically, the right of return was so universally accepted and practiced that it was not deemed necessary to prescribe or codify it in a formal manner. In 1215, at a time when rights were being questioned in England, the Magna Carta was agreed to by King John. It provided that: "It shall be lawful in the future for anyone... to leave our kingdom and to return, safe and secure by land and water..."

So let's look at the Magna Carta, and see what is hidden behind the ellipses.

42. In the future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision.

Ah, so it only applies to people who are citizens of the country they left! And it clearly does not apply to members of a entity that is hostile to the country.This is hardly a universal "right of return," and the authors of this paper knowingly quoted only a small excerpt to promote a ridiculous assertion - one that is now confidently shouted at the UN.

It also obviously doesn't apply to descendants.

1979 anti-Israel writers were no less deceptive than their more modern counterparts.

What about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

It says

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

But this also only applies to citizens or nationals of that country. The text was meant primarily to stop nations from preventing nationals from leaving, and the "return" clause was only added to strengthen the right of citizens to leave. See CAMERA's analysis. Regrettably, the 1963 UN document that is the source for this is not online as far as I can tell.

(UPDATE: Ian found it online, with free registration from Calameo. Ingles' entire monograph is suffused with references to the right of return of nationals. Several times during his discussion he refers to "the right of a national to return to his country." In addition he discusses the matter of how countries may strip nationality from those who leave their country over a long period of time; again the point being that he is only speaking of nationals of the country in the context of return. Beyond that, the language added to the UDHR for "return" being only to strengthen the right to leave was added by Lebanon:

The Lebanese amendment was to add, at the end of paragraph 2, the words
"and to return to his country".

In submitting his amendment, the representative of Lebanon pointed out that
the text under discussion:

"... was intended to cover all movements inside and outside of a given
State. According to that article, any person had the right to leave any
country, including his own. The ideal would be that any person should be
able to enter any country he might choose, but account had to be taken of
actual facts. The minimum requirement was that any person should be able
to return to his country. If that right were recognized, the right to leave a
country, already sanctioned in the article, would be strengthened by the
assurance of the right to return. Such was the object of his amendment."

And, again, it clearly does not include descendants of those who left. That is an innovation that is uniquely applied to Palestinian Arabs, with legal arguments that are at least as specious as these are.

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Poster: How badly do PalArabs want a state?

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"Pro-Palestinian" really means "anti-Israel": another example

Reader Greg points out the Australians for Palestine website, where we see this graphic prominently featured:

So-called "pro-Palestinian" advocates don't even try very hard to say they believe in a two state solution or in Israel continuing to exist.

Even though Australians for Palestine's Statement of Principles pretends to advocate for a two-state solution, they say:

...all of Jerusalem remains the subject of final status negotiations because of its strategic importance in reconnecting the northern region of the West Bank to the southern region.

In other words, Israel has no rights over even the parts of Jerusalem west of the Green Line.

Australians for Palestine upholds the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to return home. This right is enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. No agreement, negotiations or parties which purport to trade away the right of return or any other inalienable rights can have any legal basis and cannot bind or compel the Palestinian people to accept them. The right of return is as much an integral part of the Palestinians’ right of self-determination as it is of individual and collective human rights.

Meaning that even if the PA agrees to forgo this "right" in any peace plan, AfP and similar groups will not accept that peace proposal and will continue to agitate to destroy Israel demographically. (I do not need to mention that UNGR 194 does not give this right, it certainly does not apply to descendants and it was roundly rejected by all Arab states.)

Australians for Palestine adopts the position that Israel has the right to exist as does Palestine based on the 1967 borders according to UN Resolutions 242, 338 and 194. The right of Israel to exist is not exclusive to, or more valid than, the right of Palestinians to exist. How they shall exist is the issue still to be resolved.

So Israel's existence is still up for grabs. Maybe it will end up being ensconced in a cafe in Tel Aviv.

Australians for Palestine recognises the right of Palestinians to legitimately resist Israel’s oppressive occupation within the territories occupied in 1967. ...

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states quite clearly: “It is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected under the rule of law.” By failing to protect Palestinian human rights, the international community has driven the Palestinians to resist their occupiers and oppressors.

So Arab terrorism is the fault of the West!

But...

Australians for Palestine adopts the position that terrorism violates the right to life, and therefore, is contrary to the fundamental principles of humanity embodied in international humanitarian law. This applies equally to the oppressor and the oppressed.

How to resolve these two paragraphs? Clearly the first one justifies terror, but the second pretends to condemn it. Chances are that they simply define "terror" as something only Israel does. Problem solved!

Finally,

Australians for Palestine adopts the position that pressure must be put on Israel to end its occupation and apartheid policies against the Palestinians through boycotts, divestment and sanctions. The failure of diplomacy and dialogue, and an international community led by the United States unable and/or unwilling to confront Israel and demand that it respect international law and United Nations resolutions condemning its policies, leaves this as the only non-violent option to bring about change. Therefore, Australians for Palestine will appeal to our government to uphold international law and apply sanctions on Israel; appeal to institutions such as churches and universities to divest from corporations that do business with Israel; and, appeal to the general public to use their own power to boycott products and services that benefit Israel.

Even though these sanctions hurt Palestinian Arabs, and if Palestinian Arabs would divest from Israel their economy would crash and burn.

Now, note what these principles do not say.

Not a single word of responsibility for Arab countries to treat their Palestinian "guests" as equal citizens of their countries. Not a word about the systemic discrimination that Palestinian Arabs suffer in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere. Not a thing about the conditions in the camps that hundreds of thousands still live in, nor a call to dismantle them. Nothing about inter-Palestinian Arab squabbles and unifying the cause.

All of its concrete demands are against Israel. It advocates "resistance" against Israel, it advocates boycotts and sanctions against Israel and advocates destroying Israel demographically.

So why exactly is it considered "pro-Palestinian"?

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