ElderToons: One man's terrorist....

I guess I'm in a 'toon mood today.

(The fourth panel is not the Prime Minister's office. That building is actually fuzzed out in Google Street View! This is a nearby office building in Jerusalem that will have to stand in for the PM's HQ.)

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Hizballah reacts to being labeled "terrorist" by acting like - terrorists

From Hizballah's Al Manar (English):

Hezbollah expressed in a statement issued Monday evening firm rejection of the European Union’s decision to put its military wing on the list of terrorism, and considered it as “aggressive, unjust decision written with Zionist ink.”

Hezbollah saw in the EU bowing to pressures of the US administration and the Zionist entity as a serious turnover in its compliance to the White House dictates. “It looks as if the decision was written by American hands with Zionist ink and the EU had only to put its seal for approval,” Hezbollah’s statement said.

“If the EU countries think they are booking its locations in our Arab and Islamic countries by submitting to the logic of U.S. blackmailing, we assure them that Washington had made similar decision and gained only further failures and disappointments,” the statement ended up saying.

Hmmm...what do you think they are talking about, as far as the US getting physically involved in the region and then suffering "failures and disappointements"?

It sounds to me like Hizballah is bragging about the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 300 people.

So peaceful!

In its Arabic site, Hizballah reports on statements from many of its Lebanese allies complaining about the EU decision. The Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (of Lebanon!) states that the EU decision "is a behavior that encourages terrorism against free peoples," and called on "the sons of our people to further rally around the resistance and its weapons as the only option available to our people for liberation and the splendor and dignity."

MP Michel Aoun took a different tack - essentially admitting Hezbollah terrorism and justifying it. He said "the EU decision is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations, which provides for the right of peoples to liberate its land occupied by all means available." He added "all the peoples of Europe had practiced at some point resistance to liberate their lands from occupation," essentially equating Hizballah terrorism to, say, World War II.

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Hamas reportedly breaks bones of PRC terrorist who shot rockets - and that's a good thing

Last Friday, two rockets from Gaza were fired into Israel.

According to Palestine Press Agency, the Nasser Saladin Brigades of the PRC terror group announced that one of their members was arrested and beaten by Hamas on Saturday, fracturing his limbs. They said that the reason for the arrest was suspicion of shooting the rockets. (As far as I can tell, the PRC didn't take credit for the launches.)

Outside of the obvious human-rights problem that Hamas and the PA don't care about their own laws, this is actually the best possible situation in stopping terror attacks.

Both Hamas and the PA control land and have established quasi governments from which they derive their legitimacy. This is a source of pride, and pride is a huge motivating factor in the honor/shame society of the Arabs.

Therefore, it is something that must be protected at almost all costs.

Without negotiations and without fanfare, Israel makes it clear that if it is attacked, she will respond. The responses necessarily involve the hated Jews either physically coming to the areas that the attacks originated from or attacking from the air. Either way, it weakens the perceived sovereignty of the PA and Hamas over the lands that they govern, and this is a source of shame. Therefore, it must be avoided.

And if that means that these groups will stop their own citizens from attacking Israel, then that is what has to be done.

Peace can only occur if it is in the self-interests of the parties. The reason that two decades of the Oslo process have not brought a real peace is that the terms given violate the self-interests of both parties.

A detente, however, is in the interests of both parties. Over the years Israel has established just such a detente by exploiting the fact that the PA and Hamas have something to lose by not cooperating. They want to stay in power? Fine - as long as Israel is left alone, their own leadership is safe.

This is the closest thing to peace that is possible in the conflict. Thuggish methods to enforce the truce is not ideal, but it is much better than rockets landing on schools.

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J-Street student trip pays respects to Arafat

A student took a J-Street sponsored tour of Jerusalem and Ramallah - and there was nothing remotely even-handed about it.

While the point of the article is about how her fellow college students were so lacking in critical thinking skills that they swallowed the lies they were given whole, one could not tell that this trip was organized by a supposedly Jewish, "pro-Israel/pro-peace" organization as opposed to an Arab propaganda outfit. And this J-Street  trip winds up in a most sickening way:

We hopped on our charter bus and went to meet with a member of the PLO negotiating team on the well known Emek Refaim street in the German Colony. Not surprisingly, the man was filled with anger. He started off by saying how difficult it is to be a Palestinian in the German Colony seeing Israeli flags waving from houses that were once homes of Palestinians.

He then continued on for the next 40 minutes playing the blame game: “Why can’t there be peace? Because of Bibi. There are two things in this world that will never change – and that is Netanyahu and Allah.”

As he went on and on, I became lost in his web of contradictions and realized that this man has been in the peacemaking game too long. I found it odd that the students I was traveling with did not seem bothered by the bitterness of the PLO negotiator, nor did they mention how they wished we could have heard from an Israeli negotiator as well, which I believed would be beneficial to compare and contrast the two sides.

...Finally, we were on our way to Ramallah. I was searching for the images the media so often likes to portray – of a city destroyed by war, stricken with poverty. However, I noticed how modern and beautiful the city was, as we drove past sushi restaurants and five-star hotels. We went to the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights and met with a man who was not of Israeli or Palestinian descent, but Asian. This man had no relation to Israel or Palestine – just your typical civil servant.

He spoke about human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories. He lamented over Israeli settlers cutting down trees of Arab farmers, vandalizing mosques and other actions of the sort. He completely glossed over the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel (because that isn’t a big deal, right?) and barely touched on the stone throwing by Palestinians at Israelis driving through the West Bank (which has killed many).

The fact that he bypassed these subjects so smoothly was the first thing that was of concern to me. The second thing of concern was that this man did not know a word of Arabic or Hebrew. I wondered, how is he supposed to gain a first-hand experience of the trials and tribulations of the West Bank, Gaza and Israel when he files reports from within his airconditioned building without speaking to anyone on the ground?

Probably the strangest part of the entire trip was going to the PLO headquarters to visit Yasser Arafat’s memorial. I felt we stood there for an uncomfortably long time. I did not want to be disrespectful, but I in no way wanted to be mistaken as honoring him. I felt chills as I stood at the monument of a man who was thought of as a hero by the suicide bombers who killed so many Israelis over the years.

Yes - J-Street takes students on a trip to pay homage to a terrorist with the blood of hundreds of Jews on his hands!

(h/t Lauri)

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Nasrallah makes his case against EU blacklisting Hezbollah; insists Israel wants to invade Lebanon (update)

Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah made a little-noticed speech Friday night in which he not only asserted that Hezbollah is protecting Lebanon against Israel's unending expansionism, but also that the EU cannot separate Hizballah's "military wing" from the good people of Lebanon itself. This was a clear attempt to counter the possibility that the EU might declare Hezballah's military wing ("resistance")  to be a terror organization today.

Sayyed Nasrallah wondered if someone believed that Lebanon was no longer exposed to Israel threats, stressing that if someone believed so, this would be a "misfortune", as Israel's greediness has no end.

His eminence reassured that whoever tried to break or isolate the resistance has failed in achieving that, because this resistance is not an organization or a party, but a public determination which is ready for sacrifices.

"The noble people in this country have invested in the resistance with their most precious and loved ones, with their children and blood, hence, this resistance is not a faction that you can siege or isolate," he added.

Hezbollah Secretary General stated that the resistance is capable of overcoming all the difficulties, as the enemy is reviewing all its plans and calculations after what happened in the last couple of months.

He indicated that "in any coming war, the enemy's eye will be on Galilee before Beirut… and from now on, no one can assault Lebanon without paying a price."

Sayyed Nasrallah considered that what the resistance has been exposed to was the result of its victories against the Zionist entity.

"The resistance, which triumphed in 1982, 2000, and 2006, was able to destroy the 'New Middle East' project. Hence, it was natural to be targeted. In addition to the military confrontation with the enemy, we were being targeted on the military, security, cultural, and social levels," he added, pointing out that "when the resistance does not get targeted, this means it is ineffective and the enemy does not fear it."

The Lebanese are increasingly sick of Hizballah in light of its dragging the nation into the Syrian mess, and this speech exposes far more about Nasrallahs' fears than about Israel's, by not even addressing Syria and acting like just another Arab despot - by blaming Israel for all problems.

One consequence of the recent upheavals in the Arab world is that the people are no longer buying it. Nasrallah won't be taken down by Israel, but by the Lebanese people he is pretending are on his side.

UPDATE: Despite these efforts, the EU is declaring Hizballah's "military wing" to be a terrorist group.

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Hamas terrorists mourn Helen Thomas

From Hamas' Qassam Brigades English website, in one of the rotating headlines:

They also proudly show the video where she recommends ethnically cleansing Jews from the Middle East. This is the "stand" they are referring to.

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New Arab head of Cave of the Patriarchs murdered six Jews

Walla reports that the PA recently appointed a director for the "Ibrahimi Mosque," the Muslim side of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

His name is Tayser Abu Sneiheh.

If you look at his Facebook page, you can see his profile photo shows him, circled, as a member of a terrorist cell that was responsible for murdering six yeshiva students in Hebron in 1980.

In late spring of 1980, after the women had been in Beit Hadassah for over a year, Arab terrorists attacked the Yeshiva students [who came every Friday evening to dance and sing in front of the building.] The attackers began shooting and throwing hand grenades from the roof of the building facing Beit Hadassah. Six young men were murdered and many others were wounded.

It is definitely the same person because he speaks about his appointment in other Facebook posts.

There is no way that the Palestinian Authority didn't know Abu Sneineh's past. On the contrary, it seems likely that the murders are part of his credentials to be the head of the holy site in the same city that he murdered Jewish teens. Indeed, the terror cell was from Fatah, the dominant party in the PA, and the murders are still considered heroic today.

Besides the perversion of a quasi-government honoring an admitted and unrepentant terrorist, we have a murderer who is now a director of a mosque. There are a billion Muslims in the world. Will any of them condemn the idea that a terrorist - one who brags about his murders - is leading a Muslim holy place?

We know the PA will never condemn a person like Abu Sneineh and will choose to honor him instead. They routinely honor terrorists.

But is there not a single Muslim on Earth who is horrified by the idea of a mosque being associated with a proud murderer?

If not, that says a lot more about Islam than any number of anti-Muslim websites possibly can.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

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