Is the State Department Buying Arab Propaganda?
After centuries of Muslim persecution, often genocidal, or dhimmitude under sharia, Christianity in the Middle East has been stunted, if not effectively crushed. To avoid discrimination, Christians gave their children Arab names instead of Biblical ones. Their religious celebrations are kept indoors, lest Christian festivities offend Muslims. As in a Stockholm Syndrome, Middle East Christians often ended up defending and even praising Islam, even if that comes at the expense of their own religious rights.Peace With the Palestinians Was a Bust. Here’s What Israel Should Do Next.
It is stunning to see is how on the one hand, the US State Department and media play down the genocide going on today against Christians in the Middle East, but on the other hand, immediately believe Muslims when one of their leaders tells an American delegation that he does not fear Arabs but fears Jews.
With many branches of the US government apparently determined to distort reality, there seems to be a series of deliberate decisions to ignore -- and to prevent the American public from knowing -- what is really going on.
"Politically incorrect" language has been censored by the State Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the previous Executive branch, and, most recently, the National Security Council, which recently seems to have purged the entire department.
It is dangerous for the West to accept Arab anti-Semitic propaganda voiced by some Christian leaders in the Middle East; they are held hostage by the Muslim majority around them. Since the age of the internet, even many Arabs have stopped buying Arab propaganda.
A recent mark was retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was Secretary of State. Wilkerson recently said on MSNBC, during the recent Temple Mount crisis, that Jews pose the biggest threat to Christians in the Middle East. He learned this, he said, in 2002-2003 in Ramallah, during a business trip to meet with Yasser Arafat, from a Middle Eastern Catholic Bishop, who had told him that the biggest enemy for Christians in the region was not the Arabs but the Jews. So, Wilkerson, instead of condemning countless unprovoked terror attacks against Israelis, criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It is most unfortunate that a former high-ranking State Department official decided to blame Israel during the recent crisis, in which Jews were the obvious victims. It is more than unfortunate that Wilkerson took the Bishop's statement at face value instead of recognizing the complexities of the Middle East, where "no" and "yes" rarely mean "no" and "yes".
Half a century after the victory in the Six-Day War, 40 years after its most important political benefit in the separate peace with Egypt, half a decade after the implosion of the Arab structures around it, Israel needs a different strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinian issue. Israel should have adopted such a strategy at the latest when the “Peace Process” predictably failed in Oslo, Camp David, and Annapolis. But it’s not too late to finally abandon the fantasy of peace with the Palestinian national movement and move to an admittedly less desirable yet much more realistic proposition of unilateral disengagement from the overwhelming majority of the West Bank. Three questions beg a detailed and responsible answer: Why isn’t peace a possibility? Is there a viable alternative? How would it work?MEMRI: Motto Of Hamas Summer Camps This Year: 'Marching On Jerusalem'; Their Goal: To Train The Generation That Will Liberate Palestine, Jerusalem
Why no peace?
Peace, in the sense of termination of conflict and end of claims, where both sides are free to pursue their own separate nation-building projects—an Arab state of Palestine and a Jewish state of Israel—has been consistently rejected by the Palestinian national movement. Manipulative or ignorant Arabs, Westerners, and Israelis who claim that the Palestinians have all but abandoned their insistence on the “right of return”—the destruction of the Jewish state by demographic means—can no longer successfully cheat mainstream Israelis. “Let me put it simply,” said President Abbas, in January 2014: “The right of return is a personal decision. What does this mean? That neither the Palestinian Authority, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu-Mazen [Abbas], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone of his right to return. … The choice is yours. You want to return? You will return. … Even a father cannot forgo his children’s right.”
Palestinian leaders not only consistently rejected a state (notably in 1947, 2001 and 2008) but demonstrated their profound lack of interest in any constructive enterprise when the nation-builder they were lucky enough to have as prime minister—Salam Fayyad—could not muster any significant public support in the PA kleptocracy. For almost a quarter of a century of controlling most of their population—and with contributions, goodwill and assistance on a magnitude never before showered on a small people—Palestinian elites have produced little except for excuses and a discourse of perpetual victimhood. They have never taken responsibility for the consequences of their misguided decisions and have demonstrated no motivation to take charge of their future in an independent state.
Based on their national record since the emergence of a Palestinian people almost one hundred years ago, the State of Palestine, if it is born, will be a failed, violent, corrupt state, adjusted even less than other Arab entities in the region to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As long as they are under occupation the Palestinians have the supreme attention of the world, billions of dollars to live off and scheme bribes off, perfect excuses to invest nothing in their future, and armies of gullible supporters in Western democracies that help them delegitimize Israel. All this will go away if the Jews can no longer be blamed. Since the Palestinians are not willing to terminate the conflict and have no motivation to establish a state and undertake the responsibilities that statehood entails. Next to the Palestinian addiction to victimhood, the other unbridgeable obstacles for peace—including security and the barbaric Hamas regime in Gaza representing half their people—dwarf in comparison.
Hamas's summer camps in the Gaza Strip, whose motto this year was "Marching on Jerusalem,"[1] opened on July 9, 2017 and were attended by 120,000 children and teens. According to Hamas officials, their goal is to train the generation "that will lead the campaign of liberation."[2] In addition to Quran lessons, sports and technology activities, games and entertainment, the camps also offered extensive military indoctrination and training, including weapons training.[3]HAMAS SUMMER CAMP: "CAPTURE" ISRAELI SOLDIER
Explaining the rationale behind the camps' motto, Hamas's former education minister, Osama Al-Muzaini, said: "Jerusalem is the compass of the Palestinian cause and the central issue of the conflict with the occupier... It is part of the Islamic faith, and its liberation is first a religious duty and then a national one." He added that the camps' goal is "to train the generation of victory and liberation, which will have the honor of liberating Jerusalem and uprooting the occupation."[4]
Many of the camps had names alluding to Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, such as the "We Are the Keepers of the Gates" camp, while others were named for Palestinian martyrs, such as the Muhannad Al-Halabi camp, named for a man whose stabbing of two Israelis in Jerusalem's Old City in October 2015 sparked off the Al-Quds Intifada,[5] or the "Eastern Area Martyrs" camp.[6]