Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Despite Erdoğan's rhetoric, Israel's trade with Turkey more than doubled since 2009

Turkey's mutual trade volume with Israel reached over $5.6 billion in 2014, representing a nearly 50 percent rise [sic] over 2009 despite lingering diplomatic tension between the two, official figures show.

Data from the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) shows that mutual trade volume reached $2.6 billion in 2009. Turkish exports to Israel jumped to $2.92 billion in 2014 from $1.5 billion in 2009, while imports from Israel increased to $2.7 billion from $1.1 billion in the same period.

That is a 115% increase, not a 50% increase.

The escalation in tension between Turkey and Israel after the Davos crisis, when then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stormed out of a panel discussion after lambasting Israeli President Shimon Perez [sic], and over the Mavi Marmara attack, in which nine Turkish civilians were killed by Israeli marines who boarded a Gaza-bound flotilla ship, did not prevent trade between the two from rising steadily.

Government figures recently moved to deny the fact that Turkey and Israel are enjoying a boom in mutual trade, suggesting that much of the Turkish sales to Gaza and the West Bank also go through Israeli customs. Official data, however, reveals that only a small portion of Turkish exports to Palestine constituted total sales to Israel. In 2009, Turkey sent goods worth $29.8 million to Palestine, this figure surged to $75 million in 2013.

According to this article from today, Turkish exports to the territories increased to $280 million in 2014, with imports at only $5 million. This still only represents only 10% of the total exports to Israel.

Turkish opposition had called on the government to revise trade ties with Israel in response to ongoing bloodshed following Israeli air, naval and ground strikes in Gaza last summer.

Common exports include iron and steel, electrical machinery, vehicles, minerals and textiles.

Along with trade, earlier reports of Ankara's alleged role in the sale of oil from the autonomous Kurdish region in north Iraq to Israel, bypassing the central government, led Turkish opposition parties to accuse Erdoğan of hypocrisy in his pro-Palestinian rhetoric. Opposition parties, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP) blame Erdoğan for disingenuously exploiting the Gaza conflict for domestic political gain.

Erdoğan has vowed to visit Gaza on different occasions for over a year but failed to do so amid his fears of increasing tensions with the Jewish state.

As is often the case, many Muslim and Arab nations use Israel as an excuse to talk tough, but behind the scenes they act quite differently.

PA officials are blaming PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat for his role in forcing the resignation of William Schabas from the UNHRC's commission of inquiry/kangaroo court on the Gaza war.

There are rumors that Erekat might resign for his role in this affair.

The sources say that since the PLO had paid Schabas for legal work, he was somehow forced to lie to the UNHRC about not having any financial ties to any party under investigation in order to become the head of the commission. They are blaming Erekat for not foreseeing this issue.

Apparently Erekat should have been positioning Schabas to be able to do much more damage against Israel instead of burning his potential influence with a measly $1300 for an unimportant paper that ended up torpedoing his role in the upcoming UNHRC report.

If it wasn't for Erekat's paying Schabas, the notoriously anti-Israel lawyer would have remained in his role to craft the pre-ordained anti-Israel UNHRC document under the pretense of objectivity.

The critics say that Erekat has been boasting about the PLO negotiations unit's ties with Western legal experts such as Schabas rather than keeping them low-key and allowing the sympathetic Westerners to one day take over important anti-Israel roles in international bodies under the pretext of objectivity.

Schabas was already well-known for his anti-Israel positions before this entire affair. Some 65 anti-Israel NGOs signed a letter to the UNHRC supporting Schabas (or Christine Chinkin) to be the "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" to replace the notoriously anti-Israel Richard Falk.

Given that Erekat had already pretended to resign from his role and yet still remains in it, I somehow doubt that he will resign over this.

(h/t Anne)

Mysterious injury stops Arab from competing against Israeli in judo

In the European Judo Open in Bulgaria, in the preliminary men's 60kg round, there was yet another of those frequent forfeits that happen so often against Israeli opponents.

Simon Yakoub, a German who also holds citizenship with the PA, didn't appear at his match against Yoav Shemesh on Saturday morning.

On his Facebook page, Yacoub said "Hey every Supporter, I injured my back while warming up. So i am not able to fight here in sofia. Anyway i keep moving forward and hopefully i am in good health in two weeks on tatami in Düsseldorf."

Israel's coach reacted sharply, saying "The World Judo Association should put out new guidelines regarding such cases where athletes decide not to go into competition because of cheap politics. ...It's weird when the Palestinians seek recognition as a state at the time they are not ready at all to recognize our existence."

Yacoub is the latest in a never-ending series of Arabs who suddenly find that they cannot compete against Israelis in sporting competitions. YNet notes that last week a Tunisian tennis player resigned from a tournament rather than face Israel in the second round.

The ironic part is that on Yacoub's official website he writes "A fair fight ends with the opponents showing their appreciation with a handshake. Why can the same not happen on the street, at school, between neighbors, countries or entire states? Peace begins, so to speak, right next door ... "

(h/t Bob Knot)

Panicked over Egyptian attitude, Hamas video shows Egypt and Hamas against Israel

Last week an Egyptian court ruled that the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades is a terrorist group.

Hamas, panicked over how Egypt has blaming it for its problems with Sinai Islamic militants and how Egyptians are buying it, decided that they must appeal directly to Egyptians about how much Hamas also loves the Egyptian army - and, of course, to remind them of who their real enemy is.

The video shows both an Egyptian soldier and a Hamas terrorist being shot by an Israeli soldier. They reach their bloodied hands together, and then miraculously get up to both shoot the evil Zionist.

As Arabs themselves admit, hating Israel is the only thing that they have in common, so any appeal to unity must include an appeal to kill Jews together.

02/07 Links: Letter to a BBC Jerusalem correspondent – from 1948; BBC WS: the Schabas show

From Ian:

Letter to a BBC Jerusalem correspondent – from 1948

In February 1948 two successive bombings rocked Jerusalem. Three people were killed at the beginning of the month when the building housing the offices of the Palestine Post (later to become the Jerusalem Post) was attacked by means of a car bomb. Three weeks later another car bomb was detonated on Ben Yehuda Street killing over fifty people and injuring dozens more. Both attacks were initiated by the commander of Arab forces in the Jerusalem area and were carried out by two British Army deserters.
Shortly after the second bombing, the founder and editor of the Palestine Post Gershon Agron wrote the letter below to the BBC’s correspondent in Jerusalem at the time, Richard Williams, with whom he had previously engaged in an apparently heated conversation.
There are also a number of quotations that point out that the BBC was too hasty in discovering that the people who threw a bomb at The Palestine Post offices (on February 1, 1948) were either Arabs or Jews. But the Post quoted the BBC news item from London that some 300 British citizens left England to join the Arabs. This news item was never denied, even after it was proven to be false.
But this February we were the bad boys again. The BBC announced that “Jerusalem was quiet after a great Jewish anti-British demonstration.” This was the day after Ben-Yehuda Street was bombed. Jerusalem was not particularly quiet on this very day and night. A search was going on for the bodies of the 66 persons killed in this bombing. To show that in Jerusalem only the British are killed is a sham. But this was, perhaps, what the British listener wished to hear.
All this indicates that everybody falsifies and some do it on purpose. The British try to show that each murder (isn’t this a norm?) was committed by Jews. And why? Because the particulars of the murder do not explain what happened before. It may be understood that somebody wishes to see himself to be just in his own eyes. But why claim that this is the whole truth, and not something that depends on other factors?
If we arrive at a day when we all agree that the Jewish nature will show the way to the Jewish people, exactly as the British try to square things according to the British point of view, we will be able to live in peace, each respecting the other in this not entirely easy country. As one of my friends said yesterday that “only in peace we will find confidence and mutual prosperity.”

College Students Honor Convicted Palestinian Bomber

Students at DePaul University are rallying behind a woman who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a bombing in Jerusalem.
Rasmieh Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine when the group killed two students in a bombing at a market in 1969.
Odeh, now in her late 60s, was released in 1995 as part of a prisoner exchange and came to the United States.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a fundraiser for Odeh’s legal defense after a federal jury found that she lied on her immigration papers by answering “no” to the question of whether she’d been convicted of a crime.
Seth Winberg, an Orthodox rabbi and executive director of Metro Chicago Hillel, talked to Brian Kilmeade this morning about his group’s effort to protest the SJP’s actions.

Irony: Saudi UN Rep Can’t Condemn Israel On Women’s Rights Without Hijab

NOT A JOKE: The Saudis are now investigating why one of its top female envoys spoke at the U.N. without a head scarf. Irony: Manal Radwan’s speech to the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for violating women’s rights. Maybe Ms. Radwan will want to speak next time in the Israeli parliament, where she can condemn anyone without having to hide her hair or face.

Saudis investigate UN envoy for speaking without veil (condemning Israel on women's rights)

"Israel and the US cheers every time Muslims kill each other"

From Malay Mail Online January 24:

Muslims are doing the US and Israel a favour every time they kill one of their own, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said today as he called for unity among Islam’s followers to push for global recognition of a Palestinian state.

He said Muslims today are too preoccupied with revenge and killing each other over ideological differences, that they have forgotten that the Quran calls for brotherhood among all the faithful.

“Currently we are trying to bring down governments, we are fighting each other, and we are accusing each other of not being Islamic enough, just so that we can murder them.

“Every time a Muslim kills another Muslim, the Israelis and Americans cheer because we are doing their work for them. We should realise that and stop fighting each other,” he said in his keynote address at the launch of a US$1 billion (RM3.6 billion) fund raiser to rebuild Gaza.

This dovetails nicely with the video yesterday of Abd Al-Bari Atwan saying that Arabs must wage jihad against Israel since it is all they can unite on.

Mahatir is arguing the flip side: the reason that Muslims shouldn't kill each other is because it makes Israel happy. Clearly, Mahatir knows that telling them not to fight each other because killing is a bad thing won't get through to them, but if they know that Israelis are happy that they are killing each other, that might be enough to get them to stop - because who can stand when Jews are happy?

Mahatir is a known antisemite, a fact of which he is proud.

Dr Mahathir, long a critic of US foreign policy, claimed that the Muslim world in its current state of disunity is unable to counter the West’s “hypocrisy of the highest order” in dealing with terrorism and human rights.

He accused Israel and its western backers of being “state terrorists” responsible for the killing of 200,000 Palestinians, describing it as a far worse act of terrorism compared to the deadly attack on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo earlier this month.

200,000? Not quite. The number of Palestinian Arabs killed by Israel in 66 years is about one tenth of his estimate.

But it seems a little silly to expect him to say anything truthful to begin with.

(h/t Mike)

02/06 Links Pt2: PA pays terrorist prisoners salary based on carnage caused; LATMA returns!

From Ian:

Edwin Black: PA studies details of each terrorist act before issuing salaries

Congressional legislators were astonished last year to learn that the Palestinian Authority was issuing monthly payouts totaling $3-7 million as salaries and other financial rewards to specific terrorists and their families. The money was channeled, in part, through the Ministry of Prisoners pursuant to the Law of the Prisoner. The law set forth a graduated scale, pegging monthly salaries to the length of Israeli jail sentences, which generally reflects the severity of the crime and the number of people killed and/or injured.
Thousands of documents, newly obtained by this reporter through a lawsuit to unseal court-protected files, demonstrate that these payouts are not blind automated payments. Rather, senior Palestinian Authority officials as high as President Mahmoud Abbas scrutinize the details of each case, the specific carnage caused, and the personal details of each terrorist act before approving salaries and awarding honorary ranks in either the PA government or the military.
Ministry of Prisoners spokesman Amr Nasser has explained, “We are very proud of this program and we have nothing to hide.” Nonetheless, in response to the international furor over the payments, the Palestinian Authority announced last year it would replace the Ministry of Prisoners with an outside PLO commission known as the Higher National Commission for Prisoners and Detainees Affairs.
The PA is dependent upon foreign donor countries to supply much of its budget, which now exceeds $4.2 billion annually. About ten percent of the PA budget, more than $400 million, is contributed annually by United States foreign aid. The US and many other countries have enacted laws forbidding any payments when the monies directly or indirectly support or encourage terrorism.

Douglas Murray: More On "No-Go Zones": Displacing What Is Disagreeable

Amid all the giggling and the Twitter hashtags, something dark is going on in France and Britain. None of these areas is a place where non-Muslims are "forbidden" to go. But they do exist. They are places where behavior that is commonplace in wider society would certainly be discouraged, sometimes intimidatingly so.
Last year in the UK, we discovered that a portion of Birmingham's secular state schools had been taken over by Islamic fundamentalists. The results of these discoveries -- which included teachings that Muslims were to distance themselves from non-Muslims, look down on then and not take them as friends -- shocked the nation. It still seems shaken. Yet most Muslim leaders in the UK simply denied the findings of successive government-led inquiries. Instead of tackling the outrages, they dismissed them as some "Islamophobic" plot.
It seemed we were witnessing an example of "displacement:" it is so much easier to laugh at a foreign news station than to deal with the jolting nugget of truth that may have been exaggerated. So much easier to choke on your porridge at the "idiocy" of an American than to stop your schools from being lost to extremist ideologies. And so much easier to talk of "suing" a news channel than to prevent atrocities of the kind we saw last month from happening again in your city.

Right-Wing Satire Latma Finally Breaks Leftist TV Hold

Fans of the right-wing satire show Latma finally got their long-awaited wish on Thursday night, as the show that went off the internet back in August 2013 due to a budget crisis caused by a reneged-upon contract made history by airing on TV, and in doing so breaking the leftist monopoly on Israeli satire.
After Israel Broadcasting Authority's (IBA) Channel 1 initially gave the show something of a run-around, promising to air the show and leading it to raise production values that eventually bankrupted it after a full four years of donation-based glory on YouTube, the satire series has finally found a home on the TV channel.
Latma, the brainchild of veteran journalist Caroline Glick, appeared with a slick new look and graphics on TV under the new name Hakol Shafit, loosely meaning "everything can be judged."
The star of the show Noam Jacobson reprised his central position on the show in numerous roles, playing Binyamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Liberman and an elitist Supreme Court judge.

I had missed this from AP, in the story about the UNSC condemnation of the killing of a UN peacekeeper during the incident when Hezbollah attacked Israeli soldiers:

A council diplomat said Russia blocked a French-drafted press statement on Tuesday that would have condemned the Hezbollah attack on the Israeli soldiers as a violation of the resolution that ended the 2006 war as well as the death of the Spanish peacekeeper, saying it was "unbalanced."

The blocked statement, supported by Spain and many other council members, also expressed grave concern over the deterioration of the situation along both sides of the so-called Blue Line separating Lebanon and Israel, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because discussions were closed.

Hezbollah is bragging about the condemnation being stopped, writing in its Al Manar site:

Lebanon has managed to frustrate a French endeavor in the UN Security Council to issue a presidential statement that condemns Hezbollah over Shebaa operations.

The efforts exerted by the Lebanese Foreign Ministry and the Russian stance in the Security council contributed to foiling the French attempt which was clearly backed by the Israeli envoy who considered, as a result, that Hezbollah is represented in the International Organization.

02/06 Links Pt1: Phillips: The Obama doctrine says ‘Israel’s enemy is my friend’; V15's plans revealed

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Obama doctrine says ‘Israel’s enemy is my friend’

The brouhaha over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed address to the US Congress next month is simply jaw-dropping.
Uproar ensued after Netanyahu was invited by the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner. Democrats have been furiously accusing the prime minister of crude Israeli electioneering. In Israel itself, he has come under widespread attack for putting the delicate relationship between Israel and the Obama administration at risk.
What planet are these people living on? The issue, and it could hardly be more urgent or grave, is not Netanyahu’s behavior. The issue is how to stop Iran.
It is astounding to claim that Netanyahu is putting the relationship with Obama at risk. The wholly artificial storm whipped up by the White House merely illustrates once again Obama’s sustained malice toward Israel, the invaluable bulwark of Western defenses in the Middle East, while he empowers Iran and other enemies of America and the free world.
That is what everyone should be talking about.

Carline Glick: Hamas and the nexus of global jihad

In its war against Sunni and Shi’ite jihadist forces that threaten to destroy Egypt, and among other things, cause mass harm to the global economy by imperiling maritime traffic, Egypt finds itself betrayed by the Obama administration.
Last month, just a few days before the Muslim Brotherhood called for “a long and uncompromising jihad” against Egypt, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met with senior US officials at the State Department. In response to a reporter’s question about the meeting, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki insisted that despite the Brotherhood’s call for holy war against the US’s closest Arab ally, the administration has no regrets about meeting, and so conferring legitimacy and implying US support for the Brotherhood in its war against the Sisi government.
Opposition leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni have based their electoral campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on blaming him for the crisis in Israel’s relations with the White House. It is hard to think of a more cynical, destructive allegation.
As the administration’s continued embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood despite its full membership in the terrorist nexus that threatens the US and all of its closest allies, along with its desperate courtship of the Iranian mullahs, makes clear, the Obama administration has chosen to appease rather than combat America’s worst enemies.
Perhaps the most sympathetic interpretation of Livni’s and Herzog’s unwarranted and harmful assaults against Netanyahu is that they simply cannot accept that the world has changed.
But the trends are clear. The only responsible thing that Israel can do is to act accordingly.
Today Israel’s closest ally is Egypt. Under Obama, the US is a force to be worked around, not worked with.

Galloway on Question Time

There was a worrying and thinly veiled menace in some of Galloway’s remarks. He warned the audience that he and those who support him would resent this section of the programme. He went on to claim that Islamophobia was a bigger problem than antisemitism – that’s both debatable (not that it’s a competition), and beside the point. He implied that those present cared more about antisemitism than anti-Muslim bigotry. This accusation was gratuitous, groundless and divisive. In fact Jonathan Freedland, in particular, has often spoken out against attacks on Muslims. This was particularly worrying.
‘I beg you, don’t conflate Zionism, Israel and Jews in London. It’s a very dangerous thing to do.’ … ’It’s a very dangerous game that you are playing here – very, very dangerous’
Again, there’s an implication that Zionist Jews, and Jews who support Israel (and of course you can be a Zionist and supporter of Israel while having strong reservations about the Likud government) are in some way responsible for antisemitism – although one might ask what Zionism has to do with a Kosher supermarket.
Tristram Hunt got an enthusiastic round of applause from the Finchley audience when he pointed out that this is not an arms race between Islamophobia and antisemitism. Galloway, by contrast, seemed intent on stirring up antagonism between Jews and Muslims.

Guardian editor accuses George Galloway of fueling antisemitism

What’s remarkable about the Feb. 5th episode of BBC’s Question Time (from Finchley in north London) is not only that senior Guardian editor Jonathan Freedland criticizes George Galloway for using rhetoric which fuels antisemitism, but that Galloway then proceeds to lash out at the entire British Jewish community.

Galloway on Question time

Obama's Iran strategy HAS been consistent. That's what's scary.

Today's Washington Post editorial opposing the president's Iran policy will get a lot of attention:

AS THE Obama administration pushes to complete a nuclear accord with Iran, numerous members of Congress, former secretaries of state and officials of allied governments are expressing concern about the contours of the emerging deal. Though we have long supported negotiations with Iran as well as the interim agreement the United States and its allies struck with Tehran, we share several of those concerns and believe they deserve more debate now — before negotiators present the world with a fait accompli.

The problems raised by authorities ranging from Henry Kissinger, the country’s most senior former secretary of state, to Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s junior Democratic senator, can be summed up in three points:

●First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and restrict that capability.

●Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.

●Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without seeking a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.

This is good, but to really understand what is going on, you must read a long, must-read article published in Mosaic this week that seeks to explain Obama's Iran policy.

The article is frightening in showing how the president is betting the security of the entire world based on a very flawed adherence to wishful thinking.

From time to time, critics and even friends of the president have complained vocally about the seeming disarray or fecklessness of the administration’s handling of foreign policy. Words like amateurish, immature, and incompetent are bandied about; what’s needed, we’re told, is less ad-hoc fumbling, more of a guiding strategic vision. Most recently, Leslie Gelb, a former government official and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has charged that “the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national-security policy,” and has urged the president to replace the entire inner core of his advisers with “strong and strategic people of proven . . . experience.”

One sympathizes with Gelb’s sense of alarm, but his premises are mistaken. Inexperience is a problem in this administration, but there is no lack of strategic vision. Quite the contrary: a strategy has been in place from the start, and however clumsily it may on occasion have been implemented, and whatever resistance it has generated abroad or at home, Obama has doggedly adhered to the policies that have flowed from it.

In what follows, we’ll trace the course of the most important of those policies and their contribution to the president’s announced determination to encourage and augment Iran’s potential as a successful regional power and as a friend and partner to the United States.

...
But Obama does have a relatively concrete vision. When he arrived in Washington in 2006, he absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly, offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.

The report, published in December 2006, urged then-President Bush to take four major steps: withdraw American troops from Iraq; surge American troops in Afghanistan; reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli “peace process”; and, last but far from least, launch a diplomatic engagement of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its junior partner, the Assad regime in Syria. Baker and Hamilton believed that Bush stood in thrall to Israel and was therefore insufficiently alive to the benefits of cooperating with Iran and Syria. Those two regimes, supposedly, shared with Washington the twin goals of stabilizing Iraq and defeating al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadi groups. In turn, this shared interest would provide a foundation for building a concert system of states—a club of stable powers that could work together to contain the worst pathologies of the Middle East and lead the way to a sunnier future.

Expressing the ethos of an influential segment of the foreign-policy elite, the Baker-Hamilton report became the blueprint for the foreign policy of the Obama administration, and its spirit continues to pervade Obama’s inner circle. Denis McDonough, now the president’s chief of staff, once worked as an aide to Lee Hamilton; so did Benjamin Rhodes, who helped write the Iraq Study Group’s report. Obama not only adopted the blueprint but took it one step further, recruiting Vladimir Putin’s Russia as another candidate for membership in the new club. The administration’s early “reset” with Russia and its policy of reaching out to Iran and Syria formed two parts of a single vision. If, in Bushland, America had behaved like a sheriff, assembling a posse (“a coalition of the willing”) to go in search of monsters, in Obamaworld America would disarm its rivals by ensnaring them in a web of cooperation. To rid the world of rogues and tyrants, one must embrace and soften them.

Obama based his policy of outreach to Tehran on two key assumptions of the grand-bargain myth: that Tehran and Washington were natural allies, and that Washington itself was the primary cause of the enmity between the two. If only the United States were to adopt a less belligerent posture, so the thinking went, Iran would reciprocate. In his very first television interview from the White House, Obama announced his desire to talk to the Iranians, to see “where there are potential avenues for progress.” Echoing his inaugural address, he said, “[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”

Unfortunately, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, ignored the president’s invitation. Five months later, in June 2009, when the Green Movement was born, his autocratic fist was still clenched. As the streets of Tehran exploded in the largest anti-government demonstrations the country had seen since the revolution of 1979, he used that fist to beat down the protesters. For their part, the protesters, hungry for democratic reform and enraged by government rigging of the recent presidential election, appealed to Obama for help. He responded meekly, issuing tepid statements of support while maintaining a steady posture of neutrality. To alienate Khamenei, after all, might kill the dream of a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.

If this show of deference was calculated to warm the dictator’s heart, it failed. “What we intended as caution,” one of Obama’s aides would later tell a reporter, “the Iranians saw as weakness.” Indeed, the president’s studied “caution” may even have emboldened Tehran to push forward, in yet another in the long series of blatant violations of its obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with its construction of a secret uranium enrichment facility in an underground bunker at Fordow, near Qom.This time, Obama reacted. Revealing the bunker’s existence, he placed Khamenei in a tough spot. The Russians, who had been habitually more lenient toward the Iranian nuclear program than the Americans, were irritated by the disclosure of this clandestine activity; the French were moved to demand a strong Western response.

But when Khamenei finessed the situation by adopting a seemingly more flexible attitude toward negotiations, Obama quickly obliged. Delighted to find a receptive Iranian across the table, he dismissed the French call for toughness, instead volunteering a plan that would meet Iran’s desire to keep most of its nuclear infrastructure intact while proving to the world that it was not stockpiling fissile material for a bomb. In keeping with his larger aspirations, the president also placed Moscow at the center of the action, proposing that the Iranians transfer their enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for fuel rods capable of powering a nuclear reactor but not of being used in a bomb. The Iranian negotiators, displaying their new spirit of compromise, accepted the terms. Even President Ahmadinejad, the notorious hardliner, pronounced himself on board.

Obama, it seemed to some, had pulled off a major coup. Less than a year after taking office, he was turning his vision of a new Middle East order into a reality. Or was he? Once the heat was off, Khamenei reneged on the deal, throwing the president back to square one and in the process weakening him politically at home, where congressional skeptics of his engagement policy now began lobbying for more stringent economic sanctions on Tehran. To protect his flank, Obama tacked rightward, appropriating, if with visible reluctance, some of his opponents’ rhetoric and bits of their playbook as well. In 2010, he signed into law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA), which eventually would prove more painful to Iran than any previous measure of its kind.

In later years, whenever Obama would stand accused of being soft on Iran, he would invariably point to CISADA as evidence to the contrary. “[O]ver the course of several years,” he stated in March 2014, “we were able to enforce an unprecedented sanctions regime that so crippled the Iranian economy that they were willing to come to the table.” The “table” in question was the negotiation resulting in the November 2013 agreement, known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), which we shall come to in due course. But masked in the president’s boast was the fact that he had actually opposed CISADA, which was rammed down his throat by a Senate vote of 99 to zero.

Once the bill became law, a cadre of talented and dedicated professionals in the Treasury Department set to work implementing it. But the moment of presumed “convergence” between Obama and his congressional skeptics proved temporary and tactical; their fundamental difference in outlook would become much more apparent in the president’s second term. For the skeptics, the way to change Khamenei’s behavior was to place him before a stark choice: dismantle Iran’s nuclear program—period—or face catastrophic consequences. For Obama, to force a confrontation with Khamenei would destroy any chance of reaching an accommodation on the nuclear front and put paid to his grand vision of a new Middle East order.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Mike)

The homeless Palestinians no one cares about

There have been weekly stories like this one from Reuters:

Egypt and Norway urged donors on Thursday, including Gulf states squeezed by low oil prices, to keep promises of providing $5.4 billion in aid for the Palestinians after the devastating war in Gaza last year.

The two nations, who led a donors' conference in Cairo in October when the cash was pledged, wrote an open letter to donors and said people in Gaza were suffering with a slower-than-expected pace of reconstruction.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said the two felt it had become necessary to remind donors who had promised to help rebuild Gaza that they "should fulfil their obligations in this regard."

"No one has said to us that they're not committed to what they have pledged, but also due to oil price and other issues in the Gulf, there has been a bit of a lingering," Norwegian Foreign Minister Boerge Brende told a news conference.

"We know that there are houses now being built and reconstructed but the pace of this is not at a level where we had foreseen and where we had wished it, so this is very important," Brende said.

While it is interesting that donor nations, especially Arab states, have not been keen on paying their pledges, they at least paid lip service to helping the poor Gazans who are homeless because of Israel's bombing of terror infrastructure in their neighborhoods.

What about Palestinians who are homeless because of Lebanese bombing of terror infrastructure in their neighborhoods?

From May to September 2007, the Lebanese army heavily shelled the Nahr el-Bared camp in northern Lebanon to destroy the Fatah al-Islam terror group. The camp was completely destroyed and some 30,000 residents made homeless.

UNRWA estimated it would cost $345 million to rebuild the camp. Today, nearly 8 years later, only about half that amount has been raised and far less than half of the residents are back in homes.

There was no major summit to rebuild for Nahr el-Bared. No 5K walks to raise money. UNRWA has been much quieter about the wanton devastation done by Lebanese forces than the much more directed actions of the IDF.

It is much easier to make people care about Palestinian Arabs when Israel can be blamed for their plight.

Funny how that happens.

The EU is building illegal settlements (video)

From The Daily Mail:

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.

The claims have been made by Regavim, a right-of-centre Israeli NGO which has closely been documenting the construction. Its findings are backed by senior international lawyers and two MEPs.

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. ...

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.

If Oxfam says that "97% of Palestinian permit applications for building in the Occupied Palestinian Territory have been rejected by the Israeli Government" then that means that Oxfam does not consider Areas A and B to be "occupied," since Israel doesn't control building permits there - and there is plenty of building taking place in PA-controlled areas.

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.'

The largest of the alleged 'EU settlements' is Wadi Abu Hindi, which is about five miles away from Jerusalem. It is comprised of more than 100 houses, of which about 30 display EU signs.

Another, Khan Al Amar, is located one kilometre north of Highway One, which bisects the West Bank. It is comprised of about 50 houses, all of which displaying EU signs.

A third, Mak-Hul, in the northern West Bank near Nablus, is located on an Israeli military firing range. A fourth is Susia, in the south near Hebron.

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.'

According to Mark English, a European Commission spokesman, Britain – which is the seventh-largest financial contributor to the EU –is likely to have 'full knowledge' of any Palestinian settlement project.

So-called "human rights" lawyer to testify on behalf of PLO terrorists

From Wikipedia:

Michael Sfard is a lawyer specializing in international human rights law and the laws of war. He has served as counsel in various cases on these topics in Israel. Sfard has represented a variety of Israeli and Palestinian human rights and peace organizations, movements and activists at the Israeli Supreme Court....Sfard and his law office provide legal counsel for Yesh Din. Sfard is also the legal counsel for Peace Now.

Yesh Din? Peace Now? Well, they care about justice, don't they?

Now, in New York, there is a trial for a lawsuit against the PLO for their support of terror act during the second intifada.

According to NRG, the PLO will be calling Michael Sfard as a witness for their side. (Also Hanan Ashrawi, who is founder and chairperson of Miftah, which has praised terrorists in the past.)

How can a self-proclaimed human rights lawyer defend an organization being sued for blowing people up? What exactly does defending terrorists have to do with human rights?

Apparently, for leftists like Sfard, "human rights" means that Arabs have the human right to blow up Jews, and Jews clearly do not have the human rights to object to being blown up.

It's all so simple.

(h/t Yenta)

02/05 Links Pt2: Did Sky News Presenter Justify Anti-Semitism?; UK '14 Record year for anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Anne Bayefsky: How the UN Mixes Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Israeli War Crimes

At the end of the anti-Semitism meeting – which was informal because formal agreement by the General Assembly to address the subject would have run smack into Arab and OIC intransigence –a joint statement was issued. The lack of formality meant it could not take the form of an official UN resolution. It does not explicitly mention Israel, but it is tangible. Fifty states signed on to what could be called the New York declaration on anti-Semitism.
Tellingly, 90 percent of the signatories are fully free democracies (on the Freedom House scale), while only 45 percent of all UN member states are fully free. The countries that participated in the event but refused to sign the commitment to combating anti-Semitism, not only included Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar and Russia, but, disgracefully, Brazil, India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa, and Switzerland.
Less than a week later, at the UN Holocaust commemoration held on January 28, 2015 in New York, listeners heard the gut-wrenching story of one of the few surviving twins of the Nazi Dr. Mengele’s hideous experiments. Jona Laks concluded her account of the horrors of Auschwitz and surviving the Nazi death marches, only to be turned away from her former home in Poland, with this: “In 1948, an orphan, and completely alone, I made my way…to the soon to be born State of Israel. I began to rebuild my life. Only then, I began to get the feeling that I was a human being again, with a name and no more just a number.”]
It was a precise and authentic message understood long ago by the majority at the United Nations, but no longer.

Did Sky News Presenter Justify Anti-Semitism?

During Thursday morning’s review of the press on Sky News, the two studio guest reviewers made this point perfectly clear, particularly Jonny Gould. But what about Sky News presenter Eamonn Holmes’ reaction?
Jonny Gould: “The fact that it is happening around the Gaza conflict and as a consequence of it might be an understanding as to how to tackle it, but it can never be justification.
Eamonn Holmes: “It can, if you are Palestinian.”
Jonny Gould: “If you are an anti-Semitic Palestinian, yes.”
What exactly did Eamonn Holmes mean? The context of the conversation was specifically dealing with anti-Semitism in Britain. Would Holmes find it justifiable for a Palestinian living in the UK to carry out an anti-Semitic act against a British Jew?
Or is he simply stating that Palestinian anti-Semitism against Israeli Jews is understandable and even justified?

Why Do Palestinians Believe Crazy Things?

We have not seen any polls that asked Palestinians whether they believe there was a Holocaust. But a May 2009 poll by the University of Haifa found 40% of Israeli Arabs believe the Holocaust was a hoax. Note that this astonishingly high number was among Arabs who have been far more exposed to modernization and Western thinking. It seems likely that the number of Palestinians who live in Judea-Samaria or Gaza and deny the Holocaust is even higher.
Why do Palestinians believe this stuff? We leave it to sociologists, historians, and political scientists to analyze the religious and cultural factors that encourage conspiratorial thinking. We merely take note of the fact that such thinking is widespread among the Palestinians, and the implications for Israel are significant.
Hamas, in Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, in part of Judea-Samaria, already each have a de-facto state. Hamas lacks one major thing: total control of its borders. Israel’s partial blockade prevents them from acquiring tanks and jet fighters. The PA, for its part, also lacks one major thing: a full-fledged army.
So when the international community, the Jewish left, and the State Department demand that Israel lift the Gaza blockade and give the PA a sovereign state, Israelis have to ask themselves: Who would be in charge? Would reasonable, rational people run the State of Palestine? Or would the tanks and planes be in the hands of people who – by an overwhelming majority – sincerely believe crazy things, whether about 9/11 or the Holocaust or a dozen other issues?
Wishful thinkers – and there is no shortage of them in the Obama Administration, the pages of the New York Times, and the offices of various “peace” groups – look at the rest of the world and think that everyone is pretty much “just like us.” But the polls say otherwise.

Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech at the inauguration of a new headquarters of the PA's Radio and Television Corporation in Ramallah on Wednesday.

During the speech, he made it clear that an independent media is not what he is interested in.

We inaugurate today this new building of the General Authority for Radio and Television. We dreamed of this past that we hear the word 'voice of Palestine', and we were deprived of them, and you remember in the fifties the word Palestine was taboo and forbidden [in Arabic media! - EoZ], and one could not hear the name of Palestine, but only the word "refugees."

This remained a dream for many years, we yearned for it, and we did not hear during the fifties and early sixties that we were like the rest of the world and the people, we want to hear as it was in the Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi radio, "Palestinian radio" - but we did not hear it, I wonder if this was forbidden for us, it was very difficult and we felt like we're these people that do not exist.

...There are types of media that are objective and others inflammatory and provocative that leads to peril, and this is what we do not want....

What is needed is to have media that deals with our national cause and nationalism, and must address national issues in an objective manner, and our goal is basically the national interest, in this way we have a fourth authority of Media in collaboration with three other authorities [branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary -EoZ], doing the right thing and conveying correct information without abusing anyone.

Or else!