Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Syrian opposition group reportedly recognizes Israel (UPDATE)

Russia's Sputnik News Arabic reports that the Syrian opposition group "Salvation Front of Syria" is the first Syrian group to officially recognize Israel.

Fahed Al-Masri, the leader of the group but based out of Paris, has been making overtures to Israel for several months now. He's been on Israeli TV and spoke via satellite at the conference on Syria at Hebrew University last month.

Formerly spokesperson for the Free Syria Army, al-Masri was quoted as saying that in the "new Syria "that he wants to build, "we will not be hostile to Israel or any other country, and we welcome the return of Syrian Jews to Syria, even if they have Israeli nationality."

"The Syrian Jews holding Israeli citizenship would be a bridge to the Syrian people to the West," Al Masri said.

In December, al-Masri said that in his new Syria, the Golan would be returned but the Israelis who live there would become "peace ambassadors." He also said that the new Syria would give citizenship to its Palestinian residents.

This week his group issued a “Roadmap for peace between Syria and Israel “ that called for severing ties between Syria and Tehran.

Part of this publicity campaign is because that Al-Masri is hoping that Israel will take a public stand against Assad and put pressure on the regime that will help the opposition forces.

“Personally, I am ready for the risk [of assassination] if I have any role in achieving real peace between Syria and Israel and the end of Iranian domination over my country,” al-Masri told Media Line.

UPDATE: Al Masri visited here and posted the entire statement in the comments:

Roadmap for peace between Syria and Israel

Further to the open letter addressed by National Salvation Front in Syria, to the Israeli
people last month, we are pleased to offer our vision for the future of the relationship between Israel and Syria , the new Syria,which we hope and aim to be away from any conflicts,whether they are Arab crises, regional or international, and to focus on reconstruction, development, and building a culture of peace.
Security and stability of the State of Israel:

*The new Syria will not be hostile in anyway, to the State of Israel nor any State in the region, or international

*New Syria will not be, and in any case a base, a transit station nor will support or be a training center nor will allow arms , extremism and terrorism to cross its borders.

*The new Syrian state will not provide any facilities for any groups or military, nor acts of sabotage targeting the security and safety of Israel or any country from neighboring countries and Syria.

*There will never be in the new Syria nor on the territory , any foothold for any armed organizations targeting the securit y and safety of Israel or any country from neighboring countries and the world.

*The new Syria will not grant safe haven for all who plan or target the security and stability of Israel and the regional and international security and stability.

*The security and stability of Israel is necessarily linked to the departure of Assad and his regime and the return of security and stability to Syria in the presence of a strong authority to rule the state post-Assad in Damascus.

*Chaos, extremism and terrorism requires the rule of a military junta with strong support and resources and tools to govern the transitional period

*The transitional phase requires support and assistance of a joint Arab and Turkish forces to enter Syrian land under the care and supervision of the United Nations.

Palestinian issues:

•Palestinian refugees in Syria, will be Naturalized Syrian citizens.

*Palestinian refugee camps in Syria will be changed to residential areas and will be disarmed all Palestinian armed groups on Syrian territory

* All activities of any Palestinian organization is prohibited on the Syrian Territory, and in particular anti-Palestinian Authority, led by terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

*We intend to resolve and prohibit the work and the activity of all Palestinian political organizations on Syrian territory . The diplomatic mission of the Palestinian Authority is the official Palestinian legitimacy and the only one to deal with.

*The new Syrian state and its institutions in relation to the Palestinian issue will confine only legitimate representative that internationally recognized as representative of Palestinian people.

Iran and its tools:

*The expulsion of all Iranian experts and military officers and security.

*The expulsion of all Iranian militias and subdued to Iran, such as Hezbollah and the Iraqi and Afghan militias and others.

*Expulsion of all Iranian diplomats and the closure of the Iranian embassy and cultural centers of Iran

*Closure and ban of all associations, organizations c reated by Iran in Syria since 1996

*Revocation of Syrian citizenship of all Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese and others whom were granted by the Assad regime since 2003.

*All real estate and land that Iran obtained by force or by purchase from Syrian owners will be considered Syrian property and will be re-owned by the state.,

*Every legal action against the Iranian state and all its affiliated organizations will be considered to demand financial compensation for their participation in the fight against the Syrian people and the destruction of Syria.

* All agreements and treaties signed between the Assad regime and the Iranian regime will be cancelled and the new Syrian state will not assume any obligations as a result of cancelling of these agreements and treaties..

*Confiscation of all Iranian economic investments in Syria and making it property of the new Syrian state as part of the compensation to be paid by Iran to the new Syrian state as a result of their participation in the fight of the Syrian people and the destruction of Syria

*Prohibition of Hezbollah activity and all of Iran's militia on the Syrian territories as terrorist organizations

*Ban the transfer of arms through Syrian territory to Lebanon and the destruction of all secret tunnels

*Lebanese state bears full legal responsibility for the participation of Hezbollah in fighting the Syrian people and targeting of Syrian territory from Lebanese territory and to consider Hezbollah a partner in power in Lebanon.

*Iraqi state bears full legal responsibility for the participation of extremist sectarian Iraqi militias to fight the Syrian people and the targeting of Syrian territory from Iraqi territory even the Iranian Militia who partner in power in Iraq

*Ban the entry of Iranian citizens Syrian territory ,for religious or economic reasons, at least during the transitional era.

The Golan and Israeli peace:

Proceeding from the Rabin deposit and the Arab peace initiative:

*We recognize the state of Israel and we welcome Israel as a safe neighbor for us.

* We are not against giving any international guarantees requested by the Israeli people to live in security and safety, peace and stability as a nation.

*We intend to construct a new historical stage of re lationship between Syria and Israel , based on a culture of peace and cooperation and end the era of slogans and false illusions stage.

*We intend to Find a fair settlement on the Golan issue that satisfies both the Syrian and Israeli peoples.

*We intend to Jump in the relationship between Syria and Israel from the stage of hostility to friendship and alliance, cooperation and strategic relations phase.

* We intend to consider Golan Heights a garden of peace for the two peoples of Syria and Israel.

* We intend to consider Golan Heights an oasis of security and safety.

* All citizens in Golan Heights will be ambassadors of peace, coexistence and rapprochement between the two peoples, which is possible and acceptable now that Israel became a reality recognized by the world.

*Golan Heights is to be considered an oasis of investment projects and economic relations and joint cooperation and a target for tourism in the Middle East.

*We intend to Establish better relations and military and security cooperation, and economic, cultural, scientific and social development.

* We intend To call on Israel and Israeli companies to participate in an economic coalition of American -European aim of the reconstruction of Syria's oil and gas, energy, irrigation and water transport, tourism, telecommunications, agriculture, industry and commerce investment ,banking investment , projects investments.

Syrian Jews:

*Syrian Jews who emigrated to Israel or in the Diaspora are the true messengers of peace between the sta tes of Israel and Syria and their people and pillars to consolidate a culture of peace, development and cooperation and construction considerations.

* Syrian Jews will have the right to recover their property in Syria and to rebuild and take care of the Jewish temples in Syria.

*We intend To consider the Jewish heritage of religious, cultural and humanitarian and civilized in Syria as an integral part of the identity and heritage and the legacy of Syria and the identity and heritage of the entire region as well .

*We look forward to benefiting from the experience of the Jewish people in the pursuit of the Nazis to prosecute the Assad and his regime of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Army and security in the new Syria:

• To Rebuild national army, police and security forces on a professional basis.

•To Ensure the Syrian border security.

• To Adjust the internal situation.

•To fight against extremism and terrorism.

•To Restore Security and stability

*To support the construction and development process and the return of Syrian refugees from neighboring countries.

• The army and the security in the new Syrian state will not interfere or involve in any conflict outside Syria's borders.

• The Syrian army will be armed with defensive weapons to be able to achieve internal security and stability.

• The Syrian army will not possess any kind of internationally prohibited weapons.

• The length of compulsive military service will not exceed six months only to ensure the support of the national army in the fight against extremism and terrorism and restoring security and stability.

We call on Israel and all regional actors to the formation of the regional security council under the auspices of the United Nations where all the regional parties will sit together for better understanding and coordination on interests in the rest of the region. This could dissolve the bulk of the problems and put an end to bloodshed and destruction cycle in the the rest of the Middle East conflict.

We call on the State of Israel to carry out practical steps, to address the Syrian people in clear speech to emphasize that the State of Israel rejects the Holocaust statements in Syria and the continuing massacres against humanity and war crimes carried out by the Assad regime in collaboration with the Iranian ally and militias affiliated to them.

We, the National Salvation Front in Syria, which includes a selection of military and civilian elites carrying a national project for new to Syria, Syria, the future of each of their children and without any discrimination in rights and duties ,approach the Israeli people with a message of love, peace and affirm that the vision of new Syrian state will always be about re building human, land, development and culture of peace.

Fahad ALMASRI
National Salvation Front in Syria
Founder ـ General Coordinator
Paris 0033667474703
almasrifahad@gmail.com

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/07 Links Pt2: Abbas’s untranslated book; BDS is antisemitism, pure and simple; France's New Islamist Guillotine

From Ian:

Abbas’s untranslated book

On Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s website there are about 20 books listed, that have been translated to dozens of languages.
There is one book, written in Arabic, that has never been translated.
For the past 11 years Abbas has been the chairman of the PA, yet nobody bothered to check his ideology as reflected in this book – The Other Face: The Secret Contacts Between Nazism and Zionism (1984), Dar Ibn Rashid, Amman – based on Abbas’s PhD thesis, written while he was a student in the Soviet Union. (Recently it was reported that Abbas was a KGB agent and his thesis was probably written at the direct order of his Soviet commanders, to demonize Israel and the Jewish people.)
There has been a deliberate institutional silence regarding this issue. No one dared expose Abbas’ thesis, which basically denies the Holocaust. No one wanted to destroy Abbas’s “peaceful” image. Yad Vashem has never published a single article about Abbas’s thesis or book. Other academic institutions simply ignore the issue – which proves that there is no real academic freedom in Israel.
In his book Abbas claims that the Holocaust was a Zionist-Nazi plot, and indicts the Zionist movement and its leaders such as David Ben-Gurion as “fundamental partners” in the destruction of European Jewry. Abbas also wrote that the Zionists thought anything that would cause Jews to immigrate was justified, including antisemitism and cooperation with Hitler.
He makes this case by arguing that the Jews ignored the Holocaust, cooperated with Hitler and encouraged antisemitism and persecution of Jews in Europe – anything to increase immigration to the Land of Israel and speed up the growth of the Jewish National Home in Mandatory Palestine.
Abbas also claims that the Zionists deliberately sabotaged the rescue of the Jewish communities of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Baltic countries, including a shipment of 3,000 Jews from Hungary.

France's New Islamist Guillotine

It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice. Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion.
"Anti-racism... an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism". — Georges Bensoussan.
The CCIF's charge of "Islamophobia" is almost certainly built, not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society,
"To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. ... I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish." — Georges Bensoussan.
"This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence. Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole". — Georges Bensoussan.

Jerusalem Syndrome at the Met

An exhibition on the diverse multiculturalism of medieval Jerusalem has been ecstatically received. There’s just one problem: the vision of history it promotes is a myth.
Obviously, the Met doesn’t support anything like Temple denial; but its inability to characterize the “absent” Temple’s importance or to give a sense of the Jewish historical experience in Jerusalem, along with its exaggerations of the glories of Islamic rule and its relentless focus on “internationalism,” unmistakably lends itself to the purposes of those who engage in that nefarious activity—and at least one essay in the catalog, on the Dome of the Rock, silently endorses it. That essay, by Robert Hillenbrand of Edinburgh University, simply omits any mention of something called the “Temple Mount”—this, despite the fact that early Islamic sources did the exact opposite, referring to the site as Bayt al-Maqdis (Hebrew: beyt hamikdash) and to Jerusalem itself as madinat bayt al-maqdis (“the city of the Temple”). Instead, Hillenbrand locates the Dome of the Rock “on the “Haram al-Sharif, the vast open esplanade that, . . . largely empty in the late-7th century,” was described variously as a rubbish dump and a “place accursed” since the Temple was destroyed there. In other words, the Dome of the Rock was erected on unused land—an assertion that is in itself a complete perversion of the very reason why it was built there in the first place. The Mount was called a “dungheap” by St. Jerome in the 5th century: a fulfillment of Christianity’s triumph and the Jews’ curse. Today a comparable historical erasure is being advanced by other parties.
The show’s refusal to confront history in any serious way; the failure to find artifacts that match its multicultural thesis; the depiction of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem as an “absence”—all of these contribute to the impression that, for the organizers of this exhibition, the undeniable facts of ancient Jewish history were the very things that could never be acknowledged. (As, in an opposite way, were the undeniable facts of medieval Islamic history.) Better by far to imagine Jerusalem in this fantasy as an international city without a hint of historical Jewish sovereignty, and a mythical place in which all faiths enjoyed equivalent standing.
In 1995, Edward Said, writing in polemical opposition to continued Israeli control of Jerusalem, yearned for the triumph instead of the “massive Palestinian-Muslim-Christian-multicultural reality in Jerusalem.” Said’s view of Jerusalem’s supposed “multicultural reality,” which he desired to enhance and advance, was just as distended as the view on display at Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven, preserved now in its catalog and in the message it has so effectively promulgated. At least Said, a pro-Palestinian radical, was being open about his ambitions. In the Met’s soft-focus presentation, a variant of the same view came bearing the imprimatur of one of the most imposing aesthetic authorities in the West, and was thus all the more easily gulped down by viewers and reviewers besotted with its dreamy and meretricious promise.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of Jerusalem’s reunification in the Six-Day war of June 1967, it is necessary to bear this fact in mind: one of the few times in Jerusalem’s history when conquest was not followed by the demolition and appropriation of major holy sites was in the aftermath of that war, when Israel became the sites’ guardian and expanded access to them while ceding control to the authorities of different faiths. This ongoing relationship has hardly been untroubled, but it is far closer to an ideal of genuine diversity than any yet dreamed of while in the throes of Jerusalem Syndrome or its latest mutations.

From Al Arabiya:

Over 30,000 camels are expected to participate in King Abdulaziz’s prestigious Mazayen Al-Ibl heritage festival and camel beauty contest in the capital from March 19 to April 15.

An ancient tradition, the festival will attract over 2 million attendees from across the globe including royalties, celebrities, designers and athletes. A festival organized and managed by King Abdulaziz Darat, the heritage event and competition is held in respect to the role of camels in Bedouin history, preserving the purebred Arabian camel strains, safeguarding and raising awareness for the inherited heritage, culture and way of life for the Kingdom and the inhabitants of the desert and the desert-dwelling nomads of Arabia.

Judged by a committee of selected Bedouin who are considered experts and fully immersed in the ways and culture of Bedouin life and traditions, with winning camels throughout previous years often fetching millions of dirhams in price.

Event prizes will be awarded throughout the festival with camels assessed in five categories, according to breed and color.

From the Al Wadah white camel to the Al Shual yellow camel, the Al Sefr golden camel, the Al Majahateer dark camel and the Al Homor reddish, brown camel, various features considered most beautiful to each breed are closely assessed to determine the deserving winners. These include; the size of the camel’s head, whether the lips cover its teeth, the length of its neck, to the roundness of its hump, the size of its eyes, how long the lashes are, how the nose droops, whether the ears stand back, how high the hump is and where the hump sits.

Miss Universe has some competition.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

How many people stop to consider what life is like, after the terror attack is over?

Very often lives are changed, forever.

The murder of Dafna Meir was one of the more horrifying attacks Israel experienced last year. How many people stopped to consider Renana afterwards? What will her life be like?

Eldest of Dafna and Natan Meir’s six children, it was Renana who interrupted the terrorist in the middle of stabbing her mother to death. It was Renana who saw the terrorist trying to pull the knife out of her mother’s body so he could stab more people.

It was Renana who saw Dafna struggling to keep the knife inside her body so that he couldn’t hurt her children.

3 of her 6 children were in the house. Dafna’s refusal to allow them to be hurt and Renana’s screams were what made the terrorist give up and run away.

The night of the attack I wrote “How can home be the place where the heart is when that is the place where mommy’s heart stopped beating?”

How can you go on living in a house that was a home, a sanctuary that became a living nightmare? How can you walk across the floor your mother laid on while life fled from her body? How can you use that room as if it was just a regular room?

Over the past year, the people of Israel got glimpses of the spirit of the Meir family. We learned more about how extraordinary Dafna was. We also saw how Natan took all his children in hand and made sure their family life continued with light and with love.

For some reason, many assume a man won’t be able to take care of children on his own. Natan was horrified that there were those who questioned whether or not he would continue taking care of the children he and Dafna had adopted. How could that even be a question?! Dafna had wanted a big family. After they had their own children, she wanted to give a warm and loving home to additional children who needed it, so they adopted. How could anyone think that Natan would abandon the children that Dafna wanted so much? How could anyone think he would treat them differently from his biological children? They are all one family.

A terrorist could steal Dafna from them. Violence could break their family unit but it would not ruin their family. No terrorist could steal their family spirit.

Kindness is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Even when the most horrible things happen it is still possible to choose light. It isn’t easy, but it is possible.

The Meir family dramatically renovated their home. They worked on different ways to honor Dafna’s memory. Through sorrow that is difficult to fathom, an experience almost impossible to comprehend or process, they continued to live, always striving for the light.
Interestingly, Meir comes from the Hebrew word for light and means “giving light,” like a candle gives light in the darkness. And that is exactly what they have done - their example has been a light to us all.

“Or” means light in Hebrew. Interestingly, that is also the name of Renana’s fiancé. She recently announced their engagement in a touching Facebook post, saying:

“My Or who tells me not to cry, gives me reasons to be happy.
My Or who feels the evil with me, is the essence of goodness.
My light, on the day of my private devastation, on the backdrop of the Temple Mount where the Temple is sorely missed, chose that together we will build and grow.
Of course I said yes!”

I don’t know Renana and yet my heat leaps with joy to read her words.

I do not need to know her to know that no girl should ever have had to experience what she experienced. I ache for her pain, knowing that time does not heal. One learns to grow with the pain, one choose to live and be happy despite the pain but the loss never goes away.

There will always be a gaping hole where Renana’s mother is supposed to be.

I, who lost my father to cancer at a young age, can imagine what it is like for Renana. Each time she wishes she could tell her mother something, only to be hit with the reality of what happened…

What’s it like to get engaged and not be able to share your happiness with your mom? Hopes and dreams, plans will have to be made with other people…

What will it be like to have children without Dafna? I can imagine but I don’t know how Renana will feel. The only thing I am certain of is that Dafna’s example will make Renana a stronger, better mother.

The daughter who saw her mother die so that her children would not be hurt, can only become a stunning mother herself.

Renana will always carry with her the Meir family light. Now she also has Or who will add to her light. I pray that together they will have a wonderful life, full of happiness, good health and joy, free of troubles and sorrow.

And I hope they have a lot of children.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/07 Links Pt1: Kontorovich: Israel’s Settlement Regulations Bill and International Law; Renewing the “Jordanian Option” for the West Bank

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Israel’s Settlement Regulations Bill and International Law

Israel’s proposed “Regulations Bill” has attracted broad international criticism, including from the U.S. State Department and the European Union, as well as from opposition Israeli politicians and some government lawyers. The bill seeks to solve a situation in which, over several decades, over one thousand Israeli homes in West Bank settlements have been built in open areas to which Palestinians subsequently asserted property claims, typically based on broad give-aways of state land by the King of Jordan during the Hashemite occupation (1949-67). The homes are in communities built with some level of government involvement. Thus the bill provides the government would compensate the landowners 125% of the value of the land, in order to allow the communities that have been built there to remain.
The plots are generally open, uncultivated fields. The frequently used characterization of “private Palestinian lands” is misleading. In the overwhelming majority of cases, no individual Palestinians have come forward to claim the lands. Indeed, in most cases, no property claimants asserted their interests for decades after houses were built, a situation that in common law would certainly warrant the application of adverse possession doctrines, under which long-term possession of property unprotested by owners can change legal title, exactly to prevent these kinds of conflict between long-term users and owners who slept on their rights . Under Jordanian law, rules of prescription, which would turn the land over to its existing inhabitants, would apply. In cases like the community of Amona, which inspired but are not covered by the law, the Court made its determination without any fact-finding, and the lands claimed by the Palestinian petitioners only slightly overlap with those on which the Israeli homes stand.
Thus the law regulates situations where property claims, often difficult to verify, are being belatedly brought against areas that have seen significant improvement and home-building. Moreover, in the background are two legal doctrines that make the property impasse particularly costly. On one hand, the Israeli Supreme Court exercises broad remedial powers. Instead of merely awarding title to Palestinian claimants, it affirmatively requires the government to destroy all structures whose plots may overlap even in part with the claimed lands. On the other hand, bargaining in the shadow of obscure Jordanian land allotments is made close to impossible by a Palestinian Authority law criminalizing the sale of land to Jews. While Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has recently issued an executive order reducing the traditional death penalty to life at hard labor, there are reports that the old punishment may still be enforced de facto.

Caroline Glick: The evolving threat of jihad in the West

ISIS’s mode of operation is a natural progression from the September 11 attacks. Along the way, Anwar al-Awlaki, the commander of al-Qaida forces in Yemen killed in a US drone strike in 2011, was the pioneer of moving the direction of Western jihadists from the physical world to the virtual one. For more than a decade, Awlaki indoctrinated and directed numerous jihadists in the US and the UK. In the beginning Awlaki directed their actions by meeting with them and preaching to them in shared physical space. Later, he decamped to Yemen where he continued his efforts. He preached to them through cassette tapes, through satellite broadcasts and Internet chat rooms. He indoctrinated them through online essays. And he directed their terrorist attacks by email.
An interesting incident in Awlaki’s career came in 1996. At that time, Awlaki was working as a preacher at the Denver Islamic Society. According to a New York Times report from 2010, Awlaki left the mosque, and moved to San Diego shortly after an elder of the mosque upbraided him for telling a mosque member to travel to Chechnya to join the jihad against Russia.
The most revealing aspect of the story is that the elder who criticized Awlaki asked the New York Times not to publish his identity. By 2010, Awlaki had already been publicly implicated in directing scores of Western jihadists to commit attacks in the US and the UK. He was considered the commander of al-Qaida forces in Yemen. And yet, the mosque elder in Denver didn’t feel comfortable openly condemning him.
His aversion indicated where the balance of power in the American Muslim community lies.
Whether or not President Donald Trump is able to reinstitute his executive order mandating a 90-day ban on entry of nationals from Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, the fact is that such a move will be insufficient to diminish the terrorist threat in America. As Callimacci’s article made brutally clear, so long as the intellectual shackles of political correctness block the US and other Western governments from taking concerted action against the creed of Islamic supremacism and its adherents inside their own borders, the virtual terrorism command ISIS now controls will last until it morphs into an even more deadly threat in the months and years to come.

There are many aspects to the issue of Palestinian Arab refugees, a problem that persists nearly 70 years after the 1948 War that created the current situation. One question is whether Israel is actually obligated to allow those Arabs back in.

In other words, do the Palestinian Arabs have a legal "Right of Return"?

That is the argument made by pro-Arab advocate Hussein Ibish and Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah in The Palestinian Right of Return, an article they wrote together in 2001, using many of the basic arguments still being used to make the case.

They start with establishing a right according to international law -- and immediately run into a problem.

The first source is a quote by "prominent legal scholars" Mallison and Mallison that

"[h]istorically, 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.

Putting aside the possibility that the absence of such a codification could be because no such absolute right exists, the quote itself is problematic.

Tracing the origins of the quote -- the authors' paper provides no links or footnotes -- we find the full quote is a claim that the Palestinian Right of Return can be based on the Magna Carta:

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..."

Mallison and Mallison then go on to connect the Magna Carta's guarantee of return "in armed conflict and belligerent occupation situations" with the Geneva Convention's protection of war victims and repatriation.

Noting that Now, Arabs claim the Magna Carta provides the "right to return" Elder of Ziyon gives the full quote to fill in the gap created by the ellipses:

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.

So contrary to Ibish and Abunimah, Mallison and Mallison have found a source for international law for a "universally accepted and practiced" right of return that

only applies to people who are citizens of the country they left
does not apply to members of an entity that is hostile to the country
does not apply to descendants (contrary to UNRWA policy).

John sealing the Magna Carta by Frank Wood, 1925
Photo: www.bridgemanimages.com. Source: The Telegraph

Another source they quote is The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 13(2), "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country" and 15(2) "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality."

CAMERA, in a backgrounder on The Palestinian Claim to a “Right of Return”, notes the limitations on using the declaration as a source for the rights of refugees in international law.

Firstly, while granting its importance, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not legally binding -- see, for example, here. More to the point, while UDHR is the basis for
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, not one of these 3 documents actually mentions refugees.

Secondly, the reference to a "return to his country" would not include the Arabs who left then-Palestine, seeking entrance to Israel.

Ibish and Abunimah anticipate this argument and counter "It is a generally recognized principle of international law that when sovereignty or political control over an area changes hands, there is a concurrent transfer of responsibility for the population of that territory." -- but bring no source for their claim.

Thirdly, Article 29 of UDHR notes the rights of the citizens of the country itself, namely:

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

Obviously the influx of millions of Palestinian Arabs would raise concerns about the "rights" and "general welfare" of the citizens of Israel.

Ibish and Abunimah claim that Israel particularly has a responsibility for Arab refugees because they were expelled from the land. That is a whole topic unto itself, but the fact remains that

the Jewish state was involved in a war of survival not of its own choosing. It was inevitable that some of the population would be forced out because of security issues
it is documented that many of the Arabs who left did so not only to get out of harms way but also at the encouragement of the surrounding Arab countries.

A key part of the argument for a right of return is of course UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which directly addresses the issue of Palestinian Arab refugees. According to paragraph 11, the resolution:

Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;

Key points to keep in mind:

First, General Assembly resolutions are not binding -- thus the UN is not establishing a right of return.

Second, the language of the resolution, "should" instead of "shall" again points to the lack of an actual right or legal obligation.

Lastly, left unmentioned by Ibish and Abunimah is the second paragraph of Article 11, indicating that the UN:

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations;

The UN is not establishing an absolute right of return. Instead it is establishing the options of either return (repatriation) or resettlement in another country.

CAMERA points out that is why the same language reflecting 2 options occurs in

UN Resolution 393: "either by repatriation or resettlement"
UN Resolution 394: "whether repatriated or resettled"
UN Resolution 513: “reintegration either by repatriation or resettlement”

Could it be that the lack of a guaranteed right of return in Resolution 194 would explain why the Arab countries at the time voted against the resolution?

Ibish and Abunimah finish off with an argument for rights based on a comparison between the Palestinian Arabs and the situation in Kosovo -- and with the Jewish rights following Holocaust.

Without going into a discussion of their examples, one can come up with another example -- quoting Benjamin Franklin. Mitchell Bard points out that during the American Revolution, many colonists loyal to England fled to Canada. After the war, the British wanted the loyalists to be allowed to return to claim their property. Benjamin Franklin rejected this suggestion, writing:

Your ministers require that we should receive again into our bosom those who have been our bitterest enemies and restore their properties who have destroyed ours: and this while the wounds they have given us are still bleeding!

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Michael J. Dean

Based on continued Palestinian terrorism to this day, the comparison still holds.

Similarly, Bard notes that after WWII, 12.5, million Germans in Poland and then-Czechoslovakia were expelled, allowed to take only the possessions they could carry. World War II’s effects on Poland’s boundaries and population were considered a fait accompli that could not be undone after the war. Those expelled did not receive compensation for confiscated property and no one in Germany petitions for the right of the millions of deportees, and their children, to return to the countries from which they were expelled. This is in spite of the fact that they and their ancestors had lived in those countries for hundreds of years.

The bottom line is that while refugees in general, and Palestinian Arab refugees in particular, retain an option to return -- this is not considered an absolute right. Instead it is one option to measured against existing circumstances and the consequences of repatriation. This is established based on the resolutions of the UN itself, something that perhaps should be pointed out to UNRWA.

And what about UNRWA and their policy on the refugee status of Palestinian Arabs and a right of return? That is exactly the point -- it is an organizational policy as opposed to international law. As Elder of Ziyon pointed out yesterday, UNRWA has taken liberties with the legal definition of refugees, arbitrarily fabricating refugee status where none exists and granting refugee status to descendants in contradiction of international law.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Maybe I just missed it, but of all the millions of words being written about Donald Trump over the past year, I never saw anyone in the media actually compare his views and actions against what Trump wrote in his 2012 book, "Time to Get Tough."

Trump wrote the book during the 2012 presidential race. It is written in his voice, almost certainly based on his recording his words and then editing them. There is no ghostwriter here.

Much of it is online.

The table of contents of the book is essentially a blueprint of the topics that Trump was to campaign on four years later:

Not Steve Bannon. This is all Trump. Which is a comfort, in a way - the analyses about Bannon secretly controlling the White House agenda do not appear to be based on any actual research.

There are a few differences between the book and what we are seeing, and I'll highlight a couple of those. But for the most part this book is an invaluable tool to understand Trump, whether you love him or loathe him. It is sort of pathetic that no one in the media seems to be willing to compare Trump's words today against what he was saying previously. Whatever happened to source material?

Trump mentions Israel essentially only in the context of Iran:

[W]e know Obama’s instincts on Iran are horrible. On May 18, 2008, during a campaign speech then-candidate Obama made this breathtakingly ignorant statement: “I mean, think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela—these countries are tiny, compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. . . . You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have, to be bold enough to go ahead and listen.” Then, after his advisors told him what a moronic statement he’d made, Obama went out two days later and reversed his stance: “Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program, it supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq, it threatens Israel’s existence, it denies the holocaust.”27 Once again, the guy’s initial instincts are always wrong. And in this case, they endangered America and our ally Israel.

Obviously we must listen to our intelligence experts to decide the best way to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But here’s the reality: because the clock is ticking down, the next president America elects will in all likelihood be the president who either stops Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon or who sits back and lets it happen. Given Obama’s track record of weakness, that’s not a risk America can afford to take.

The highlighted portion is of course of interest today, when it appears based on media reports that Trump disrespects the role of the intelligence agencies.

By the way, Trump's 2000 political book, The America We Deserve, had far more about Israel's importance as an ally for the US. It also has an entire chapter warning of the dangers of terrorism, more than a year before 9/11.

Here's an important section that is critical to understanding Trump's foreign policy philosophy in his own words:

If history teaches us anything, it’s that strong nations require strong leaders with clearly defined national security principles. Realities change at warp speed; international events can turn on a dime. The 9-11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Arab Spring—all these happened in the blink of an eye. A president can’t always predict where the next national security “fire” will erupt, but he can and must have a steady and reliable compass to guide his decisions. Citizens need to know the values and principles their president will rely on to lead America through whatever unknown threats lie over the horizon. I believe that any credible American foreign policy doctrine should be defined by at least seven core principles:

1. American interests come first. Always. No apologies.

2. Maximum firepower and military preparedness.

3. Only go to war to win.

4. Stay loyal to your friends and suspicious of your enemies.

5. Keep the technological sword razor sharp.

6. See the unseen. Prepare for threats before they materialize.

7. Respect and support our present and past warriors.

Sadly, President Obama has undermined each of these core principles. First, no sooner had he been sworn into office than he went on an apology tour to the Arab world. Did you know that the very first interview Obama gave as president was with the Arabic news channel Al Arabiya? I’ve got news for President Obama: America is not what’s wrong with the world. I don’t believe we need to apologize for being hated by Islamic radical terrorists who hate our religion, hate our freedom, and hate that we extend human rights to women. Second, even as Obama’s blown trillions of our tax dollars on his “stimulus” schemes, he’s proposed cutting $400 billion from our defense budget. Third, by announcing the time and date for withdrawal in Afghanistan and not clearly defining our objectives in Libya’s civil war, Obama has completely blown it, making it virtually impossible for us to define what victory is and achieve it. Fourth, the president sold out our dear friend and ally Israel. He’s also thrown other allies, like Poland and the Czech Republic, under the bus by bowing to Russian demands that we not build missile defenses to protect our friends. Fifth, by slashing military budgets Obama has threatened our ability to keep our technological edge in weapons systems. Sixth, Obama has been caught flatfooted by China’s development of the J-20 fighter jet, something his administration didn’t think would happen for years to come. And finally, by raiding the defense budget to pay for his failed social programs, Obama continues to weaken our ability to honor our present and past warriors.

Perhaps the most important section to read in the 2012 book is this, about Russia:

Obama’s popularity in America may be at rock bottom levels, but I know one place his ratings are likely sky high: the Kremlin. Russia’s leaders can hardly believe their luck. Never in a million years did they think America would elect a guy as ineffective as this. Obama’s pretty-please diplomacy and endless American apology tours have served Russian interests extremely well. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, of whom I often speak highly for his intelligence and no-nonsense way, is a former KGB officer. No sooner did Obama move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than he began making concessions and sacrificing American power on the altar of “improving relations” with Russia.

According to Barack Obama’s favorite newspaper, the New York Times, within weeks of being sworn in as president of the United States, Obama sent a top U.S. official to Moscow to hand deliver a secret letter to Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev. According to the Times, the secret letter said that Obama “would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons.” It’s so outrageous I hardly believed it until I read it myself. Obama had barely moved his stuff into the White House residence and already the guy was just itching to start degrading America’s power and undermining our allies.

Not surprisingly, Putin was ecstatic: “The latest decision by President Obama . . . has positive implications,” said Putin. “I very much hope that this very right and brave decision will be followed by others.”15

But it gets even worse. Incredibly, the Obama administration made the decision to throw our friends Poland and the Czech Republic under the bus and leave them naked to missile attacks “despite having no public guarantees” that Moscow would help crack down on Iran’s missile programs. 16 Many in the intelligence world were baffled by Obama’s reckless and foolish move. U.S. senators piped up too. “This is going to be seen as a capitulation to the Russians, who had no real basis to object to what we were doing,” warned Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “And at the end of the day you empowered the Russians, you made Iran happy and you made the people in Eastern Europe wonder who we are as Americans.”17 What was Barack Obama’s response? “If the byproduct of it is that the Russians feel a little less paranoid and are now willing to work more effectively with us to deal with threats like ballistic missiles from Iran or nuclear development in Iran, you know, then that’s a bonus.”

The results of Obama’s pandering to the Russians have been a total disaster. In 2010, the Russians outsmarted Obama by promising to play nice and not sell Iran anti-aircraft missiles. The administration proudly hailed the announcement as a big success and praised Medvedev for having “shown leadership in holding Iran accountable for its actions, from start to finish.” Then, even as Obama was busy cheerleading the Russians’ actions, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Russian diplomats were quietly recruiting other countries . . . to undercut tougher penalties imposed on the Islamic Republic.”18 It was an incredible coup for Russia: they got Obama to give up missile defense for absolutely nothing in return and stuck it to America by secretly convincing other nations to back Iran.

Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe.19 Putin has also announced his grand vision: the creation of a “Eurasian Union” made up of former Soviet nations that can dominate the region. I respect Putin and the Russians but cannot believe our leader allows them to get away with so much—I am sure that Vladimir Putin is even more surprised than I am. Hats off to the Russians.

If Trump's opinion hasn't changed, then it seems like while his respect for Putin is quite real, his overtures towards Russia are meant to outfox Putin, not to blindly do his will as the media seems to imply.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but there is no better place to begin such an analysis than Trump's own words, especially when they align so well with practically everything else he is doing.

In this next section, Trump pretty much admits that he would divide the country to win a presidential campaign - because that is what he accused Obama of doing in 2012:

In all my years in business and participating in politics I’ve never seen the country as divided as it is right now—and I’ve seen bad times. Voters’ hatred of both Democrats and Republicans is beyond anything I have ever witnessed. A great leader can bring America together. But unfortunately for us, Barack Obama is not a leader.

...[T]he Republicans are going to have a very tough race. Obama is harnessing all of the negativity he created and flipping it back on the people—a very smart, if cynical, strategy. I’ve never seen anything like it. The guy is willing to rip the country in half to win. Sadly, it may prove to be a winning strategy. If I were doing as badly as he is, I would realize it is my only road to victory.

It is obvious that this was Trump's strategy on the campaign trail. Unfortunately we have seen very little of Trump's trying to bringing America together since then. Today's divisions are worse than they were under Obama, and that's saying something. I think that this division is far more dangerous and will cause far more long-term damage than any of Trump's policies might. From the point of view of Israel, Trump has managed to split the American Jewish and the American Zionist community far worse and far more starkly than eight years of Obama deliberately pushing J-Street for that very purpose.

What about Trump's thin skin? There is plenty of evidence of it in this book as well, and he rips many people who insult him (or who he simply thinks are useless.) . But he also says why he is so aggressive towards those who cross him. He says "I always believe when attacked, hit your opponent back harder and meaner and ideally right between the eyes." In a few cases, however, he admits respecting people he disagrees with.

It makes no difference if you support Trump or not. It is a much better use of your time to read this book (it really isn't that long) than to read any of a zillion half-baked analyses being published in the media about him.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Video of this week's "Talmudic ritual" on the Temple Mount

The Arab headlines of Jews "performing Talmudic rituals" on the Temple Mount never go away.

But yesterday it appears that they finally caught one of them on video.

If you enlarge the video to full screen, you can almost make out that the offender is moving his lips.

Scandalously, the guards are not forcibly picking him up and throwing him off the Mount for this blatant violation of the Muslim sanctity of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound.

The Jewish violations of the sanctity of the site are so great and outrageous that the Muslim authorities a couple of years ago commissioned videos for children to explain exactly how heinous the Jewish crimes are. The videos include this character tearfully begging for Muslim rights to the holy site be respected.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Spot the difference (poster)

This seems accurate.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/06 Links Pt2: Linda Sarsour, The Left's Latest Star; NFL football stars to visit Israel

From Ian:

Daniel Pipes: Linda Sarsour, The Left's Latest Star

What to make of Linda Sarsour of Brooklyn, lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against President Trump's immigration order and the new, seemingly ubiquitous symbol of the hard Left-radical Islam alliance?
The Obama White House designated her a "champion of change." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio sought her endorsement. Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders used her as a surrogate in his presidential campaign. She served as a delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
She appeared on major television shows and the New York Times ran a long puff piece calling her "a Brooklyn homegirl in a hijab." David Brock's Media Matters for America advocates for her. She was one of four lead organizers of the anti-Trump Women's March on Washington. Actress Susan Sarandon and Rep. Keith Ellison endorse her. Sarsour, in brief, is "venerated by leftists," observes Muslim reformer Shireen Qudosi. And Islamists too: for example, Al-Jazeera celebrates her.
If Sarsour is the vaunted star of the leftist-Islamist alliance, conservatives can rest easy.
Sarsour plopped herself into my life in March 2010 when she confused me, Daniel Pipes, with PipeLineNews.org, a "boutique news service" that had run a critical article on her calling her a "Hamas sympathizer." She responded by showering me with mock gratitude for the attention ("THANK YOU Mr. Pipes!"). Noting her error, I wrote a sarcastic response ("Sarsour ought to shower PipeLineNews.org, not me, with her affections"). When she did not acknowledge her mistake, I took an interest in her career.
I learned that Sarsour frequently errs without later correcting herself. She wrongly portrayed the murder of Shaima Alawadi as resulting from hatred of Muslims when in fact Alawadi's Muslim husband, Kassim Alhimidi, honor-killed her. Worse, she faked a hate crime against herself, scoring political points nationally by portraying a mentally ill homeless man as a violent racist.
I learned about Sarsour's paranoid loathing for the U.S. government. She portrayed would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a CIA agent, implying that the federal government murders Americans to frame Muslims. She also off-handedly claimed Muslim "kids [are] being executed" in the United States, presumably by the government.

IsraellyCool: WATCH: Bernard-Henri Levy: “BDS Is An Antisemitic Campaign”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual and author, was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria of CNN on the rising anti-semitism in the US.
The majority of the interview, he spends ripping BDS for antisemitism.

Tenenbom’s latest book demonstrates why a concerted effort should be made to encourage American Jews to emigrate to Israel

Tuvia Tenenbom’s book The Lies They Tell demonstrates why American Jews should move to Israel. The book is a seething indictment of the mindframe of the “progressive” American global melting pot and its “progressive” Jewish community, whose members deny their very essence and are at the forefront of the fight for the rights of every group in the world, with the exception of the Jews.
While travelling through the United States Tenenbom meets people who refuse to discuss politics and philosophy and are afraid to speek their minds unless their opinions are ‘politically correct’. The world is divided into good and bad, black and white, left or right. The politically-correct decultured global white progressive American is inevitably ‘pro-Palestinian’ and opposed to ‘global warming’. Needless to say, all who profess to be ‘pro-Palestinian’ and ‘progressive’ know — with the exception of slogans and for the most part slanted or incorrect facts — absolutely nothing about Israel.
The ‘progressive’ Jews are busy committing cultural suicide/genocide by denying their own culture and internalizing a melting pot without essence. They speak little if any Hebrew or Yiddish and with the exception of superficialities do not identify with Judaism and know hardly anything about it.
Political activists complain about Israeli ‘apartheid’ but are apparently unaware of the fact that nearly half the Israeli Jewish population have their origins in Muslim countries. Nearly all of these countries refuse to allow a single Jew into their country. Nor do they seem to be aware that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas do not allow Jews to live or study in ‘Palestine’ which, of course, opposes apartheid. That the Israeli apartheid state is 20 percent Palestinian while ‘Palestine’ is 0 percent Jewish seems perfectly logical to “progressive” Jews.

The Palestinian Attorney General's office has issued a ban on a crime thriller called "A Crime in Ramallah" on the grounds that it violates public morals.

Deputy general counsel Ahmed Barak said that a decision was made to pull all copies of the novel from all libraries and bookstores.

The ban is supposedly because the novel includes violations of "ethics and morals" and that it "would prejudice the citizen" who reads it - it would cause juvenile delinquency if the young should read it. He hides this censorship behind claims that the book violates the Press and publications Law, the Penal Code, the Law on the Protection of Juveniles, and the Law of the Child, which prohibits the publication or display or circulation of any books or audio or videos that might make a child act "contrary to public order and morals."

The book looks like a standard crime novel that is meant to illuminate the dark parts of society, with corrupt politicians and police. If I understand the plot correctly, it involves a murder of a young woman whose circumstances would embarrass prominent officials so the family is framed as if it was an honor killing.

Reviews have been generally positive although they note that the novel is bold.

It appears that the novel hit too close to home for the Palestinian Authority officials.

I'm sure that human rights groups will be very loud in their denunciation of this censorship. Right after the flying pigs invasion.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Remember Qaradawi when comparing Jewish and Muslim refugees (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Nobody can know how the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust would feel about the now so fashionable use of their despair and suffering for the benefit of today’s mostly Muslim refugees. I have repeatedly tried to explain why I think the comparison is inappropriate; but even though more influential writers have also adamantly opposed this facile “lesson of history,” it only seems to become more popular. One notable example for this trend is the Twitter account St. Louis Manifest: set up for the recent International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it quickly gained almost 74,000 followers by combining the commemoration of the Jewish refugees on board the St. Louis, who were denied entry to the US and later killed by the Nazis, with the message #RefugeesWelcome. In the same spirit, columnist Peter Beinart decreed on Twitter that it was completely unacceptable for Jewish organizations to commemorate the Holocaust without forcefully rejecting the Trump administration’s recent “Muslim ban” (which isn’t really a “Muslim ban”).

In a probably futile attempt to make the virtue-signalers think twice, Lee Smith argued in Tablet that if today’s Syrian refugees are the “new Jews,” we should urgently figure out who are the new Nazis. According to Smith, it is Iran and “its crack troops, the Quds Force,” as well as Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and Assad ally Russia “that hunted Sunni Arabs like animals and slaughtered them or sent them running for their lives. These are the Nazis. That’s who sent the Syrians running for their lives like Jews fleeing Hitler.”

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead and Nicholas M. Gallagher make a similar argument:

“The refugee question is not the only uncomfortable parallel between the 1930s and our own time. The real problem in the 1930s wasn’t the lack of compassion for Jewish and other refugees; it was the feckless appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the unwillingness to confront him that empowered the Nazi persecution of the Jews and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. So today the true villain of the Syria story—aside from Syria, Russia, and Iran—is the feckless Obama foreign policy that allowed a cyst to metastasize into a cancer, just as Britain, France, and America once allowed Hitler to grow into the master of Europe.

The Obama officials and cheerleaders now guilt-tripping the country over ‘heartlessness’ toward Syria refugees are giving hypocrisy a bad name. Bad foreign policy is the cause of the heartbreak in Syria today, not bad immigration policy. The world does not need lectures from Susan Rice and Samantha Power on what we should do about Syrian refugees; the best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening. The Holocaust was not caused by the Reed-Johnson Act [which sharply curtailed immigration since 1924]; it was caused by Nazi hatred, enabled by naive liberal illusions about the ‘arc of history’ that prevented the West from mobilizing against Hitler when he was weak and [could have been] easily defeated.”

But current controversies about Muslim immigration are of course not just about Syrian refugees, and arguably, everyone who is eager to cite “lessons” of the 1930s and 1940s should be confronted with the fact that the murderous Jew-hatred of this time remains not only fairly popular in the Muslim world, but is further fortified by ancient Islamic enmity to Jews. While there is plenty of evidence for these unfortunate facts, the perhaps best example is the popular Muslim leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is crucial to understand how enormously influential Qaradawi is: A 2009 book entitled “The Global Mufti” asserts that “Qaradawi is unquestionably the most important Sunni religious figure in the world today,” and a Huffington Post/World Post list of Arab “thought leaders” ranks the now ninety-year old cleric as number three for 2016.

According to the Huffington Post, Qaradawi is best known for his program “Sharia and Life,” which is broadcast on Al Jazeera and has an estimated audience of 60 million worldwide; he has also published more than 120 books, and helped found the popular website IslamOnline, for which he has long served as “chief religious scholar.”

Interestingly, even the Huffington Post notes in its short biography on Qaradawi that due to some “controversial” views, he was refused entry to the UK (2008) and France (2012). One could add that also his US visa was revoked already in 1999, and he has even become controversial in the Arab world because many regard him “as the religious voice giving power to people in Arab countries to rise against their oppressive rulers.” Along with many Muslim Brotherhood members, an Egyptian court sentenced Qaradawi (in absentia) to death in 2015; Georgetown professor Abdullah Al-Arian denounced the sentence in his Al Jazeera column and praised Qaradawi as “possibly the most prominent religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world.”

Westerners who are eager to use the victims of the Holocaust for today’s political debates should be familiar with some of the relevant views of this highly influential Muslim scholar, who – as Al-Arian illustrates – has also well-placed admirers in the West.

In a speech broadcast on Al Jazeera TV on January 30, 2009, Qaradawi declared:

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

So apparently, Qaradawi would prefer to see Muslims not as the new Jews, but rather as the new Nazis.

A few weeks before Qaradawi expressed his hope that Muslims would follow in Hitler’s footsteps, he also prayed in a Friday sermon that was aired by Al Jazeera TV:

“Oh Allah, take the Jews, the treacherous aggressors. Oh Allah, take this profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people. Oh Allah, they have spread much tyranny and corruption in the land. Pour Your wrath upon them, oh our God. Lie in wait for them. […] oh Allah, take this oppressive, tyrannical band of people. Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”

These kind of fervent prayers calling on Allah to kill all the Jews are not uncommon – here is a selection: a Palestinian preacher (2010); a Hamas imam (2011); a Spanish imam (2014); an Italian preacher (2014); an imam in Berlin (2014); a Qatari sheikh (2014); a Palestinian sheikh (2016).

As far as Qaradawi is concerned, he had freely promoted his intense Jew-hatred already for years. In 2003, he published a book (in Arabic) explaining his “rulings” on Palestine; the book was translated to English in 2007. In this book Qaradawi warns Muslims not to be friends with “Jews, in general, and Israelis, in particular;” he describes Jews as “devourers of Riba (usury) and ill-gotten money” and as “true examples of miserliness and stinginess;” he also claims that Jews “have killed Prophet Zakariyya and Prophet Yahya and wove conspiracies against Jesus Christ.”

However, as Mark Gardner and Dave Rich noted in their review (full pdf text), the “most striking part of the book” is Qaradawi’s discussion of a notorious hadith [i.e. records “of the traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad” which are viewed “as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the authority of the Qurʾān”] that also appears prominently in the Hamas Charter and reads:

“The last day will not come unless you fight Jews. A Jew will hide himself behind stones and trees and stones and trees will say, O servant of Allah [or O Muslim] there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.””

Qaradawi describes this hadith as “one of the miracles of our Prophet” and elaborates:

“[W]e believe that the battle between us and the Jews is coming. Such a battle is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging; it is rather driven by religious incentives. This battle is not going to happen between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else. It is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the hadith. This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews i.e. all Muslims and all Jews. (p. 77).”

Gardner and Rich argue that Qaradawi “personifies the combination of theological anti-Judaism, modern European antisemitism and conflict-driven Judeophobia that make up contemporary Islamist attitudes to Jews.” But given the fact that Qaradawi has long been recognized as “possibly the most prominent religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world” – to quote Georgetown professor Abdullah Al-Arian – it is by no means clear that only “Islamists” would share his views on Jews. And indeed, there is plenty of evidence that antisemitism is not only rampant in the Arab and Muslim world, but also prevalent in Muslim communities in the West.

I would have thought that if we want to draw “lessons” from the Holocaust, one of the most important would be to never again ignore incitement to murderous Jew-hatred. But the recent International Holocaust Remembrance Day was just one of many occasions to realize that I’m apparently wrong.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/06 Links Pt1: The Choices Palestinians Make; 'Hamas cell planned terror attacks at synagogue, train station in Israel'

From Ian:

The Choices Palestinians Make

The notion that the Israeli pilot is the only one who has any responsibility for the child's death is simply false. A lot of bad choices were made — by Palestinians — prior to the death of the young child and Atef Abu Saif knows it; he just can't — or will not — address these choices, at least not in this text.
The reality that Saif will not confront in his book [The Drone Eats With Me] is that Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, bears a huge measure of responsibility for the suffering he documents. Hamas has repeatedly started wars that it cannot win against a country that cannot afford to lose.
During these conflicts, it has launched rockets from schoolyards and has used hospitals as command centers for its leaders, putting civilians on both sides of the conflict at risk. When children are killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas puts their bodies on display to demonize Israel, and writers such as Saif assist in this tactic.
During the war in 2008–2009, Hamas... used cement and other building materials allowed into the Gaza Strip—ostensibly for the benefit of Palestinian civilians—in order to construct tunnels that could penetrate Israel and serve as a means to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians.
During its 2012 fight with Israel, Hamas leaders declared that killing Jews is a religious obligation. Hamas promotes a genocidal organization that seeks Israel's destruction and yet Saif does not speak a word about this lethal ideology or actions before or during the 2014 war.
Honesty requires that the deaths of these Palestinian children serve to drive — not obstruct — the conversation toward Palestinian abilities and responsibility.

PMW: Germany signs sports agreement with terror promoting PA official Rajoub

Last week, the head of the German representation in Ramallah, Peter Beerwerth, signed “the first bilateral cooperation agreement” in sports between the PA and Germany with Jibril Rajoub, the president of the Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs in the Palestinian Authority.
In its recent report The Rajoub File, Palestinian Media Watch documented that Jibril Rajoub is an outspoken supporter of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis and prohibits peacebuilding sports activities between Palestinians and Israelis. During the latest wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis, Rajoub congratulated terrorist murderers, telling them that: “You are ‎heroes and we bless you... you are a ‎crown on our heads.” When a friendly football match took place between 11-year-old Israeli and Palestinian boys after the Gaza War in 2014, Rajoub called it a “crime against humanity.”
In addition, the Palestinian Football Association, which will be the beneficiary of a German football expert paid for by Germany, supervises an annual sporting event named after arch-terrorist Abu Jihad. According to the Palestinian Authority’s own documentation, terrorist Abu Jihad was responsible for the murder of 125 people.
The official PA daily reported that the new agreement between Germany and the PA is the result of “meetings between Rajoub and senior officials of the sports sector in Germany,” and that the German Olympic Committee and the German Football Association at these meetings had “demonstrated a willingness to contribute to the development of many sports branches in Palestine.” [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 1, 2017]