Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, November 01, 2018

11/01 Links Pt1: Omani FM: Israel Is Part of the Region; The Torah And Israelite Prophets Emerged In The ME; In Gaza, tire shortage hits motorists but not protesters

From Ian:

MEMRI: Articles In Palestinian Press Condemn President Trump And His Administration: Neo-Hitlerism Aspiring To Global Hegemony – According To Instructions Of Rothschild Family

In the wake of the crisis in relations between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, the PA press has published numerous articles condemning the Trump administration and President Trump personally. Inter alia, they called the administration "the most bullying U.S. administration in modern American history" whose racist, colonialist and "neo-Hitlerism" policy "heralds terrifying catastrophes for mankind." They also said that Trump was acting deliberately to bring down the global order and the UN institutions in order to force complete American hegemony on the world and bring it back to the law of the jungle. One columnist in a PA daily even accused the Trump administration of aspiring to change the world order according to instructions by the global government headed by the Rothschild family.

Some of the articles were addressed, in particularly harsh tones, against President Trump himself, calling him a "gang leader," a "highway robber," a "new cowboy," a bully who wants to turn America into the world's "sheriff," and more.

The following are excerpts from the articles.
Columnist In PA Daily: Trump Is Acting According To Guidelines Of The Rothschild Family World Government – To Dismantle And Reassemble The World

'Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, a columnist for the PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote that the Trump administration is acting to destroy the UN because it is unwilling to obey the international law and heed the positions of other countries, especially poor ones. He added that the capitalist U.S. administration follows "the guidelines of the global government headed by the Zionist Rothschild family," and aims to achieve global hegemony:

"The U.S. under Trump is pursuing a tycoon-like policy of dismantling and reassembling the world map, after it could no longer tolerate the UN system that it itself founded upon the ruins of the League of Nations… as though it no longer believes in the goals [the UN] is expected [to achieve]. [This is] because the other major international forces and the poor countries represented in the UN pulled the rug out from under its feet based on the norms of international law... which the gang [in the U.S. administration] refuses to accept and acts to change and eliminate.

"What the U.S. administration is implementing is America's [preferred] choice: creating a vortex of global chaos or creative chaos, in accordance with the guidelines of the global government headed by the Zionist Rothschild family, and [also in accordance with] Trump's slogan of 'America First.' The [American] struggle in the various arenas thus [corresponds to] the tycoon [Trump's] decision to persecute the [other international] players in order to take back the reigns of decision-making and global policy..."[1]

PMW: Fatah supports Islamic edict prohibiting land sales to "enemies"

Abbas' Fatah Movement endorses the PA's fatwa, or religious edict, prohibiting the transfer or selling of land to Israelis/Jews and encourages Palestinians not to violate it.

Fatah has announced that selling land to Israelis/Jews constitutes "high treason against the religion, the homeland, and the people." Thereby the movement repeats the PA Mufti's ban on selling land documented by Palestinian Media Watch. Fatah, which is supposedly a secular movement, also used religious language, warning that violating this prohibition would even have implications after death, in "the world to come":

"The Fatah Movement emphasized that the sale of properties and lands to the occupation or their illegal transfer to dubious sources constitutes high treason against the religion, the homeland, and the people, and that 'whoever does this decrees upon himself shame and disgrace in this world and in the world to come.'"
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 14, 2018]

A Fatah official went even further, stating that "the occupation's contemptible agents" who sell or transfer land to Israelis/Jews are "bats of the night" and the opposite of those Palestinians "who are sacrificing their lives for Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque":

"Fatah Revolutionary Council member and [Fatah] Spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi said: 'There are those who are sacrificing their lives for Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and in order to defend its status and its Arabness, and on the other hand there are bats of the night - the occupation's contemptible agents - who sell their conscience and their religion and betray Jerusalem for money, which will turn into a curse on their heads.'"
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 14, 2018]

Omani FM: Israel Is Part of the Region; The Torah And Israelite Prophets Emerged In The Middle East

Speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies' (IISS) 2018 Manama Dialogue, Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah said: "Israel is one of the countries in the region… Maybe it is time that Israel had the same privileges and duties as other countries." Bin Abdullah said that the Torah and the Israelite prophets emerged in the Middle East and that there had even been Jews in Medina. He stated that improved relations between Israel and its neighbors can be accomplished and that such relations would bring stability to the Middle East while serving both Palestinian and Israeli interests. Earlier in the Manama Dialogue, Bin Abdullah had expressed his support for the "Deal of the Century." Bin Abdullah made these comments in the wake of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's October 26 visit to Oman. The video was uploaded to the Internet on October 27, 2018.

Gulf states ignore Palestinian demand to stop normalization with Israel

From Al Ahram:

This week the Palestinian Central Council (PCC) appealed to Arab states to suspend further normalisation with Israel pending the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“We are asking Arab states to send a message of resolve and tell Israeli officials that they cannot expect to make any more political and economic gains with Arab states when they are making the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories a nightmare. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees our request will be considered,” said a Palestinian source who spoke on the phone from Ramallah on Monday.

What a change from a few years ago when every Palestinian demand at every Arab conference would be highlighted and accepted without question.

The Palestinian fear that the Gulf doesn't really care about them is well-founded. I've documented for years that the rich Arab Gulf states would pay lip service to the Palestinian cause but not live up to their promises of monetary or other support.

Now, they are more explicit about it:

On the same day a Cairo-based Arab diplomat confirmed to Al-Ahram Weekly that the PCC’s request was unlikely to be given a serious hearing.

“When the [PCC] requests the suspension of further normalisation with Israel it is basically talking about Gulf countries, not about Egypt or Jordan which have peace treaties with Israel. But the Gulf countries take the position that if the Palestinian Authority continues to refuse US proposals for a possible deal that could eventually resolve the Palestinian problem, then the Palestinian leadership is in no position to ask Gulf states to refrain from any steps that might be in their political or economic interests,” said the source.

Far more likely, he added, is that the “next few weeks and months” will see a much greater public acknowledgment of Israeli relations with Arab Gulf countries “and Arab countries in general” and that “Israeli officials are likely to visit Manama soon”.

Speaking during a press briefing on Saturday on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogues, Bahrani Foreign Minister Khaled bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa suggested that normalisation with Israel is progressing in parallel with diplomacy to resolve the Palestinian problem.

Meanwhile, Cairo-based regional diplomats say that they would not be surprised if Bahrain proves to be the next stop. In the words of one, “Israel and Bahrain have much in common when it comes to Iran.”

An article that has been published in many Arab newspapers today bemoans the fact that Israelis are attending an economic conference in Qatar this week, an event that that has apparently been unreported in English-language media so far. Representatives of the Peres Center, Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, The Israel Project and even a former Foreign Ministry official are in attendance.

Notice that people who claim to be "pro-peace" are not celebrating these now almost daily examples of Israel making diplomatic, economic and cultural inroads into former bitter enemies.

Because the Israeli and US governments support actual, on the ground peace between Israel and her neighbors, then the "pro-peace" crowd who hate Trump and Netanyahu above all must be against it.

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The New York Times has a good article about antisemitic hate crimes in New York City.

Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.

This is a startling statistic. FBI hate crime statistics shows that anti-Jewish hate crimes easily outnumber all other anti-religion hate crimes nationwide, and they have since they started keeping records, but usually anti-black crimes are far more prevalent nationwide. New York is the only city where Jews are the top victims of all hate crimes.

The actual numbers are even more stunning. In 2017, there were 151 complaints about antisemitic hate crimes, as opposed to 34 anti-black crimes and 40 anti-gay crimes.

Then the article reveals something that is almost incomprehensible to anyone who relies on the headlines to determine what the biggest threat to Jews in America are:

During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

22 months is how long Donald Trump has been in office.

We should not minimize right-wing antisemitism. But too much of the news coverage in the wake of Pittsburgh has minimized all other forms of antisemitism. Muslims attacking Jews and blacks attacking hasidim are "accepted" as just part of the scenery, barely worth reporting. The article dryly mentions:

When a Hasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of gender or sexual orientation.

Sympathies are distributed unevenly. Few are extended toward religious fundamentalists, of any kind, who reach the radar of the urbane, “Pod Save America” class only when stories appear confirming existing impressions of backwardness — the hordes of children delivered into the world whom families refuse to vaccinate and keep semiliterate.

The Anti-Defamation League maintains its own statistics and last year it reported that nine of the 12 physical assaults against Jews categorized as hate crimes in New York State were committed in Brooklyn and involved victims who were easily marked as members of traditionally Orthodox communities. Outside that world they were hardly noticed at all.

Jewish lives matter - but seemingly only when they are attacked by evil skinhead neo-Nazi villains. When the Jew is attacked by a person of color or a Muslim or a "pro-Palestinian activist," then the sympathy by the "progressive" crowd disappears, seemingly because the attacker has established themselves as the bigger victim in the grand scheme of things. The motivation of a black antisemite against "rich Jewish landlords" or of a Muslim against "Zionist usurpers" makes those crimes somehow less interesting to report and the victims less sympathetic. The 1991 Crown Heights pogrom, where mobs of people of color attacked Jews and yet the media reported it as if both sides were fighting, still rankles.

To put it simply, incidents of people attacking Jews aren't as juicy when the attackers aren't neo-Nazis.

The real, everyday antisemitism that far outstrips all other hate crimes doesn't interest New York City liberals. There is no outrage among them when videos surface every couple of months of religious Jews being mercilessly attacked in their own neighborhoods.

If these so-called "progressives" would be honest with themselves, they don't want to sympathize with those Jewish victims because deep down they think, to some extent, that those Jews deserve it - that those Jews are the oppressors, not the oppressed, in the Oppression Olympics. If the attacker is black or Muslim, suddenly there is visceral sympathy for the attacker, no matter what the facts.

Deadly attacks and major terror threats against the American Jewish community over the past three decades have been pretty much divided between far-right and Muslim attackers. The progressive crowd is usually not directly involved in gunfire or bombings. But that doesn't mean that the Left is any less antisemitic than anyone else. Their selective outrage over Jews being attacked based on who the attacker is shows that their supposedly principled stand against antisemitism is really an excuse to show their outrage over their ideological enemies - the Jewish victims are reduced to being props for the real agenda of hating Trump.

The bias is the same as the bias of those who attack Jews to begin with.

If one is going to justifiably blame Donald Trump for creating an environment where extremist rightists feel more comfortable attacking Jews, then one must also blame the liberal media and the "progressive" crowd for consistently downplaying the far more numerous antisemitic attacks when the attackers are black or Muslim or "anti-Zionist." They are just as guilty for creating an environment where Jews can be attacked with impunity.

Pittsburgh should have brought people together to understand the reality of antisemitism in America today. There are strains of antisemitism in every group - right and left, black and white, Muslim and Christian. Instead, the slaughtered Jews of Pittsburgh have been turned into another prop in a pissing contest between groups who are all guilty to some extent of enabling Jew-hatred.

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Work accident! Hamas terrorist blows himself up

Another Hamas "martyr" who should be a role model for all Hamas members:

Dawud Rizk Eid Junaid, 37, blew himself up in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday morning in an "accidental explosion."

Hamas' obituaries are always careful to mention which mosque he was a member of. In this case, the "Abu al-Khair" mosque in Jabalya.

Junaid was apparently a senior tunnel-digger.

He was killed in a site that was targeted by Israeli bombs over the weekend in response to Gaza rockets.

Hamas' statement looked forward to the day when all Zionists "are expelled from our land, Allah-willing."

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10/31 Links Pt2: Special Editorial: #WeAreAllJews; Sohrab Ahmari: Why This Catholic Loves the Jews; Roger Waters and the Great Green Chevron Scam; Ben & Jerry’s on Partnering With Group Tied to Farrakhan

From Ian:

Sohrab Ahmari: Why This Catholic Loves the Jews

For starters, it was mainly Jewish writers who dispelled the dangerous Marxist illusions of my youth and ushered me to political maturity. Were it not for Leon Kass, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, and Leo Strauss, to name but a few of them, I probably would have continued to wallow in the lethal “idealism” of the very hard left. In Natan Sharansky’s gulag memoir, Fear No Evil, I discovered the link between faith in the God of the Bible and freedom, both political freedom and the more important kind: spiritual freedom. The words that sustained Sharansky through his ordeal belonged to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “The entire world is a narrow bridge, and the important point is not to be afraid.”

Reading those lines while picturing Sharansky in his punishment cell sent shivers of understanding down my spine. A part of me knew that Nachman was right, even though I would have insisted that I was an unbeliever at the time. And that intuition raised an uncomfortable thought: I could only cross the bridge fearlessly and avoid the abyss below if there was Someone at the other end waiting for me—a metaphysical direction and endpoint, a loving Almighty who thunders: “Be not afraid.”

I picked up that interior confidence—that no force on earth could shake me if I feared Almighty God, that no regime could compel me to abide evil if I hewed to God’s ways—from Jewish writers, some of whom weren’t even traditional believers. Initially, I was reluctant to articulate this newfound confidence in the first person, lest my mostly secular friends sneer at me. But eventually, I professed faith in the one God.

When I did, I professed faith in the Christian God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who, I believe, entered human history a little more than 2,000 years ago and made of himself the bridge across that terrifying abyss that Rabbi Nachman had written about. I concluded that the bridge is cruciform, in other words. And that, of course, is where Jews and Christians part theological ways. But in so concluding, my mind never gave in to the classical anti-Semitism that historically disfigured relations between Christians and Jews.

Rather, my attitude was one of gratitude. Gratitude for the Jewish genius of the Hebrew Bible. Gratitude for the Jewish landscape of human salvation and the Jewish men and women that peopled it, not least Jesus of Nazareth and his blessed mother. Gratitude for Jews as Christianity’s elder brothers and sisters, who nurtured faith in the true God like a “well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles,” as the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate has it. Gratitude for the depths of Jewish ethics, for the resounding Jewish “No” to pagan abominations and emperor-worship, a “No” that echoes to this day.

Thanks to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, and Jewish intellectuals, I’m a Christian believer and not a modern pagan. How could I then not love the Jewish people?

Kevin D. Williamson: Green Floyd: Roger Waters and the Great Green Chevron Scam

The slow unraveling of the case against Chevron has been eye-opening, not least for the glimpse it offers into the way money moves through the progressive activist world.

The background: Chevron was accused of inflicting horrible suffering on the people of Ecuador through mismanagement of drilling operations there, contaminating the groundwater and exposing thousands of people, mostly in nearby indigenous communities, to a stew of toxic sludge. The most obvious problem with the case was that Chevron had never drilled for oil in Ecuador; it acquired Texaco, which had done so years before, in partnership with the Ecuadoran state oil company. At the conclusion of its operations, Texaco received a formal certification from the government of Ecuador that it had cleaned up after itself (at a cost of about $40 million) and that it was released from further liability for the operations, which were continued by the state oil company. Like many state oil companies, Ecuador’s had at times been something less than scrupulous in its observance of environmental standards. Its operations are likely the source of the pollution in Ecuador.

But American lawyer Steven Donziger, an old basketball buddy of Barack Obama’s, managed to obtain a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadoran court. Chevron complained that this judgment was the product of corruption, that Donziger et al. had falsified evidence, paid off allegedly neutral experts, bribed judges, and more. Chevron took those complaints to court in the United States and was successful.

Chevron wants the court to find Donziger in contempt because he “willfully and repeatedly has violated the RICO injunction, monetizing and profiting from the fraudulent Ecuadorian judgment by selling, assigning, pledging, transferring, and encumbering interests therein.” The court is considering its claims.

Roger Waters, the rock musician, has denounced Chevron for its “greed,” complaining that it is “disquietingly apparent that the rich and powerful are still much attached to the feathering of their own nests at any cost to others.” Well. Documents submitted to the court show “George R. Waters” taking two equity positions in the case, one for 0.076 percent and one for 0.025 percent, through “Fenwick,” presumably the firm of Mark Fenwick, Rogers’s manager and an heir to the Fenwick department-store chain in the United Kingdom. That would come to roughly $9.6 million of a $9.5 billion judgment. You could feather a lot of nests with that. (I was unable to contact Waters or Fenwick for comment. Rock stars are really hard to get on the phone.) If taking in a few million dollars via an investment in extortion and bribery is not greed, then what is?

Pens to Wear 'Stronger Than Hate' Patches Tonight Against the Islanders

Pittsburgh Penguins players will wear special "Stronger Than Hate" patches on their jerseys for tonight's game against the New York Islanders at PPG Paints Arena (7 p.m.).

The patches - and the accompanying jersey auction - are part of the organization's effort to support victims and families of Saturday's tragic shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill.

Each player will sign his jersey after the game, and the jerseys will be available for auction at treeoflife.givesmart.com.

All proceeds from the jersey auction and the Penguins other fundraising efforts, including tonight's 50/50 Raffle, will benefit the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and a fund established by the City of Pittsburgh Department of Safety to benefit police officers wounded during the attack.

The jersey auction will start at 11 a.m. today and continue until November 13 at 12 p.m.

The Penguins will also conduct a collection of monetary donations at all three entrance gates at tonight's game. Fans may donate online at treeoflife.givesmart.com.

The Penguins Foundation also is donating $50,000 to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and to the officers' fund.

Meanwhile, Muslim and Arab antisemitism continues, but no one wants to talk about that

Al Watan Voice has an article about how the Communist movement was dominated by "Zionists."

Sometimes the author slips and says "Zionist Jews."

So we learn that Karl Marx was a "Zionist Jew" who came from a long line of Talmudic scholars. (Marx was baptized at 6 and raised as a Christian.) Practically all the people behind Communism were "Zionists."

"Zionist Jews" were responsible for the murder of 66 million people in the Soviet Union from 1918-1959, we are told.

Meanwhile, an article in Iran's Al Alam says that Jews are cowardly, claiming that Israeli Jews are emigrating from Israel in droves when faced with a single rocket that lands in an open area, damaging nothing.

Al Ahram published a letter from Dr. Ali Bayoumi of Zagazig University saying that Israel was implementing Protocol 15 of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Gaza.

The Protocols are accepted as fact in many Arabic articles.

This is only in the past couple of days.

The issue of endemic Arab and Muslim antisemitism is Kryptonite to Western media, who want to always paint Muslims and Arabs in the best possible light to avoid accusations of "Islamophobia." So the real threats to Jews are downplayed in order to appease the very Muslims who want to kill them.

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I Boycott Jerusalem Elections, Then Complain The City Ignores Me (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

I Boycott Jerusalem Elections, Then Complain The City Ignores Me

By Alhaf Suwij, East Jerusalem resident

Ras-a-Amud, Jerusalem, October 31 - Maintaining one's ideological principles is important. Me, I adhere to my people's official position that participating in the holy city's municipal elections normalizes occupation, and therefore all Palestinians must refrain from voting. But that will not stop me from criticizing the city government for disregarding the desires or expectations I thus refused to express.

Al-Quds has been an Islamic city since its conquest in the early eight century CE, and control of it cannot be relinquished - which means control by n non-Islamic entity must never be granted legitimacy. My peers and I will on principle never dignify the Zionist occupation of even a centimeter of this holy ground by setting foot in a Zionist-run polling place. And I will also enlist NGOs, a pliant media, and international bodies in railing against the city's elected government for neglecting the needs of the Arab residents who could have cast a vote for representatives to fight for them on the city council, but refused to do so.

It is a matter of integrity. I cannot in good conscience condone non-Islamic control of Jerusalem, and I cannot in good conscience abandon the Palestinian sense of entitlement that characterizes our behavior on the world stage. I might not engage in the political life of this city, but by thunder, am I going to lambaste those who do for failing to do the job I refuse to do.

The international media, of course, make it easy. They echo, even amplify, the assumption that we deserve to be served by the municipality as we wish, and paint our refusal to participate in the city's political administration as a noble position. Even some Israelis side with us on both points. Why should we change anything, then, if we get such sympathetic treatment in the public arena?

The icing on the cake, though, is when these NGOs and media people point to the inadequate services in Arab areas of the city - emergency medical services, firefighting, electrical infrastructure, sewage, plumbing, road maintenance, or what have you - and when the city or whoever does send people, those personnel get attacked because they're Jewish, or because they're acting on behalf of the illegitimate Jewish administration of the city. It's poetic in a way I find difficult to articulate.

In this week's municipal elections there were some residents of our neighborhoods who did participate, and one even ran for office. That cannot be allowed to continue! Getting our needs met by others without our having to take responsibility is an inseparable part of the Palestinian way of life. Any attempt to alter that constitutes an attempt to undermine our very culture and identity.

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10/31 Links Pt1: The West Must Stop Fetishizing Palestinian Extremists; Is UNRWA damaging the Palestinians?; Israel Helped Foil Plot to Assassinate Dissidents in Denmark

From Ian:

The West Must Stop Fetishizing Palestinian Extremists

He is bare-chested, muscular and not unattractive. A Palestinian flag blazes in one hand, a slingshot is strained taut in the other. All around him is smoke and press photographers. Aed Abu Amro, a 20-year-old Gazan, is rioting on the boundary between the Hamas-run statelet and Israel's southern frontier. Amro, who was snapped mid-rampage on Monday, has stirred that morbid romanticism which draws Western progressives to the Palestinians.

Newsweek gushed of "the now-iconic photo." The New Zealand Herald told its readers the image had "drawn comparisons with the iconic French Revolution painting, 'Liberty Leading the People,' by Eugene Delacroix." There is scarcely an anti-Israel agitator who has not tweeted, Facebooked or Instagrammed the picture. Depictions of heroic resistance rewrite the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a romantic epic in which righteous victims are ennobled by their oppression at the hands of inhuman tormentors.

Amro is the new Ahed Tamimi, the 17-year-old Palestinian jailed for eight months for assaulting Israeli soldiers. In a series of interviews with Tunisian media this month, she said: "We should always be slapping soldiers, wherever they may be, regardless of whether they did anything or not....We, as a generation, will fight for the liberation of Palestine in its entirety."

Tamimi will fight for the destruction of the world's only Jewish state, which is located, for those who still inhabit the fact-based community, on land to which Jews are indigenous, in which they alone have ever been sovereign, from which they were expelled, to which they returned, and upon which a rival Palestinian nationality so defined has staked a claim to nationhood for little more than a century and to statehood for around half that time.

Westerners have little time and even less comprehension for Palestinians who seek comity and compromise, who acknowledge Israel as the state of the Jewish people, who recognize Israel's legitimate security needs and who spurn the self-harming violence of their fellow Palestinians. The peacemakers exist but they do not capture the imagination of remote revolutionaries. They are the wrong kind of Palestinians.

Instead, Aed Abu Amro will be the face of Palestine and Tamimi its voice. The Palestinians will go on being pin-ups and go on being stateless.

Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz: Is UNRWA damaging the Palestinians?

Shmuel Rosner chats with Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz, the writers of the book “The War for the Palestinian Right of Return”, about the Palestinian refugees, the right of return and the existence of UNRWA.

Einat Wilf is a writer and a politician who served as a member of the Knesset for Independence and the Labor Party.

Adi Schwartz is a journalist and academic. A former staff writer for Haaretz, he currently works as a freelance journalist for Israeli and international newspapers and magazines. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

David Letterman visited Donald Trump in 1986, in what may have been Trump's first appearance on the show.

When Letterman visits Trump's office, there is a shot of the wall where Trump places various awards he had received.

Most prominent is the "Etz Chaim" award from some Jewish organization.

The words mean "Tree of Life."

I also remember during a season of The Apprentice, there were two religious Jews in the competition. When one of them was on a team that lost one week, one of his teammates tried to get him "fired" by pointing out that he didn't do much of the work on Saturday (the contestants would participate in meetings and such but wouldn't violate any Sabbath prohibitions.)

Trump's disdainful reaction was that he would never fire someone for adhering to his religious principles.

There is plenty to criticize Donald Trump about, including his not being forceful enough against white supremacists who openly praise him. But he is no antisemite, nor does he tolerate antisemitism. To politicize Pittsburgh into another reason to bash Trump as a tacit Jew-hater is disgusting.

No matter what The Forward says.

There is nothing wrong with analyzing why antisemitism exists in America. There is something very wrong about jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

Mourn and remember the dead. Don't use them as a prop to push your political agenda. Don't congratulate yourself for attending an anti-Trump rally and pretend that somehow you have done something about the problem.

The problem isn't Trump - it is antisemitism. It is real. It exists on the right and on the left, it exists in some streams of Christianity and Islam, it exists among atheists and the fervent believers, it can be found among the educated as well as the ignorant. White people and people of color can be and are antisemites.

If you want to fight it, look for the strain that is in the group you identify with and fight it there. Don't sit back and pretend that it is only a problem with your political opponents. If you think that, you are fooling yourself - and you are part of the problem.

(h/t Eric)

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Using media logic, I just "proved" that Obama encouraged violence against Jews!

Yesterday I pointed out that antisemitic hate crimes may have soared far more than the 57% increase in antisemitic incidents that the ADL reported on for 2017.

We won't know whether my analysis is true until the FBI releases its hate crimes report for 2017.

But right now there are lots of pundits who are linking Trump with the 2017 increase in incidents. One prominent example:

I will add, though, that it is not a coincidence that the number of anti-Semitic attacks has jumped nearly 60% in 2017—the biggest one-year increase in recent history—while this administration has systematically pulled back resources from countering domestic extremism.
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) October 29, 2018

This is a classic example of a "questionable cause logical fallacy," known as "cum hoc ergo propter hoc." Just because Trump is president during a rise in reported antisemitic incidents does not mean that he is the cause of such a rise.

As my analysis showed, the biggest increase of antisemitic hate crimes came from a huge increase in vandalism. But the number of assaults against Jews - the most serious category the ADL tracks - went up dramatically when Obama was in office and has gone down significantly since Trump has been president.

Using the "logic" that we have been seeing since the Pittsburgh massacre, we can conclude that Obama was responsible for the huge increase in assaults against Jews in the US - if we were to make up a reason, perhaps as he tried to push the Iran deal and conservative Jews were against it.

Taking that same "logic" further, Trump must be responsible for the dramatic decrease in assaults against Jews in 2017.

These arguments are obviously absurd. But they are just as absurd as the arguments that are being accepted by the mainstream media, taking it as a given that the increase in less-violent crimes in 2017 is Trump's fault.

The president can influence behavior, of course. But so can the news media, TV shows, hit songs and YouTube stars. Drawing conclusions based on limited information is simply wrong, and it is shameful that so many people who should know better have fallen for one of the most well known logical fallacies - correlation does not imply causation.

(I tweeted this last night.)

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The Gaza Ministry of Health issued a statement about the critical shortage of immunosuppressant and other drugs in Gaza, jeopardizing the health and life of hundreds of patients who have had successful kidney transplants.

Without those drugs, the patients may have to return to going on dialysis, their new kidneys becoming useless.

There are 333 kidney transplant patients in Gaza, and hundreds more with renal failure who need medicines desperately.

While the Gaza Health Ministry did not place any blame for the lack of medicines, the Palestinian Authority has been limiting medicines to Gaza for over 18 months.

The ministry appealed to international organizations to help fill the shortfall.

Israel does not have any restrictions on medicines to Gaza. Nevertheless, the UK-based pan-Arab news site Al Araby (The New Arab in English) blames Israel anyway, falsely blaming the "blockade" on the lack of medicines.

Apparently, pressuring the PA is not considered productive. The fact that Abbas is so eager to put his people's lives at risk barely ranks as an issue in the West.

If he is willing to have his own people die for the sake of his political goals, why does anyone seriously think he can be trusted when he claims he wants peace with Israel?

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10/30 Links Pt2: Ben Shapiro: How to Fight Anti-Semitism; Doctor: First Three People to Treat Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooter at Hospital Were Jews

From Ian:

Ben Shapiro: How to Fight Anti-Semitism

Understanding the particular nature of anti-Semitism requires fighting it wherever it exists. Believing that anti-Semitism is merely a symptom of generalized bigotry, by contrast, allows the parsing of anti-Semitism — and its sublimation into broader political conversations regarding hierarchies of power and privilege.

Take, for example, the anti-Semitic murder of Jews in Israel. The first theory of anti-Semitism suggests that such murder is the byproduct of radical Islamic anti-Semitism — and that such anti-Semitism isn’t driven by socioeconomic concerns, but by hatred of Jews. The death of a Jew in Pittsburgh at the hands of a white supremacist is driven by the same basic issues as the death of a Jew in Jerusalem at the hands of a member of Hamas.

The second theory of anti-Semitism suggests that such murder isn’t actually about Jewishness per se. In fact, such murder may be completely different than the anti-Semitic murder of a Jew in Pittsburgh. The solution, therefore, isn’t fighting anti-Semitism, but catering to its underlying causes. The first theory leads to a policy of staunch opposition to Palestinian terrorism and Iranian Jew-hatred; the second policy leads to a policy of appeasement and diplomacy with Palestinian terrorism and Iranian Jew-hatred.

The same logic holds true of anti-Semitism in Europe. The first theory suggests that such anti-Semitism is part of an age-old hatred of the Jewish people; the second theory suggests that anti-Semitism is merely a byproduct of Israeli policy.

To properly understand America, and to properly fight anti-Semitism, we must understand that the first theory of anti-Semitism is correct; the second is wrong.

The second theory actually feeds anti-Semitism: If hatred of Jews isn’t special, then why are Jews constantly in the headlines? It must be their outsized power and influence, brought about by structural inequities. Where fighting anti-Semitism conflicts with fighting other forms of bigotry, fighting anti-Semitism takes a back seat.
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The first theory recognizes the amazing nature of America: a country founded on religious freedom, and on tolerance. We’ve strayed from that mission all too often — but the Jews are a success story.

Furthermore, the first theory recognizes that anti-Semitism is something different — and that it ought to be treated as such. That doesn’t mean that the interests of Jews ought to take precedence over those of other groups, of course — that would be ethnocentric and idiotic. But it does mean that Jew-hatred can’t be curbed by generalized progressive policy prescriptions. It must be fought at every turn.

Making Pittsburgh shooting about Trump diminishes problem of anti-Semitism

Even before we knew many details about the horrific slaughter of 11 Jews on Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, critics were rushing to make the shooting about President Trump — in some cases, going to the lengths of blaming pro-Israel Jews who support Trump.

Now, there’s plenty to criticize in Trump’s rhetoric — something I have consistently done since I condemned Mitt Romney in 2012 for accepting his endorsement and that I continued to do through the 2016 election and into his presidency. But by trying to turn this attack into a referendum on Trump and his supporters, critics are only diminishing the much broader problem of anti-Semitism and ensuring that it gets swept under the rug. The sense one gets from reading a lot of media coverage is somehow, if we could just throw out Trump and his enablers, suddenly the problem will go away.

The reality is that anti-Semitism is an evil that has been with us for thousands of years and, despite the great blessings of freedom and religious liberty enjoyed by Jews here, it existed in America long before Trump entered the political scene. If we only talk about anti-Semitism within the limited context of Trump, we will fail to understand and combat it.

Since the FBI started keeping data in 1996 and through 2016 (the most recent year for which statistics were available and the year prior to Trump’s presidency), there were 19,023 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded. That represented about two-thirds of all religious hate crimes in the U.S. — a shocking statistic considering that Jews only make up about 2 percent of the population. Those crimes occurred under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

It’s common for Jews to navigate armed guards, police, and metal detectors when going to worship at synagogues, drop their children off at Jewish daycare centers, or attend activities at local Jewish community centers.

Caroline Glick: 'Left-Wing Jews' Blaming Trump for Pittsburgh 'Are Dishonoring the Dead'

Breitbart News’s Caroline Glick said left-wing Jews blaming President Donald Trump for inciting Saturday’s mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue are “dishonoring the dead” and “dishonoring the cause of fighting anti-Semitism.” She offered her remarks in a Monday interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

Glick said, “It would’ve been good if the Jewish community in the United States and the national leadership, instead of pronouncing these milquetoast things that we all need to be more civil in our tone, would say, ‘No, we have to be less civil to anti-Semites. We have to be less civil to people who want to annihilate the Jewish people [and] the Jewish state.'”

Glick added, “But what we’re finding, particularly among left-wing Jews is that they’re using it to attack the administration and trying to conflate the Nazi who committed this massacre with President Trump. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth.”

Glick noted an article published at the Atlantic by Franklin Foer, a Jewish writer accusing Trump of inciting anti-Semitism. Foer also called for the shunning of other Jews supporting Trump:

In Donald Trump’s abhorrence for globalism and in his inability to smack down David Duke, it was easy to hear the ominous chords of history, to see how he was activating dormant hatreds with his conspiratorial tropes.

Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.

Just disgusting. @hrw's Mideast Director @sarahleah1 retweets rabid antisemite. Tweet is full of blatantly false statements. Remember this next time @kenroth asks you to take their #Israel reports seriously pic.twitter.com/ieSayRVat5
— NGO Monitor (@ngomonitor) October 30, 2018

The hardest part of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life massacre, for those of us with roots in Squirrel Hill, was waiting for the names. In Israel, we’re resigned to the idea that we must wait for the inevitable roll call of victims after every terror attack. And even though the wait seems interminable we know that it’s about the need to inform the families first before releasing the information to the press. You don’t want to find out the worst possible news by reading about it online or hearing it on TV, God forbid.

But the lack of information creates a terrible anxiety for those who know they might be touched by tragedy—it’s just that they just don’t know it yet.

And here was my idyllic childhood neighborhood, splashed all over the news. Though I left Pittsburgh at 18 to live in Israel, that anxiety was not lessened by time or proximity. I obsessed, went from website to website, watching the live coverage and footage for hours, shocked to see streets as familiar to me as my own face in the mainstream media, no matter where I turned. Every major outlet was covering this story.

It’s not like I’m from a place that everyone’s heard of, a big, busy city like Boston or LA. When people ask where I’m from, and I tell them, their expectant faces go blank. They literally have nothing to say. They don’t know anyone from Pittsburgh. They’ve never heard of someone from Pittsburgh. The most they usually manage is a bland and meaningless, “Aha,” or “Very nice.”

I took a screenshot of the Google map at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with its marker showing the location of Tree of Life. I added a small red circle to show where the home I grew up in was situated relative to the synagogue. I wanted to show my family members. “Look how close I lived to what has happened!”

Distance from Tree of Life to my childhood home

I needed to make them feel just how personal this was.

As if they didn’t know.

Actually, it was my soldier son who saw the news first and called us before we’d even said Havdalah. He was worried that my brother, his uncle, might be among the victims. At least on that score, I was able to reassure him. My brother is orthodox. He wouldn’t have been there on that terrible day.

But what my kids couldn’t possibly take in was what Squirrel Hill means to me, what it symbolizes in my heart. It’s the place where you could walk at night without fear, and leave the side door unlocked. It’s the old fashioned soda fountain at Mr. Frye’s drugstore on the corner of Northumberland and my street, Asbury Place, where you could get a chocolate phosphate or a cherry coke, way into the 70s.

We didn’t actually buy our drugs at that drugstore, there were cheaper places for that. But we all bought our penny candy there. My mom would give me a penny and I would press my nose to the glass, to make that agonizing, all important choice. Usually, I would buy a vanilla Tootsie Roll or perhaps dots, those pastel candies you scraped off the paper with your teeth. Occasionally, I even bought one of those wax bottles filled with sweet liquid. But best of all was Turkish Taffy, preferably banana flavor. You’d slam it on the sidewalk outside the drugstore, still in its wrapper, in order to break the rock hard candy into manageable pieces. Then you’d share the sweet shards with your friends, and play on the monkey bars, which is what we called the heavy copper guard rails next to the steps that led from the raised Northumberland shopping area to the sidewalk below.

Perhaps those double bars were meant to keep people from falling off and getting hurt, but to us, they were an entire playground in and of themselves, though they were only about 4 feet high and 6 feet long. We’d wrap ourselves around them and swing in all kinds of creative ways. All the while gorging ourselves on candy.

When we got bored with swinging on the monkey bars, we’d go across the street to the combination police and fire station and chat with the firemen, who in nice weather, would sit outside. They knew our names, which is why every time I walked by, one of them would break into song, “I dream of Jeannie with the light bro-own hair.”

My hair was blond, but my middle name was Jean. That was close enough.

The policemen, if we begged long enough and hard enough, would consent to lock us up in one of the three holding cells. That was the best of times. We’d bang on the bars with a tin cup and beg to be released, wanting to stay in as long as we possibly could. And between the fire station and the residential section of the street was this shady little alleyway where we could seek respite from the summer sun or hide during hide and go seek.

Sometimes, we’d go visit the little Italian shoemaker. He didn’t speak English very well, but he always smiled at us. One time my mom brought in a pair of Ferragamo shoes to be repaired and his eyes lit up with delight. In halting English, he told my mother that he had worked in the Ferragamo factory in Italy, it was there he’d learned his craft. He was so happy, caressing the leather of those shoes, looking back on his youth. He could fix shoes in any state of disrepair. He was a magician.

And then there was Zuckerman’s, the little mom and pop store. My mom could send me down the street to buy things. I’d collect the items, wait my turn and when old Mrs. Zuckerman rang up my bill, I’d nonchalantly say, “Charge it.”

After Mrs. Zuckerman died, her son opened a children’s shoe store inside of Newman’s, a children’s clothing shop on Forbes Ave. It turned out that all along, he’d dreamed of having a children’s shoe store. And Mr. Zuckerman was the best children’s shoe salesman ever! He just blossomed in that store. It made us so happy to see him that way.

Back on Asbury Place, there were trees on the street that I loved to peel, the bark coming off in such pleasing segments. There were cracks in the sidewalk where I liked to dig with a stick. I liked to find potato bugs and watch them curl and unfurl, or at night, in summer, to hold a lightning bug in my hand, and see it flash so quietly, by magic.

If the delights of Asbury Place failed to interest, there was always Ferree Street, which was a brick-paved street that ran straight into my home. I loved the moment when my mom drove up Ferree, and hesitated at the rise, where our home became suddenly visible with its red brick siding and gated staircase, painted white. Only then would we begin the slow descent to the bottom of the street and pull into the driveway of our home. It was like a breathless royal entrance. As if we approached a palace with a moat.

My mother and I posing before my piano recital in front of our home at 1523 Asbury Place.

The children of Asbury and Ferree were natural playmates and companions. The two streets were the boundaries of our friendships, for the most part. We played stickball, and put on shows. Played in each other homes.

Children from Asbury Place pose together on Ferree Street. Front row left, the author, right Miles Kirshner, back row from left, the author's sister Margery Haber, Bruce Landman, Jonnie Daniels (photo credit: Howie Daniels--he snapped this with his Brownie!)

This was my neighborhood, a place where during the High Holidays, everyone got dressed in their nice clothes and walked to shul. We’d see each other and notice what we were wearing. We got Hershey bars on Simchas Torah, and left the shul during Yizkor, when we’d find all sorts of secret corridors inside Beth Shalom Synagogue, a place where my parents had met and married, where my mom, as a little girl took dance classes in the basement from Gene Kelly, his imperious mom holding out her hand for each child’s nickel every week.

It was a hardship for my grandmother, during the Depression, to come up with the money for those lessons, but miracle of miracles, a year of lessons with Gene cured my mom, who started out bow-legged and ended up with legs to envy. It was no surprise to anyone that Gene went to Hollywood and became famous.

My parents on their wedding day, in front of my grandparents' house on Alderson Street, in Squirrel Hill.

This was my neighborhood, and the names of the people in that neighborhood were a part of my consciousness, going way back. And now I was waiting to hear which of those wonderful people, woven into the very fabric of my being, had been brutally murdered, just for being Jews in shul.

And when the dreaded names were announced at last, there it was, the person whose name I knew. Rose Mallinger, 97. Rose Mallinger of Ferree Street, a contemporary of my mother, whose children, now grown, had played stickball in the street with my brother.

The knowledge brought no relief. A gunman had taken actual aim at an inoffensive senior, stealing what was left of her life and those of ten other harmless, blameless people (including brothers with intellectual disabilities). In so doing, Robert Bowers, may his name and memory be erased, had not just committed murder, targeting some of the weakest sectors of society, he’d violated the very sanctity of a neighborhood, where Jews had been happy, had always felt right at home.

People are always kind and careful in the aftermath, reaching out with notes or messages. They’d never really thought about Pittsburgh before. But they saw this was huge and painful.

I can’t take you back to my childhood with me, to the streets where I played, where Rose Mallinger, seeing it was getting dark outside, would call to her children to come inside, it’s getting late. All I can do is rehash the memories before you, and mourn the end of an era.

The Jews of Squirrel Hill were safe for 100 years. And then, one day, they were not.

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10/30 Links Pt1: Glick: Jordan's King Abdullah -- Weak, Untrustworthy, and Irreplaceable; No disguising Abbas' anti-Semitism; Restore deterrence in Gaza now

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Jordan's King Abdullah -- Weak, Untrustworthy, and Irreplaceable

It is an open secret, seldom discussed, that the regime of King Abdullah II of Jordan is extraordinarily weak.

He is viewed in the U.S. as a close ally, whose counsel is sought by senior officials and foreign policy practitioners. But more than an ally, Abdullah is a dependent. Without the U.S. — and to a similar degree, without Israel — the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan would not long survive.

The weakness of the Kingdom has two sources. First, Jordan is poor. It lacks natural resources, and due to the regime’s failure to liberalize the economy or reform the legal system in order to cultivate economic growth and productivity, there are few opportunities for private advancement. The average Jordanian lives in poverty. Per capita income in Jordan is $3,238 per year.

The second source of the Kingdom’s weakness is the unpopularity of the regime. The Hashemites are Beduins. They were installed as monarchs of the area by the British in the aftermath of World War I. The vast majority of the population is Palestinian, not Beduin. The Palestinian majority in Jordan is systematically discriminated against by the regime. That regime-based discrimination has escalated steeply in recent years. Palestinians have been ejected from the military and denied the right to work in various professions.

The Hashemite regime is based on an alliance it built with the other Beduin tribes east of the Jordan River. But the bonds between the Hashemites and the other Beduin tribes have been steadily eroding. Over the past year, the Beduin have been leading mass, countrywide protests against the regime. They demand the transformation of the monarchy from an effective dictatorship, where Abdullah controls all aspects of the government, into a constitutional monarchy along the lines of the British monarchy. Several of the tribes are allied with Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda.

The weakness of the Kingdom of Jordan is the cause of King Abdullah’s abrupt announcement on Sunday that Jordan is canceling two annexes of the 1994 peace treaty it signed with Israel. The annexes in question set the terms for Israel’s 25-year lease of lands along the border with Jordan, at the Tzofar enclave in the Arava desert in Israel’s south, and at the so-called Isle of Peace at Naharayim, adjacent to the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel.

No disguising Abbas' anti-Semitism

One can feign understanding for Abbas' ability to ‎defraud the Israeli Left, and even for his resolve ‎to keep paying terrorists' stipends, but one cannot ‎accept the malevolence of a Holocaust denier like ‎Abbas when he tries to belittle the Jewish tragedy ‎by repeatedly enlisting the number "6 million" to ‎inflate his bogus claim of refugees. Arabs who fled Israel during its 1948 War of Independence numbered, at most, around 700,000.

When piercing the motivation of sanctimonious ‎Holocaust deniers and examining their arguments ‎against Israel one always circles back to their ‎anti-Semitism. Some boycott "only" the "occupation"; ‎some disguise their desire to destroy us with their ‎‎"profound concern" for the Palestinians; some ‎boycott Israel out of "concern for its fate"; and ‎some "only target Zionists, not Jews."‎

But getting to the core of the multilayered facade ‎of these "lovers of Zion" is akin to pulling apart a ‎matryoshka doll, whose hollow core houses wooden ‎dolls of decreasing size. It is only in the very ‎last piece that the truth – pure anti-Semitism – ‎lies. ‎

The matryoshka doll principle also applies to the ‎mudslinging between the Israeli Right and Left. ‎Beyond the Left's grudges and false claims about ‎political failures and corruption, the heart of the ‎matter – the smallest doll, if you will – is the ‎Left's regret that time and again it cannot regain ‎the reins of power. ‎

And last but by all means not least: The Pittsburgh ‎synagogue shooting demonstrated that Jews are being ‎killed simply for being Jews. A gunman does not stop ‎to check if one is a BDS supporter, a virulent ‎critic of Israel in the U.N., a New Israel Fund ‎lobbyist or merely a naive ideologue. Your death may ‎be banal, just because you are a Jew.‎

Mahmoud Abbas: We Will Continue to Pay The Families Of Martyrs, Prisoners, And The Wounded

Speaking at a PLO Central Council meeting, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that the Palestinian government will continue to pay salaries to the families of martyrs, prisoners, and wounded Palestinians, even if salaries are subtracted from Palestinian money held by Israel. He said that the families are sacred, and stated: "Even if we only have one cent left, it should go to them and not to the living." Abbas also denied the claim that there are only 40,000 Palestinian refugees left, and said that today there are six million Palestinian refugees. Abbas' remarks aired on Palestine TV on October 28, 2018.

Reports indicate that Mahmoud Abba has dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council.

This was anticipated, as Al Monitor reported last week:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is moving toward dissolving the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in a legally questionable step. The amended Palestinian Basic Law of 2003 does not grant the president or any official Palestinian committee the power to dissolve the PLC.

Abbas’ move would remove any remaining authority and power Hamas has in the PLC, where it won the majority of seats in the last parliamentary elections in 2006. Such a move would further deepen the Palestinian division between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Fatah’s Revolutionary Council led by Abbas issued a statement Oct. 14 after the council had been convening over three consecutive days in Ramallah. In the statement, the Revolutionary Council called on the PLO's Palestinian Central Council (PCC), which is also led by Abbas, to dissolve the PLC and prepare for general elections in the Palestinian territories within a year.

The PLC acts as a parliament that is elected during general elections. It is considered one of the institutions of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The PCC is one of the PLO’s institutions that was behind the decision to create the PA in 1993. The PCC is in charge of monitoring the PLO’s Executive Committee that is responsible for implementing the decision of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). The PNC is considered the parliament of the PLO. The PCC also follows up on the work of PLO institutions and submits its resolutions to the Executive Committee for implementation. The PCC members are chosen during elections among the PNC members.

The Basic Law and its 2003 amendments does not grant the PCC or any other party or person the right to dissolve the PLC. Article 113 of the law states, “The Palestinian Legislative Council may not be dissolved or its work hindered during a state of emergency, nor shall the provisions of this title be suspended.”

The JCPA adds:

As a matter of fact, as far as Ramallah is concerned, this body has already finished its life. It has not convened since Hamas captured Gaza, and Fatah “rogue” delegates are arrested despite the fact that they are immune from arrest.

Abbas seeks to terminate the council formally to avoid legal claims by Hamas’ “speaker,” Aziz Dweik, that he is the rightful successor to Mahmoud Abbas in an interim period. Fatah will not let that happen at all costs.

Many of the delegates didn't even show up at this week's "important" PLO Central Committee meeting, which can't do anything without Abbas' support anyway.

The idea that Abbas is anything other than a dictator is a joke.

Palestine Today gives another reason Abbas wants to dissolve the PLC: Hamas complained to the UN that Abbas should not give a speech representing all Palestinians in September, because the PLC is headed by Hamas. Abbas wants revenge.

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