Faisal al Qassem is a popular host of an Al Jazeera TV debate show "The Opposite Direction" and is celebrated as being willing to break taboos in the Arab world. His Twitter account has over 5.5 million followers.
Ha - The majority of Arabs, if they want to insult you, describe you as "Zionist", while knowing that the most successful project of the last century and the present is the Zionist project, while all Arab projects, especially those of the Arab nationalists, have failed. That's why, dear, before you use the word Zionist as a curse, you must first reach the shoes of Zionism and then we can talk.
When you read the Arab comments against the Zionists on Twitter and how sharp they are, the impression is that the Arab tanks are at the gates of Jerusalem, while their rulers lick the shoes of the Zionists under the table in order to keep them happy and keep themselves in their thrones, the last of which is the General of Sudan who sold the "Three no's" [of Khartoum] with a crust of bread and rushed to meet [Netanyahu] like the hired help.
People protested his comments, calling them Zionist, to which he responded:
As you can see, nearly 82% of his followers agree that Zionism has been more successful than Arab nationalism.
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This passage is from the very beginning of an article in the Fatah website denying any Jewish connection, and claiming ancient Palestinian ties, to Jerusalem:
"Hundreds of millions of Muslims across the globe have no doubt that Palestine is Arab from eternity, and that Jerusalem is its eternal capital ... and that there is no meaning to Palestine without Jerusalem, no meaning to Jerusalem without the Al-Aqsa Mosque, no meaning to the Al-Aqsa Mosque without the Al-Buraq Wall..."
The "Al Buraq Wall" is what Palestinians have called the Kotel, the Western Wall, for only the past century. Before that there was no consensus of which wall surrounding the Temple Mount was considered to be the one that Mohammed supposedly entered in his night journey, although evidence points strongly to the southern wall, with its double gate, as described by Charles D. Matthews in 1932:
The evidence of Muqaddasi (985 A. D.), a citizen of Jerusalem itself, is unquestionably for the southern location. Muqaddasi speaks of the “Two gates of the Prophet,” Babai an-Nabi, in such a way as to make the identification with the Double Gate quite positive. The descriptions of Nasir-i-Khusrau, a Persian historian who visited Jerusalem in 1047 A. D., is quite arresting. He says (as quoted by the English scholar Le Strange, in his very excellent book, “Palestine Under the Moslems,” p. 178) : “One such as these (gates) is called Bab an-Nabi (or the Gate of the Prophet)-peace and blessing upon him, which opens toward the Qiblah point-that is, toward the south (toward Mecca). . . . The Prophet. . . on the night of his ascent into heaven passed into the Noble Sanctuary through this passageway, for the gateway opens on the road from Makkah.” What could be clearer? And from the hand of a Jerusalemite and reputable historian!
Either way, no Muslim would ever say that the Buraq Wall is more sacred than the Al Aqsa Mosque. To say that the mosque has no meaning without the Kotel - the one place that Jews have venerated for centuries when banned from even visiting the Temple Mount itself - is proof positive that the entire Palestinian narrative is a series of lies.
Is there any clearer evidence that the entire Palestinian claim is not meant to assert any historic or legal rights, but to destroy Jewish rights? Literally every Jewish shrine in the Holy Land is claimed by the Palestinians to be their own, which is a hell of a coincidence. And they have been strident in saying that the Kotel was theirs as well, the Palestinian TV only recently telling viewers that Palestinians must defend their rights to the site with their lives.
The rest of the Fatah article is filled with such lies, as in this section still in the first paragraph, where it says "history proves that Palestine with its capital, Jerusalem, is Arab before the feet of the first Jew entered (Joshua bin Nun.)" The Palestinians now claim to be descended from the Jebusites, a tribe that has no evidence of existence beyond the Jewish Scriptures, who have no evidence of being Arab.
Beyond the obvious fact that Jerusalem wasn't the capital of any other nation besides Israel/Judah and there was never a "Palestine."
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Furthermore, the movement may present itself as peaceful, but there have been countless cases of its activists creating hostile and potentially dangerous environments for Jewish people on university campuses. BDS supporters will counter these claims by pointing to the movement’s 2018 Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Yet this nomination means very little. The BDS movement was nominated by Norwegian parliamentarian Bjørnar Moxnes — the chairman of the far-left Red Party, which holds a single seat of 169 in the Norwegian parliament. This nomination is a farce, and means nothing.
What’s more important is BDS’ constant link to known terrorist organizations. One such example of this is the global leadership of the BDS operation — the BDS National Committee’s — membership. which includes the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, which itself includes several groups designated as terrorist organizations, such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In addition to this, tens of financial accounts linked to BDS have been shut down in the US and EU in the past few years, due to ties with terrorist groups. In an interview from late 2010, even Barghouti has spoken in support of violent attacks on “settlers” (i.e. civilians), calling them “legitimate targets.”
The BDS movement has consistently been linked with terrorist organizations, and its supporters have become aggressive and violent towards any and all who disagree with their view of Israel. The methods that the movement urges show little regard for hurting civilians, even Palestinian ones — all the while, creating a divide between Israeli people and Palestinians.
There is a good reason why so many world leaders, prominent politicians and government institutions view BDS as toxic, given the actions of its followers. BDS does not belong in any conversation about anti-racism.
Warren's eagerness to back the AIPAC boycott movement did not come as a surprise to mainstream pro-Israel Democrats, who say they have long been battling efforts by the party's left wing to mainstream anti-Israel causes.
One Jewish Democratic operative with ties to AIPAC told the Washington Free Beacon that IfNotNow's influence on the party is becoming increasingly problematic.
"There are many reasons for [Warren] not to attend AIPAC's Policy Conference, but getting pressured by an extremist group is not one of them," said the source, who would only discuss the matter anonymously. "IfNotNow has no place in anything close to the mainstream political discourse, including within the Democratic primary."
The push to boycott AIPAC is by no means new. Liberal advocacy groups have long viewed AIPAC as overly hawkish on Israel and out of line with the Democratic Party's evolving stance on the Jewish state. Liberal mainstays like the anti-war MoveOn group have demanded Democratic leaders boycott Israel for some time. This has dovetailed with growing support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which seeks to wage economic warfare on Israel.
Support for these movements has been building in the Democratic Party for years, with one of the most notable examples playing out at the 2012 convention, when a majority of Democratic conference goers audibly booed the state of Israel.
An AIPAC spokesman would not comment on the issue when contacted by the Free Beacon.
Tonight, Elizabeth Warren nodded along and smiled as a questioner slandered AIPAC as "an unholy alliance" of "Islamophobes," "anti-semites, and white nationalists" that perpetuates "bigotry"
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued an apology on Saturday after sponsoring a Facebook ad that slammed “radicals in the Democratic Party” and blamed them for “pushing their antisemitic policies down the throats of the American people.” It also called supporters to sign a letter to Democrats in Congress “don’t abandon Israel.”
According to the Facebook ad details, between 25,000 and 30,000 people saw it and AIPAC paid between $1,000 to $1,500 to promote in on the social media platform, primarily for people ages 55 and above. The ad is no longer active.
“We offer our unequivocal apology to the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress who are rightfully offended by the inaccurate assertion that the poorly worded, inflammatory advertisement implied,” AIPAC said in a statement that was shared on Twitter on Saturday.
“We deeply appreciate the broad and reliable support that Democrats in Congress have consistently demonstrated for Israel. The bipartisan consensus that Democrats and Republicans have established on this issue forms the foundation of the US-Israel relationship,” the statement read.
“The ad, which is no longer running, alluded to a genuine concern of many pro-Israel Democrats about a small but growing group, in and out of Congress, that is deliberately working to erode the bipartisan consensus on this issue and undermine the US-Israel relationship,” the apology continued.
Now the American Jewish Left is using this World Zionist Congress election to try to turn the financial support of the Jewish people against Israel, and they’re not even trying to hide it.
Reporting on the election, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained,
The list includes names like Peter Beinart, the liberal writer; Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Middle East policy group J Street; and Sheila Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women.
No, it’s not an ad for a symposium on the Upper East Side, but a slate of first-time candidates seeking seats in the 38th World Zionist Congress, the legislative authority of a 120-year-old Zionist organization that helps determine the fate of $1 billion in spending on Jewish causes.
The candidates hope to steer funding away from Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and toward causes like expanding rights for women and minorities. The second paragraph of the group’s platform notes its opposition to “the current policy of permanent occupation and annexation,” which it calls “unjust” and a threat to Israeli democracy.
Liberal Jewish groups already hold a majority of the American Jewish community’s 145 seats in the congress, but they have mainly used them to advocate for more religious pluralism in Israel. The new candidates hope to nudge those groups toward addressing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank more directly and to registering the unhappiness of the American Jewish community with the status quo there.
“My view of the American Jewish establishment and the Zionist establishment is that it is morally corrupt by defending the indefensible, for defending an occupation that holds millions of people occupied,” Beinart said in an interview.
Not content to allow politicized leftists take over the Congress and the money it could allocate, more right-leaning (religiously and politically) Jews are pushing back. In his endorsement of one of the slates, the Orthodox Israel Coalition, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro explained, “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish groups like J Street have mobilized to direct funding toward causes that run directly counter to the interests of the organization, including support of BDS.”
It remains to be seen how effective this effort will be to hijack a billion dollars in money meant to support Israel, not undermine it. This little-known election could have far-reaching and disastrous ramifications for Israeli security for years to come if liberals get their way.
We’re extremely concerned about what will happen if the ZOA Coalition does not do well in this WZC election.
Our opponents used the power they obtained in previous WZC elections to stop Israel’s national institutions from purchasing lands in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and even in the Negev. This anti-Jewish discrimination could become even worse.
Shockingly, at the most recent World Zionist Congress, our opponents tried to pass a resolution smearing Israel’s tolerant, multi-faceted society as replete with “institutional racism.” We were only able to defeat this resolution — which reminded us of the notorious 1975 United Nations “Zionism is racism” resolution — by one vote.
An opposition group now openly says that it is running in the WZC election to “divert” the $1 billion per year of Israel’s national institution funding “away from the entrenchment of the occupation.”
“Occupation” is a false propaganda term used to attack Jewish persons’ rights to continue living on historic Jewish lands designated for the Jewish homeland under international law. Anti-Israel boycott groups use the term “occupation” to demonize Israel. It is frightening that groups running in the WZC election are using the same rallying cry.
The ZOA Coalition (slate #11) needs many more votes now, so that the next attempt to use the World Zionist Congress to smear Israel has no chance of passing. The full slate includes the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Aish HaTorah, Students Supporting Israel, NORPAC, The Lawfare Project, American Friends of Likud, Dov Hikind’s Americans Against Antisemitism, One Israel Fund, Young Jewish Conservatives, Z Street, American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, American Friends of Likud, Chovevei Zion, Eretz Israel Movement, National Conference on Jewish Affairs, major Russian-Jewish and Persian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish groups, Beta Israel, and more.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., raised eyebrows on Thursday night for appearing to agree with a town hall attendee that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is an "unholy alliance" of "Islamophobes, anti-Semites, and white nationalists."
At a New Hampshire event, a woman who describes herself as an "American Jew" expressed her disdain for the pro-Israel group and asked whether or not Warren would vow not to attend the upcoming annual conference in March.
"I'm an American Jew and I'm terrified by the unholy alliance that AIPAC is forming with Islamophobes and anti-Semites and white nationalists," the attendee began. "And no Democrat should legitimize that kind of bigotry by attending their annual policy conference."
Warren nodded along as she took a swig from her water bottle.
The attendee continued. "I'm really grateful that you skipped the AIPAC conference last year and so my question is if you'll join me in committing to skip the AIPAC conference this year."
"Yeah," Warren simply replied and waved off the attendee.
She later said about her views on U.S.-Israel relations, "For America to be a good ally of Israel and the Palestinians we need to get both parties to the table. We're not getting that if we just stand with one party."
The Warren campaign did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
Warren, who previously attended other AIPAC events in recent years, was one of several prominent 2020 candidates who boycotted the annual conference last year. Meanwhile, top Democratic lawmakers like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. attended the conference last year.
It keeps getting worse. As the 2020 Dems get more & more anti-Israel, will any of them stand up and condemn comments like these? Directly? Or are they too scared of the angry anti-Semitic Left? https://t.co/bUTRA4STxz
I almost hate to mention this because the situation is always precarious, but unless I'm mistaken it has been nearly six months since any Israeli was killed in a terror attack.
The last victim was Rina Shnerb, 17, killed by an IED on August 23, 2019.
That attack was done by the PFLP - the same PFLP who is linked to anti-Israel NGO DCI-Palestine in news over the past couple of days. The PFLP is linked to a number of NGOs to use them as another avenue to attack Israel under the guise of human rights.
Needless to say, none of the PFLP-linked NGOs said a word against Rina's murder.
Still, a six month stretch without a terrorist murder in Israel is quite unusual; the last time I can see a stretch that long was seven months between October 29, 2011 (Moshe Ami, 56, rocket hitting Ashkelon) and June 1, 2012 (Staff-Sgt Netanel Moshiashvili, 21, shot on patrol near Gaza).
Let's hope the current streak continues for a long, long time.
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Palestinian leaders were handed a great and unexpected victory in late 2016 when President Obama facilitated the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334. It asserts that there is "no legal basis" for Israeli claims to the West Bank – for centuries known as Judea and Samaria – including even the 2,000-year-old Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, and the ancient Jewish holy sites of the Temple Mount.
If that were true, on what basis would Israelis have a right to anything – even a right to exist?
And if that's the verdict not just of Israel's enemies but even of the "international community" including the US, why should Palestinian leaders compromise? Why accept less than Israel's surrender and a new Jewish exile – to be called, for public relations purposes, an "end to occupation"?
By putting forward a plan that licenses Israelis, should they face continued Palestinian rejectionism, to alter facts on the ground through annexations, President Trump has changed the dynamic – at least for now.
Perhaps the next Palestinian Authority leader will be pragmatic enough to recognize that in the contemporary Middle East, where Iran's Shia imperialists pose an existential threat to their neighbors, it's time to relinquish the dream of a Palestine that is Jew-free from the river to the sea.
That does not mean acquiescing to everything President Trump and Kushner packed into their 180-page plan. It does mean resuming negotiations with Israelis, perhaps putting a counteroffer on the table and, for the first time ever, transitioning from "resisting" the Jewish state to building a Palestinian state – a real state, with functioning institutions, not a failed state kept afloat by the "donor community."
To do that would give birth to something that for generations has existed only in our imaginations: a peace process.
On Wednesday morning, NeverTrump propagandist Bill Kristol told his MSNBC audience that Democratic chances of victory over US President Donald Trump will rise if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated in Israel's elections on March 2.
Along the same lines, if Netanyahu fails to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before the election, not only will he almost certainly lose those elections, his defeat will bury Trump's peace plan and harm Trump's reelection chances.
To understand why this is the case it is first necessary to understand the nature of the Blue and White party and its relationship to Trump and his peace plan.
After Trump's peace plan was published, Israelis discovered significant problems with the map attached to the plan. Among other things, the map places large sections of Highway 60, which crosses Judea and Samaria from south to north outside Israeli jurisdiction. If left uncorrected, the designation will endanger the security of tens of thousands of Israelis whose communities will be rendered isolated enclaves. Since ensuring Israel's ability to defend itself and its citizens on a permanent basis is a major goal of the plan, this omission was obviously an oversight. Netanyahu announced this week that he has assembled a team to work on the map.
So long as the map is not adjusted, members of Likud and other parties in the right-religious bloc Netanyahu leads will be unable to vote in favor of the plan, despite their support for Trump and for the plan overall.
This then brings us to Benny Gantz and his party.
Just before Gantz traveled to Washington to meet with Trump at the White House last Monday, it came out that his top campaign strategists, Ronen Tzur and Joel Benenson had both separately published multiple posts on Twitter viciously attacking Trump. Both men compared him to Hitler, called him a Russian agent and a racist. In other words, both men parroted Democratic talking points against Trump. (After his posts were reported, Tzur claimed that he no longer believed the things he had written.)
Whereas Tzur – like every garden variety Israeli leftist politico – apparently follows the Democrats on everything related to American public affairs automatically, Benenson shapes Democratic positions. Benenson served as Barack Obama's senior political strategist in the 2008 and 2012 elections and as Hillary Clinton's senior political strategist in 2016.
In 2015, Wikileaks published Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta's emails. Several email chains included internal campaign discussions in which Benenson participated. In two discussions, Benenson advised Clinton not to mention Israel in public events.
Now Benenson is directing Blue and White's campaign, and there is little reason for surprise at the seamlessness of his move from Obama and Clinton to Gantz. The Israeli left has been intertwined with the Democratic Party.
Look instead at the reaction by the Palestinians. Not the reaction by the Palestinian Authority, which was merely the latest of their many rejections of a state of their own alongside Israel.
Look at the Palestinians themselves for whom that state is intended. What is their reaction to the offer of more than 80 percent of the land for such a state? They're furious.
This isn't because it's not 100 percent of the land. They're furious at the idea that they might find themselves living in such a state. So furious that they demonstrated in the thousands against the prospect.
Palestinian leaders and their Western supporters are shrieking that the plan would strip the Israeli Arabs in the Jordan Valley and the "Triangle" area of their Israeli citizenship, and transfer them into Palestine by the simply expedient of drawing its border around their villages.
This is untrue. The Trump plan states that they will be able to choose between remaining citizens of Israel and becoming citizens of Palestine. So they wouldn't be "stripped" of their citizenship at all. Changing it would be their choice.
And surely, they would all choose to become citizens of Palestine – the outcome we've been told is the absolute precondition for ending the Arab-Israel conflict?
With the unveiling of Trump's "Deal of the Century," many analyses and critiques have come out, and will continue to come out, focusing both on what Israel gets -- and on what the Palestinian Arabs do not.
In making the case for his peace plan, Trump points to 2 successful peace agreements that Israel has with its neighbors. These are supposed to be models for what is possible:
The State of Israel has made peace with two of its neighbors. It made peace with the Arab Republic of Egypt in 1979 and it made peace with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1994, two countries with which the State of Israel had fought multiple wars and numerous border skirmishes...These two peace agreements, now 40 and 25 years old, have endured and bettered the lives of citizens in Israel, Jordan and Egypt. ("Peace to Prosperity," p. 2)
Israel's peace with Egypt has long been recognized as a "cold peace," yet there have been examples of cooperation, especially in terms of security in the Sinai. There is also the gas pipeline deal, which includes the cooperation of both Egypt and Jordan -- with Israel.
Then there is Jordan.
In criticizing the Palestinian Authority, Trump's plan describes the Palestinian Authority as
"plagued by failed institutions and endemic corruption. Its laws incentivize terrorism and Palestinian Authority controlled media and schools promote a culture of incitement." (p. 4)
But this is also a pretty accurate description of Jordan as well -- especially the part about terrorism.
In 1994 Mohammad Abequa murdered his wife in New Jersey but then escaped to Jordan. President Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno and New Jersey's US representatives and senators pleaded with King Hussein for Abequa to be returned to the US for trial. Jordan refused because there was no extradition treaty between the 2 countries. Jordan did, however, agree to put Abequa on trial -- and he was found guilty of murder. He could have been sentenced to death, but instead, Abequa was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Just 5 years later, he was released, based on Abequa's claim that he killed his wife to protect his honor.
This was not a terrorist act, but the reaction of the Jordanian government to the murder of Americans by Jordanians have not always been helpful.
In 1993, a Jordanian national, Eyad Ismoil, participated in the World Trade Center bombing. Afterwards, he fled to Jordan to evade capture. In 1995, the US and Jordan signed an extradition treaty that made it possible to return Ismoil to the US.
Perhaps because the incident passed without wide media attention, when another Jordanian killed US soldiers the following November, there was wider coverage. On November 4, 2016, a Jordanian soldier fired on 3 US soldiers as they were entering a Jordanian military base, killing three. The shooter was wounded. The Jordanian government was desperate to avoid responsibility:
o First the Jordanian government claimed that the US soldiers had failed to stop at the gate o When the video disproved that, the Jordanians claimed that there had been an “accidental discharge” by one of the soldiers. o When that was disproven, the Jordanians claimed there had been a loud noise.
Eventually, a Jordanian court found the soldier guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The request by the parents of the 3 US soldiers that the killer be extradited to the US was refused.
Speaking of extradition, there is, of course, the attempt by the US to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, the self-confessed mastermind of the Sbarro Massacre, in which US citizens were killed. Jordan claims the extradition treaty, which was valid enough for Jordan to hand over Ismoil, is not valid enough to hand over Tamimi.
The Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan does not consider acts of national armed struggle and fighting foreign occupation in the exercise of people’s right to self-determination as terrorist acts
This is an ally against terrorism?
This is an anchor for a Mideast peace?
Jordan's approach to terrorism was apparent in 1997 in the Island of Peace massacre, when 80 7th and 8th-graders from Beit Shemesh went on a field trip to the Jordan Valley and Golan Heights. They went to an area of Israeli land between the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers. The area was returned to Jordan as part of the Israel-Jordan peace deal in 1994, but was leased back.
A Jordanian soldier, Ahmed al-Daqamse, started shooting at the schoolgirls, killing 7, before was stopped when his rifle jammed. He was put and trial and sentenced to life in prison.
The New York Times reported at the time:
According to reports from Amman, the Jordanian capital, most Jordanians expressed dismay at the shooting. There were also reports that hundreds of soldiers lined up to give blood at the hospital where the girls were taken.
King Hussein himself a personal visit to offer his condolences to the families.
According to the Times of Israel, the military court determined that the Jordanian soldier was mentally unstable and while life in prison in Jordan normally means 25 years, he was released in 2017, after 20 years.
When he was released, al-Daqamse got a hero's welcome, just as Ahlam Tamimi did.
Footage shot early on Sunday, a day before the 20th anniversary of the massacre, showed Daqamseh being driven slowly through crowds chanting and clapping to show their support.
Jordan’s Roya television channel broadcast footage of him held aloft by a crowd in his home town of Irbid in northern Jordan, next to a poster describing him as a "hero".
It is not so surprising then that on October 26, 2019, the 25th anniversary of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, Times of Israel reported there was no commemoration.
In October 2018 Jordan announced it would not renew an annex of the treaty that had allowed Israelis to visit and Israeli farmers to use 2 plots of land along the border.
Bottom line:
Security and intelligence cooperation remain strong, but even bilateral trade is now declining
Hardly the model for peace that Trump claims.
According to Trump's peace plan:
It is important that governments unambiguously condemn all forms of terrorism, and that governments work together to fight against global terrorism. (p. 8)
If Trump seriously believes that Jordan is one of those governments -- good luck with that.
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Here is a cartoon meant for kids to watch that shows a heroic Palestinian prepare for and execute a terror attack of a mass shooting of Jews at a mall.
I don't yet know the provenance of this cartoon, but it is bad enough that it exists.
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UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ spoke at the opening of the 2020 session of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and he spoke like it is still 1999:
We know that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains key to sustainable peace in the Middle East. Its persistence reverberates far beyond Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, and it continues to further radicalization across the region. That is why we have been repeatedly raising alerts about actions that would erode the possibility of a viable and contiguous Palestinian State based on the two-State solution and that are contrary to international law and United Nations resolutions. This includes expansion and acceleration of illegal settlement activities in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as ongoing demolitions and seizures of Palestinian-owned property and evictions.
"We know"? Syria's civil war, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan would all be peaceful if Palestinians accepted the Clinton parameters? Iran's threats and Hezbollah wouldn't exist if there was a Palestinian state?
And of course, only Israel is guilty in the UN's eyes. Not a word about Palestinian terrorism, about Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Fatah's own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, nothing about rockets or balloon bombs.
The Middle East is very different than it was during Oslo, and Israel has better relations with the larger Arab and Muslim world than ever before. That by itself shows Guterres' assumption to be false. There are fewer terror attacks in Israel now than there was during the heady days of the 90s. But the "experts" have learned no lessons since then.
Why do these people believe something that is so obviously false? Because Palestinians keep saying it - as a veiled threat in order to get the world to pressure Israel to make more concessions.
(h/t Irene)
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Moreover, anyone who points out that Islamic terrorism is part of a holy war being waged against both the west and the not-Islamic-enough Muslim world is denounced for “Islamophobia”.
This also undermines those courageous Muslims pressing for a reform of their religion, often at risk to their lives, who have the ground cut from under their feet by westerners maintaining that the problem doesn’t lie within the Islamic world but with “Islamophobes” who claim that it does.
If we really are not to “go on like this”, the first thing that needs to happen is that this dishonesty must end and the truth must publicly be told.
The government should start saying what it has flinched from saying: that the west is the target of Islamic holy war. It should say that, although many British Muslims pose no threat to anyone, too many in the community either believe the extremist precepts on which the jihad is based or passively go along with them; that too many groups and individuals revere, for example, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi who has endorsed human bomb attacks; that even among those Muslims who oppose violence, too many endorse poisonous ideas about the non-Muslim world which create the sea in which extremism and terrorism swim.
It should state bluntly that Muslims must start to take responsibility, both at home and abroad, for this war being waged in the name of their religion – and that the government will take all necessary measures to defeat it.
You see, it’s not just a matter of passing stricter laws. It’s all about the narrative. The jihadists know that whoever controls the narrative, wins. So far, the ignorant, spineless, demoralised west has let them seize control of it. That’s what now has to end.
"We cannot have the situation...where an offender — a known risk to innocent members of the public — is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board. — UK Secretary of State for Justice.
"When I was a constable, I could arrest and process a suspect in an hour, maximum. Today, it takes a day or more.... The police are mired in bureaucracy, while the judicial system has become an institutional cloud-cuckoo land." — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.
"Bluntly, how would you feel if you were told to keep track of known terrorists who have been released from prison to satisfy the politically correct assumptions of our justice system?" — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.
Ian Acheson, a veteran prison officer who in 2015 led an independent review of Islamist extremism in British prisons, told the BBC's Today program that the UK's risk-management system is fundamentally broken:
"We are going to have to accept that we have to be much more skeptical and robust about dealing with the risk of harm.
"We may need to accept that there are certain people who are so dangerous they must be kept in prison indefinitely....
"I am still unconvinced that the prison service itself has the aptitude or the attitude to assertively manage terrorist offenders."
"What we found [in prisons] was so shockingly bad that I had to agree to the language in the original report being toned down. With hindsight, I'm not sure that was the right decision." — Ian Acheson, British expert on prisons.
"There were serious deficiencies in almost every aspect of the management of terrorist offenders... Frontline prison staff were vulnerable to attack and were ill-equipped to counter hateful extremism on prison landings for fear of being accused of racism. Prison imams did not possess the tools, and sometimes the will, to combat Islamist ideology. The prison service's intelligence-gathering system was hopelessly fractured and ineffectual." — Ian Acheson, "London Bridge attack: I told ministers we were treating terrorist prisoners with jaw-dropping naivety. Did they listen?", London Times, December 1, 2019.
"Obedience is achieved by violence and intimidation carried out by members of the group known as enforcers. 'Those who had committed terrorist crimes often held more senior roles in the gang,' the study found, 'facilitated by the respect some younger prisoners gave them.' The study found that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida did not see prison as an obstacle. Quite the opposite, they viewed it as an opportunity to organize and expand." — Patrick Dunleavy, former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections, June 18, 2019.
I'm actually a little stunned at how little Elizabeth Warren knows about Israel and the history of the moribund peace process, as seen in this video clip:
"We need to encourage Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate with each other."
Wow! Who ever thought of that before?
Of course, the Palestinians refuse to negotiate directly with Israel. Does she have a plan B?
"Israel has the right to security, Palestinians have the right to self-determination and to be treated with respect."
Israel has offered them self-determination many times. As far as respect - that is something that is earned, not a human right. Just today Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party tweeted support for the person who rammed his car into a bunch of Israelis, mostly soldiers. Should we respect that?
Notice that Israel does not seem worthy of respect.
"The two state solution has been the policy of the United States and of Israel for nearly seventy years now."
Ummm...what? What was the second state in 1951? Is she saying Jordan is the Palestinian state? Is she referring to Zionists accepting the 1947 partition plan that was abrogated by the Arab world?
No, she's just proving that she has no idea what she is talking about.
"The embassy is what they should be negotiating."
Palestinians should be part of the decision where to put the US embassy to Israel? Do they help decide where the US embassy to Canada should be as well?
"They should be negotiating what constitutes the capital.That's really my point, is that that's what the parties should decide."
Oh, so Israel cannot choose its own capital - it needs the approval of its sworn enemy. The most basic decision of any world government cannot be made by that government. Sure.
This is kumbaya foreign policy. It is stupid, not prudent, to be "evenhanded" between a modern liberal state and a terror-supporting, misogynist, anti-gay, freedom hating entity whose entire purpose is to destroy the first state. Would she say that we should have been evenhanded between Iraq and ISIS, another wannabe state?
The times I've met with senators and members of Congress they knew their stuff. Warren's ignorance is laughable. (And she hired a large foreign policy team, as well.)
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Rafah, February 6 - The departed spirit of an American activist who sought to shield a terrorist armaments cache with her body but ended up crushed by a bulldozer must spend the rest of eternity looking on as Israeli soldiers and machines continue to dispose of war materiel intended for use by the terrorist groups she tried to defend, sources in the transcendental realm disclosed today.
Reporters in the World of the Souls confirmed to PreOccupied Territory Thursday morning that Rachel Corrie's spirit suffers everlasting torment in the form of being forced to watch every instance of the IDF interdicting, destroying, or otherwise rendering inaccessible any weapons, explosives, ammunition, or other instruments of war in the possession of Hamas or allied Palestinian terrorist groups, or such materials on their way to said groups.
"Ms. Corrie inhabits the eternity she created for herself," a spectral representative stated. "Her choice in 2003 to enter a closed military area - effectively a war zone - to serve as cover for terrorists and to prevent soldiers from stemming the flow of arms to those terrorists, all while claiming the mantle of 'human rights' among other dubious goals, led her to stand in front of an armored bulldozer whose driver had limited visibility, and who was trying to destroy a weapons-smuggling tunnel. Her decision to side with murderous thugs who target children and other innocents as a core part of their ideology, and who would otherwise target Corrie herself for her non-Islamic allegiances and lifestyle, brought her to this place."
Corrie took part in an operation by the pro-Palestinian group the International Solidarity Movement to disrupt IDF activities in this town bordering Egypt, where an unknown number of smuggling tunnels and weapons caches ran under the frontier. Most of the passages led into homes or other civilian structures near the Philadelphi Road running parallel to the boundary, structures that also often served as cover for Palestinian snipers firing on IDF troops patrolling the area or engaged in operations to find and destroy the tunnels and weapons. Israel withdrew its soldiers and uprooted thousands of residents from the Gaza Strip in a unilateral disengagement two years later; the smuggling and armed attacks on Israelis have continued.
Corrie's ghost remained unavailable for comment; a spokespecter told journalists that until other materials come to light, her eternal consciousness will be forced to view video of the capture of a Hamas armaments-smuggling boat in an operation that took place this past November.
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A string of Palestinian terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank on Thursday left 16 Israelis wounded.
“Terrorism will not defeat us — we will win,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the surge of violence.
In the first incident, 14 IDF soldiers were injured — one seriously — in an early Thursday morning car-ramming assault at the old train station on David Remez Street in the Israeli capital.
The perpetrator fled the area and the vehicle used in the attack was later found south of Jerusalem, near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Later on Thursday, an Israeli Border Police officer was lightly wounded by a gunman in Jerusalem’s Old City, near the Temple Mount.
The assailant — an Israeli Arab from the northern city of Haifa who had recently converted to Islam from Christianity — was killed at the scene.
This was followed after a few hours by a shooting at a guard post at a junction on Route 463 in the Binyamin region of the West Bank, north of Jerusalem.
One IDF soldier was lightly hurt. The attacker escaped.
The Israeli military is sending reinforcements to the Jerusalem and West Bank sectors, in a bid to thwart further attacks.
The plan's limited version of Palestinian sovereignty derives from the need for defensible borders as well, since as the past quarter-century has shown, Palestinian military control over territory means kissing Israeli security goodbye. The Palestinian Authority was able to wage the Second Intifada – which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, 78 percent of them civilians, including through suicide bombings in major Israeli cities – because the Oslo Accords barred the Israel Defense Forces from entering P.A. territory. Only after the IDF reasserted control over those areas did the terror wane. Similarly, the IDF's absence from Gaza is what has allowed Palestinians to fire more than 20,000 rockets at Israel from that territory, even as not one rocket has ever been launched from the West Bank.
Having learned this lesson, Trump's plan assigns security control of the West Bank solely to Israel. And again, this used to be an Israeli consensus before Oslo fever took hold; even Rabin, in his final speech, envisioned a Palestinian "entity which is less than a state."
One could obviously quibble with certain details of the plan; for instance, the idea of leaving some settlements as enclaves in Palestinian territory sounds like a security nightmare. One could even legitimately wonder, given the experience of the last 25 years, whether any kind of Palestinian state is compatible with Israel's security.
Nevertheless, Trump's plan is the first serious attempt to give Israel what Resolution 242 promised more than 50 years ago – borders that are not only recognized, but secure. As such, far from "violating UN resolutions," it's actually the first plan that doesn't violate them.
This provides Israel and its allies with a golden opportunity to remind the world that contrary to what is widely believed today, UN resolutions and "internationally agreed parameters" originally promised Israel defensible borders. Thus all the plans that broke this promise are the ones that ought to be deemed illegitimate – not the one plan that finally seeks to keep it.
It takes time for attitudes to change, and changing attitudes in the Middle East is a tough proposition. Moving the Europeans may prove harder.
An Israeli general once told this story (I was there):
The Israeli general commanded a unit that crossed the Suez Canal in 1973 after repulsing Egypt’s surprise Yom Kippur War attack. In his headquarters, he received a message that purported to be from an Egyptian general, telling him to come — alone — in a jeep to a certain spot in the desert and “hear something.” The general told the group, “I was sure I was going to die, but I did it.” The Egyptian proved to be the chief of the Egyptian general staff and he, too, was alone.
The Egyptian said, “The war is over.”
The Israeli general said, “Yes. I know.”
The Egyptian general sighed, “Not this war. In 1948, Egypt was within 11 miles of Tel Aviv and you pushed us back. In 1956, you drove through Sinai — but it wasn’t fair because you had the French and the British. In 1967, you did it again — by yourselves. Now you have crossed the Suez Canal and are 99 kilometers from Cairo. I’m here to tell you that you won’t get any closer. The war is over.”
He got back in his jeep and left.
The Israeli returned to his headquarters and told the story to the general staff in Tel Aviv. “No one believed me,” the Israeli said.
But it was true. The Egyptian government had determined that fighting, losing, and regrouping was not a plan. In 1979, Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem, and in so doing met Israel’s primary condition for peace — recognition of Israel as a legitimate and permanent state in the region, entitled to “secure and recognized boundaries, free from threats or acts of force” (the language of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242). Today, Egypt and Israel cooperate on energy, security (including for the Gaza Strip), and trade.
In the broader Arab world, it is taking longer. Unable to countenance Jewish sovereignty in the region, the Arabs went to war in 1948 to erase it. They failed. They tried again in 1967. They failed again. After that war, an Arab League Summit convened in Sudan and issued what became known as the Khartoum Resolution: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”
In short, her piece attacks The Forward for not being leftist enough. (The subtitle is "How America's Jewish newspaper lost the left.")
Now, I have attacked the Forward many times for publishing opinions and promoting articles that I think gave too much oxygen to the far-Left, providing their members a platform that is far out of proportion to their actual numbers. But the standard that one should use to criticize a media outlet, outside of insisting they report the truth, is whether it adheres to its own stated positions. The Forward's masthead says " News That Matters To American Jews," not "Bernie Sanders Fan Club" or "Zionists are Racists." (The Forward's advertising pitch does say that it is "a beacon of integrity, iconoclasm and progressive thought" but it is unclear whether it uses the word "progressive" the same way the uber-Left does. What is clear is that The Forward considers itself above all a Jewish media outlet, not a leftist one.)
Criticizing The Forward for not being leftist enough when it never claimed to be a leftist media outlet is only one piece of Zonszein's dishonesty. Zonszein misleads again and again, stating things that CFR should have fact-checked.
For example, she writes, "Compared to figures such as Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, Stephen Miller, a Trump senior adviser who is one of the most influential Jews in the White House, was given less attention, even as he advanced white-supremacist policies inspired by Mein Kampf." I count over 90 articles in The Forward about Stephen Miller, nearly all of them extremely negative. That's plenty of attention! Yes, there are about 130 articles that mention Omar, but a significant number of them support her against her critics. (Zonszein's link about Mein Kampf is also false, it does not support her assertion that Miller's positions were inspired by Hitler.)
The article goes on to berate the Forward for publishing occasional opinion pieces from the Right, such as from Mort Klein. Whether she likes him or not, he is the head of a major Zionist organization and to banning him from the Forward would be astonishing To the Left, censorship of opinions they don't agree with is a higher editorial imperative than publishing a variety of opinions that are representative of American Jews.
More outrageous is this section where Zonszein implies that The Forward is in bed with neo-Nazis: "Another contributor published 'We Need to Start Befriending Neo-Nazis.'" The article in question, by Bethany Mandel, was about the few people who try to get neo-Nazis to understand Jews and to change their minds - the exact opposite of the implication by Zonszein.
The straw that broke the camel's back, to Zonszein and her far-Left, anti-Israel friends, was that The Forward has not been shy about calling out leftist antisemitism such as that consistently pushed by Ilhan Omar.
That problem came to a head last February, when Batya Ungar-Sargon, The Forward’s opinion editor, called out Congresswoman Omar for anti-Semitism, sparking a national controversy and leading to the fundraising email that angered Jewish progressives like me. “It is frustrating and saddening to see The Forward today embracing, indeed, reveling in, its newfound role as policeman, prosecutor, judge, and jury deciding what is and isn’t anti-Semitism,” Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, says.
So the Left can tell us what antisemitism is and the Forward cannot? Because according to them, there is simply no such thing as any antisemitism that is not from the far Right, and mentioning any other type outrages them. Arab antisemitism is "protesting for Palestinian freedom" no matter how many times the word "Jew" is used. Attacks on Jews in Brooklyn are twisted to somehow be Trump's fault. And, of course, there is antisemitism on the Left itself, often camouflaged as being anti-Israel. Even UN expert on freedom of religion and belief admits that there is leftist antisemitism.
But the far Left is outraged and wants to silence any such opinion. To them, even the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance cannot express an opinion on what antisemitism is. Only they can, and all antisemitism conveniently comes from their political opponents. They are guilty of the "weaponizing" antisemitism they accuse everyone else of doing, even in this very essay.
The article doesn't even have a consistent, coherent viewpoint. Zonszein's last paragraph is a stunning example:
In many ways, what is happening with the paper reflects what has been going on in the American Jewish community writ large: the collapse of centrism, the polarization of discourse, and the imperative to take a stand. And that’s the source of my frustration with The Forward. Communicating through op-eds and imposing divides among Jews isn’t the kind of journalism required to guide us through the difficult moment we’re in.
She just wrote an entire article attacking the site for publishing opinions that are too Right and not enough from the Left, and then she complains about "the collapse of centrism"? She wants to silence Bethany Mandel, who cannot be pigeonholed as Right of Left and is as classically liberal as they come, and then complains about the "polarization of discourse"? Is the "imperative to take a stand" a bad thing? She mercilessly attacks any Jewish opinion she disagrees with and then complains about "imposing divides among Jews"? What a bizarre conclusion to Zonszein's screed.
The main thrust of the piece, besides attempting to smear The Forward, is to insist that it has no right to publish any opinions that Leftists disagree with. This fundamentally anti-liberal and anti-free speech stance is a very strange one for a watchdog like CJR to publish.
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Two Palestinians, including a policeman, were killed in riots which broke out in the West Bank city of Jenin after IDF troops demolished the home of a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the death of Rabbi Raziel Shevach in September 2018.
According to Palestinian news agency WAFA, 19 year-old Yazan Abu Tabikh was killed after IDF troops opened fire at rioters who had been clashing with troops. The policeman was identified as Sergeant Tarek Badwan.
The first question is - was the policeman attacking the IDF?
But there is more. Yazan Abu Tabikh was identified in Palestinian media as also a paid member of the PA's National Security Service in Jenin.
This means that two PA police were killed and they were the only ones.
This sure makes it sound like the PA is now actively attacking Israeli forces.
This gets even more interesting because Islamic Jihad issued a statement that strongly suggested that Abu Tabikh was also one of its members as well, but that is not certain.
Either way, if the PA is now encouraging its police to attack Israeli security, things could escalate quickly.
Mahmoud Abbas said last Saturday that "we still believe in peace and a culture of peace."
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
