The United Arab Emirates (UAE) defended the position of French President Emmanuel Macron with respect to the controversy that has arisen in recent days in the Muslim world over his stance in defence of freedom of expression with respect to the dissemination of the cartoons of Mohammed.
In an interview published on Monday by the German newspaper Die Welt, Anwar Gargash, Emirates' Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, rejected the idea that Emmanuel Macron has sent a message of exclusion to Muslims. "You have to listen to what Macron really said in his speech: he does not want ghettoisation of Muslims in the West and he is absolutely right," he said.
Muslims must be more integrated, and the French state has the right to seek the means to achieve this while combating radicalisation and communal seclusion, the head of UAE diplomacy said.
The Emirati minister added that Muslims should be better integrated and that the French state has the right to seek ways to achieve this in parallel with the fight against extremism, referring also to the law against Islamist separatism that the French government has been advocating during this time. "It does not want Muslims in the West to be isolated, and it is absolutely right. They need to be better integrated into society. The French state has the right to look for ways to achieve this: to find a place for Muslims in French civil society and means to combat isolation and militancy," Anwar Gargash said.
On the other hand, Anwar Gargash did admit to being offended as a Muslim by some of the cartoons, but made it clear that the policy is about something else. Anwar Gargash expressed his feelings as a Muslim about some of the offensive cartoons, but warned against using the issue politically in a way that harms the interests of Muslims.
Given a clear choice between the modern world and the Muslim world, the UAE is choosing the West.
Gargash is acting like an enlightened leader. He is avoiding knee-jerk reactions, he is not falling for conspiracy theories, he actually listened to what Macron said, he is understanding nuance and the bigger picture.
This never used to happen.
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That is the opinion of North Carolina's Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, who
was overheard on a hot mic as he assured Joe Biden:
“I think we’re gonna all get across the line. I think Cal’s gonna get across
the line, too. I know that’s frustrating. We’ll get him across.”
[emphasis added]
There was a time when scandals had consequences, but Cunningham is laying low
for the duration of his campaign and may just win.
Speaking of Joe Biden, there is no clear indication of what effect the
questions surrounding his son Hunter will have on the presidential election.
Like Cunningham, Joe Biden has not mounted a counter-attack against the
accusations.
Then again, why should he?
The only thing getting more attention than the apparent scandal surrounding
Biden's son, is the transparent attempt of the media -- both social and
mainstream -- to bury the issue.
In the last few weeks I’ve heard from multiple well-known journalists going
through struggles in their newsrooms, with pressure to avoid certain themes
in campaign coverage often central to their worries. There are many
reporters out there — most of them quite personally hostile to Donald Trump
— who are grating under what they perceive as relentless pressure to publish
material favorable to the Democratic Party cause.
We'll soon see how successful that pressure has been.
Putting domestic politics aside, there is an apparent effort, on an
international level, to help an old favorite finally cross the finish line.
In an exclusive interview with Al-Monitor, the Permanent Observer of Palestine
to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, sounded upbeat about the interest of the
world community in participating in the suggested conference due to take place
after the inauguration of a new US president in 2021.
The Security
Council discussions revealed
near-unanimous support for the initiative presented by Abbas at the UN
General Assembly on Sept. 25. [emphasis added]
The US of course is fully in support of The Abraham Accords and has made a
point of letting Abbas know that the Palestinian Authority is no longer going
to get a free ride.
Nevertheless, according to Al-Monitor:
Comments at the Security Council session showed that France, Germany,
Belgium, China and others all spoke in support of the conference. Even the
United States and Israel, who are opposed to the idea, were
forced to engage
with the concept and take it seriously in their deliberation.
U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft was skeptical that a conference would produce
results, but said the Trump administration, Israel’s closest and most
important ally, was open to the possibility raised by Abbas.
“We
have no objection to meeting with international partners to discuss the issue.
But I have to ask, how is this different than every other meeting convened
on this issue over the past 60 years?” she asked the council.
Israel’s new U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan
opposed the Palestinian call,
accusing Abbas of refusing “every peace offer made by the state of
Israel”
and attacking Israel’s recent agreements with the United Arab Emirates,
Bahrain and Sudan instead of viewing them as “a new opportunity to kick-start
negotiations.”
The fact is that there is no indication that there is anything new being
offered here.
Is this a serious attempt to achieve a two-state solution or just an attempt
to help Abbas out of a jam, 'saving' him from having to make the kinds of
concessions required for peace, and failing to do so -- proving how irrelevant
he really is?
What makes all of this possible of course are the presidential elections this
week.
This conference is only feasible if Biden becomes president, since he would be
expected to support this old, failed approach to peace.
Joe Biden, as Obama's vice president, would never have seen the potential of
diplomacy that would focus on the benefits of normalizing relations between
Israel and Arab countries. During the Obama administration, their foreign
policy achievements were restoring diplomatic relations with Myanmar and Cuba
while strengthening Iran.
As president, Biden (and Kamala Harris) would be amenable to the insistence of
the progressive wing of the Democratic party to take up the cause of the
Palestinian Arabs -- something not at the top of the agenda of the Gulf
states.
Also, there is every reason to believe that Biden, and Harris would push for
relaxing sanctions on Iran and for the re-establishment of the Iran deal in
one form or another which would only set much of the Arab world on edge and
help to push many of those Arab countries into the arms of Israel, to begin
with.
The future of the Middle East will depend to a great extent on this week's
elections and on Europe's old habits and knee-jerk response to the region, as it
attempts to save Abbas and the Palestinian Authority from the changing Arab
world.
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Unlike Trump’s unilateralism, Biden is expected to bring back the “old” American brokership to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The 2020 Democratic Party Platform calls for the creation of a “viable” Palestinian state where Palestinians “should be free to govern themselves,” and opposes “unilateral action” from either side.
Would that reduce the number of attacks against Israeli citizens and IDF soldiers? Unlikely. But, Biden has made it clear that he will “fully support the Taylor Force Act, which withholds aid to the PA based on payments it makes to terrorists in Israeli jails.”
Biden has also said that “Palestinians need to end incitement in the West Bank and rocket attacks in Gaza” and that the leadership “must begin to level with their people about the legitimacy and permanence of Israel as a Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.”
What about Iran?
Israel considers Iran’s nuclear program its number one concern. According to intelligence assessments, if the Islamic Republic does decide to fully renege on the agreement, it wouldn’t take long to produce enough fissure material to make a nuclear bomb.
Biden has signaled that he will try to bring Iran back into the nuclear deal and that the economic sanctions placed on the country could eventually be eased. Nevertheless, he has acknowledged that there’s no guarantee Iran would return to compliance with the agreement.
Netanyahu has been one of the loudest critics of the deal. Although IDF officers and defense experts were concerned about some elements of the JCPOA, many believed that Israel was better off when the deal was alive and Iran was adhering to it.
Should Biden win, he may only have a short time to bring Iran back to the agreement before hardliners, including members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, who oppose any engagement with the West, are expected to win Iran’s upcoming presidential elections.
And should that happen, Israel will not be any better off.
Nevertheless, no matter who wins the upcoming US elections, Trump or Biden, Israel has to remember one thing: When it comes to its security, Israel has to be able to defend itself, by itself, at any given time. At the very least, Washington will continue to reinforce that.
The sound of the ram’s horn resounded in front of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the biblical city of Hebron as settler leaders held a small rally and brief prayer service Monday for US President Donald Trump’s victory in the November 3 election.
“We are people of faith, and here – from the Tomb of the Patriarchs, we pray and express our gratitude to President Trump,” Binyamin Regional Council head Israel Ganz said.
As Ganz spoke, he stood on the stone plaza in front of the King Herod-era structure that housed the Tomb of the Biblical forefathers and foremother, including that of Abraham, whose purchase of the site is recorded in the Book of Genesis.
The settlers and their right-wing supporters, out of all the Israelis, have the most to gain from a Trump victory.
Among those who stood there were leaders like Ganz and South Hebron Hills Regional Council head Yochai Damri, who opposed Trump’s peace deal with the Palestinians, but have in the last weeks still come out in support of the US president.
Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan, who held a Trump rally in his region of the West Bank last week, was absent from the event.
Both the settlers and Trump support Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank settlements, but the settlers want a more expanded annexation map and opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, even the demilitarized one that is part of the Trump plan.
Ganz said he hoped that Trump would “be granted additional years as President of the United States, and will strengthen the State of Israel, so that together, we can apply sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.”
America is at an inflection point more ominous and dangerous than the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Then, America elected a president who would fight for the good of the Union against misguided forces that broke with the Nation and sought to continue the evils of slavery.
Today, another great evil haunts the United States of America. It is an evil that has infected almost all of the Democrat party, as well as mainstream media and can be described as cultist woke-ism. Woke-ism is the accelerating set of “acceptable” ideas whose adherents dictate that if you fail to accept every single one of the cult's lunatic fringe “axioms,” you will be called a “racist,” “homophobe,” “transphobe,” Islamophobe,” be summarily "cancelled" and even lose your job.
Increasingly, the “end point” of this ghoulish intellectual infection appears to be that the only “cure” America’s “systemic racism” is to “burn it down.” Today, in the possible election of Joe Biden, we will have a president who will not fight for the forces of good, as did Lincoln, but instead, will be fighting to instill a new Fascist plan of Wokeness that enslaves Americans in a tyranny worse than the regime of hate and evil that would have ensued had the enemy defeated and occupied America in WWII. Our only salvation from this regime of Woke is for President Trump to win re-election in the coming election.
Why is a Biden victory more dangerous than America’s so far only Civil War?
The answer is first and foremost, that unlike the Lincoln victory which put the reins of power of America into the hands of the forces of Good, a Biden victory will put the awesome powers of the government into the hands of the faceless forces of political correctness, Woke-ism, and the Deep State.
Today, the media is keeping Biden’s blatant corruption off the front pages so as to elect Biden’s “name,” but then slip in Kamela Harris. If the Biden-Harris ticket wins, within three months the same media that suffocated the Biden corruption scandal, will blare it from every site and hound him from office, thereby installing the “most liberal Senator in the Senate” as President of the United States.
Biden is the Trojan Horse that hides a Harris extreme-Left Presidency. No Democrat seriously thinks Biden will last out his first year in office, most bets are on 3 months.
The level of obsession that Iran has about Israel is mind-boggling. They held an entire conference on how to politicize sports in order to delegitimize Israel.
Yet the more you read, the more you see that Iran is the one on the defensive, as more sports federations are penalizing Iran for refusing to compete against Israel and this conference was more about Irans' response to that than to the possibility of Iran influencing other countries against Israel.
The 16th pre-session on studies on the Zionist regime titled “The Use of Sports by the Zionist Regime for Normalization” was held at Tehran International Studies and Research Institute (TISRI).
The senior expert of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mojtaba Amini, noted that topics such as the Zionist regime’s racism can be highlighted by creating an anti-Zionist axis in sports and citing compelling reasons.
Head of the Athletes' Basij Organization, Dr. Mir-Jalili, also said that the Zionist regime is seeking normalization by using sports as a tool and the ways in which this could be countered included the setup of workgroups and regular meetings, using the potentials of the Olympic Charter, advertising and public opinion, using the potentials of international organizations such as UNESCO, and creating motivational topics for athletes.
He continued by saying that synergy between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Sports, and the international branch of Basij was necessary and highlighted the need to build dialogue and award the international medal of resistance to athletes who do not participate in games against the Zionist regime.
A faculty member of Allameh Tabataba’i University, Dr. Heybatollah Najandi, also had a speech and said that the abstinence of Iranian athletes from playing with the athletes of the Zionist regime was in fact a protest against the illegitimacy of this regime and the widespread violation of human rights against the oppressed people of Palestine. He said our athletes turning up for games with the Zionist regime only reduced the ugliness of the regime’s illegitimate existence.
Also at the pre-session meeting, Hojjat al-Islam Seyed Mohammad-Reza Mir-Tajedini highlighted the need for a multilateral struggle in all sectors against the Zionist regime and stressed that this must be relevant and transparent. He added that sport is not separate from the economy, it also cannot be separate from politics, and the sports sector must be freed from neutrality and move towards areas of value. He finished by emphasizing the need for increased cooperation between the diplomacy apparatus and the Ministry of Sport and considered the legal vacuum in this field a serious shortfall.
I hope that the various sports federations are taking note that Iran has no interest in sportsmanship. This conference proves it.
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PLO leader Yasir Arafat was infamous for saying peaceful messages in English and pivoting to pro-terror messages in Arabic.
Hamas has learned that lesson well.
On Hamas' Arabic webpage, there is a press release and an article about the 103rd anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
In both those cases, Hamas emphasizes that "armed resistance" (i.e., terrorism) is a valid option: "Resistance in all its forms, from popular to armed, will remain a legitimate and proven option, and it will not be withdrawn to restore the stolen right of our people and sweep the occupation."
But in its English language website, there are no articles on Balfour. The only article about "resistance" is a copy of a Mondoweiss piece about hunger striking as a form of resistance.
Even terror groups try to pretend to be peaceful when appealing to their Western fans.
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There is no doubt that there was significant Arab immigration to British Mandate Palestine in the 1920s and 30s. Yet unlike the Jewish immigrants at the time, the Arabs are never referred to as "colonialists" or "settler colonialists" as the Jews are.
In fact, in a true irony, today they are considered to be "Palestinians" - even though most of them lived in British Mandate Palestine for only 20 years or so. And they took the name of the people who were called Palestinians at the time.
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If more Arab countries normalize relations with Israel, what will the PLO leadership do?
They angrily denounced the UAE and Bahrain agreements, trying to marginalize those countries from the Arab League and failing miserably.
They seemed a little more circumspect about Sudan, but also a little more shocked.
However, in general their media is not looking at this as a wake-up call. It is still a reason for them to dig in their heels and say that they have principles that they will not give in on, even when their Arab benefactors are urging flexibility.
Part of the reason is that the PLO leadership is waiting for the US elections. They are hoping that Joe Biden rolls back Trump's pro-Israel moves and returns to a posture of pressuring Israel, coddling Palestinians and linking world peace to Palestinian acceptance of an offer.
But if they miscalculate - if either Trump wins, or if the other moderate Arab states decide to recognize Israel without US sponsorship (very possible if Biden embraces Iran and pushes Arab states towards Israel,) or if Biden recognizes that the Middle East is not the same as it was four years ago - then what?
The PLO has two options. One is to listen to its friends and accept a solution that Israel can live with. The other is to remain intransigent and seek new friends - namely, Iran.
Right now, under US sanctions, Iran is not in a position to financially aid the PLO. And unless the PLO changes its current stated policy of avoiding terror attacks, it is unlikely that Iran would fund it. But if Biden wins the presidency, and he lifts sanctions against Iran and puts Sunni Arab states in the same uncomfortable position that Obama did, it seems possible that the PLO will embrace Iran as its new benefactor.
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Here, too, Iran is the exception to the rule. Most Middle East countries want to see Trump remain in the White House; the fact that Iran fears him so much is considered a bonus. One can argue about his style, but no one can deny Trump credit for the fact that his regional policies have made friends and foes alike take notice. He has restored the United States’ standing as a major power-player in the Middle East.
There is also no doubt that his crowning achievement is making actual breakthroughs in the moribund Middle East peace process. His decision to go over the Palestinian Authority’s head was proven right, and regardless of what the future might bring, Trump will go down in history as the US president who brokered three peace agreements between Muslim nations — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan — and the Jewish state, and presided over the Israel-Lebanon maritime border talks. And more is sure to come.
Effective progress in peacemaking in the Middle East alongside the very effective deterrence gained vis-à-vis Iran has restored stability to the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring, and therefore has been welcomed by the region’s rulers. Trump has proven he has a better understanding of regional realities than his predecessor, and unlike President Barack Obama didn’t create an Islamist backlash by trying to push Western democracy or preach morals.
The results of the November 3 elections are for American voters to decide, but Trump’s legacy will be felt in the Middle East long after he leaves the White House, be it in 2020 or in 2024. His will be a legacy of power and determination, of resorting stability to the region, and of proving that the United States stands by its allies.
Support for Normalization: Sudan National Dialogue
All of this came on the backdrop of the so-called Sudan National Dialogue, a summit attended by all of the country’s political parties and factions, during which many of them expressed support for normalizing relations with Israel, especially due to the economic benefits that such a move would entail.
Under-the-radar discussions between Sudan and Israel were launched and continued into February 2020, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Uganda with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Khartoum’s Sovereignty Council. The two held a two-hour tete-a-tete that resulted in a loose agreement to start forging ties.
Saeb Erekat, Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization, “aggressively” condemned the move, saying that it constituted “a stab in the back of the Palestinian nation.”
Massive Country, Massive Achievement
Despite objections from Ramallah, the encounter bore immediate fruit as Israeli commercial planes were later that month given permission to use Sudanese airspace. This, in turn, decreased the flight time from Israel to South America by three hours.
The fact that Sudan, which has a population four times larger than the UAE and Bahrain combined, and whose geographical size is 22 times bigger than those two countries together, appears to be choosing a path of engagement with Israel is a remarkable twist.
A historic development of this magnitude between former enemies simply cannot be downplayed or ignored.
Regardless of the outcome of next week’s election, former Vice President Joe Biden will have the distinction of being the first American presidential candidate to draw attention to the US government’s shameful record of friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
During the final presidential debate on October 22, President Donald Trump claimed that he has “a good relationship” with North Korea and argued that “having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.” Former Vice President Biden retorted that “we had a good relationship with Hitler before he in fact invaded Europe.”
Biden’s assertion must have surprised many viewers of the debate, who likely assumed that because President Franklin D. Roosevelt led America in a war against Nazi Germany, he must have always been hostile to the Hitler regime. In fact, from the time FDR first took office in 1933 until America entered World War II in December 1941, the Roosevelt administration’s policy was to pursue cordial, sometimes even friendly relations with the Nazi regime.
Many Americans boycotted products from Nazi Germany. But the Roosevelt administration helped Nazi Germany evade the boycott in the 1930s by permitting goods from Germany to bear labels that misled consumers as to their country of origin. The administration halted this disgraceful practice only when threatened with a lawsuit by boycott activists.
FDR also sent Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper to address a pro-Nazi rally in New York City in 1933. At that rally, Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States was the keynote speaker and the podium and hall were decorated with swastika flags. In 1937, the administration sent one of its senior diplomats to represent the United States at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.
In some instances, the Roosevelt administration actually apologized for U.S. citizens’ anti-Nazi sentiment. In 1935, the administration publicly apologized to Adolf Hitler after a New York City judge released protesters who tore a swastika flag off a visiting German ship. Then, in 1937, when New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia called Hitler a “brown-shirted fanatic who is threatening the peace of the world,” Roosevelt’s secretary of state expressed the US government’s “regret” over “utterances calculated to be offensive to a foreign government.
When he hosted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House in May 2017, President Trump boasted of the ease with which he would achieve the Israeli-Palestinian peace that had eluded his predecessors in office.
“We will get it done,” Trump told reporters, saying that the task was “not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”
Three and a half years later, the promised peace seems further away than ever. Trump’s plan, crafted by son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, landed with a thud in February and all but disappeared.
Instead, Trump moved the goal posts, last week claiming to have succeeded with a deal that others “were unable to make . . . for 40 years.”
The writers, Karen DeYoung and Steve Hendrix, are skipping over some crucial parts of what happened between May 2017 and now.
Trump always said that he wasn't going to force any agreement - that Israel and the Palestinians both have to want to make an agreement, and only then is peace possible.
When Trump announced that the US recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017, he specifically said that this was simply a reflection of reality, not a position of the final status of Jerusalem. It was ending the idiotic and unconscionable US position that Jerusalem might still become an international city. The option for east Jerusalem being capital of a Palestinian state was not changed at all.
But the Palestinian reaction was fierce and insulting to the US.
As a result, Trump in February 2018 said he is "taking Jerusalem off the table." But even when he said that, he criticized both the Palestinians and Israelis as not being truly interested in peace:
“Right now, I would say the Palestinians are not looking to make peace, they are not looking to make peace...And I am not necessarily sure that Israel is looking to make peace,” he said.
The PLO continued to lash out at the US. And the US, instead of coddling them as was done in the past, reacted in kind - by shutting down the PLO office in Washington in September 2018:
"We have permitted the PLO office to conduct operations that support the objective of achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between Israelis and the Palestinians," State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said in a statement Monday.
"However, the PLO has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel," she added.
The PLO reactions to both the economic peace plan presented in Bahrain in June 2019 and then the January 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan - which pushed a path to a contiguous Palestinian state that again realistically dealt with Israeli communities - were similarly and summarily rejected with insults and no counter-offers.
Whether one agrees with the US administration's positions, one cannot ignore the incitement and intransigence of the PLO which prompted the White House to move away from considering the PLO a serious peace partner. The Trump administration is transactional, and it treats other nations the way that they treat the US as opposed to the traditional way of begging for acceptance.
The PLO chose the path of making itself irrelevant, and the entire history of the Trump team's interactions with them shows that everything they did was a reaction to PLO decisions. This includes facilitating peace directly between Israel and Arab states.
It is not much different from George W. Bush's reaction to finding out that Yasir Arafat lied to his face about the Karine A weapons ship, denying anything to do with it when Israel showed Bush Arafat's signature was on the paperwork. Bush stopped talking to Arafat after that, later writing "Arafat had lied to me. I never trusted him again. In fact, I never spoke to him again. By the spring of 2002, I had concluded that peace would not be possible with Arafat in power."
So, no, Trump didn't move the goalposts. He is optimizing peace in the Middle East given a PLO that wants to be the roadblock to peace. No one could have done any better, and the WaPo criticism is based on hate of Trump rather than any objective analysis.
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I have never heard of this JaFaJ site before, but it looks like a sober intelligence site and doesn't have any crazy conspiracy theory stories that I can find.
Iraqi Officials Have Already Visited Jerusalem
JaFaJ Intelligence has confirmed that senior Iraqi officials have been engaged in peace talks with their Israeli counterparts for over a month. The talks, from the Iraqi side, involved senior official from the Prime Minister’s office, and are being facilitated under direct supervision of Jared Kushner, the President’s Middle East Advisor.
Iraqi sources have also confirmed that peace with Israel was one of the key reasons behind the Iraqi Prime Minister’s visit to Washington DC and his meeting with President Trump in August 2020.
JaFaJ Intelligence sources have also confirmed that the Iraqis have exhibited a sincere desire to reach a peace deal with Israel. The talks have been held between the parties in Jerusalem and the United States, with one Iraqi delegation visiting Israel last September under a shroud of total secrecy to meet with officials from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office.
This is important because the intelligence community knows that the Iranian government controls the jobs of most senior Iraqi government officials, and that they are members of the Shiite sect. Therefore, it is well reasoned that the Iraqi government would have never made such a move without full Iranian consent.
What is most surprising about this development is that JaFaJ Intelligence sources in Iraq have confirmed that “Iran is supportive of the negotiations”.
Facially, this statement may seem outlandish to an outsider looking in, but nonetheless, President Trump himself mentioned something about Iran when he spoke about the Sudan-Israel peace deal during a recent rally. During that speech, he implied that the deal was so good, that Iran may eventually join in.
Plagued by ruthless economic distress and unforgiving American economic sanctions that are crushing the country, Iran found itself under immense pressure from inside and outside the country, in a nation where riots have become regular happenings since 2019. Bankrupt, weakened, crushed and losing ground, the Iranian regime may not survive unless it gets a break from these sanctions.
With the elections in mind, Iran has had hopes that Trump would not win re-election and would restore the Iran Deal, giving it a break. Nonetheless, the Iranians have been forced to take this position when they received confirmation from Chinese officials that “Unfortunately, Trump is going to win, because he has the American Middle Class behind him”.
Since then, Iran has been trying to minimize its damages by helping to “broker a peace deal between Iraq and Israel”. The Iranians have gone as far as to assure the Americans (through a third party), that they could not only secure support for the peace deal from Iraqi’s Shiite religious leaders, but even have them issue Fatwas legitimizing it.
This does not seem so far fetched as I have been documenting Iraqi media showing interest in peace with Israel, and it seems unlikely that such articles would be written without an Iraqi government green light.
(h/t Yoel)
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Whatever happened to those Palestinian elections that are supposedly scheduled for February or March?
Whatever happened to unity between Hamas and Fatah that they were talking about in Istanbul in September?
Apparently, Fatah has been putting everything on hold - until the US elections. This is consensus from Palestinian media and the analysts they are interviewing.
Fatah is not interested in reconciliation with Hamas nor in elections. They don't want to risk losing the power they have; they don't want Hamas in the PLO and they are under pressure from moderate Arab states who hate the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Hamas.
Most importantly, though, is that Fatah wants to wait until after the US presidential elections. They are betting that if Biden wins, he will turn the clock back to the Obama era when the US publicly pressured Israel for concessions and left the Palestinians alone. Biden would also likely restore funding to the Palestinian Authority, which means more money for Fatah.
If Trump wins, then Fatah will feel they are backed into a corner and will have no choice but to unify with Hamas and/or hold elections to strengthen at least their on internal unity.
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The Nobel Peace Prize Committee's decision to award the prize to the World Food Program this year assuaged the fears of elitists from New York to Paris and Berlin. The Abraham Accords, which include bilateral peace treaties between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and most recently Sudan, and Israel have fundamentally changed the Middle East. They have upended fifty years of failed peace processing on the part of Western foreign policy elites who seem to fall into deeper and deeper funks with word of each new peace deal.
Newsweek's cover story on Oct. 2 nicely encapsulated the distress. The cover featured a leering black and white photo of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a red and white headline, The Netanyahu Dilemma: Can The Nobel Prize Say No to Bibi?
By giving the prize to the World Health Organization, the committee kicked the can down the road. Maybe President Donald Trump will be defeated next week. Maybe Netanyahu will be ousted from power. And then things can return to normal, they console themselves. They will be able to forget all about the unpleasantness.
What is it about the Abraham Accords that makes the foreign policy "experts" so upset?
Three aspects of the deals really get their goat. The first is their authors. For the likes of the British Foreign Office and the Council on Foreign Relations, few are held in greater contempt than Netanyahu and Trump. The Newsweek article, which dealt with Netanyahu specifically, called him "widely loathed." And of course, there hasn't been a US President as despised by "the smart set" as Trump since Andrew Jackson.
The second aspect of the Abraham Accords that drives the peace processors to distraction is the fact that they were done at all. The Arab-Israel conflict isn't supposed to end this way. For 50 years, the "experts" have all agreed that the road to peace goes through Ramallah. So long as Israel doesn't make peace with the Palestinians, it cannot make peace with the Arabs. And in the two instances where Israel was able to sidestep the Palestinians – its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt and its 1994 peace treaty with Jordan – both the Jordanians and the Egyptians refused to implement the normalization clauses of the deals so long as Israel didn't make peace with the Palestinians.
The absence of normalization reduced the deals from actual peace to little more than long-term ceasefires. The same hostility and anti-Semitism that fueled the Arab wars against Israel which Egypt and Jordan led, remained and even grew within their societies in the years and decades after they signed the peace agreements.
As Newsweek put it, with barely disguised fury, "The agreements that Netanyahu has wrangled with Arab states of the Persian Gulf fail to resolve, or even address the situation of the Palestinians – a cause with passionate supporters in Europe, on US college campuses and with many US liberals."
Israelis are fretting. What nonsense! | “a Trump victory offers Israel no guarantees. A second-term President Trump, unfettered of his need to please pro-Israel evangelical voters, might rush into an overly forgiving new deal w/Iran, many Israelis fret.” https://t.co/Y3Kagv68sV
Allegations that @realDonaldTrump, the best friend the Jewish people have ever had in the White House, is in any way anti-Semitic are utter nonsense. They are an attempt as well to divert attention away from the Democrat Party's growing anti-Jewish bigotry. https://t.co/8DYjjOHoEm
The Anti-Defamation League slammed a conservative political action committee for calling prominent New York Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum an “antisemite.”
The ad, paid for by the American Liberty Fund and appearing on Facebook, begins: “Are you Jewish? Are you even thinking about voting Democrat? Have you ever heard the phrase ‘never again?'”
The ad then runs through an array of figures it describes as “antisemites” who spoke at the Democratic National Convention this summer, two of whom were Jewish: Kleinbaum and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Others on the list include Tamika Mallory, a Black activist who has spoken admirably about Louis Farrakhan, and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has been accused by mainstream Jewish organizations of making statements seen as crossing into anti-Semitism.
“Anti-Israel Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum and Bernie Sanders were on the program,” the ad says. “She sits on the board of radical NIF, which accuses Israel of war crimes.”
In a tweet on Friday, the ADL said: “The video distributed by Super PAC American Liberty Fund disrespects the memory of the Holocaust and smears a respected rabbi, @Skleinbaum. This is just another shameless attempt to use Jews as a political football.”
Antisemitic forms of anti-Zionism have roots in the UK far left going back decades. Before Corbyn’s victory in 2015 the UK far left tried in the mid 1980s to ban Jewish Student Societies on campuses because they were ‘Zionist’. Sunderland Polytechnic did so. A group Corbyn sponsored ran a piece titled ‘Why we support Sunderland Polytechnic’ and said the ban was not ‘in any way antisemitic’.
Move on a few decades and look at this cartoon. It circulated on the radical left and is a kind of summa of how the old socialism of fools has been blended with the new anti-imperialism of idiots and has then gone viral on social media. And you can be sure that those who created it and circulated it thought it ‘in no way antisemitic’.
The left needs to learn that antisemitism is the most protean and changeable of hatreds and it has shape-shifted yet again. Yes, Labour was poisoned in part by the flourishing of ‘classic’ anti-Jewish stereotypes and slurs in the party, as my 2019 report recorded. (There were even a few ‘Hitler was right’ types, believe it or not.) But the heart of the problem was ‘anti-Zionism’ of such an obsessive, conspiracist and demonising kind that it long ago left the terrain of ‘legitimate criticism of Israeli policy’ and merged itself with an older set of classical antisemitic tropes, images and assumptions to create antisemitic anti-Zionism.
There are legitimate criticisms to be made of Israel, as there are of every nation-state. Ringing up a Jewish Labour MP and calling her a ‘Zionist C***’ is not one of them. Nor is tweeting that Israel creating ISIS.
In short, that which the demonised Jew once was in older forms of antisemitism, demonised Israel now is in contemporary antisemitic anti-Zionism: all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on.’
Yes, disciplinary action should now follow. It is right that Corbyn has been suspended. But it will be even more important to wage a battle of ideas against antisemitic anti-Zionism. But the useful left-wing idiots who protected Corbyn for four years are legion. They infest a bio-degraded UK left and UK academia. So here is an idea: the party should turn for help to those of us on the left who have spent a good part of our professional and political lives understanding, fighting and defeating left-wing antisemitism. We just might know something.
The EHRC fallout – Jezza – your part in his downfall
I was reporting on antisemitism in the party long before most. In Autumn 2015, after Corbyn’s leadership victory, it felt like a lonely and uphill struggle. Few wanted to see the truth. We are diaspora Jews – we do not like to be seen to be rocking any boats.
It took far too long for some in the community to wake up and realise the dangers that antisemitism on the left poses. The problems that pro-Corbyn elements presented for us as Jews in the UK. There was ignorance about how antisemitism has masked itself and naivety over how quickly it spreads. Until spring 2018 a sense of ‘it will pass’ or ‘can’t happen here’ was still the order of the day.
For now, lots of people are climbing to the top of the hill, metaphorically holding the head of Corbyn aloft and crowing about how they (or their organisation) are heroes. It is my hope that this pause in fighting to chest-beat and celebrate is a brief one. Does our community possess both the understanding to realise the battle is not done and the courage to accept the boat must be rocked even further? I am not sure it does.
We must turn our attention to campus. The unions must also be fought. And on the political front, Jezza’s army – that sees the EHRC only as the establishment protecting itself – is still out there – and it is far larger than it was in 2015. Many local Labour Party groups remain toxic and hostile. Does anyone really believe that the antisemitic Palestine Solidarity Campaign – which actively spreads Jew hatred – will be unwelcome at the next Labour Party Conference?
Celebrate if you must, but make sure you are ready to fight again when dawn comes.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the major drivers of Israel demonization and delegitimization are the universities. The United States took action to address this last year when President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning anti-Semitic behavior and actions at colleges and universities that receive federal funding.
Further key promoters of this infamy are some of the giant international NGOs such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and others. People assume these to be run by people of conscience committed to relieving poverty and oppression.
At a time of unprecedented loss of trust in politicians and other authority figures, NGOs such as these therefore have a massive influence. They have become, in effect, a secular church. In fact, they often peddle pure poison about Israel, singling it out for wildly unfair and twisted condemnation while sanitizing or ignoring the Palestinians' murderous targeting of Israeli civilians.
Once again, it's the Trump administration that is leading the world in trying to tackle this, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushing to brand several of them anti-Semitic and withdraw federal funding from them.
Of course, it's naive to think that the world's oldest hatred can ever be eradicated. The best we can hope for is to push it back under its stone. To do that, however, it has to be correctly called out and its proponents treated as social pariahs.
But to do that on the left means progressively minded people must acknowledge that, in this instance, their anti-racism is actually racism, and they are not on the side of the angels at all.
The problem is that the left can never accept that they are not always on the side of virtue. And that's why the anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, as more generally in progressive circles, is a moral stain that won't go away.
The EHRC has crystallised a new legal precedent that the ‘Livingstone Formulation’ is antisemitic. It has added to the IHRA definition of antisemitism a new archetype of antisemitic behaviour.
I first named the Livingstone Formulation in 2006 after Livingstone’s bizarre spat with a Jewish journalist, whom he accused of being like a Nazi. Instead of apologising, Livingstone came back with an aggressive counter-accusation against those who said his late night ranting had been antisemitic. “For far too long the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government, as I have been.”
The Macpherson principle says that if a black person says they have experienced racism you should begin by assuming that they are right. The Livingstone principle says: if Jews complain about antisemitism on the left then you should begin by assuming that they are making it up to silence criticism of Israel or to smear the left.
It is antisemitic conspiracy fantasy because it doesn’t just say that Jews sometimes get it wrong, but that they know full well they’re wrong and they say it anyway, to increase their power.
The Livingstone Formulation is the key mode of antisemitic bullying mobilised against Jews on the left. It treats Jews as alien to the left and as treasonous. Pete Willsman accused the 60 rabbis of being Trump fanatics. Such an accusation is a way, rhetorically, of deporting Jews from their political home and making them homeless.
Livingstone himself was thrown overboard by the Corbynites in an effort to save their own skins and he has now been singled out in the EHRC report as a key example of Labour antisemitism. But Corbyn has now been thrown overboard too and is reunited with his old comrade Livingstone. There is justice in that, since they have always shared the same antisemitic politics.
I just found this in the JTA archives from September 5, 1968:
Since the Six-Day War, secret negotiations conducted by Spain have resulted in freeing several hundred Jewish families from Egypt, the Washington Post said Wednesday. “Possibly 500 families–Egyptian citizens as well as aliens–have been helped out of Egypt and have been dispersed” to Western countries. “Many stateless Jews,” the Post said, “have been given Spanish passports.” It said the International Red Cross and United States Jewish organizations have aided the effort.
“Some estimates are that 1,000 Egyptian Jews, most of them permitted to take only their personal belongings, have been helped to resettle abroad,” the newspaper reported. The Post noted, however, that “an estimated 250 Jews remain in confinement, principally in the Al-Thawra prison near Cairo. Other Jews freed previously have alleged that they were forced by prison officers to submit to sexual perversion and other indignities and were beaten and tortured.”
Last December the exodus was reduced to a trickle, and since July, the Post said, the Jewish exodus has apparently stopped.
Credited with the largest role in arranging the release of many of the Jews is the Spanish Ambassador in Cairo, Angel Sagaz. Mr. Sagaz, the Post noted, “played an important role in getting Jews out of Nazi Germany during World War II.” The Post quoted one Jew rescued from an Egyptian prison as saying that Ambassador Sagaz “went back as far as the inquisition in order to construe for the Sephardic Jews a Spanish origin and give them a passport.”
Ambassador Angel Sagaz was a hero who was not recognized during his lifetime. (His NYT obituary did not mention this episode.)
This account notes that when Sagaz found out that Jews could not even take their jewels with them from Egypt, he told them to deposit them in the Spanish Embassy in Cairo and they were later delivered by diplomatic pouch to them in Spain. He also saved some synagogue ceremonial objects.
One of the reasons that Sagaz was successful. according to this account, was that Spain at the time did not recognize Israel and was friendly with Arab states, so it couldn't be accused of "Zionist" leanings. Sagaz lobbied the police, Egypt's ministries and Nasser himself, claiming that the Jews were Spanish citizens based on a 1924 edict from Spain's leader Primo de Rivera that Sephardic Jews could become citizens. (Spanish diplomats used that same ruling to save 5000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.)
Angel Sagaz' story needs to be better known. Here's the only photo I could find of him, along with his wife, who helped him in his heroism.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Explanations given by the US in the past for an unwillingness to connect Jerusalem – any part of Jerusalem – to Israel in passports revolved primarily around the idea that the status of Jerusalem in the eyes of most countries, is still pending, and that this is a hot-button issue that needs to be determined in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The US, according to this argument, did not want to prejudice the outcome of future negotiations by taking a stand on the issue.
But that argument was disingenuous, because what about Jerusalem before 1967, before Israel repelled the Jordanian attack during the Six Day War and gained control of the entire city, east and west.
Why could Israel not be Jerusalem’s designated state in US passports before the Six Day War, when Israel only had control of the western part of the city?
The reason: because the US never formally relinquished its support for UN resolutions dating to the Partition Plan in 1947 calling for the city to be designated as a “corpus separatum’’ – a city with a special status to be placed under an international regime. Washington’s clinging on, at least formally, to the “corpus separatum” idea only really ended in 2018 when Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, in accordance with a 1995 US law.
The long-standing American refusal to acknowledge in passports that any part of Jerusalem was an integral part of Israel spoke of a belief, or even a hope, that it was not. This reinforced the pernicious notion – an idea propagated by Palestinian propaganda and which gained traction in recent years, and was even incorporated in the resolutions of various UN bodies – that Israel had no valid historical tie or claim to the Holy City. It was high time to put that idea to rest.
The US Supreme Court had the opportunity to do so in 2015, when it ruled on a case brought by Ari Zivotofsky to force the State Department to list “Jerusalem, Israel” as the place of birth for his son, Menachem, in conformity with a 2002 law passed by Congress. But the court missed the opportunity, ruling that the president, not Congress, has the sole authority to make these types of foreign policy decisions and the court struck down the law.
That being the case, once Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there in 2018, it should have been just a matter of time for the State Department to change its procedures on this matter as well. These types of ingrained policies, apparently, are not easy to reverse, and it took over two years for this to happen.
If you conduct foreign policy as a transaction, then there is always a chance that if some part of the transaction doesn't hold up, or if the person in the White House changes, that the foreign state will renege. That means that to cement Israel's relationships with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and potentially other deals with Oman, Saudi Arabia or several other countries, the U.S. needs to continue to be a stakeholder—or Israel and its new friends need to move quickly to cement the deals.
Israel has had pragmatic relationships in the past. It reached out to Iran and Turkey in the 1950s, when Arab states were hostile, and then it signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan while never cultivating a particularly close relationship with either. Iran's regime is today the most hostile country to Israel and Turkey—and Turkey, which still has relations with Israel, has vowed to "liberate" Muslim areas of Jerusalem from the Jewish state. This shows how Israel's relationships in the region tend to be precarious.
How can relations with the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan learn from the challenges of the pas?
First, Israel and the UAE already share a worldview on the region, and can be part of an emerging U.S. alliance with India and Greece that would create a nexus of power from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. This is predicated upon a strategic partnership with Washington built on F-35s for Israel, Greece and the UAE, and a close partnership between Israel and India that already exists. People-to-people relationships are also essential to developing ties between Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem. The business hubs in Tel Aviv and Dubai offer excellent opportunities. Already, there is cooperation on the medical front against COVID-19. The first ship has arrived in Israel from the Emirates, as well as the first flights.
The foundation for Israel's new friendships are being built. Now, the countries need to fill the new edifice with economic, cultural and, eventually, defense ties. Some of those ties are being pushed by Washington, but in the wake of the U.S. election, it is important that these new friendships grow on their own accord. Collective focus from Israeli, Emirati and other regional leaders, businessmen and civil society organizations can help make that happen.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has long been considered an anti-Israel institute, to put it mildly.
It was established following an Australian tourist’s attempt to burn down Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque in 1969. Its members are the representatives of 57 Islamic states, including Turkey and Iran, and for the past four years the organization has been headed by Secretary-General Yousef Al-Othaimeen, a Saudi politician. In February, the organization rejected US President Donald Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative, calling on its members not to cooperate with it.
On Monday, however, Al-Othaimeen sounded a very different tone.
In an interview to Sky News in Arabic, Al-Othaimeen said: “We need to think outside the box… This [Palestinian] issue has been going on for over 70 years. We have tried wars and throwing the Israelis into the sea; we have tried a lot. The new generation of our Palestinian brothers needs to try ideas that will lead to a solution to this problem, which is of interest to us all, but in new ways, ways that have not yet been tried, in order to reach a two-state solution with East Jerusalem as the capital of this state.”
Al-Othaimeen then asked: “Why insist on the path of resistance and boycott and distancing? What should be distanced are the traditional and familiar ideas.”
A few months ago such statements would have been inconceivable. That they were uttered this week, by the head of this organization, shows how the Israeli normalization agreement with Sudan, and the earlier agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, have generated nothing short of a Middle East earthquake.
The world view of generations of Arabs in the region, in both Sunni and Shiite states, was shaped around the Palestinian issue and the conflict with Israel. Yet here before the astonished eyes of hundreds of millions of Muslim and Christian Arabs — and especially the Palestinians’ shocked gaze — that foundational worldview has collapsed. Suddenly, the Palestinians – who would wave the prospect of normalized relations with the Arab world as the carrot to try to convince Israel to resolve the conflict with them — now find themselves irrelevant. They woke up one morning to find that the presumed consensus, the very premise, the whole concept of Palestinian nationality is in real danger.
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
