Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, January 05, 2018

01/05 Links Pt2: Murray: The Iranian rebellion the world wants to ignore; Phillips: The Iranian uprising and Europe’s shameful silence; The meaningless protests of American Jewish leftists

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The Iranian rebellion the world wants to ignore

Elsewhere the silence indicates the dream-puncturing of an entire political class. In 2015 the UN security council agreed a deal with Iran to limit elements of its nuclear programme for a period. Iran’s incentives included a freeing up of trade and a delivery of billions of dollars in cash. For their part, companies and governments across Europe hoped to get their own cash bonanzas in the wake of that deal. Such deals always compromise the people who make them. One of the chief defenders of the 2015 deal, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, has spent recent days being studiously silent on the uprisings in Iran. When President Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital she couldn’t tweet enough condemnations of his action. Yet five days into the protests in Iran, she hadn’t even said that she is watching events closely. Europe’s leading foreign affairs ideologue needs Iran’s governing status quo to stay in place so that nothing about her own deal, future cash prize or putative Nobel award is in any way disturbed.

Even if the regime is one day toppled — far-off though that day looks at the moment — there are enough rival factions within Iran to make the result as unpredictable as it was for many people in 1979. Back then the New York Times published a memorable piece by Richard Falk (formerly of the UN, now professor emeritus at Princeton University) assuring readers that the depiction of Ayatollah Khomeini ‘as fanatical… and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.’ He later added that ‘Khomeini’s Islamic republic can be expected to have a doctrine of social justice at its core; from all indications it will be flexible in interpreting the Koran.’ Charitably we might say that Iranian politics has long been hard to read. The classified advice of the CIA in August 1978 was that ‘Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.’

Many people will dream their own dreams about the latest events in Iran, as experts and amateurs did in 1979. But for some people in the West — notably the Iranian regime’s paid and unpaid defenders — the mission right now will be to defend and otherwise cover for the regime. They will point out that the House of Saud isn’t at all nice: as though that is contested, or presently relevant.

If the Iranian people want freedom from the mullahs and can seize it for themselves, then we should wish them solidarity and luck. They will need it — for every succeeding stage, as well as this one. They are facing a regime that is not just the region’s chief destabiliser and terror sponsor, but a brutal theocracy. And that regime will certainly remain in power so long as the rest of the world remains as confused, compromised, sympathetic and supine as it has been in recent days and years.

PodCast: Iran's Uprising: Is this a rebellion the world wants to ignore?
With Douglas Murray, Nazenin Ansari, Nigel Jones, Sam Leith, Mark Mason and Freddy Gray.

Melanie Phillips: The Iranian uprising and Europe’s shameful silence

Obama believed the only reason Muslims attacked the West was that it had oppressed them. If the West offered Iran the hand of friendship, he suggested, it would turn into a model global citizen.

So he was determined to empower Iran, and Britain and the EU – driven as ever by a combination of greed and funk – fell into line behind him.

Obama thus bent over backward to give Iran a free pass. According to Politico, his administration stymied an FBI-led operation to shut down Hezbollah’s drug-running, terrorism- financing racket.

In the 2016 prisoner swap deal with Iran, he released several men who his own law enforcement agencies believed posed a danger to national security.

And in the 2009 Green Revolution, Obama abandoned the Iranian people by refusing to give the protesters support.

All of this was to secure the nuclear deal – which has merely empowered Iran to use the money released by sanctions relief to strengthen its terrorist infrastructure and step up its malign and aggressive meddling in the rest of the region.

The Iranian protesters offer the one hope that a catastrophic conflagration can be averted by regime change from within.

But the Western Left doesn’t want them to succeed – because that would shine the harshest possible light on the moral bankruptcy of the Obama administration that the Left supported to the hilt.

More unthinkable still, it would mean giving some credit to Donald Trump. But the Left’s unhinged hatred of the US president will allow nothing – not even the liberation of an oppressed people and the safety of the world – to challenge their unshakable conviction that he can never do a single thing that is good.

If the Iranian uprising is stamped out, it will be because of the absence of support from Britain and Europe. Their silence makes them complicit with a genocidal regime at war with the West and has caused them shamefully to betray a brave people fighting for its freedom.

Hillel Neuer on Radio Sweden - "Margot Wallström's position on Iran is troubling"

Jan. 4, 2018 - UN Watch, an NGO which scrutinizes the United Nations, has criticized Sweden's foreign minister Margot Wallström for not condemning Iran strongly enough over its violent response to protests in the country. UN Watch has also criticised Sweden's lack of commitment to an emergency UN Security Council meeting on the situation in Iran. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told Radio Sweden: The position of the Swedish foreign minister is troubling. There are hundreds of thousands of people affected by what's happening in Iran and Iran is involved in conflicts across the region. Neuer claims Sweden is neglecting its duty to advocate for human rights, but in a statement to Radio Sweden, Margot Wallström's press secretary said that she was among the first foreign ministers to comment on the situation in Iran. He added: Discussions are currently underway regarding whether the situation in Iran should be brought up in the UN Security Council and, if so, in what format. Wallström’s office insisted that Sweden's position on the matter is as yet undetermined and that a vote on whether to call a Security Council meeting is expected later today. On Thursday afternoon, Wallström took to Twitter again to express concern over the deaths, mass arrests and restrictions on the internet in Iran.

Palestinian "rage" demonstrations over Jerusalem are getting smaller and smaller

Islamci Jihad organized a rally in Gaza to denounce Trump (for the fifth Friday in a row.)

The biggest crowd scene I could find was this one:

Compared to previous Islamic Jihad rallies, this is pretty pathetic.

An anti-John Kerry rally in 2014:

Anniversary celebration in 2012:

Another in 2016:

Palestinians have to work very hard to make it look like their people are angry over this.

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01/05 Links Pt1: Is US aid to the Palestinians actually preventing them from making peace?; US Suspends at $900 Million in Security Aid to Pakistan

From Ian:

Rabbi Abraham Cooper: Trump's bold moves just might jolt the Palestinians to finally negotiate with Israel

President Trump has sent a loud and clear message to leaders of the Palestinian Authority: Stop treating the United States like a giant ATM, withdrawing billions of dollars in aid without engaging in peace negotiations with Israel and being willing to make mutual compromises.

Has this message upset Palestinian leaders and their supporters? Absolutely.

But maybe – just maybe – President Trump’s bold and unconventional message will act like a shock treatment and jumpstart new talks between Palestinians and Israelis. If this happens – and it is far from certain – the president’s departure from past policies could go down as an historic turning point in what seems like a never-ending and frozen “peace process.”

The State Department reports that America has provided more than $5.2 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Palestinians since 1994, including $290 million in 2016.

In addition, the U.S. has provided billions more to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), which has aided Palestinian “refugees” in several countries in the Middle East since 1949. This aid includes $355 million from American taxpayers in 2016 alone. America also provided an additional $55 million to Palestinians in 2016 for law enforcement.

The term “refugees” includes children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of people who left Israel when the nation became independent 70 years ago.

The president tweeted Tuesday: “… we pay the Palestinians HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel…. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”

President Trump’s tweet comes on the heels of his announcement last month that the U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – and our United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s threat to make deep cuts to America’s financial contributions to the world body.

Fight against incitement

As Palestinian leaders call for more violence and Palestinians burn American flags alongside effigies of U.S. President Donald Trump on the streets, the prospects for peace appear more distant than ever.

But Palestinian terrorism did not begin with Trump's Dec. 6 declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the official capital of Israel. It has been ongoing since the 1920s and it is fueled by violent indoctrination spread by the Palestinian leadership. It is only via incitement and indoctrination that innocent Palestinian children grow up to become terrorists.

More must be done to prevent the Palestinian children of today from becoming the terrorists of tomorrow.

The only way to stop young, impressionable Palestinian children from supporting terrorism in the future is to ensure that UNRWA schools no longer indoctrinate children into supporting terrorism.

Recently, the Center for Near East Policy Research published a comprehensive study on Palestinian school textbooks. The study argues that indoctrination continues to be a systematic problem in the Palestinian Authority school system.

Sexual Harassment East and West

"I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her." — Nabih Wahsh, Islamist lawyer, on Egypt's al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women's rights being increasingly denied.

We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values -- whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. There are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.

From Al Arabiya:

Activists in Lebanon ridiculed the announcement, during an interview with a TV station, by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah that his monthly salary, from Iran, was $1300.
Nasrallah, who tried yesterday to deflect the condemnation of Iranians shouting in the streets against Tehran’s funding of the Hezbollah militia while more than half of the Iranian people live below the poverty line, refused to disclose the amount paid to his militia from Iran.

He might be telling the truth about his direct salary, but as others pointed out, Nasrallah gets probably hundreds of millions or more from Iran to run Hezbollah. He decides where all the money is spent, including how much to allocate to himself.

Nasrallah refused to answer the question of how much Iran pays Hezbollah.

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Glenn Greenwald's fact-free criticism of Israeli policy towards incitement on social media

At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald wrote an article last week about how Facebook is supposedly doing Israel's bidding on censoring any anti-Israel posts.

As he is wont to do, Greenwald will take half-truths, eradicate context, and use these pseudo-facts to make insane generalizations that are, in the end, absolute lies.

Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders:

Shortly after news broke earlier this month of the agreement between the Israeli government and Facebook, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to the social media giant over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement.” She said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests.

She’s right. The submission to Israeli dictates is hard to overstate: As the New York Times put it in December of last year, “Israeli security agencies monitor Facebook and send the company posts they consider incitement. Facebook has responded by removing most of them.”

What makes this censorship particularly consequential is that “96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news.” That means that Israeli officials have virtually unfettered control over a key communications forum of Palestinians.

Greenwald is saying that what Israel says is incitement is actually any criticism of Israel.

The charge is almost too laughable to believe. Anyone can go to Arabic news pages in Facebook and use their translation service to see that not only are there thousands of anti-Israel posts every day, but there is still plenty of raw incitement to murder Jews that Facebook misses.

Greenwald's dishonesty in proving his position becomes clear in the next paragraph:

In the weeks following those Facebook-Israel meetings, reported The Independent, “the activist collective Palestinian Information Center reported that at least 10 of their administrators’ accounts for their Arabic and English Facebook pages — followed by more than 2 million people — have been suspended, seven of them permanently, which they say is a result of new measures put in place in the wake of Facebook’s meeting with Israel.”

The Palestine Information Center is a front for an internationally recognized terror group. It is Hamas. Too bad this little piece of information wasn't considered important for Greenwald.

Last March, Facebook briefly shut down the Facebook page of the political party, Fatah, followed by millions, “because of an old photo posted of former leader Yasser Arafat holding a rifle.”

Greenwald doesn't give the source for his quote. Do you want to know why? Because it was a lie spouted by Fatah itself!

Fatah's Facebook page publishes direct incitement to kill Israelis and Jews, as I've documented here and Palestinian Media Watch has literally hundreds of examples. An old photo of Arafat with a rifle is not considered offensive by PMW, by Israeli officials or by anyone. This, however, is:

A real journalist would know this. An anti-Israel propagandist like Greenwald would know this too - and purposefully hide that information from his readers.

But Greenwald's crimes against the truth don't end there. Not only does he laughably imply that Palestinians cannot find any anti-Israel news to read, he also claims that official Israeli social media - including Netanyahu's - is filled with direct incitement to kill Palestinians:

Though some of the most inflammatory and explicit calls for murder are sometimes removed, Facebook continues to allow the most extremist calls for incitement against Palestinians to flourish. Indeed, Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has often used social media to post what is clearly incitement to violence against Palestinians generally. In contrast to Facebook’s active suppression against Palestinians, the very idea that Facebook would ever use its censorship power against Netanyahu or other prominent Israelis calling for violence and inciting attacks is unthinkable. Indeed, as Al Jazeera concisely put it, “Facebook hasn’t met Palestinian leaders to discuss their concern.”

Greenwald's link for Netanyahu's supposed incitement against Palestinians is when he was referring to the kidnap and murder of three Israeli boys. He quoted a poem about vengeance but in no way could anyone interpret that as a call to hurt or kill Arabs, only the people responsible for the murders.

And while it is true that Facebook would never censor Netanyahu, it would also never censor Abbas, who directly incited his people to oppose the Jews who "desecrate Al Aqsa with their filthy feet" and who he exhorted to oppose by all means - literally two weeks before the wave of knifing and car ramming attacks began in 2015, a mini-intifada that was directly encouraged by the same Fatah Facebook page that Greenwald says is innocent of any incitement.

One other difference between Palestinian incitement and the (admitted) Israeli incitement: Israelis are horrified at the few Jewish terror attacks against Arabs and the entire society is against such acts. Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian society honors the terrorists.

Palestinian incitement on social media results in actual attacks in the hundreds per month. And social media is a large part of the reason for it. One cannot say the same about Israelis.

But Greenwald doesn't care about actual incitement to murder Jews. He's pretty much condoned it.

(h/t Bill, Yosef)

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Now's not the right time (poster)

When the intelligentsia of the world tried to argue against the US recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, their arguments fell into three categories:

One, by supposedly Zionist left wing Jews, was that while ultimately part of Jerusalem would be Israel's capital, now was not the right time to make such a declaration.

Two, often made by diplomats and Middle East "experts," was that the move would make Arabs very, very, very angry and would ignite the region into a huge terror war.

Three, made by the Palestinians and their Arab allies to the West, was that such a move would destroy any chance for peace.

It's funny, because those same arguments are used all the time to stop anything happening that Palestinian Arabs (or Arabs altogether) don't want.

(retweet the poster)

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01/04 Links Pt2: From Berkeley To Europe: The Normalization Of Anti-Semitism; Sir Ringo Starr Outclasses Lorde And BDS Movement

From Ian:

IsraellyCool: The Palestinian Search for Peace

Fresh from his lung transplant in the US and follow-up treatment in Israel, Saeb “Massacre” Erekat had the chutzpah to once again rant on about supposed Israeli occupation, apartheid and heinous crimes.

Erekat slammed the American president for being unreasonable with the Palestinians and accused Trump, by his actions, of encouraging “the Israeli occupation to consolidate its occupation and apartheid regime.”

“Now, he is threatening to starve Palestinian children in refugee camps and deny their natural rights to health and education if we don’t endorse his terms and dictations,” Erekat said, referring to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“Instead of treating the Palestinians with fairness, President Trump has chosen a game of blame rather being an honest broker,” Erekat said. “His statements against the Palestinian people have encouraged Israel to continue its heinous crimes and violations of International Law.”

But I think fellow palestinian propagandist Hanan Ashrawi takes the cake with her response.

“President Trump has sabotaged our search for peace, freedom and justice. Now he dares to blame the Palestinians for the consequences of his own irresponsible actions!”

Yup, she really did claim that the palestinians – despite decades of rejecting peace offers and engaging in terrorism) have been searching for peace all this time.

Melanie Phillips: Our Crazy World - the Iran uprising

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the Iran uprising, the excommunication from liberal Eden of Professor Alan Dershowitz and the inversion by the left of truth and lies.

Christian fundamentalists found a silver lining in the Holocaust

Continuing my reading of The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel by Caitlin Carenen:

During World War II, the mainstream American Protestants came around to the idea of helping the Jews being massacred in Europe, but the fundamentalists looked at the extermination of the Jews as part of God's plan.

During the years of Hitler's campaign against the European Jews, the fundamentalist periodicals, such as Our Hope, the Weekly Evangel, the Sunday School Times, the Moody Monthly, and others, approached the persecution quite differently from their mainline counterparts. The periodicals consistently and accurately reported the statistics and details of the persecution.But unlike pro-Zionist mainline Protestants, fundamentalists saw the persecution of the Jews in a prophetic light and, for the most part, eschewed human efforts to intervene. They condemned Hitler’s campaign against the Jews, even while acknowledging that the persecutions helped to fulfill biblical prophecy-namely, pushing more Jews toward Palestine. One fundamentalist noted ironically in a Moody Monthly article that “by driving the preserved people back into the Promised Land. Hitler, who does not believe the Bible and who sneers at the Word of God, is helping to fulfill its most outstanding prophecy.”" Furthermore, most dispensationalists, though quick to point out that those who persecuted the Jews would be punished by God, nonetheless insisted that such persecutions were a necessary part of God's plan for the Jews.

In Our Hope, Gaebelein noted that of the estimated ten million Jews living in Europe, more than half were the subject of increasing antisemitism, and noted particularly the plight of Jews in Germany and Poland. It was proof, he insisted, that “their own God-inspired Scriptures are being fulfilled.” This persecution could not be solved with human endeavors, and, perhaps in a reference to the efforts of the [Christian Zionist] ACPC, he argued, “nor can a united front with Gentile nominal Christians bring about change. The change will come when “they shall look upon Him whom they pierced’ and acknowledge Christ as their Saviour-King."

Many fundamentalists viewed the persecution of the Jews in Europe as an opportunity to witness. As the Moody Monthly pointed out in April 1943, “The terrific persecutions in Europe, the troubles in Palestine, and the ever increasing antisemitism throughout the world have softened their hearts and make them long for security and rest of soul.” Even though the conservative press offered far more details of Jewish destruction than their liberal counterparts, they nonetheless interpreted these statistics through a uniquely prophetic perspective which emphasized that the divine purpose of Nazi persecution lay in Jewish conversion to Christianity." For example, the Moody Monthly argued that the persecution of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had resulted in mass conversions of Jewish children. “Perhaps that is the reason the Devil saw to it that Warsaw was wrecked and the Jews scattered,” one contributor suggested." Nonetheless, nations who wreaked such destruction on God's chosen people would surely face divine judgment, “the wrath of
God Almighty.“

Sure hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and deported from the Warsaw Ghetto - but so many of their orphaned children were becoming Christian!

All it takes is a little perspective to see that the Nazi persecutions weren't all bad.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Recently Donald Trump and Nikki Haley made news by threatening to cut off (or at least sharply reduce) funds given to the Palestinians. Trump wasn’t clear about which funds, but Haley referred to US support for UNRWA, the welfare agency which maintains the ever-growing class of “Palestinian refugees.”

It’s important to understand what a Palestinian refugee is, because it is very different from any other kind of refugee.

A refugee is normally someone who fled or was driven from his own country by war, political unrest or natural disaster. Often they do not have a permanent home and are temporarily living in a refugee camp. They have no independent means of sustenance, and are dependent on charity.

The UN has an agency, the UNHCR, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose job it is to help such people survive until they can either return home or make a new life in a new place. For example, today there are millions of refugees from places like Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and more. UNHCR feeds refugees and provides temporary housing and medical assistance in the short term, and tries to provide longer range solutions such as resettlement so that people can stop being refugees. In 2016, UNHCR says it has resettled over 189,000 people. This is a drop in the bucket when there are 17.2 million refugees in the world, by UNHCR figures, but it is something.

UNHCR has a budget of $7.7 billion and about 11,000 employees worldwide; it is funded by voluntary contributions, 87 percent of which come from the EU (yes, I was surprised to read this too).

Europe today is in the process of being overrun by people claiming to be refugees. It’s important to distinguish refugees, who have been forced to leave their homes, from migrants, who have chosen to emigrate in order to improve their lives. But that’s not what I am writing about today.

From the point of view of UNHCR, a refugee is a person in a particular condition. Its goal is to reduce the number of people in that condition, by finding permanent jobs and places to live, by helping stateless refugees get asylum in places where they will not be victimized further. Refugee status for UNHCR is a situation, not a defining characteristic of a person. It is something undesirable that one wants to end as soon as possible.

A “Palestinian refugee,” on the other hand, is something else entirely. Palestinian refugee status was granted to anyone who could prove that he had resided in Mandate Palestine for at least two years in 1948 (since June 1, 1946) and was then displaced (voluntarily or not) from his home. And it inheres in the person, not his situation; so even if, for example, a Palestinian refugee gets rich and builds a mansion in Samaria or Jordan, he still keeps his refugee status. Not only that, but it is hereditary – a father passes his refugee status down to his children and his grandchildren. Apparently there is only one way to lose Palestinian refugee status, and that is for a refugee to “return” to “his home” in what is today Israel.

UNHCR does not deal with Palestinian refugees. A special UN agency, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) was created in 1949 just for the refugees of 1948. Estimates vary, but there were probably about 600,000 Arabs displaced by the war. Some Arabs who were not actually displaced received refugee status, and a figure of 750,000 Palestinian refugees is quoted by UNRWA. Thanks to the unique hereditary nature of Palestinian refugeehood, there are today about 5 million “Palestinian refugees.” UNRWA spends about US $1.5 billion each year housing, feeding and educating the refugee population, meeting their medical needs, and so on. Palestinian families also receive welfare payments depending on the size of the family. The lion’s share of this comes from the US and the EU, with small amounts from the rest of the world (including the Arab world).

“Palestinian refugees” live in camps in the Gaza Strip (1,300,000), Judea/Samaria (800,000), Lebanon (450,000), Syria (526,000), and Jordan (2,175,000). These “camps” are more like large neighborhoods or small cities than the temporary refugee camp that comes to mind. They are administered by the host governments (including the Palestinian Authority) and provisioned by UNRWA. In Lebanon, restrictions on education and employment reminiscent of apartheid have been placed on residents; in Syria, refugee camps have been attacked by regime forces and residents massacred.

Think about it. There are now four generations of refugees. A migrant who arrived in Mandate Palestine in 1946 to work for the British authorities and then left in 1948 was guaranteed support in perpetuity for himself and all his descendents. But UNRWA’s mandate does not include resettlement, and none of the host countries – not even the Palestinian Authority! – will grant citizenship to “Palestinian refugees.” Once a Palestinian refugee, always a refugee.

UNRWA has about 30,000 employees, some 99% of whom are Palestinians. Its educational system is designed to teach the Palestinian narrative of victimization and revenge. In the Gaza strip, it teaches the Hamas ideology of hatred for Jews as well.

This is not a formula for solving a refugee problem, the way the problem of the millions of refugees of WWII was solved. It is a way to create a continually growing dependent class of stateless, disaffected and furious people. The welfare system encourages large families, while at the same time the refugee camp system makes it impossible for most of the young males to find work. No wonder the camps have proved to be a fertile breeding ground for terrorism!

How did this happen? How is it that the international community tried to solve every refugee problem except this one, which it chose to exacerbate? The simple answer is that the Arab nations wanted it as a weapon against Israel, and the West gave them what they wanted so as not to imperil its supply of oil.

But the times have changed, Arab oil is not what it used to be, the conservative Sunni Arab nations are more worried about Iran than Israel, and simple mathematics have made the maintenance of the refugee population too expensive. At the same time, Mr. Trump has voiced the feeling of many, which is that the Palestinians, with their unique sense of entitlement, know only how to take, and are not willing to make the slightest gesture toward compromise.

If the goal is a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO (in my opinion a terrible idea) then Trump is quite right that continuing to pay them while they refuse to negotiate is stupid. But leaving this aside, maybe there is a bigger opportunity. Is it not time to move to end the “Palestinian refugee problem” for once and for all? Here is how to do it:

First, stop creating new refugees. Children of refugees will no longer inherit their status. At the same time, the host countries will be expected to grant full residency to those who request it (interestingly, this is already the case for the one refugee camp, Shu’afat, that is located in an area under Israeli civil control – its residents have been treated as Arab residents of Jerusalem). The hosts will be required to remove apartheid-like restrictions on the refugees. Welfare and other aid will be phased out, and the funds intended to pay for education and medical care will be transferred to the host countries – under careful control – to begin bringing those services directly to the residents.

Ultimately UNRWA itself will disappear. Those who have inherited refugee status will lose it. The few real refugees – those who actually left in 1948 (a babe in arms then will be 70 this year) – will come under the UNHCR framework.

In order for there to ever be peace between Israel and her neighbors, the Arabs must face reality: that Israel is a legitimate country belonging to a legitimate people, and that the Palestinians are not going to “return” to it, not ever. The charade of the “Palestinian refugee” must end.

Today Trump has an opportunity to tear away another veil of pretense, just as he did for Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,

He should go for it.

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01/04 Links Pt1: Sharansky: The West Should Stop Dithering and Show Its Support for the Protesters in Iran; Iran’s Endgame In Gaza

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: The West Should Stop Dithering and Show Its Support for the Protesters in Iran

An opinion piece in the New York Times recently argued that the best way for the U.S. government to help the Iranian protesters is to "Keep quiet and do nothing." It is vital to understand why failing to support the protesters at this critical juncture would constitute a moral and strategic mistake.

In 2009, when Iranians came out in large numbers to denounce their country's rigged presidential election, the response they received from the American government was decidedly tepid. This policy of non-interference discouraged protesters and reinforced the regime.

My experiences as a political prisoner and my decades of involvement with democratic dissidents around the world have shown me that all democratic revolutions have some elements in common. It is the drive of ordinary citizens to free themselves from government control over their thought, speech and livelihoods that has propelled dissidents and revolutionary movements around the world.

Any regime that refuses to respect its citizens' most basic rights, and especially the right to think and speak freely, can maintain its power only by intimidation and force. Revolutions take place when enough people simultaneously cross that fateful line between silent questioning and open dissent. Once they do so, the regime can no longer contain the upsurge of opposition and must either begin to liberalize or collapse.

World powers should warn Tehran - and thereby reassure protesters - that it must respect its citizens' rights if it wishes to continue receiving benefits from their countries. Articulating a clear policy of linkage would put pressure on the regime to make genuine changes and give hope to protesters that their sacrifices will not be in vain.

It is time for all those who value freedom to state clearly that the Iranian people - like all people - deserve to be free, and that when they fight for this right, those of us who already enjoy it will stand unequivocally by their side.

Iran’s Endgame In Gaza

One week of popular protests in Iran has brought into stark focus the country’s deep internal divisions, along with widespread resentment towards the mullahs, which have remained relatively dormant since regime forces brutally quashed the Green Revolution in 2009. What started last Thursday in the city of Mashhad as a small economic rally—with participants primarily venting frustration over the lack of trickle-down effect from some $100 billion in sanctions relief granted to Tehran in the 2015 nuclear deal—has morphed into nationwide, deadly demonstrations against the rulership of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Across Iran chants of “death to the dictator” have become common refrain as pictures of the ayatollah are set on fire. Among the many grievances being aired is anger over the Islamic Republic’s deep military, and thus financial, involvement in conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, in addition to support for Lebanese-based Hizbullah. Somewhat less pronounced is the regime’s bankrolling of the Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, although protesters have reportedly recited slogans such as ‘Let go of Palestine’ and ‘Forget Palestine’ while invoking the Gaza Strip in particular.

In this respect, relations between Shiite Iran and Sunni Hamas have thawed since the former froze ties with Gaza’s rulers after they refused to support the Assad government at the onset of the Syrian war. Now, Tehran’s renewed funding of Hamas is part and parcel of the Islamic Republic’s attempt to increase its regional influence and, on the micro level, its presence along Israel’s borders. The latter entails accelerating Hizbullah’s militarization in Lebanon and establishing a permanent presence in Syria, including the entrenchment of Shiite proxies in the Golan Heights.

According to Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser (ret.), former director general of the Israeli Ministry of International Affairs and Strategy, Iran’s growing involvement in Gaza is based on a convergence of interests. “On the one hand, Hamas has become weaker as it lost the ability to rely on its usual supporters, while its effort to forge unity with the Palestinian Authority appears to have failed. “On the other hand,” he explained to The Media Line, “the Iranians want to increase the strength of the ‘resistance’ axis that opposes Israel and promotes radical Islamic ideology and Hamas can be a useful ally in this cause.”

Sohrab Ahmari: More Iran Nonsense From the New York Times

Thomas Erdbrink is at it again. The New York Times Tehran bureau chief told readers in November that Donald Trump’s tough rhetoric had pushed the Iranian people into the arms of a regime they detest. Iranians begged to differ: A few weeks after Erdbrink’s story appeared, hundreds of thousands of them poured into the streets in opposition to clerical rule.

Confronted with this apparent discrepancy between reality and his thesis, Erdbrink filed a December 29 dispatch–from Niseko, Japan–that described the protests as “scattered” and concerned mainly with the “government’s handling of the economy.” Meanwhile, in actually existing Iran, the protests had spread from Mashhad, in the northeast, to some two-dozen cities. And the protesters were chanting “Death to the Islamic Republic,” “Death to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei,” and “Death to the Principle of the Guardianship” of the mullahs–not “Death to Inflation.” Erdbrink could have gotten wind of these slogans via Twitter and other social media outlets. Instead, he mostly relied on quotes from regime figures and pro-regime think-tankers keen to frame the uprising as apolitical.

Nearly a week since the protests erupted, Erdbrink remains committed to his earlier conclusions. Witness his January 2 dispatch, this time from the Iranian capital. “Hard-Liners and Reformers Tapped Iranians’ Ire. Now Both Are Protest Targets,” reads the headline, and the body of the article suggests that the current revolt was instigated by these two competing factions inside the regime.

The Tehran regime is invested in the hard-liners-versus-moderates-and-reformers narrative. It is a classic good-cop-bad-cop routine with many useful applications in foreign diplomacy. Numerous Western statesmen and intellectuals have fallen for it since the regime’s founding in 1979. Back then, another writer for the Times, Princeton’s Richard Falk, wrote of how the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “entourage of supporters is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals”–shortly before the Khomeinists staged a decade-long orgy of torture and summary execution. Ever since, finding and supporting regime moderates has been a cornerstone of U.S. and European policy toward Iran.

It is notable that the people that claim that UN Security Council resolutions are massively important when they apply to Israel are silent when Israel's enemies violate them - and brag about it.

UNSC 1701, passed to end the 2006 Lebanon war, called for:

full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of 27 July 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese State;

and

no sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorized by its Government;

and

Calls upon the Government of Lebanon to secure its borders and other entry points to prevent the entry in Lebanon without its consent of arms or related materiel and requests UNIFIL as authorized in paragraph 11 to assist the Government of Lebanon at its request;

Hezbollah has been flouting this resolution for 11 years, and the government of Lebanon as well as UNIFIL and the UN have ignored it as well.

Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah literally brags about how he is violating UNSC 1701:

Meanwhile, Sayyed Nasrallah urged "The axis of the Resistance to be prepared for this war and turn this threat into an opportunity."
"We must prepare surprises and sophisticated weapons for any future war," he confirmed, reiterating that the Resistance is working day and night to get all kinds of arms that will allow it to rise victorious in any future war."
Moreover, Hezbollah Secretary General underscored that "the Lebanese Resistance has surprises and modern arms for any future war."
"If a great war takes place, all options are on table including to go beyond the Galilee," he unveiled, assuring that "The Resistance in Lebanon is stronger than ever."

This explicit and open violation of a Security Council resolution doesn't even merit a single newspaper article.

And Hezbollah isn't only arming itself, but it is arming other terrorist groups, as Nasrallah continues to brag:

Expressing Hezbollah's readiness to seize every chance to offer support and arms to the Resistance in Palestine, Sayyed Nasrallah declared the Lebanese Resistance openness to all Palestinian factions because there is an agreement at least on Al-Quds.

Beyond that, Nasrallah calls to expand terror operations outside Israel to the entire world:

Sayyed Nasrallah also emphasized that Hezbollah had repeatedly stressed the principle of coordination between the different Palestinian factions. "We discussed with the Palestinian factions activating the Intifada at home and abroad and providing support for it."

"Activating an intifada abroad" means Hezbollah is admitting to organizing terror attacks worldwide. We knew this, of course, but they don't normally admit it so explicitly.

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Qalandia "refugee" camp in the West Bank

From Times of Israel on Tuesday:

Responding to a reporter’s question on whether the US will continue to provide funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to millions of Palestinian refugees, in light of a non-binding UN General Assembly resolution last month condemning the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, [Nikki] Haley said Trump was prepared to cut aid to UNRWA if the Palestinians refuse to return to peace talks.

“I think the president has basically said that he doesn’t want to give any additional funding until the Palestinians are agreeing to come back to the negotiation table,” Haley said. “We’re trying to move for a peace process but if that doesn’t happen the president is not going to continue to fund that situation.”

“The Palestinians now have to show their will — they want to come to the table. As of now they are not coming to the table but they ask for aid. We’re not giving the aid,” added Haley. “We’re going to make sure they come to the table and we want to move forward with the peace process.”

An article in Palestine Today says in Arabic what the Palestinians try not to say in English.

If UNRWA cannot get funded, then the "refugee" issue would fall to the UNHCR.

The UNHCR would not consider the vast majority of the people under UNRWA's mandate to be refugees.

As the article says, the entire point of UNRWA, from the Palestinian perspective, is to artificially keep the "refugee" issue alive - until the descendants of the refugees from 1948 are allowed to "return" to Israel.

Why would any self-respecting state, as the Palestinians consider themselves, want their own people to move to an enemy state? A state that they claim has an apartheid system against them, no less?

Absurdly, the demand for Arabs of Palestinian descent to move to Israel doesn't only apply to those who languish in "refugee" camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, but also to every single resident of the camps in the West Bank and Gaza - under Palestinian control!

Nothing makes the goals of Palestinian nationalism as clear as their demands to perpetuate and fund the fake "refugee" status of their people until they can "return."

UNHCR tries to resettle refugees in other countries so they can rebuild their lives in peace and security. UNRWA wants to keep their "Palestine refugees" to be stateless until they "return" to Israel.

The goal is not to build a state for Palestinians but to destroy Israel. And it always has been.

Everyone knows that "return" is a demand to destroy Israel from the inside. But the international community won't say this out loud. The claim that Israel is somehow obligated to adhere to a tortured reading of a part of a single paragraph of a non-binding General Assembly resolution is still considered a cogent argument from the world that is still frightened of Arab terror. They pretend that the unique UNRWA definition of "refugee" has the same legal weight that the real definition of refugee has. (Not one European or even Arab country will accept asylum applications from UNRWA's "Palestine refugees" unless they are real refugees from Syria, for example.)

The entire UNRWA ecosystem has been subverted and repurposed since the 1950s with the single goal of destroying Israel - by keeping Palestinian Arabs in stateless misery - under the pretense of human rights.

The goals of Mahmoud Abbas' PA, of Fatah and Hamas, of the "pro-Palestinian" agitators, are all the same. And the "refugee" issue is all the proof you need.

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