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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Rachel Neuwirth and John Landau</title>
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		<title>Are Jewish Settlements Built on Arab Land?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rachel-neuwirth-and-john-landau/are-jewish-settlements-built-on-arab-land/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=are-jewish-settlements-built-on-arab-land</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2012 04:10:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachel Neuwirth and John Landau]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Judea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[land]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Samaria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Settlements]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[west bank]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=145715</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The truth behind the deceitful reports manufactured by the Israeli Left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/west-bank-israeli-_1000389c.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146022" title="west-bank-israeli-_1000389c" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/west-bank-israeli-_1000389c.gif" alt="" width="375" height="235" /></a>Is it really true, as much of the European and American press have been reporting for years, that Jewish “settlers” in the “West Bank” (more properly known as Judea and Samaria) are living on land that they have stolen from Palestinian Arabs?</p>
<p>This is in fact utterly impossible. Every time that the Israeli government has proposed or given tentative approval for the construction of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, it has first advertised its intentions in Arab newspapers, and invited any Arabs who have claims to the land to come forward with them. Only if no such claims were put forward for at least six months; or if, after such claims were made, the Israeli court system had ruled against them following a painstaking and thorough review of the facts, in which the courts bent over backwards to be fair to all Arab claimants, did the Israeli government actually authorize the construction of Jewish communities in this disputed area. Israeli courts have forbidden the Israel government from confiscating any Arab-owned land for Jewish settlement since 1980. And the Israel government has not authorized any new settlements since the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” began in 1993.</p>
<p>Not even the so-called “unauthorized” or “illegal” Jewish settlements, those that the Israeli government has not fully and expressly authorized, are built on Arab-owned land. Both the authorized and unauthorized Jewish communities were all built on what had been completely unoccupied, uncultivated and uninhabited “waste land.” No Arab homes were destroyed, no Arab residents were expelled, and no Arab farmland was seized in creating any of these Jewish communities—whether their construction was fully authorized by the Israeli government or not. And under the land ownership laws of Judea and Samaria &#8212; which date to when these territories were under Turkish rule, and which have been respected by all subsequent governments, including the Israeli administration &#8212; nearly all uninhabited and completely undeveloped “waste land” belongs to the state, not to any private owner. While such land could legally be purchased from the state, there were almost no instances in which Arabs actually did purchase such “waste land,” because they would have had to pay taxes on it while deriving no benefit for the foreseeable future. Whatever few purchases of such land were made, were made by Jewish philanthropists hoping to provide land for future Jewish refugees or immigrants.</p>
<p>Why, then, have the notions that all of the Jewish “settlements” are “illegal” and, what is more, built on Arab-owned land taken such a firm hold on the belief-systems of the world’s governments and news media? One major reason has been the activities of Israel-based “Human rights” NGOs (“non-governmental organizations”) such as Peace Now, B’tselem, Yesh Din, Yesh Gvul and many others. These <em>soi-disant</em> human rights organizations, which are committed to ending the Israeli “occupation” of all land outside the country’s June 3, 1967 cease-fire lines, and to forcing the expulsion of the 600,000 Israelis who live outside those cease-fire lines (which were never legal borders), have published a series “reports” claiming that up to 30 percent of the land on which Israeli-Jewish “settlements” on the “West Bank” are built exist on what these groups describe as “privately owned Arab land” (or is it 38%? Or 32%? or 24% ? or 16%? Each “report” gives a different percentage figure, and sometimes there are even two contradictory figures within one “report”). These figures, as well as many other claims by the <em>soi-disant</em> human rights groups, are then immediately published as facts—first by the Israeli newspaper <em>Haaretz</em>, which despite being published in Israel is actually a mouthpiece for the Palestinian Authority and its network of affiliated organizations—and then by <em>The New York Times, </em><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-settlement22nov22,0,6720701.story?coll=la-home-world"><em>The Los Angeles Times</em></a>, the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/22/AR2006112200270.html"><em>Washington Post</em></a>, the <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20061121-101321-1011r.htm"><em>The Washington Times</em></a>, <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=6518851">NPR</a>, the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6168752.stm">BBC</a> and a thousand other newspapers and electronic media services throughout the Western world.</p>
<p>However, when one actually reads in detail the lengthy reports on the web sites of these “human rights” groups that purport to document the supposed settler “land grabs,” one finds no credible evidence for these percentage claims, despite many footnotes and long statistical tables, charts, etc. Either these “reports” a) fail to give any original source at all for the statistics, or b) they claim that they are supported by thousands of Israeli government documents that these groups have received under Israel’s Freedom of Information law—but <em>without quoting from a single specific document</em> that supports their claims about Jewish settlements on “privately owned Arab land.”</p>
<p>A report issued by Peace Now titled “Breaking the Law in the  West Bank,” first published in November 2006, is a case in point. It is the one that claims that “nearly 40 per cent” (later, in the report’s fine print, specified down to  <strong>“</strong>38.76” per cent”) of settlements are built on “privately owned Arab land.” The report is also filled with graphs and charts, much of them about irrelevancies such as the exact number of square kilometers in each settlement, maps of the settlements and of the entire “West Bank” showing the location of settlements, even photographs (some of them, ironically, showing the beauty of these communities), which give a semblance of verisimilitude and accuracy to the report. But whenever claims are made about the amount of land in the settlements that belongs to Arabs, no documentary source is given. Despite all the graphs, charts, tables and maps in the 21-page report, we are never told precisely how Peace Now reached its conclusions about the extent of land owned by Arabs in the Jewish settlements</p>
<p>After the 2006 report aroused some criticism and questions in Israel, Peace Now issued a second report a year later, “clarifying” and “correcting” the one issued a year earlier. Peace Now claimed that <em>this</em> report was based on more than 3,500 documents received from the Israeli government since the original 2006 report was published. This of course raised the question as to how Peace Now had compiled the earlier report, complete with all those statistics and other detailed data <em>without</em> these documents. Be that as it may, the 2007 Peace Now report admits that the previous report had been wrong in claiming that 83.4% of the “settlement” of Maale Haadumim (actually a suburb of Jerusalem less than 5 miles outside the city limits) was owned by Arabs, and scaled down that claim to 0.5 percent—a 99.95 percent decrease in the amount of land in the community that Peace Now claimed was “privately owned” by Arabs. The total percentage of land in Jewish “settlements” alleged to be “privately owned” by Arabs was revised downward from 38 percent to 32 percent in the 2007 report. At the same time, the revised report stood by Peace Now’s earlier claims about Arab ownership of land in the other Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and even increased the amount of land that it alleged was owned by Arabs in some of these communities. But even the “new” revised report, despite its claim to be based on Israeli government documents, <em>fails to quote even one such document in support of these statistical claims, </em>or even a specific document that states that <em>any land at all</em> in the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is owned by Arabs and illegally occupied by Jews.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Peter Beinart: Trojan Horse in the Temple</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rachel-neuwirth-and-john-landau/peter-beinart-trojan-horse-in-the-temple/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=peter-beinart-trojan-horse-in-the-temple</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 May 2012 04:17:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachel Neuwirth and John Landau]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apartheid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jewish community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Beinart]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Zionism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=133419</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why are Jews rolling out the red carpet for a slanderer of Israel? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/peter.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-133436" title="peter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/peter.gif" alt="" width="375" height="258" /></a>Peter Beinart, author of the recently published <em>The Crisis of Zionism</em> and editor of the Daily Beast’s “Open Zion” blog, has been criss-crossing the nation on a speaking tour for months, speaking at synagogues and to Jewish student groups on college campuses. He sometimes lectures alone, and sometimes engages in &#8220;debates&#8221; with individuals whose areas of disagreement with him are limited.</p>
<p>American Jews are not alone in laying out the welcome mat for Beinart. Within the past week, the Jerusalem Post published an editorial welcoming Beinart into the “big tent” of “Zionism,” and commending his call for a boycott of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “well-intentioned” and somehow different from similar calls by foreign governments. In an unprecedented move, the Jerusalem Post’s weekly columnist Isi Leibler was compelled to condemn his own newspaper’s editorial as “idiotic.”</p>
<p>Why are we Jews laying out the red carpet to this man? And why, in general, are we Jews so friendly and deferential to our worst enemies?</p>
<p>One reason is that, despite the efforts of our enemies through the ages to portray us as super-sophisticated criminal masterminds, we Jews are actually very simple-minded and naive, at least where our enemies are concerned.</p>
<p>Beinart professes at every opportunity to love Israel and to even be a “Zionist.” He boasts that he even has an Israeli flag displayed on the wall of his six-year-old son’s room. This seems to render his Jewish audiences oblivious to Beinart’s repetition and endorsement of nearly every element of the Arab world’s anti-Israel narrative and his overwhelmingly negative characterization of Israel as an “undemocratic&#8221; society.</p>
<p>Not that Beinart isn’t also a clever debater. His principal tactic is to make so many false or misleading statements all at once that it is impossible to reply to or even to keep track of them all. Inevitably, some of them will sink subliminally into the minds of his audience, if they are the least bit open to suggestion. Also in his arsenal of debating tactics are distortions by omission and false assumptions implied by his tone and the drift of his argument. These methods are especially insidious since they do not require the “lie direct” and make it difficult for the audience to examine the implied assumptions on which they are based.</p>
<p>All three of these tactics were much in evidence during Beinart’s debate with Daniel Gordis at Columbia University on May 2. Within the space of six minutes, Beinart informed his audience that Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is “undemocratic” and “South African”  in character (he avoids using the inflammatory word “apartheid” when speaking to Jews not yet fully indoctrinated in hostility to Israel); that “occupied” Palestinians are not allowed to vote, while Israeli Jewish “settlers” in the “occupied territories” are; that Palestinians are stopped at checkpoints while Jewish settlers are waived through them; that Israel is sponsoring “settlement growth” in the “remote” Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba and in Ariel, which is “thirteen miles inside” the Palestinian territories; that Israel is “paying” Israelis to move to the “occupied” territories; and that Israel’s government is the obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.</p>
<p>The claim that Israel denies the Palestinian Arabs the right to vote is flat-out false. Palestinians have voted repeatedly in Palestinian elections without Israeli interference of any kind. The only reason they have not voted in the last few years is that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has refused to hold elections in open defiance of the Palestinians&#8217; own constitution, and he has continued to rule his people without any legal mandate. That is Abbas’s own choice, not that of Israel or, for that matter, the Palestinian Arabs. The claim that Palestinians are forced to submit to searches at checkpoints while Israelis are automatically waived through is equally false. As Eli E. Hertz has pointed out, Israeli Jews are routinely subjected to searches at checkpoints whenever they go into a supermarket, restaurant or post office, or get on a bus—usually several times each day. In addition, they are frequently <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11552#.T8WSEZlYte9">stopped</a> at roadside checkpoints, just as Palestinian Arabs are.</p>
<p>Nor does Israel’s government pay anyone a single shekel as a reward for moving to a “settlement.” In fact, it issues so few permits for new houses in the so-called “settlements”—actually villages and suburban communities less than 15 miles from Israel’s 1949 armistice lines—that it is almost impossible for young Jewish couples with children to remain in them, much less for Israelis from within the “green line” to move to them.</p>
<p>Furthermore, there is no real similarity between Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. Israel has completely integrated public transportation, restaurants and markets, and has no legal restrictions on the right of the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel to live on or to own land anywhere in Israel. There are numerous integrated neighborhoods throughout the country, and Arabs serve as members of parliament, judges and government ministers. In fact, an Arab judge recently convicted former Israeli president Moshe Katzav of rape and sentenced him to prison. Could a black judge (of course there were none) have done that to a white president in apartheid South Africa?</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Anders Behring Breivik and Norway&#8217;s Illness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rachel-neuwirth-and-john-landau/anders-behring-breivik-and-norways-illness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anders-behring-breivik-and-norways-illness</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 May 2012 04:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachel Neuwirth and John Landau]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Breivik]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[counter-jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MSM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trial]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=132991</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lessons from the trial of a mass murderer held in a society obsessed with being nice.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/breivik11.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-132995" title="breivik1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/breivik11.jpg" alt="" width="434" height="326" /></a>The trial of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is, in the words of a perceptive Norwegian reporter-blogger, a &#8220;media circus.&#8221; The killer is being allowed to spout his extremist views on a wide variety of subjects, and although he murdered 77 people with no apparent provocation, he is being permitted by the court to plead self-defense.</p>
<p>And amazingly, the trial began with the presiding judge and the prosecutors advancing to the defendant&#8217;s box and shaking Breivik&#8217;s hand&#8211;a mass murderer who admits his crimes and expresses no remorse.</p>
<p>Plainly, there is something wrong with such a &#8220;non-adversarial&#8221; criminal trial, and with the politeness-obsessed, conflict-averse Norwegian society that has created such a criminal justice system. Other aspects of the trial are equally non-adversarial. While in an American courtroom the defendant&#8217;s lawyer would argue that his client is not guilty by reason of insanity&#8211;the only plausible defense for a murderer who freely admits his guilt and expresses pride in his crimes&#8211;Breivik&#8217;s lawyer is allowing his client to argue that he is sane. In his remarks to the court and the press, the lawyer freely admits that he finds it distasteful to represent his client, and he doesn&#8217;t make any serious effort to defend or even excuse him. &#8220;I feel I have lost my soul as a result of this case,&#8221; he told reporters.</p>
<p>On the other hand, while the defense attorney shows little interest in defending, the prosecution seems equally uninterested in prosecuting. It has not argued that the defendant is sane&#8211;which it must do in order to obtain a conviction&#8211;and is instead leaning toward the view that Breivik is insane. In other words, the prosecutors are on the whole more helpful to the defendant than his own lawyer.</p>
<p>But whether he is convicted or found &#8220;not guilty by reason of insanity,&#8221; Breivik will live a comfortable life under some form of detention, with numerous rights and privileges that in Norway’s ultra-humane correctional system are granted to all criminals. On the other hand, he will be detained indefinitely in either case&#8211;until and unless he can persuade his &#8220;guardians&#8221; that he is no longer a threat to society. In Norway’s permissive, soft-hearted and soft-headed society, he might just succeed in doing that some day.</p>
<p>Why then, hold a trial at all?</p>
<p>In an American courtroom, a defendant pleading self-defense after killing 77 unarmed, unresisting people would be required to produce evidence that he actually was under attack and needed to use deadly force to protect his life. Any other &#8220;evidence&#8221; offered by the defendant would be disallowed by the judge as irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial. Instead, the Norwegian court is allowing Breivik to mount a &#8220;political&#8221; defense that his atrocities were necessary to protect his society from multiculturalism, socialism and an Islamic takeover. This makes for a prolonged, extremely painful trial for the relatives of the victims, who must sit there listening to a remorseless killer boast of the dreadful things he did to their deceased loved ones, and attempt to justify, even glorify, his crimes. Since none of this &#8220;testimony&#8221; has any real bearing on the question of Breivik&#8217;s guilt or innocence, allowing it in court serves only Breivik&#8217;s twisted purposes&#8211;and perhaps those of others who seek to exploit his atrocities, and the horror they have inspired, to advance their own political agendas.</p>
<p>Some of these “others” who are seeking to make political capital out of the Breivik massacre are commentators for the “mainstream media” (MSM) who seek to blame Breivik’s atrocities on conservative politicians and bloggers. Their rhetorical trope is guilt-by-association&#8211; but they provide no evidence of any association between the people whom they blame for the murders and Breivik, who committed them.</p>
<p>Typical of this MSM  blame-game response to the Breivik massacre is New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who claims that nearly everyone on two continents who has warned of the danger to Western civilization posed by militant Islamism, even those who have made no criticism of Islam as such, are &#8220;enablers of terrorism&#8221; and responsible for Breivik&#8217;s vicious deeds. According to Cohen, Breivik&#8217;s &#8220;many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic&#8221; include such conservative politicians as &#8220;Geert Wilders in the Netherlands,” “the surging Marine Le Pen in France,” and “Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King,” as well as “far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain,” and “U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam.&#8221;</p>
<p>Cohen leaves out one small detail: none of these people have ever advocated violence against Muslims, or much less indigenous Norwegian Christians, who formed the overwhelming majority of Behring&#8217;s victims.</p>
<p>On the other hand, New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment in Oslo and co-author of &#8220;Al-Qaida in Its Own Words,&#8221; prefers to link Breivik to &#8220;counterjihad&#8221; bloggers:</p>
<blockquote><p>While Mr. Breivik&#8217;s violent acts are exceptional, his anti-Islamic views are not. Much, though not all, of Mr. Breivik’s manifesto is inspired by a relatively new right-wing intellectual current often referred to as counterjihad. The movement&#8217;s main home is the Internet, where blogs like Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs and Gates of Vienna publish essays by writers like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Bat Ye&#8217;or and Fjordman, the pseudonym for a Norwegian blogger. Mr. Breivik&#8217;s manifesto is replete with citations of counterjihad writers, strongly suggesting that he was inspired by them.</p></blockquote>
<p>However, Hegghammer concedes that &#8220;the leading counterjihad writers have virtually never advocated violence, and several of them have condemned Mr. Breivik&#8217;s actions&#8221; and that &#8220;the more belligerent part of Mr. Breivik&#8217;s ideology has less in common with counterjihad than with its archenemy, Al Qaeda.&#8221;</p>
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