<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; abbas</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/abbas/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:46:16 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Mahmoud Abbas: Failing the Palestinians and Peace</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/mahmoud-abbas-failing-the-palestinians-and-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mahmoud-abbas-failing-the-palestinians-and-peace</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/mahmoud-abbas-failing-the-palestinians-and-peace/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:35:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[process]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248290</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Palestinian president takes an even more drastic totalitarian turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Mahmoud-Abbas-AP.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248291" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Mahmoud-Abbas-AP-450x324.jpg" alt="Mahmoud Abbas" width="296" height="213" /></a>Mahmoud Abbas, (aka Abu Mazen) has been a failure as the Palestinian “Rais.” He failed to lead the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward peace with Israel, and he mismanaged the alleged goal to achieve statehood for the Palestinians. Instead of facing the tough issues and making compromises required in negotiating peace and statehood with the Israelis, Abbas chose an alliance with the Gaza controlled terrorist group Hamas. Following Abbas’ pact with Hamas last April, Israel broke off peace negotiations with the Palestinians, just days before the talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry were scheduled to expire.</p>
<p>Abbas isn’t only confusing Israelis, Americans, and is his Europeans patrons, he is perplexing his own Palestinian consituents. Following last summer’s Gaza War between Hamas and Israel, Abbas threatened to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) and saught to indict Israel on war crimes. PA Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki met with the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC last August to explore ways of joining the court by PA President Abbas signing the Rome Statute.  When, however, the U.S. Congress threatened to cut off all funding to Palestine if Abbas filed war crimes charges against Israel, Abbas backed off. At the same time though, Israel’s Prime Minister threatened to counter-sue, alleging that the rockets fired by Hamas terrorists into Israeli civilian areas constituted “<a href="http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/09/hamas-quietly-admits-it-fired-rockets-from-civilian-areas/380149/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">double war</span></a>” crimes.</p>
<p>The Israeli Law Center called Shurat-HaDin, led by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner submitted a complaint against Mahmoud Abbas in the ICC for “war crimes.” The complaint claims that Abbas may be tried for his responsibility in the missile attacks targeting Israeli cities, executed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which Abbas heads. It charges that Fatah, also led by Abbas, was responsible for several missile attacks on Israeli cities. Darshn-Leitner pointed out that Fatah leader Abbas may be tried by the ICC. Abbas is a citizen of Jordan and Jordan is a member-state of the ICC. The ICC has jurisdiction over crimes committed by a citizen of a member state. Darshan-Leitner added, the organization “will not allow Fatah to carry out rocket attacks on Israeli population centers, while <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Shurat-Hadin-files-war-crimes-complaint-against-Abbas-with-ICC-381312"><span style="color: #0433ff;">hypocritically</span></a> advocating Palestinian membership in the ICC. Abbas falsely believes that alleged crimes against Arabs are the only ones that should be prosecuted.”</p>
<p>A week ago, Abbas threatened again. This time he fingered the security co-ordination with Israel following the death of Ziad Abu Ein, 55, PA Minister without Portfolio. He promptly backtracked. On November 29, 2014, Abbas declared  that if the United Nations Security Council rejects the Palestinian statehood resolution, he will seek membership in the ICC. He said, “We will seek Palestinian membership in international organizations, including the International Criminal Court in the Hague. We will also <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.629102"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reassess</span></a> our ties with Israel, including ending the security cooperation between us.”</p>
<p>Abbas’ latest gambit is a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution that would force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria (West Bank) within two-years. According to press reports, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry requested to postpone the Palestinian initiative at the UNSC until after the Israeli elections, (March 17, 2015) but the Palestinians refused. PA Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki intimated to reporters that there was disagreement between the Americans and Palestinians on how the elections in Israel would or wouldn’t advance the PA UNSC resolution. Kerry believed that a UNSC vote before the elections would impact adversely on the winners. In other words, a vote before the elections would strengthen Netanyahu and the Right in Israel. Maliki argued that a vote before January, 2015 would be rather positive.</p>
<p>At a closed meeting last week with 28 EU ambassadors, John Kerry revealed that he was asked by former Israeli president Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni to prevent the Palestinian initiative at the UNSC because it will help “<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.632816"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Netanyahu and Bennett</span></a> (Jewish Home Party chairman) in the upcoming elections.” Maliki posited that Kerry himself has not abided by his pledge not to intervene in the Israeli elections.</p>
<p>Also last week in London, Secretary of State Kerry met with Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, and according to a PA senior official, Kerry posed a number of U.S. principles that should be included in the Palestinian UNSC resolution. Kerry supposedly refused the two year time period demand by the PA for Israeli withdrawal. The resolution as Kerry suggested should include recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, as well as U.S. opposition to declare Jerusalem as a joint capital for Palestine and Israel. Erekat rejected the U.S. proposals. Kerry declared afterward that the U.S. does not accept the Jordanian (presenting the Palestinian resolution)  and French resolutions. He warned that if the Palestinians insist on presenting the resolutions, the U.S. would use its veto power. Erekat rejected Kerry’s ideas, and insisted that the resolutions would be submitted. As of December 25, 2014, Abbas rejected an Arab League request to delay the submission of the Palestinian statehood until January when five new members who support the Palestinian cause will join the Security Council.</p>
<p>Abbas’ gambits notwithstanding, the increased authoritarianism of Abu Mazen is reflected in a recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. It indicates that 66% of Palestinians are afraid to criticise Abu Mazen and the PA, and 80% consider the PA institutions to be corrupt and infected with nepotism. Last summer, according to the survey, support for Abbas (Abu Mazen) declined to 35% from 50%. “There is no doubt about the fact that <a href="http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/659/827.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">outlawing</span></a> freedoms and rights, especially of professional unions, is a factor in Abbas’ decline in popularity,” said Dr. Khalil Shikaki, one of the survey takers<span style="color: #323333;">. </span></p>
<p>PA security agents inspect what is written in the social media, and threaten those who criticize Abbas. Abu Mazen critics point out that after a decade in power he is controlling all systems of government to such an extent as to minimize all resistance. Perceived political rivals such as Mohammad Dahlan, who once served as Abu Mazen’s assistant, and Salam Fayyad, the former Prime Minister of the PA, are vilified by Abbas. Following the Palestinian Unity government formation, headed by Rami Hamdallah last May, elections were to follow. But, once again, internal squabbling prevented it, and added to it was Abbas’ fear of a Hamas victory.</p>
<p>Abu Mazen’s strategy for the establishment of a Palestinian state has reached a cul-de-sac.  None of his gambits proved successful. His rivalry with Hamas is bitter and ongoing, despite the alliance he forged at the expense of negotiations with Israel. And, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, he balks at the idea of ‘ending the conflict’ with Israel. He knows full well that this might be a death sentence for him, targeting him for assassination. It is for this reason that Abbas and the PA are unlikely to forgo the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel. Israel for its part, cannot accept such a demographic suicide. This is why Abbas would rather avoid negotiations with Israel and bypass it by going to the UNSC. It is also the ostensible reason why peace with Israel cannot be achieved, and as a result, the Palestinian people continue to suffer political and economic deprivation. Abbas has not been the solution to the Palestinian problems; rather, he has been responsible for failing them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/mahmoud-abbas-failing-the-palestinians-and-peace/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Lethality of De-Judaizing Jerusalem</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-lethality-of-de-judaizing-jerusalem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lethality-of-de-judaizing-jerusalem</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-lethality-of-de-judaizing-jerusalem/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2014 05:02:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holiest city]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246372</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Abbas's unrelenting campaign to erase the Jewish presence and history in the world's holiest city.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/jr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246373" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/jr-409x350.jpg" alt="jr" width="271" height="232" /></a>As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book <em>The World Turned Upside Down</em>, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is continuing a long tradition of attempting to de-Judaize Jerusalem by expressing his mendacious notion that, as he put it, “Jerusalem has a special flavor and taste not only in our hearts, but also in the hearts of all Arabs and Muslims and Christians,” and “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Palestinian state and without it there will be no state.” The same scholar of history who wrote a doctoral dissertation that questioned the extent and truthfulness of the Holocaust was now making his own historical claim that there had never been a Jewish presence and history in the world&#8217;s holiest city.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, Abbas has been at it again, adding new layers of rhetoric to his tactical campaign to de-Judaize Jerusalem, in general, and to the Temple Mount, specifically. In an October PA TV broadcast, Abbas made the breathtakingly absurd claim that Jews not only had no historic claim to the Temple Mount, but they also should never even be allowed to have their presence known at that location. “The settlers have arrived . . . ,” he said. “This is our Sanctuary, our Al-Aqsa and our Church [of the Holy Sepulchre]. They have no right to enter it . . . [or] right to defile it. We must prevent them . . . .”</p>
<p>Only in an alternate, Orwellian universe could only one group of people on earth—Jews—be enjoined from praying on the single site most holy to their faith, and, moreover, be told that their presence there is not only provocative but is repugnant and befouls the very ground on which those of another faith—Muslims—have staked a triumphalist religious claim and now wish gather and pray.</p>
<p>This attempt to airbrush out a Jewish presence from Jerusalem—in fact, all of historic Palestine—is not a new message for Abbas, of course. In 2000 he expressed similar contempt for the idea that a Jewish temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount and that, even if it had existed, the offenses committed by Israel against the Palestinians negated any claim Jews might have enjoyed, absent their perfidy. “Anyone who wants to forget the past [i.e., the Israelis] cannot come and claim that the [Jewish] temple is situated beneath the Haram,” Abbas absurdly asserted in an article in <em>Kul Al-Arab</em>, an Israeli Arabic-language weekly newspaper. “ . . . But even if it is so, we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace.”</p>
<p>Judging by the October 30<sup>th</sup> statement by U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki, forgetting the past is something in which the John Kerry’s office is also complicit. “We&#8217;re extremely concerned by escalating tensions across Jerusalem and particularly surrounding the Haram al-Sharif, Temple Mount,” Psaki said, pointedly, and dangerously, referring to the Temple Mount by its Arab name first and thereby fortifying, and seeming to lend equal weight to, the Palestinian’s spurious claim to spiritual and territorial rights to the site, and to the wider area described now as East Jerusalem.</p>
<p>“It is actually critical that all sides exercise restraint, refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric and preserve the status quo,” she added, suggesting that Jews not be allowed to pray on the Mount and that the status quo prohibiting Jews from praying on the site be ordered to continue so as to not incite Muslim sensibilities.</p>
<p>But in characterizing East Jerusalem —or any part of Jerusalem, for that matter —as territory that Israel “occupies” but over which it enjoys no sovereignty, Abbas (and U.S. State Department, too) is misreading, once again, the content and purpose of 1967&#8242;s U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 that suggested an Israeli withdrawal “from <em>territories</em> [not <em>all</em> territories]” it acquired in the Six-Day War. Critics of Israeli policy who either willfully misread or deliberately obscure the resolution&#8217;s purpose say that the Jewish State is in violation of 242 by continuing to occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem, including what is spuriously now referred to as “Arab” East Jerusalem.  But the drafters of Resolution 242 were very precise in creating the statute’s language, and they never considered Jerusalem to have been occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War.  Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, one of the resolution&#8217;s authors, made this very clear when he wrote some years later that “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate[.] . . . At no time in [my] many speeches [before the U.N.] did I refer to East Jerusalem as occupied territory.”</p>
<p>But the true danger of the Palestinian thinking about Jerusalem—and, indeed, about all of the Palestine that they covet, including Israel itself—was revealed in Yasser Arafat&#8217;s own view that he expressed in a July 2000 edition of <em>al-Hayat al-Jadida</em> when he threatened that “They can occupy us by force, because we are weaker now, but in two years, ten years, or one hundred years, there will be someone who will liberate Jerusalem [from them].”</p>
<p>“Liberating” Jerusalem, of course, does not mean transforming it into a pluralistic, open city where members of three major faiths can live freely and practice their religions openly. Liberating Jerusalem for the Palestinians would be more in keeping with the type of liberation that Transjordan&#8217;s Arab League effected when they burned and looted the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem in 1948; expelled and killed its hapless Jewish population; destroyed some 58 synagogues, many hundreds of years old; unearthed gravestones from the history-laden Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for latrine pavers; and barred any Jew from praying at the Western Wall or entering the Temple Mount.</p>
<p>But false irredentist claims, Islamic supremacism which compels Jews and Christians to live in dhimmitude under Muslim control, and an evident cultural and theological disregard for other faiths— while troubling in the battle over sovereignty in Jerusalem—are not, according to Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, the most dangerous aspects of a diplomatic capitulation which would allow the Palestinians to claim a shared Jerusalem. In his engaging book, <em>The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City</em>, Gold pointed to a far more troubling aspect: in their desire to accede to Arab requests for a presence and religious sovereignty in Jerusalem, the State Department, EU, UN member states, and Islamic apologists in the Middle East and worldwide may actually ignite jihadist impulses they seek to dampen with their well-intentioned, but defective, diplomacy.</p>
<p>Why? Because, as Gold explained, “In the world of apocalyptic speculation, Jerusalem has many other associations—it is the place where the messianic Mahdi [the redeemer of Islam] is to establish his capital. For that reason, some argue that it also should become the seat of the new caliphate that most Islamic groups—from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda—seek to establish.”</p>
<p>When Yasser Arafat in July 2000 gave expression to the eventual “liberation” of Jerusalem as a sacred and unending ambition for the Palestinian cause, he defined it as a recapture of what had been, and should be, in his view, Muslim land, just as the eventual extirpation of Israel and the reclamation of all of historic Palestine would accomplish. The establishment of the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is the first important step in the long-term strategy to rid the Levant of Jews and reestablish the House of Islam in Palestine. “Jerusalem’s recapture is seen by some as one of the signs that ‘the Hour’ and the end of times are about to occur,” Gold suggested. “And most importantly, because of these associations, it is the launching pad for a new global jihad powered by the conviction that this time the war will unfold according to a pre-planned religious script, and hence must succeed.”</p>
<p>So far from creating a political situation in which both parties—Israelis and the Palestinians—feel they have sought and received equal benefits, such negotiations and final agreements would have precisely the opposite effect: destabilizing the region and creating, not the oft-hoped for Israel and Palestine “living side by side in peace,” but an incendiary cauldron about to explode into an annihilatory, jihadist rage. Those in the West who are urging Israel “to redivide Jerusalem by relinquishing its holy sites,” Dore cautioned, “may well believe that they are lowering the flames of radical Islamic rage, but in fact they will only be turning up those flames to heights that have not been seen before.” If the State Department and other Western diplomats are intent on mollifying the Arab street by pressuring Israel to divide Jerusalem as a peace offering to the Palestinians, it may well be setting into motion the exact opposite result—a jihadist, apocalyptic movement invigorated by the misguided diplomacy of the West that, once more, asks Israel to sacrifice its security and nationhood so that Islamists can realize their own imperial and theological ambitions at the Jewish state’s expense.</p>
<p><em>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of </em>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-lethality-of-de-judaizing-jerusalem/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Al Aqsa Libel: A Brief History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:08:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246027</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dark background to Abbas’s incitement of murderous violence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/al.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246072" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/al-450x287.jpg" alt="al" width="298" height="190" /></a>Repeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, and Abbas’s calls for Palestinians and other Muslims to take action to defend Al Aqsa and &#8220;purify&#8221; the Temple Mount, have been a key factor in the latest spate of deadly Arab assaults on Israelis.</p>
<p>Other PA officials have echoed and elaborated on Abbas’s message, with some calling explicitly for murdering Jews in response to supposed provocations against Al Aqsa. Palestinian Authority media have conveyed the same message, punctuated by cartoons depicting Jews attacking Al Aqsa and Palestinians defending it.</p>
<p>A number of those involved in the assaults against Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere have asserted that they were acting in response to the calls of their leaders to protect Al-Aqsa.</p>
<p>The false claims of Jewish threats against or damage to Al Aqsa have a long pedigree. They have been made by Abbas many times in the past and were a staple of Yasser Arafat’s screeds against Israel and against Jews more generally. Arafat labeled the terror war he launched in 2000 the &#8220;Al Aqsa Intifada.&#8221; He did so to cast the onslaught not as an aggressive campaign of mass murder of Israelis but as a struggle in defense of the Islamic holy site and to render the war not simply one of Palestinian pursuit of Israel’s destruction but as an Islamic fight against hostile, Al Aqsa-defiling non-believers.</p>
<p>But such anti-Jewish libels have a still older history, pre-dating Arafat, pre-dating Israel’s gaining control over the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, even pre-dating Israel’s creation.</p>
<p>In 1929, during the British Mandate, the rabidly anti-Jewish, British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, claimed that Jews were threatening Al-Aqsa and sought to end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (a Temple Mount retaining wall, which had become a place of Jewish prayer in the context of Jews being barred from ascending to the Temple Mount itself &#8211; the site of the First and Second Temples &#8211; for much of the preceding 2,000 years). According to the Mufti, the Western Wall was an Islamic holy place and Jewish prayer there was both an affront to Islam and a step towards Jewish attacks against Al-Aqsa. The Mufti is also reported to have distributed doctored photographs showing a damaged Al-Aqsa, with claims that the Jews were responsible.</p>
<p>The Mufti’s incitement was accompanied by calls for the murder of Jews as revenge. Ensuing attacks by Arab mobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Mandate territory resulted in the death of 133 Jews and major injury to over 200 others. The most severely affected community was that of Hebron, where 64 Jews were slaughtered and another 85 injured.</p>
<p>British authorities did virtually nothing to stop the attacks. They did evacuate the surviving Jews from Hebron. They also exonerated the Mufti from any responsibility for the murders and took almost no steps against those who actually carried out the carnage.</p>
<p>(Only in 1937,when The Mufti began to instigate attacks against British forces, did the authorities seek to arrest him. El-Husseini, however, escaped and fled the Mandate, eventually making his way to Berlin, where he spent much of World War II as Hitler’s guest. Among his activities while in Europe were recruiting Balkan Muslims and Muslims in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory to Nazi SS units and broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East and north Africa calling on Arabs to support the Nazis and to destroy the Jews in their midst.)</p>
<p>Abbas has praised the Mufti as an inspiring hero of the Palestinian cause worthy of emulation.</p>
<p>In reality, far from threatening Al Aqsa, Israel has repeatedly bowed to Arab claims of exclusive rights on the Temple Mount. In the wake of Israel’s gaining control of the Old City and the Temple Mount in 1967, the Israelis, with then defense minister Moshe Dayan delineating the policy, granted the Muslim religious authority, the Waqf, control over the Temple Mount. Jews would be allowed access to the Mount but forbidden to pray there. Christians and other non-Muslims would also be allowed access. The Israel Antiquities Authority was to oversee any construction or other physical changes on the Mount that would have an impact on this most sensitive of archaeological sites.</p>
<p>The prohibition of Jewish prayer on the Mount has been strictly enforced by Israeli governments. While there is increasing support among Israelis for a small area of the Mount &#8211; far from Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock &#8211; to be set aside for Jewish prayer, no such arrangement has won government backing. Furthermore, Jewish and other non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount have commonly been harassed by Waqf guards and other Muslims, and Israeli officials have responded typically not by countering such harassment but by restricting non-Muslim access.</p>
<p>Also, particularly between 1999 and 2001, the Waqf, in the context of establishing and expanding additional places of Muslim worship on the Mount and seeking to destroy evidence of historic Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Mount, brought heavy earth-moving equipment onto the Mount and dug up and hauled away thousands of tons of material. This material contained the remains of structures and other relics from pre-Muslim epochs, most notably from the First and Second Temple periods. In the context of any archaeological excavation of such a sensitive and historically rich site, the work would have been approached with archaeologists’ hand trowels and brushes. Yet the Israeli government &#8211; led for most of this period by Ehud Barak &#8211; did nothing to block this desecration of the Temple Mount, and the Israel Antiquities Authority likewise did nothing. A broad coalition of Israelis, drawn from across the nation’s political and religious spectra and including such luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, formed &#8220;The Council for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount&#8221; and urged the Barak government to stop the desecration, but to little avail.</p>
<p>So the Al Aqsa libel stands truth on its head: Muslim supremacism on the Temple Mount has not only been maintained since Israel gained control of the Old City, but has been expanded through aggressive Muslim actions and general Israeli acquiescence.</p>
<p>Bur the anti-Jewish libel lives on, because it, and the violence it generates, serve its purveyors. Abbas uses it to build up his own anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bonafides against the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians. He also employs it to draw wider Arab attention away from the bloody chaos enveloping much of the Arab world, chaos that has led some Arab leaders to at least temporarily relate to Israel as an ally confronting shared threats. Abbas seeks to resurrect the focusing of Arab enmity on Israel.</p>
<p>Abbas is also using the Al Aqsa libel and the accompanying bloodletting to advance his pursuit of UN and European &#8220;recognition&#8221; and international pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions, particularly withdrawal to the indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines. Abbas, like Arafat before him, seeks to achieve Israeli withdrawal while avoiding any bilateral agreement with Israel that would entail formal acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy within any borders.</p>
<p>The Grand Mufti’s Al Aqsa libel and his incitement to the murder of Jews ultimately served him well. An investigating commission sent from London found the Arabs fully responsible for the bloodshed but then recommended steps be taken against the Jews so as to assuage Arab hostility, steps that violated Britain’s obligations to the Jewish community under the terms of its League of Nations mandate.</p>
<p>European and some American media coverage of the recent violence, and the reactions of United Nations officials, various European governments and, with rare exception, the Obama administration, downplay or ignore entirely Abbas’s cynical use of the libel and incitement of murderous violence. Some distort the realities surrounding the violence into an indictment of Israel. And so again the libel and its murderous fallout redound to the perpetrator’s gain.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>16</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Left’s Lingering Oslo Delusions</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-lefts-lingering-oslo-delusions/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-lingering-oslo-delusions</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-lefts-lingering-oslo-delusions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:40:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moderate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oslo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pa.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Two-State solution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245176</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why there are no moderate Palestinian factions. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/abbas-resistance-2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245183" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/abbas-resistance-2.jpg" alt="abbas-resistance-2" width="300" height="251" /></a>Writing for The Times of Israel, senior staff writer Avi Issacharoff <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/as-attacks-spread-israel-sees-the-perfect-scapegoat-in-abbas/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">criticize</span></a><span style="color: #0433ff;">d</span> Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for scapegoating Abbas as the cause for the recent disturbances in Israel and for failing to point the finger at the real culprits, Hamas. He posits that Netanyahu, in a quest to avoid negotiations with Israel’s “peace partners,” has painted Abbas as a purveyor of violence and thus, an obstacle to peace. He also notes that as a result of the disturbances, “an entire country is in a panic.”</p>
<p>I submit however, that the only people who are &#8220;in a panic&#8221; are Issacharoff and leftists of like-mind who detest Netanyahu, seek his demise and will stop at nothing to disparage him. Israel has in the past witnessed and endured far worse violence and each time weathered the storm calmly and resolutely. The people of Israel in the instant mini-crisis are neither panic-stricken nor hysterical though many on the left would like to have us think that. What better way to produce an “intifada” than by talking about it incessantly in the hope of producing a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>Issacharoff’s analysis is fundamentally flawed on a number of levels. First, it is Abbas and his Palestinian Authority who are primarily responsible for the uptick in violence. No doubt that Hamas shares some responsibility but it is the PA’s continued campaign of incitement, where Jews are compared to the descendants of <a href="http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3928/palestinian_tv_broadcasts_little_girls_calling_jews_barbaric_monkeys_wretched_pigs"><span style="color: #0433ff;">apes and pigs</span></a> and Palestinians are continuously urged in TV broadcasts to confront the “<a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=763&amp;doc_id=12686"><span style="color: #0433ff;">barbaric monkeys</span></a>” and “wretched pigs” aka Jews, that has led to the current state of affairs.</p>
<p>Abbas’s inflammatory rhetoric adds fuel to the fire. Responsible leaders don&#8217;t incite their populace to attack the citizens of another state, and that is precisely what Abbas has done, over and over again. Responsible leaders don’t pay condolence calls to the families of assassins and refer to them as <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-says-glick-shooter-will-go-to-heaven-as-martyr/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">martyrs</span></a> who will ascend to heaven, and that is precisely what Abbas has done. Responsible leaders don’t <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=679"><span style="color: #0433ff;">name squares and streets</span></a> after people, who in normal societies, would be locked up in institutions for the criminally insane, but Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has done so repeatedly.</p>
<p>Issacharoff refers to Abbas’s recent vitriolic, blood-curdling rhetoric, including the glorification of <a href="http://www.israeltoday.co.il/Default.aspx?tabid=178&amp;nid=25482"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Yehudah Glick’s</span></a> attempted murder as “stupid.” “Stupid” is a term that should be applied to one who texts while driving or chain smokes. Stupid is not a term that one normally associates with visceral anti-Semitism and incitement to murder. When the leader of the Palestinians extolls the virtues of the murderer of Jews, that is incitement to murder and anti-Semitism, plain and simple. To call it anything else is “stupid” and delusional. I wonder if Issacharoff would refer to Goebbels’s propaganda pieces in which he depicts Jews as rats as “stupid.”</p>
<p>Second, contrary to Issacharoff’s assertions, it is Abbas who remains the impediment to negotiations, not Netanyahu. In 2009, Netanyahu agreed to an unprecedented <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-bibi-and-barack-on-the-rocks-1414451799"><span style="color: #0433ff;">10-month settlement freeze</span></a> in the hopes of spurring on the anemic “peace talks.” Abbas waited nine months before engaging Netanyahu ensuring that there would be virtually no time for any meaningful substantive negotiations.</p>
<p>In the latest round of negotiations, Abbas remained the stumbling block, refusing to budge on the so-called Right of Return issue, refusing to acknowledge that the Jews have some rights here too and in general, maintaining the same tired rejectionist posture of his mentor-in-chief, Yassir Arafat, who in turn adopted his views from the Nazi collaborator, Haj Amin el-Husseini.</p>
<p>Let us call a spade a spade and be honest with ourselves. Abbas is an <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/palestinian-president-for-life-abbas-begins-10th-year-of-4-year-term/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">autocratic ruler</span></a> whose term of office was supposed to have ended six years ago. He is therefore a leader with absolutely zero legitimacy. He is also a <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/exposing-abbas-5335">Holocaust denier</a></span>, who, in his doctoral thesis, denied the existence of gas chambers, called the deaths of 6,000,000 Jews “a fantastic lie” and somewhat paradoxically blamed the Holocaust on the evil Zionists, who incited the Germans to hate Jews. In other words, the Jews are responsible for the Holocaust, which, incidentally, never happened. These repugnant views place Abbas in the same category as former “Grand Wizard” David Duke and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p>
<p>The sad truth is that the Palestinians, whether Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Army of Islam or Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, share the same pernicious goals, which is the total eradication and annihilation of the State of Israel. The only difference between the former three groups and the latter is that Abbas and his cronies on the PA payroll wear ties whereas the other groups have adopted the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB117892880341600648"><span style="color: #0433ff;">fashion style of their brethren in the Islamic Republic</span></a>. The sooner the left understands this concept and stops treating Abbas as though he was some toddler, dismissing his deleterious statements as the product of “stupidity” rather than something much more malevolent, the closer we’ll come to a sustainable peace but not before then.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-lefts-lingering-oslo-delusions/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Kicking the PLO Habit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kicking-the-plo-habit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kicking-the-plo-habit</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kicking-the-plo-habit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2014 04:53:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PLO]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse with the successors of Arafat in power.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si_-432x350.jpg" alt="abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si" width="285" height="231" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-world-Kicking-the-PLO-habit-376614">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The signs are everywhere that the time has come for Israel to abandon the PLO.</p>
<p>So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.</p>
<p>PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s speech last Friday at the UN General Assembly where he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide was not merely an abandonment of direct peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas abandoned the very concept of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Abbas called for the UN to pass a resolution that will require Israel to cede Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in their entirety to the PLO within a set period of time. No Israeli consideration can be taken into account. No Israel concern can be attended to.</p>
<p>As he put it, “Palestine refuses to have the right to freedom of her people, who are subjected to the terrorism by the racist occupying Power and its settlers, remain hostage to Israel’s security conditions.”</p>
<p>As is always the case, the immediate victims of Abbas’s blood libels are the Israeli Left. The politicians and media elite that have hitched their horse to the PLO were again left stuttering by the wayside.</p>
<p>For some, like Meretz chair Zehava Gal-On, stuttering is a fine option. So she pushed out an endorsement of Abbas’s genocide speech.</p>
<p>Gal-On said, “Meretz supports Abbas’s international efforts to bring the end of the occupation and to get international recognition as a [Palestinian] state and member of the UN before and as a corridor to reaching peace in bilateral negotiations between equals,” And she joined Abbas in blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for Abbas’s rejection of peace.</p>
<p>As the center-left commentator Dan Margalit noted in Yisrael Hayom, Gal-On and Meretz are basically alone in their embrace of Abbas today.</p>
<p>But they are far from alone in maintaining their slavish devotion to the idea that the only way to improve the situation is by giving Abbas whatever he wants.</p>
<p>And here the circle of victims of Abbas’s hostility expands from the Left to the entire country.</p>
<p>In a Facebook post on Saturday, Opposition leader and Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog latched all of Israel to the Left’s position by seeming to condemn Abbas while insisting that he is Israel’s only hope.</p>
<p>Herzog wrote that Abbas’s remarks, “were disappointing but not surprising.</p>
<p>“I have met with [Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen dozens of times: He is not a friend or a sympathetic ally. He is someone we have to make a deal with,” Herzog insisted.</p>
<p>Herzog then repeated the same points he and his fellow leftists have made for decades: that Abbas is better than Hamas, that Israel’s security cooperation with the PLO is really great, and that he only way to get the world to be nice to us is by maintaining our allegiance to Abbas and the PLO.</p>
<p>Herzog concluded by joining Gal-On and Abbas in attacking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and blaming him for Abbas’s open transformation into Israel’s enemy.</p>
<p>The first problem with Herzog’s statement is that if it is true that he has always known that Abbas is our enemy, then he just told us that he is a liar.</p>
<p>Like all his friends on the Left, Herzog has continuously embraced Abbas and insisted that he is a man of peace and a moderate and interested in making a deal with Israel.</p>
<p>Yet far worse than his apparent serial dishonesty is Herzog’s insistence that Israel remain in the same policy straitjacket of embracing the PLO.</p>
<p>It is true that Israel gets some security cooperation from the Palestinian security forces. But it is also true that the only guarantor of Israel’s security is the IDF. Were the Palestinian security forces to disband tomorrow, Israel would be better off, not worse off.</p>
<p>This is the case because as Abbas showed, the PA views Israel as its enemy. For tactical reasons PLO militias do work with the IDF from time to time. But their strategic goal – Israel’s destruction – is unchanging. Any doubts that this is the case were dispelled by Abbas’s remarks in New York.</p>
<p>As for the PLO being preferable to Hamas, the PLO is Hamas’s coalition partner. Abbas staunchly expressed his commitment to the unity government he forged with Hamas in his UN speech.</p>
<p>Supporting the PLO in Gaza is the same as supporting Hamas.</p>
<p>Finally, Israel’s international position is continuously degraded, and has been since 1993 as a direct result of its embrace of the PLO. As Abbas showed yet again on Friday, the PLO is leading an international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. By embracing the PLO, Israel is legitimizing the campaign against it.</p>
<p>Due to our adoption of the Left’s catechism, that Israel has no choice but to continue its embrace of the PLO, we find ourselves at this juncture &#8212; where the PLO no longer even tries to hide its rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state &#8212; unable to mount a concerted defense of our rights and legitimate concerns.</p>
<p>If we have no choice but to cut a deal with a group that openly seeks our annihilation in collaboration with Hamas, a terrorist group supported by Iran, then how can we defend ourselves and ensure our rights are respected and our interests are secured? The short answer is that we cannot. Since the PLO seeks our destruction, everything we do to strengthen it weakens us. Abbas made clear in his UN speech that he is playing a zero-sum game with Israel. Everything he gains comes at our expense.</p>
<p>Herzog and his comrades are right about one thing. Chances for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians will increase in an environment where the Palestinians enjoy civil rights and economic opportunities. The problem is that the PLO has harmed, and will continue to harm both for as long as it remains in power.</p>
<p>In large part because the PLO recognizes that freedom and economic opportunity engender social happiness and peace, for the past 21 years they have taken active steps to repress freedom and strangle economic opportunities. Only a Palestinian society that is poor, immiserated and indoctrinated to hate Jews will agree to serve as foot soldiers in a perpetual war.</p>
<p>To this end, the PLO has stolen billions in international aid funds, imprisoned and tortured its critics, built an economy based on graft and protection, and brainwashed the Palestinians with a narrative of hating Jews and blaming Israel for the misery to which the PLO has reduced them.</p>
<p>Israel has two options going forward to secure its rights and protect its interests. Both options are preferable to remaining where we are. But to adopt either of these policies, we first need to abandon the pretense that the PLO is a credible, legitimate actor.</p>
<p>The first option is to adopt Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s plan to apply Israeli law over Area C of Judea and Samaria – that is, the land lacking a significant Palestinian population, and agreeing to Palestinian self-rule in the Palestinian population centers.</p>
<p>For this option to work, Israel will have to cultivate a security and social environment among the Palestinians that is conducive to the emergence of a genuinely moderate leadership. This new leadership could replace the PLO and lead the Palestinians to a better, freer life based on peaceful coexistence with Israel and freedom in a self-governing territory.</p>
<p>The second option is to adopt the policy I set out in my recent book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. That policy involves implementing Israeli law over all of Judea and Samaria and providing the Palestinians with equal rights under Israeli law.</p>
<p>Palestinians will receive permanent residency status as the Arab residents of Jerusalem and the Druse of the Golan Heights received in 1967 and 1981. Like them, Palestinians will have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship. Those who abide by the criteria of Israel’s citizenship laws will receive citizenship.</p>
<p>Both of these options will improve chances for peace. Both policies with secure the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and foster their rights and prosperity.</p>
<p>Friday Abbas told clearly that he is our enemy, and indeed the enemy of the Palestinians whose lives he insists on imperiling and embittering by locking them into a perpetual war for the destruction of Israel.</p>
<p>He told us to move on.</p>
<p>And move on we must, first and foremost by kicking our PLO habit.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kicking-the-plo-habit/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>37</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Abbas’ Deceit at the Vatican</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/abbass-deceit-at-the-vatican/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=abbass-deceit-at-the-vatican</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/abbass-deceit-at-the-vatican/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:56:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peres]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prayer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233654</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the Palestinian president says to his Hamas partners behind closed doors. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/0613.francis.palestinian.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233655" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/0613.francis.palestinian-450x305.jpg" alt="Pope Francis walks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during arrival ceremony at presidential palace in Bethlehem" width="329" height="223" /></a>Pope Francis provided a nice backdrop for a so-called “prayer summit” in the Vatican gardens on June 8th, attended by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres. “It is my hope that this meeting will mark the beginning of a new journey where we seek the things that unite, so as to overcome the things that divide,” Pope Francis said at the prayer ceremony. Prayers and readings were provided by Jews, Christians and Muslims, followed by remarks from the pope and the two presidents.  Each set of prayers praised God for creation, begged forgiveness of sins and asked for peace in the Holy Land.</p>
<p>In an obviously orchestrated photo op, Presidents Abbas and Peres embraced in the presence of the pope. &#8220;Nice to see you,&#8221; Peres and Abbas said to each other in English. At the end of the ceremony, they took up shovels to add dirt to the base of a newly planted olive tree.</p>
<p>Politics were not intended to be on the agenda. This was a prayer summit, after all. Abbas even managed to avoid using the word “occupation,” at least according to the English translation of his prepared remarks.  He offered a prayer for peace: “O Lord, bring comprehensive and just peace to our country and region so that our people and the peoples of the Middle East and the whole world would enjoy the fruit of peace, stability and coexistence.” He presented the Palestinians as a people “craving for a just peace, dignified living and liberty.” He also was quoted as saying: “We want peace for us and for our neighbors. We seek prosperity and peace of mind for ourselves and for others alike.”</p>
<p>In other words, Abbas laid it on very thick with nice words that sound like themes on which the Israelis and Palestinians could unite. But they are just hollow words. Interspersed was his divisive reference to Jerusalem as “our Holy City.” And the elephant in the room was his pact with Hamas.</p>
<p>The “things that unite,” which Pope Francis was hoping could become the key to achieving peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, are in reality found only in the unity agreement between Abbas and the jihadist organization that wants to destroy the Jewish state completely, Hamas. Despite Abbas’s assurances that the unity government will adhere to the principles of recognition of the state of Israel and renouncing of violence, Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh is having nothing to do with that program. &#8220;Hamas&#8217;s strategy has not changed and will not change,&#8221; he declared on June 8<sup>th</sup> at the opening session of the jihadist training &#8220;summer camps&#8221; in Gaza that indoctrinate children to hate Jews. &#8220;We emphasize now that we will not retreat from out plan to liberate our lands and ensure the right of return…”</p>
<p>As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who did not attend the Vatican ceremony, said during a cabinet meeting on Sunday in Jerusalem, “Whoever hoped that the Palestinian unity between Fatah and Hamas would moderate Hamas is mistaken.” The Obama administration, as well as much of the international community that does not live daily under the shadow of Hamas, have decided to recognize the new interim Palestinian government resulting from Abbas’s pact with Hamas. They are doing so on the basis of the mistaken belief that Hamas or any jihadists can be “moderated.”</p>
<p>Indeed, it was reported in <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/the-us-has-been-speaking-to-hamas-through-backchannels-for-o"><span style="color: #0463c1;"><i>Buzzfeed</i></span></a><i> </i>that the U.S. has been secretly holding talks with Hamas for months through back channels. The Obama administration has denied the report. However, after the release of the five dangerous, high-level terrorists from Guantanamo, worked out secretly by the Obama administration with the Taliban in exchange for securing the release of Bowe Bergdahl, it is more likely than not that the report is true.</p>
<p>Abbas’s visit to the Vatican is all in keeping with his propaganda campaign to convince the West that he is sincere about seeking real peace with Israel, which he is not. On the very day that Abbas was making nice at the Vatican, a former Hamas government spokesman, Ihab al-Ghussein, revealed that Abbas has said in private meetings he is lying in public statements to &#8220;trick the Americans.&#8221;</p>
<p>As reported in <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/181507"><span style="color: #0463c1;"><i>Arutz Sheva</i></span></a>, Ihab al-Ghussein wrote on Facebook that &#8220;behind closed doors,&#8221; Abbas had said: &#8220;Guys, let me (continue) saying what I say to the media. Those words are meant for the Americans and the occupation (i.e., Israel), not for you. What&#8217;s important is what we agree on among ourselves. &#8230;Don&#8217;t harp on everything I tell the media, forget about the statements in the media.&#8221;</p>
<p>Abbas was following his own self-declared script of deceit at the Vatican.  His words were nothing more than a blatant display of taqiyya (lying to unbelievers). We should take the advice that he gave to Hamas – forget about his public words of seeking genuine peace with Israel as they mean absolutely nothing.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/abbass-deceit-at-the-vatican/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>35</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Pope Francis’ Unfriendly Visit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/pope-francis-unfriendly-visit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pope-francis-unfriendly-visit</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/pope-francis-unfriendly-visit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 28 May 2014 04:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[visit]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226392</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Golden Age of Catholic-Jewish relations seems to have come to an end.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/popedf.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-226398" alt="popedf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/popedf-450x273.jpg" width="450" height="273" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.jpost.com"><em>The Jerusalem Post</em></a>. </strong></p>
<p>Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement rampant in Europe for Saturday’s murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and the assault and battery of two Jewish brothers outside their synagogue in a Paris suburb later that day.</p>
<p>Anti-Israel incitement is ubiquitous in Europe and is appearing in ever-widening circles of the Western world as a whole.</p>
<p>Until this week, the Catholic Church stayed out of the campaign to dehumanize Jews and malign the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Pope Benedict XVI was perceived as a friend of Israel, despite his childhood membership in the Hitler Youth. His opposition to Islam’s rejection of reason, eloquently expressed at his speech at the University of Regensburg in 2006, positioned him as a religious champion of reason, individual responsibility and law – Judaism’s primary contributions to humanity.</p>
<p>His predecessor Pope John Paul II was less willing to confront Islamic violence. But his opposition to Communism made him respect Israel as freedom’s outpost in the Middle East. John Paul’s visit to Israel in 2000 was in some ways an historic gesture of friendship to the Jewish people of Israel.</p>
<p>Both Benedict and John Paul II were outspoken champions of the Second Vatican Council and maintained doctrinal allegiance to the Church’s rejection of anti-Judaism, including the charge of deicide, and its denunciation of replacement theology.</p>
<p>Alas, the Golden Age of Catholic-Jewish relations seems to have come to an end during Francis’s visit to the Promised Land this week.</p>
<p>In one of his blander pronouncements during the papal visit, Netanyahu mentioned on Monday that Jesus spoke Hebrew. There was nothing incorrect about Netanyahu’s statement. Jesus was after all, an Israeli Jew.</p>
<p>But Francis couldn’t take the truth. So he indelicately interrupted his host, interjecting, “Aramaic.”</p>
<p>Netanyahu was probably flustered. True, at the time, educated Jews spoke and wrote in Aramaic. And Jesus was educated. But the language of the people was Hebrew. And Jesus preached to the people, in Hebrew.</p>
<p>Netanyahu responded, “He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew.”</p>
<p>Reuters’ write-up of the incident tried to explain away the pope’s rudeness and historical revisionism, asserting, “Modern-day discourse about Jesus is complicated and often political.” The report went on to delicately mention, “Palestinians sometimes describe Jesus as a Palestinian. Israelis object to that.”</p>
<p>Israelis “object to that” because it is a lie.</p>
<p>The Palestinians – and their Islamic and Western supporters – de-Judaize Jesus and proclaim him Palestinian in order to libel the Jews and criminalize the Jewish state. It seems like it would be the job of the Bishop of Rome to set the record straight. But instead, Francis’s discourtesy indicated that at a minimum, he doesn’t think the fact of Jesus’s Judaism should be mentioned in polite company.</p>
<p>Francis’s behavior during his public meeting with Netanyahu could have been brushed off as much ado about nothing if it hadn’t occurred the day after his symbolic embrace of some of the worst anti-Jewish calumnies of our times, and his seeming adoption of replacement theology during his homily in Bethlehem.</p>
<p>Consider first Francis&#8217;s behavior at the security barrier.</p>
<p>Reasonable people disagree about the contribution the security fence makes to the security of Israelis. But no one can reasonably doubt that it was built to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorist murderers. And Francis ought to know this. Francis’s decision to hold a photo-op at the security barrier was an act of extreme hostility against Israel and the Jewish people.</p>
<p>As the former Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Francis may have heard of the November 2002 massacre at Kibbutz Metzer. Metzer was founded by Argentine communists in the 1950s. Metzer is located 500 meters from the 1949 armistice lines which made it an obvious beneficiary of the security fence. But true to its radical roots, in 2002 members of the kibbutz waged a public campaign against the planned route of the security fence. They feared that it would, in the words of Metzer member Danny Dovrat, “ignite hostility and create problems” with the kibbutz’s Palestinian neighbors.</p>
<p>Thanks to that concern, on the night of November 10, 2002, a gunman from the “moderate” US- and EU-supported Fatah terror organization faced no physical obstacle when he entered the kibbutz. Once there he killed two people on the street and then entered the home of Revital Ohayon and executed Revital and her two sons, Matan, 5, and Noam, 4 years old.</p>
<p>Fatah praised the attack on its website and pledged to conduct more assaults on “Zionist colonizers,” and promised to continue “targeting their children as well.”</p>
<p>Had he actually cared about the cause of peace and non-violence he claims to champion, Francis might have averred from stopping at the barrier, recognizing that doing so would defile the memory of the Ohayons and of hundreds of other Israeli Jewish families who were destroyed by Palestinian bloodlust and anti-Semitic depravity.</p>
<p>Instead, Francis “spontaneously” got out of his popemobile, walked over to a section of the barrier, and reverentially touched it and kissed it as if it were the Wailing Wall.</p>
<p>The graffiti on the section of the barrier Francis stopped at reinforced his anti-Semitic position. One of the slogans called for the embrace of the BDS campaign.</p>
<p>Although the economic consequences of the campaign of economic warfare against Israel in the West have been negligible, BDS’s goal is not economic. The goal of the movement is to dehumanize Israelis and set apart for social ostracism anyone who refuses to embrace the anti-Jewish slanders that Jews have no right to self-determination and are morally inferior to every other religious, ethnic and national group in the world.</p>
<p>And that is nothing compared to the other slogan on the barrier. That one equated the Palestinians in Bethlehem to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. In other words, it denied the Holocaust.</p>
<p>By standing there, kissing the barrier with its Holocaust denying slogan, Francis gave Vatican license to Holocaust denial.</p>
<p>And that was just the beginning.</p>
<p>Pope Francis met with Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas at his presidential palace in Bethlehem. When Israel transferred control over Jesus’s birthplace to Abbas’s predecessor Yasser Arafat in 1996, Arafat seized the Greek Orthodox monastery next to the Church of the Nativity and turned it into his – and later Abbas’s – official residence.</p>
<p>Standing next to Abbas on seized church property, the pope called Abbas “a man of peace.”</p>
<p>Abbas returned the favor by calling for Israel to release all Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons. And the pope – who interrupted Netanyahu when he told an historic truth – said nothing.</p>
<p>At mass at the Church of the Nativity on Sunday, Pope Francis prayed with Latin Patriarch Fuoad Twal. In his sermon Twal accused Israelis of being the present-day version of Christ killers by referring to the Palestinians as walking “in the footsteps of the Divine Child,” and likening the Israelis to King Herod.</p>
<p>In his words, “We are not yet done with the present-day Herods, who fear peace more than war&#8230; and who are prepared to continue killing.”</p>
<p>Rather than condemn these remarks, Francis echoed them.</p>
<p>“Who are we, as we stand before the Child Jesus? Who are we, standing as we before today’s children?” the pope asked.</p>
<p>“Are we like Mary and Joseph, who welcomed Jesus and cared for him with the love of a father and mother? Or are we like Herod, who wanted to eliminate him?” During his visit Monday to Jerusalem, Francis embraced the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Muhammed Hussein. Departing from his scripted remarks which called for the pope to refer to the mufti and his associates as “dear friends,” Francis called them his “dear brothers.”</p>
<p>Hussein has been condemned by the US and the EU for his calls for the annihilation of Jews in the name of Islam.</p>
<p>In 2012, Hussein said it was the destiny of Muslims to kill Jews, who he claims are subhuman beasts and “the enemies of Allah.” He has also praised suicide bombers and said their souls “tell us to follow in their path.”</p>
<p>Francis didn&#8217;t condemn him.</p>
<p>Francis stridently condemned the anti-Jewish attacks in Brussels and Paris. And during his ceremonial visits to Yad Vashem, the Wailing Wall and the terror victims memorial he said similarly appropriate things. But all of his statements ring hollow and false in light of his actions.</p>
<p>Israelis and Jews around the world need to be aware of what is happening. Francis is leading the Catholic Church in a distressingly anti-Jewish direction.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/pope-francis-unfriendly-visit/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>173</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Pope Francis: Mahmoud Abbas is a “Man of Peace”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/pope-francis-mahmoud-abbas-is-a-man-of-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pope-francis-mahmoud-abbas-is-a-man-of-peace</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/pope-francis-mahmoud-abbas-is-a-man-of-peace/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2014 04:20:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[koran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226339</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Which he is just as much as the Qur’an is “opposed to every form of violence.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/25/pope-francis-refers-to-state-of-palestine-on-holy-land-trip-calls-mahmoud-abbas-a-man-of-peace/?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=story&amp;utm_campaign=ShareButtons" target="_blank"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226343" alt="pa" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/pa1-450x307.jpg" width="315" height="215" />AP</a> reported Sunday that “Pope Francis delivered a powerful boost of support to the Palestinians during a Holy Land pilgrimage Sunday, repeatedly backing their statehood aspirations, praying solemnly at Israel’s controversial separation barrier and calling the stalemate in peace efforts ‘unacceptable.’”</p>
<p>Not only that, but “Palestinian officials hailed Francis’ decision to refer to the ‘state of Palestine.’ In its official program, the Vatican referred to President Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the ‘state of Palestine,’ and his Bethlehem office as the ‘presidential palace.’ He pointedly called Abbas a ‘man of peace.’”</p>
<p>This is not really all that surprising. After all, this is the Pope who wrote last November that “<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/11/pope-francis-authentic-islam-and-the-proper-reading-of-the-koran-are-opposed-to-every-form-of-violen" target="_blank">authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence</a>.” If “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” then Abbas is certainly a “man of peace.”</p>
<p>Abbas is the “man of peace” who said on <a href="http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3774.htm" target="_blank">March 15, 2013</a>: “As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.” He said that while undoubtedly knowing that <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp" target="_blank">Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna is quoted in the Hamas Charter </a>as saying: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=8091" target="_blank">Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV</a> has featured a music video that proclaimed: “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah.”</p>
<p>The “man of peace” heads up Fatah, which is hardly more “moderate.” <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=11455" target="_blank">Palestinian Media Watch</a> reported on May 14 that “on one of its official Facebook pages the Fatah movement, which is headed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, yesterday posted a warning to Israelis. A sign showed an assault rifle and a map of ‘Palestine’ that included both PA areas and all of Israel. In Arabic, Hebrew, and English it said: ‘Warning. This is a land of a Palestinian state and the occupation to leave immediately’ (English original).”</p>
<p>Likewise, <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=10921" target="_blank">in mid-March</a>, Palestinian official Abbas Zaki, a close friend of the “man of peace,” declared: “These Israelis have no belief, no principles. They are an advanced instrument of evil. They say, the Holocaust, and so on – fine, why are they doing this to us? Therefore, I believe that Allah, will gather them so we can kill them. I am informing the murderer of his death.” <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=11274">Fatah has also vowed</a> to “adhere to the option of armed resistance until the liberation of all of Palestine,” and threatened to “turn the beloved [Gaza] Strip into a graveyard for your soldiers, and we will turn Tel Aviv into a ball of fire.”</p>
<p>On top of all this, the spot where the Pope paused to pray at what AP called “Israel’s controversial separation barrier” – actually its security barrier – featured graffiti referring to the barrier as an “apartheid wall” and comparing Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto. Middle East analyst <a href="http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001453.html" target="_blank">Tom Gross</a> noted that in reality, “the security barrier, which has saved countless lives, was built to protect Israelis after some 1000 civilians were killed by suicide bombers.” Israel did not build the barrier because of “racism” or a desire to emulate apartheid South Africa &#8212; to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is a monstrous piece of disinformation, as a black South African <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/03/black-south-african-explains-why-israel-is-not-an-apartheid-state&amp;sa=U&amp;ei=qmCCU-KeJ-ijsQS7vYHYBw&amp;ved=0CAYQFjAA&amp;client=internal-uds-cse&amp;usg=AFQjCNEixH7HDWPm0dt2tQBF_xXpcgi_sw" target="_blank">has explained</a>.</p>
<p>Moreover, Gross points out: “Bethlehem is a relatively prosperous town where restaurants and juice bars are packed, and BMWs, Mercedes and Humvees compete for parking spaces in the center or town. By contrast, 400,000 Jews were herded into the Warsaw Ghetto and those who weren’t beaten or starved to death there, were taken to be exterminated at nearby camps.”</p>
<p>In allowing himself to become an instrument of Palestinian jihad propaganda, and spreading that propaganda himself, the Pope has done a grave disservice to free people and aided and abetted the genocidal jihad against Israel. The damage resulting from his trip is impossible to calculate at this point, but it could be immense. Pope Francis’s jaunt in the “State of Palestine,” was a tremendous show of support for the jihad against Israel, and a dark day for the papacy, the Roman Catholic Church, and free people everywhere.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/pope-francis-mahmoud-abbas-is-a-man-of-peace/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>238</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Pope Francis: &#8216;The Che Guevara of the Palestinians&#8217;?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/pope-francis-the-che-guevara-of-the-palestinians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pope-francis-the-che-guevara-of-the-palestinians</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/pope-francis-the-che-guevara-of-the-palestinians/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 May 2014 04:39:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state of palestine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226052</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The pontiff may recognize the “State of Palestine,” but will he acknowledge the plight of Palestinian Christians?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/pa.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226053" alt="pa" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/pa.jpg" width="314" height="176" /></a>“The Che Guevara of the Palestinians” is set to visit Palestinian Authority-controlled Judea and Samaria next week, beginning in Bethlehem, and the city of Jesus’s birth is already in high excitement. The bearer of that illustrious title is none other than Pope Francis. <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/180779#.U31CLi-6Cmq">According to Israel National News</a>, “Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a member of the Argentinian parliament and close friend of Pope Francis…said that the pope intends to define himself as the ‘<a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177110" target="_blank">Che Guevera of the Palestinians</a>’ and support their ‘struggle and rights’ during his visit.”</p>
<p>If the Pope or anyone around him has expressed a similar intention to speak out about the Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, it has not been recorded – in sharp contrast to the abundance of signals that the Pope has sent to Palestinian Authority officials. Fr. Jamal Khader of the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/180779#.U30uyS9irUp">explained</a>: “He is taking a helicopter directly from Jordan to Palestine &#8212; to Bethlehem. It’s a kind of sign of recognizing Palestine.” In anticipation of his doing just that officially, Palestinian officials have <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/rabbi-muslim-leader-join-pope-francis-holy-land-trip-article-1.1793254">put up posters proclaiming</a> “State of Palestine” and depicting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Pope Francis, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.</p>
<p>Not only that, but while in Bethlehem, Pope Francis will meet with Abbas; he also plans to celebrate Mass there rather than in Jerusalem, a move that <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/180779#.U31I4C-6Cmr">Israel National News says</a> “has been called a show of support for the PA.” He then plans to visit a Palestinian “refugee camp.”</p>
<p>Khader predicted: “Knowing who he is, and his sensitivity for all those who suffer, I am sure that he will say something defending all those who are suffering, including the Palestinians who live under occupation.” Ziyyad Bandak, Abbas’s adviser for Christian affairs, was enthusiastic: “This visit will help us in supporting our struggle to end the longest occupation in history….We welcome this visit and consider it as support for the Palestinian people, and confirmation from the Vatican of the need to end the occupation.”</p>
<p>All this comes after a Church official in Jerusalem criticized Israeli authorities for asking that a sign announcing the Pope’s visit be taken down from a historic site on which such signs are prohibited for preservation reasons. The unnamed official referenced recent Hebrew-language hate graffiti spray-painted on mosques and churches, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.589924">saying</a> that he and other Church officials “question the fact that the police, instead of taking action against the extremists who paint hate slogans on mosques and churches, choose to remove a sign with a positive message that welcomes the pope in three languages. We hope the police will act with the same determination to prevent the growing incitement and violence against Christians.”</p>
<p>While referring to the graffiti as “incitement and violence against Christians,” however, Church officials have been much more reticent regarding Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, even when it has included actual violence. <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/180757#.U31VWy-6Cmo">According to Israel National News</a>, “Christian Arab residents of the village of El-Khader in the Bethlehem area <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/180652_seg" target="_blank">were savagely attacked</a> by local Muslims as they celebrated a Christian holiday two weeks ago. A report by CAMERA, an organization which monitors anti-Israel bias in the media, reported that Christians attempting to enter Saint George’s Monastery in the village were intimidated and attacked with rocks and stones.”</p>
<p>Yet about this and other incidents of Muslim persecution of Christians, Pope Francis, as well as Vatican and Church officials, have said little. <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/pope-francis-we-won-t-resign-ourselves-middle-east-without">Last November</a>, Pope Francis decried the plight of “Christians who suffer in a particularly severe way the consequences of tensions and conflicts in many parts of the Middle East.” He added that “Syria, Iraq, Egypt and other areas of the Holy Land sometimes overflow with tears” and declared: “We won’t resign ourselves to a Middle East without Christians who for two thousand years confess the name of Jesus, as full citizens in social, cultural and religious life of the nations to which they belong.”</p>
<p>Neither on that occasion or any other, however, has Pope Francis ever ascribed the suffering of Middle Eastern Christians to anything beyond “the consequences of tensions and conflicts in many parts of the Middle East.” Apparently he believes that if those tensions and conflicts could somehow be resolved, Christians would be able to live freely in the Middle East. After all, he has famously <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/11/pope-francis-authentic-islam-and-the-proper-reading-of-the-koran-are-opposed-to-every-form-of-violen">asserted</a> that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” thereby dismissing the possibility that Christians may be facing persecution from Muslims who are obeying the Qur’anic imperative to fight them “until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29).</p>
<p>What’s more, when Pope Benedict XVI spoke out in January 2011 against the jihad bombing of the Coptic cathedral in Alexandria, Egypt, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the world’s most prestigious Sunni Muslim institution, reacted angrily, breaking off dialogue with the Vatican and accusing the Pope of interference in internal Egyptian affairs. In a statement, Al-Azhar denounced the pontiff’s “repeated negative references to Islam and his claims that Muslims persecute those living among them in the Middle East.” When Pope Francis succeeded Benedict, Al-Azhar and other Muslim authorities expressed hopes that he would repair relations between Muslims and Christians by not repeating the mistakes of his predecessor — including speaking out about the Muslim persecution of Christians.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/09/pope-francis-writes-to-grand-imam-of-al-azhar-stressing-vaticans-respect-for-islam-and-calling-for-m">Francis complied</a>, affirming his “respect” for Islam and apparently accepting al-Azhar’s stipulation that “casting Islam in a negative light is ‘a red line’ that must not be crossed.” He has not, in any case, crossed it, even to decry the actions of Muslims to harass, victimize and persecute Christians because of Qur’anic declarations that they are accursed of Allah for saying Jesus is the Son of God (9:30); are unbelievers for affirming the divinity of Christ (5:17; 5:72); and must be warred against and subjugated (9:29).</p>
<p>And so during his trip that the Palestinians are awaiting with such excitement, it is likely that he will have little, if anything, to say about how core beliefs held by the Palestinians he is celebrating are used to justify the oppression of their Christian brethren. It is even less likely that he will note that Christians in Israel enjoy greater rights and freedoms than their brethren in any Muslim country. We may only hope that whatever the “Che Guevara of the Palestinians” says in Bethlehem or elsewhere in the Palestinian Authority, that it will not be capable of being exploited, by those persecutors of Christians he seems determined to ignore, to justify their actions and perpetuate that persecution.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/pope-francis-the-che-guevara-of-the-palestinians/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>148</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Abbas’ Holocaust Spin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/abbas-holocaust-spin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=abbas-holocaust-spin</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/abbas-holocaust-spin/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2014 04:05:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holocaust]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nakba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224901</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Does one truly recognize Jewish suffering when equating it with the Palestinian experience?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Abbas67.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224991" alt="Abbas67" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Abbas67-450x253.jpeg" width="315" height="177" /></a>Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) issued an unprecedented statement on the eve of the Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom Ha’Shoah). Abbas’ remarks were published by the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA, just hours before the start of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Commemoration.</p>
<p>In the English version of Abbas’ remarks, he called the Holocaust “the most heinous crime” of modern history and expressed his sympathy for the victims. The significance of his remarks rests in the fact that such an acknowledgement by an Arab leader about Jewish suffering during the Holocaust is rare. In an earlier statement in Arabic, Abbas used the term “<a href="http://www.arabnews.com/print/561986">ugliest crime</a>.”</p>
<p>Abbas recently met with Rabbi Marc Schneier.  In response to Rabbi Schneier’s request, Abbas announced that this year he will publicly <a href="http://matzav.com/rabbi-marc-schneier-meets-with-mahmoud-abbas">speak</a> out on behalf of Holocaust remembrance efforts around the world.</p>
<p>Abbas’ Holocaust remarks, albeit unprecedented, were clearly politically motivated. After breaking the negotiations with Israel and entering into unity talks with Hamas, (a terrorist organization whose declared goal is the destruction of the Jewish state) Abbas aimed to win over Israeli public opinion, particularly the Israeli leftist opposition, led by Yitzhak “Buji” Herzog, leader of the Labor party, who visited him last December in Ramallah.  Herzog accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being responsible for the rapprochement between Abbas and Hamas.</p>
<p>Abu Mazen’s reputation as a Holocaust denier required him to make a goodwill gesture. Mahmoud Abbas wrote his 1982 PhD dissertation, and later used it in his 1984 published book entitled <i>“The Other Side: </i><a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143752#.U1_kjKHD_3g"><i>The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism</i></a><i>.”</i> By all accounts, it amounted to Holocaust denial. In the book, Abbas argues that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis had been exaggerated. He further claimed that those Jews who were killed by the Nazis were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot aimed to fuel vengeance against Jews and to expand their mass extermination. Today, his book dominates the PA educational curriculum and forms the essence of Holocaust studies taught throughout the PA schools.</p>
<p>Abu Mazen’s primary use of the occasion (Holocaust Remembrance Day) was to equate the Holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), the exodus of Palestinians in 1948 and the resultant refugee problem, which is observed during Israel’s Independence Day. Abbas drew a parallel between the Holocaust and its ethnic discrimination and racism of the Nazi regime, and alleged Palestinian suffering today.</p>
<p>Such a comparison is not only false, it is disgraceful. The Holocaust is a story of genocide, the attempted liquidation of the entire Jewish people from the face of the earth, based on fanatical racism, and a result of two millennium of anti-Semitism. The Nakba, on the other hand, was not a story of genocide; on the contrary, it was the attempt by the Arabs in Palestine in cahoots with the Arab states to exterminate its Jewish people and the nascent Jewish state at its birth. Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler’s ally during WWII, and the instigator and leader of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, sought to administer the “final solution” to the Jews of Palestine had the Arabs been successful in the 1948 war.</p>
<p>A professor of Nursing at Haifa University named Maayan Agmon, in a lecture to her students in March, 2014, actually compared the Nakba to the Holocaust, albeit, she later apologized for her remark and claimed to have been misunderstood. The University responded by issuing the following statement. “The Holocaust was a deliberate and systematic genocide the like of which has never been seen in history. Any comparison between the Holocaust and other events (like the Nakba) is distorted and <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=8471">baseless</a>.”</p>
<p>Anti-Israel groups such as Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) are among those who compared the Nakba to the Holocaust.  In May, 2008, JVP protested the celebration of Israel’s Independence Day. JVP’s board members wrote a letter titled “We Will Not Be Celebrating” in which they compared the Palestinian Nakba to the Holocaust, stating “As Edward Said emphasized, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the <a href="http://www.adl.org/israel-international/anti-israel-activity/c/backgrounder-jewish-voice.html">Nakba</a> is to the Palestinians.”</p>
<p>Some on the Israeli far-left, like the late Shulamit Aloni, while serving as Minister of Education in the Rabin Government, strongly criticized organized tours by Israeli high school students to Holocaust era concentration camps, alleging that it is turning Israeli youth into rabid nationalists and haters of gentiles. Yet, Israeli Jews have not become suicide bombers killing Germans or Arabs, nor denied them the right to exist.  Conversely, the Palestinians, in preserving their memory of displacement (largely due to exhortations by their leaders to leave their homes) sought revenge through terror against Jewish civilians. The Jews, instead of hate, dependency, and poverty, turned to construction, economic growth and prosperity. Jewish refugees were absorbed into Israel, housed, and made into proud citizens.</p>
<p>The commemoration of the Nakba fostered incitement against Jews and the justification of violence, terror, and revenge.  None of that is a part of the Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust. While it is true that Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war became refugees and suffered in the intervening years, it is also true that millions of other refugees were dislocated by war, ethnic and religious strife. The Jews of the Arab world, almost a million strong, also became refugees. Unlike the Palestinians however, they did not seek war, or the extermination of their Arab neighbors. If there is to be any comparison between Arab Palestinian suffering and that of Jews, it would be between the Arab Palestinian refugees and the Jewish refugees from the Arab world. There is a clear dichotomy. Jewish refugees were not abandoned in camps and made into victims.</p>
<p>Mahmoud Abbas set an Arab precedent in recognizing Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. However, his remarks were gratuitous. In stating that the Holocaust was “the “most heinous,” or “ugliest” crime of modern history, he also added that, “The <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/print/561986">Palestinian people</a>, who suffer from injustice, oppression, and are denied freedom and peace, are the first to demand to lift the injustice and racism that befell other subjected peoples subjected to such crimes.” The cynicism here is transparent. Palestinians were not thrown into cattle cars like animals and led to gas chambers to be burned, nor has Israel erected labor camps for Palestinian terrorists, let alone civilians.</p>
<p>The implication stemming from Abbas’ follow-up statement is that Nazis did to the Jews what Israel is now doing to the Palestinians. That comparison is shameful, particularly since a Palestinian icon &#8211; Haj Amin el-Husseini, was actively involved in the Holocaust, a fact that Abbas refrained from mentioning, or apologized for.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/abbas-holocaust-spin/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Peace Process Is the Process of Blaming Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-peace-process-is-the-process-of-blaming-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-peace-process-is-the-process-of-blaming-israel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-peace-process-is-the-process-of-blaming-israel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:50:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apartheid state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224355</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Kerry's musings on an "apartheid" Jewish State and the Peace Lobby's big lies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/John-Kerry1-415x280.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224357" alt="John-Kerry1-415x280" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/John-Kerry1-415x280.jpg" width="291" height="196" /></a>Big lies don&#8217;t always start out big. They don&#8217;t even always start out as lies. They only grow big in the cover-up when the truth has to be beaten off with a stick made out of even bigger lies.</span></p>
<p>A brief read of the daily newspapers, a quick flick through the cable news networks and an ear cocked to the drive-time news minute might give you the idea that Israel is isolated and besieged. Israel is indeed a small country. It&#8217;s always been isolated in a Muslim region that is willing to kill even fellow Arab Christians and fellow Arab Shiites over differences of religion.</p>
<p>But contrary to the Peace Lobby sloganeering, Israel isn&#8217;t morally bankrupt, the intellectual premises of Zionism aren&#8217;t shattered and it&#8217;s not a failed state on the verge of destruction.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the Peace Lobby that is frantically struggling to keep its big lie together. Its attacks on Israel are not a show of strength, but a desperate cover-up. From the high chambers where John Kerry suggests Israel is going to be an Apartheid state to the low chambers of failed boycotts against academics and soda companies, the purveyors of the big lie are coming apart at the seams.</p>
<p>The big peace lie started out small. Both sides would shake hands and make peace. And white doves would fly from Jerusalem to Ramallah. To some it wasn&#8217;t even a lie; just blind idealism and wishful thinking. It was only when the lie was tried and failed that it truly became a lie and then there were no more idealists, only desperate liars covering up one lie with another.</p>
<p>The entire peace process rested on the lie that the PLO wanted to make peace. Israel had successfully reached peace agreements, including territorial compromises, with its enemies. Its credibility was never in question. The PLO&#8217;s credibility was the big question mark and when its willingness to make peace was put to the test and it failed, again and again, the big lie began.</p>
<p>Israel can’t do anything right in the peace process and the PLO can’t do anything wrong. When Abbas blatantly violated his agreements by going to the UN, Secretary of State John Kerry took a seat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and blamed Israel.</p>
<p>Then Abbas made a unity deal with Hamas, which is committed to destroying Israel, and Kerry told the Trilateral Commission that Israel was on the path to becoming an Apartheid state.</p>
<p>Kerry may be notorious for his terrorist sympathies, but he was following the grand tradition of his predecessors and of the entire Peace Lobby by blaming the peace partner with the most credibility instead of the one with the least credibility because the credibility of the peace process depends on its weakest link. And that is the Palestinian Authority’s Abbas and his PLO terrorists.</p>
<p>If you were trying to negotiate the sale of a home from a seller acting in good faith to a buyer acting in bad faith, you would blame the seller because once you admit that the buyer is acting in bad faith, the credibility of the sale vanishes into thin air. The smart thing for the seller to do is to walk away, but unfortunately Israeli leaders are convinced that they can prove their good faith by eagerly showing up to negotiate.</p>
<p>What they don&#8217;t understand is that blaming Israel is a structural part of the peace process.</p>
<p>If the Peace Lobby admits that the PLO is not credible, that Abbas is a manipulative crook, that his henchmen are waiting for his death to begin offing each other, not to continue the great struggle for the nationhood of a nation that never existed, but for the chance to dip their golden buckets in the river of foreign aid that flows from Brussels, Washington and Tokyo, the peace process would collapse.</p>
<p>The only way to keep the peace process going is to blame Israel. The Jewish State can never prove its good faith and the PLO can never demonstrate its bad faith.</p>
<p>The worse the PLO behaves, the harsher the Peace Lobby attacks on Israel become.</p>
<p>If Abbas goes to the UN, Kerry bashes Israel in the Senate. If Abbas goes to Hamas, Kerry calls Israel an Apartheid State. In the Peace Lobby&#8217;s version of The Untouchables, if Abbas brings a knife, Kerry shoots Israel in the head.</p>
<p>It makes no moral sense, but it&#8217;s an entirely pragmatic response if you&#8217;re covering up a big lie by escalating its size and scope. Kerry isn&#8217;t a peace negotiator; he&#8217;s Peacegate&#8217;s cover-up man.</p>
<p>The tragedy of the Peace Lobby is that by tying peace to the PLO, they made peace impossible. When the PLO realized that it couldn&#8217;t lose and Israel couldn&#8217;t win, it escalated its demands. The more the Peace Lobby covered up for the PLO, the more the PLO acted in ways that made the cover-ups necessary and peace impossible.</p>
<p>The big peace liars escalated the problem they were lying about with their lies. The more they lied to protect the peace process, the more the peace process drew out of reach. Their own lies about the PLO in support of the peace process killed peace.</p>
<p>Now all that&#8217;s left is the dirty business of the cover-up. And the cover-up of the biggest Western diplomatic failure of the last two decades may still destroy Israel.</p>
<p>Too many governments and public figures have invested too much in the big lie. Like so many other big lies, the big peace lie has become too big to fail.</p>
<p>If politicians from around the world and across the political spectrum were to admit that they trusted a terrorist group to reform only to see the whole thing blow up in their faces, they would look like idiots. Like John Kerry and Miley Cyrus, they can&#8217;t stop. The whole thing has gone on for too long and the longer it goes on, the worse admitting the truth would make them look.</p>
<p>And so the big lie keeps gaining momentum. Its dimensions are swiftly becoming universal as the Peace Lobby claims that all the terrorism in the world and all the instability in the Middle East will be put to rest once the peace process is completed. Before too long, the peace process will offer the cure to cancer, lost socks and global warming. Like every bubble, the only way to prevent it from bursting is by blowing it up even bigger.</p>
<p>And when it does burst, it will take a lot more with it.</p>
<p>Israel can never prove its willingness to make peace to a Peace Lobby whose reputations would be destroyed by that proof. The Peace Lobby allowed the PLO to take the peace process hostage and once that happened any hope for peace became hopeless.</p>
<p>The big peace lie killed the peace it was lying about. And now all that&#8217;s left is protecting the lie, no longer for the sake of peace, but for the sake of the liars.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-peace-process-is-the-process-of-blaming-israel/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>82</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Time for Consequences</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/time-for-consequences/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=time-for-consequences</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/time-for-consequences/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2014 04:48:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian authority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PLO]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unity deal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224104</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Palestinians publicly announce their embrace of terrorism -- and their true intentions in the "peace process." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Palestinian-leader-Mahmoud-Abbas.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224105" alt="Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas holds a" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Palestinian-leader-Mahmoud-Abbas-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-one-Time-for-consequences-350385">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>It’s hard not to admire Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s brazenness.</p>
<p>Two weeks ago, Abbas signed on to 15 international agreements that among other things require the PA to respect human rights and punish war criminals.</p>
<p>And this week, he signed a unity deal with two genocidal terror groups all of whose leaders are war criminals. Every leader of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two parties that signed the deal with the PLO, are war criminals. Under the Geneva Conventions, which Abbas signed onto just a couple of weeks ago, he is required to put them on trial, for their war crimes.</p>
<p>Here it is worth noting that under the Geneva Conventions, every single rocket launch from Gaza into Israeli territory is a separate war crime.</p>
<p>Abbas was only able to sign the Geneva Conventions on the one hand, and the unity deal with terrorist war criminals on the other, because he is utterly convinced that neither the US nor the European Union will hold him accountable for his actions. He is completely certain that neither the Americans nor the Europeans are serious about their professed commitments to upholding international law.</p>
<p>Abbas is sure that for both the Obama administration and the EU, maintaining support for the PLO far outweighs any concern they have for abiding by the law of nations. He believes this because he has watched them make excuses for the PLO and its leaders for the past two decades.</p>
<p>When it comes to the Palestinians, the Western powers are always perfectly willing to throw out their allegiance to law – international law and their domestic statutes – to continue supporting the PLO in the name of a peace process, which by now, everyone understands is entirely fictional.</p>
<p>Why do they do this? They do it because the peace process gives them a way to ignore and wish away the pathologies of the Islamic and Arab world. The peace process is predicated on the notion that all those pathologies are Israel’s fault. If Israel would just surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians, then the Arabs writ large, and the Muslim world as a whole will cast aside their support for jihad and terrorism and everything will be fine.</p>
<p>At least that is how Abbas analyzes the situation.</p>
<p>And so far, the US has not disappointed him.</p>
<p>The Obama administration’s immediate response to Abbas’s unity with terrorist war criminals deal involved pretending it didn’t understand what had just happened.</p>
<p>In a press briefing on Wednesday, shortly after Hamas war criminal Ismail Haniyeh signed the deal with Fatah and Islamic Jihad, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki acknowledged that the deal is bad for the peace process. But she wasn’t willing to reach the inevitable conclusion.</p>
<p>Rather, she averred, idiotically, “I think the ball, at this point, is in the Palestinians’ court to answer questions to whether this reconciliation meets the US’s long-standing principles.”</p>
<p>Two days before the unity deal, a reporter from Al-Monitor asked Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar if Hamas has given up terrorism.</p>
<p>Zahar responded, “Anyone who claims so must be drunk. How has Hamas abandoned the resistance [that is, terrorist] effort? What are the manifestations of it doing so? Where have we prevented the launching of rockets?” No ambiguity whatsoever there.</p>
<p>And Abbas just signed a deal Hamas, and with Islamic Jihad, the official representative of the Iranian mullahs in the Palestinian war criminal lineup.</p>
<p>No ambiguity there, either.</p>
<p>If the US is willfully blind to who the Palestinians are, what they are doing, and what they stand for, the Europeans are so committed to the Palestinians that they invented an imaginary world where international law protects war criminals and castigates their Jewish victims as international outlaws.</p>
<p>In the EU’s view, Hamas is an attractive organization.</p>
<p>During a meeting with Abbas last October, Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, urged Abbas to sign a unity deal with Hamas. A statement from her office read that she views reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas “as an important element for the unity of a future Palestinian state and for reaching a twostate solution.”</p>
<p>And while unity between terrorist factions is something that Ashton considers conducive to peace, in her view, Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is tantamount to a war crime.</p>
<p>In a statement released by her office last week, after Baruch Mizrahi was murdered by Palestinian terrorists while driving in his family car, with his wife and young children, to a Passover Seder, Ashton gave no more than a perfunctory condemnation of the war crime.</p>
<p>Four-fifths of her statement involved condemning Israel for respecting Jewish property rights and the rules of due process and international law in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>In the EU’s imaginary world, being in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem while Jewish is a war crime. Murdering Jews is merely impolite.</p>
<p>The deal signed on Wednesday is the fourth unity deal Fatah has signed with Hamas. After the first one was signed in 2007, the so-called Middle East Quartet, which includes the US, the EU, the UN and Russia, issued three conditions for accepting the unity government: Hamas has to recognize Israel’s right to exist, abjure terrorism and accept the legitimacy of the previous agreements signed by the PLO with Israel.</p>
<p>As Zahar and every other Hamas leader has made clear repeatedly, these conditions will never be met.</p>
<p>But regardless of how Hamas views them, in and of themselves the Quartet’s conditions are deeply problematic. They themselves constitute a breach of international law.</p>
<p>The Quartet’s conditions assert that if Hamas and Islamic Jihad agree to them, they will be accorded the same legitimacy as the PLO. In other words, the Quartet members have committed themselves to granting immunity from prosecution for war crimes to all Palestinian terrorists.</p>
<p>Providing such immunity is arguably a breach of international law. And it exposes a profound and irrational dependence on the mythical peace process on the part of Western policy-makers.</p>
<p>Reacting to this week’s unity deal, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said, “The agreement between Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad brings the Middle East to a new diplomatic era. The Palestinian Authority turned into the largest terrorist organization in the world, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv.”</p>
<p>And under international law, including the agreements that Abbas acceded to just two weeks ago, Bennett is absolutely right.</p>
<p>Apologists for Abbas note that this week’s deal is as unlikely as all its predecessors to be implemented.</p>
<p>But even if they are right this doesn’t mean that Abbas’s repeated practice of signing unity deals with war criminals should be cast aside as insignificant.</p>
<p>They expose the lie at the heart of the peace process. The time has come to call things by their names. Abbas is a terrorist and the PA is a terrorist organization.</p>
<p>In light of this incontrovertible fact, the time has come to treat the PA in accordance with international law.</p>
<p>Perhaps shocked by Abbas’s behavior, perhaps overwhelmed by the serial failure of every one of its foreign policies, the administration acknowledged that Israel can’t be expected to negotiate with a government that doesn’t accept its right to exist.</p>
<p>Administration officials even said that the US would have to revisit its relationship with the PA in light of the agreement with Hamas.</p>
<p>No doubt, the administration is convinced that it can revert to form and ignore reality once again the moment the smoke as cleared. But whatever its intentions, the administration’s acknowledgment of Abbas’s bad faith opens the door to action by both Israel and the US Congress.</p>
<p>The Israeli government and the US Congress should take the steps necessary to bring their national policies toward the Palestinians into accordance with the law of nations.</p>
<p>On Thursday, the security cabinet rightly decided to end negotiations with the PA. But this cannot be the end of the line. Israel must also stop all financial transfers to the PA.</p>
<p>Just as critically, Israel must stop cooperating with PA security forces in Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>It must end its support for US training of those forces and call for the US to end its mission to assist PA security forces.</p>
<p>Israel must begin arresting and prosecuting Palestinian officials who incite for the murder of Jews, and charge them with solicitation of murder.</p>
<p>The government should assist Israeli citizens in submitting war crimes complaints against Palestinian officials and the PA generally at international tribunals for their involvement in war crimes, including their incitement of genocide.</p>
<p>As for the US Congress, last week, with the passage into law of Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill banning terrorists from serving as UN ambassadors, the Congress showed that it is capable of acting to force the administration to uphold US anti-terror laws.</p>
<p>To this end, in accordance with those laws, Congress must act to immediately end US military support for Palestinian security services.</p>
<p>The Office of the US Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian territories that trains Palestinian military forces should be closed straightaway. Its personnel should be redeployed out of the area forthwith.</p>
<p>So, too, given that the Palestinian Authority now inarguably meets the US definition of a foreign terrorist organization, the US must end all financial assistance to its operating budget. Also, in accordance with US law, the US banking system must be closed to PA entities. Foreign banks that do business with these entities should be barred from doing business with US banks.</p>
<p>Abbas is not interested in peace. The two-state model isn’t about achieving peace. It is about blaming the victim of the absence of peace for the absence of peace.</p>
<p>Abbas knows his apologists, both in Israel, and most important in the US and Europe. He knows they will go to any length to defend him.</p>
<p>The Israeli Left does so because without the phony peace process, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, the Labor Party and Meretz become political irrelevancies.</p>
<p>The administration and the EU defend Abbas and the phony peace process because they don’t want to acknowledge the plain fact that Israel is the only stable ally they have in the Middle East and the stronger Israel is the more protected they are. Doing so contradicts their ideology.</p>
<p>So now Abbas is telling them that the deal is good for peace since it brings Hamas-controlled Gaza into the PLO and so reunifies the PA, which has been operating as two separate entities for seven years. And they may go along with it.</p>
<p>They’ve been perfectly willing to embrace utter nonsense countless times over the years.</p>
<p>Only the Israeli government and Congress can stop them. And they must stop them.</p>
<p>These phony peaceniks’ preference for Jew-killers over international law comes with a prohibitive price tag. Jews are murdered, war criminals are embraced, and the rule of law is rent asunder.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/time-for-consequences/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>105</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Predictable Failure of Kerry’s &#8220;Peace&#8221; Mission</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/the-predictable-failure-of-kerrys-peace-mission/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-predictable-failure-of-kerrys-peace-mission</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/the-predictable-failure-of-kerrys-peace-mission/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Apr 2014 04:06:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace Process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PLO]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223384</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When fantasies about terrorists collide with reality. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/kerry-abbas1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223430" alt="kerry abbas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/kerry-abbas1-450x299.jpg" width="315" height="209" /></a>In August, 2013, this writer had a column in Front Page Magazine titled </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Why Kerry’s Mideast Peace Is Doomed. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Less than a year later, it appears as if the aimless “peace” talks between Israel and the Palestinians, with Secretary of State John Kerry and Martin Indyk, the U.S Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, serving as chaperones, are over and done with. John Kerry, however, cannot bring himself to say enough. He is determined to succeed where so many others have failed. And, like his boss, President Barack Obama, he wants to add a Nobel Prize to his name.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The predictable failure of the “talks” is rooted in the Palestinians inability to resign to and accept the reality of a Jewish State. Mahmoud Abbas, (as Yasser Arafat before him), is unable to forgo his shared ideological commitment to the revolutionary past, and the “armed struggle,” aimed at liberating Palestine from the Jews.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Arafat, during the Camp David Summit in July, 2000, was given a golden opportunity to “end the conflict” with Israel, when Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton offered him a Palestinian State on 97% of the West Bank and Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem, as well as additional territory to compensate for the 3% of land (Jewish settlements) slated to be annexed to Israel. Arafat understood that “an end of conflict” without “an end to Israel,” could cost him his life. He therefore chose to launch the Second Intifada.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Abu Mazen is cognizant of the personal price he will pay should he sign on a document that “ends the conflict.” It is for this reason that he, like Arafat, chose to contravene the agreement reached with Kerry and the U.S. Administration, which precluded his making any unilateral moves, such as applying for membership to 15 U.N. agencies.  Moreover, Mahmoud Abbas’ insistence on the “Palestinian Right of Return,” and his refusal to recognize Israel as the Nation-State of the Jews, are clear indicators that the Palestinians never intended to make real peace with Israel. The façade was maintained in order to insure the financial rewards that stemmed from dealing with the U.S., which obligated them to enter the negotiations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">John Kerry and the Obama administration have continually ignored the fact that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority President, has failed to prepare his people for the possibility of peace with Israel. Instead, the Palestinians initiate campaigns that promote boycotts of Israel and hatred of its people. Diplomatic formulas cannot substitute for educating the Palestinian public about peace and humanizing Israelis, something neither Arafat nor Abbas have done since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. On the contrary, both the deceased Arafat and his successor, Abbas, have created an educational system rife with hatred of Israelis, Jews, Christians and Americans. The next generations of Palestinians have been infected with the hatred and intolerance virus, and overcoming it will take more than a peace conference.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Israel’s delay in executing the fourth release of Palestinian terrorists with blood on their hands was the declared reason for the Palestinians to turn to the U.N. agencies for membership. That, however, was a mere excuse.  Had it not been the release of the Palestinian terrorists, there would have been a half-dozen other excuses to abandon the negotiations including any construction in Jewish settlements, demands for more (terrorist) prisoner releases, the refusal to recognize Israel as a state of the Jews, and finally, insisting on the “Right of Return.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yoram Ettinger, former Israeli Consul General in Houston, Texas, and Minister for Congressional Affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington opined that, “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has ignored the lessons of history in favor of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/04/04/former-israeli-ambassador-pins-dead-peace-process-on-american-wishful-thinking-says-kerry-smothered-in-a-middle-east-sandstorm-interview/">wishful thinking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.” Ettinger told </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Algemeiner</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that “Kerry’s refusal to acknowledge the historical facts and realities of the Middle East left America’s top diplomat </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/04/04/former-israeli-ambassador-pins-dead-peace-process-on-american-wishful-thinking-says-kerry-smothered-in-a-middle-east-sandstorm-interview/">smothered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in a Middle East sandstorm.” Ettinger pointed out that the Obama administration’s ‘Palestine Firsters’ mentality was what doomed the nine months of peace talks that collapsed this week between the internationally recognized Jewish state and the PLO (as Ettinger prefers to call the Palestinian negotiating team). “Those initials,” Ettinger insisted, “with all the connotation those initials represent, is a clear reminder of its long terrorist roots, and showing how far the world is from, in its mistaken conventional wisdom of a Palestinian Authority, being prepared to govern beside Israel.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ettinger explained that the ‘Palestine Firsters’ believe that the Palestinian issue is the center of everything. “These are the same people who also believe that the UN is the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/04/04/former-israeli-ambassador-pins-dead-peace-process-on-american-wishful-thinking-says-kerry-smothered-in-a-middle-east-sandstorm-interview/">quarterback</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of international relations. The UN assumes that the Palestinians issue is the center, so if the quarterback is telling you that the entire game plan has to be based on the Palestinian issue, you go with the quarterback. They also genuinely believe an Israeli concession &#8211; the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria &#8211; is going to do the trick, and thereby they ignore the roughly 100 years of conflict that sends a very clear message to the contrary.”</span></p>
<p>Following the delivery of letters of accession to 15 U.N. International conventions signed by Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, April 1, 2014, the Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Abed Rabbo, in a rather cynical retort said, “We hope that Kerry renews his <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/02/middle-east-peace-talks-john-kerry-edge-collapse">efforts</a> in the coming days. We don’t want his mission to fail.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Friday (4/4/14) editorial in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> disclosed that senior aides close to Kerry, as well as White House staffers, believe that there are no chances for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to succeed and that the time has come for Kerry to say “enough.”</span></p>
<p>Obama administration officials have said that Kerry has devoted too much time and effort to the Middle East negotiations at the expense of other urgent international issues. They hinted that his efforts to reach a deal between Israel and the Palestinians may end up damaging his reputation. “A point will come where he has to go out and own the failure,” an official said. For now, the official said, Kerry needs to “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-israeli-palestinian-peace-talks-faltering-kerry-must-decide-how-to-proceed/2014/04/03/464517bc-bb41-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html">lower the volume</a> and see how things unfold.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kerry’s financial inducement brought Abbas to the negotiating table to begin with, but that was not enough to build a comprehensive peace that ends the conflict. For Israelis and Americans, peace equals normalization of relations. For Palestinians in particular, it meant an opportunity for an extra financial bonus, unilateral Israeli concessions, including the release of over 100 terrorist killers, and heavy U.S. pressure on Israel. But, as Arafat demonstrated in July, 2000, the Palestinians are simply “unwilling to end the conflict” and refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. It is for this reason that Kerry’s Mideast peace initiative was doomed from the start.</span></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss the recent <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Glazov Gang</a> episode with <b>Mudar Zahran, </b>a leader of Palestinians in Jordan who has been living in exile in the UK since 2010. He calls out Kerry on his &#8220;peace&#8221; plan and asks why a U.S. Secretary of State is threatening Israel to commit suicide:<br />
</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2AjTjpmC5q4" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/the-predictable-failure-of-kerrys-peace-mission/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Negotiating With Terrorists Doesn’t Work</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/negotiating-with-terrorists-doesnt-work-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=negotiating-with-terrorists-doesnt-work-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/negotiating-with-terrorists-doesnt-work-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2014 04:40:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorists]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222863</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Abbas won’t ever make peace.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/John-Kerry-and-Mahmoud-Ab-009.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-222864" alt="John Kerry and Mahmoud Abbas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/John-Kerry-and-Mahmoud-Ab-009.jpg" width="326" height="275" /></a>Let’s set aside the moral issue that it’s wrong to negotiate with terrorists and the practical issue that negotiating with terrorists encourages more terrorism. Those are both right and obvious, but there’s also a third issue. Negotiating with terrorists doesn’t work unless they intend to stop being terrorists.</span></p>
<p>The peace process between Israel and the PLO has never worked and will never work because the members of the terrorist group never intended to stop being terrorists. The PLO yammers on about Palestine, a country that never existed and a name that has nothing to do with the Arab conquerors they descend from, but functions like a terrorist group, not like a state.</p>
<p>Diplomats and politicians write up annual reports claiming that the Palestinian Authority has made progress with its civic institutions and its economic development. The truth is that if anything it has actually gone backward.</p>
<p>Mahmoud Abbas has no intention of running for office. The elected legislature has long been defunct and actual decisions are made by the PLO Council. The Palestinian Authority is a dictatorship run by high profile leaders of a terrorist group. It is less open and democratic than it was a decade ago and it wasn’t very open and democratic back then either.</p>
<p>The only progress that the latest incarnation of the peace process achieved was to give Abbas enough confidence to boot his Prime Minister who was there to assure the Euros that there was some slightly competent management at the helm. The same pundits who were praising Fayyad for salvaging the Palestinian Authority have already forgotten about him.</p>
<p>The international community has poured fortunes into the Palestinian Authority to construct civic institutions and engage in economic development. Despite all that, the Palestinian Authority is a smaller scale model of every regional tyranny with economic monopolies for the sons of Abbas, no freedom and no elections that matter.</p>
<p>Unlike them, it’s also incapable of paying for anything or maintaining its own economy.</p>
<p>Imagine if Assad’s regime was entirely subsidized by foreign donors. Imagine that it was also largely run by foreign experts free of charge. Imagine if it didn’t actually do anything except use aid money to pay its gangs of terrorists and bureaucrats who don’t actually do anything either except occasionally kill people.</p>
<p>That’s as good as the Palestinian Authority ever gets. It’s not a state, it’s a welfare state run by terrorists.</p>
<p>And that’s the problem.</p>
<p>Terrorists and states negotiate differently.  Terrorists escalate a conflict to achieve leverage for their latest demand. They don’t seek a final settlement. There can be no final settlement because that would mean the end of terror.</p>
<p>Arafat and Abbas always negotiated the same way. They arrived prepared to disrupt the negotiating session at a crucial moment. The “peace process” was their hostage and they always hijacked it and began issuing demands.</p>
<p>It’s no surprise that the same thing happened yet again.</p>
<p>Faced with having to compromise, Abbas looked around and took the peace process hostage. Again. Now the process is, once again, on the brink of collapse. Netanyahu is resigned because this is what he knew would happen all along; as did anyone who had been paying attention for the last twenty years.</p>
<p>That doesn’t include John Kerry or most Western politicians and diplomats who still assume that if you get the parties to sit down at a table, they will compromise and work things out.</p>
<p>Negotiations work when both parties view them as an end to the conflict, rather than an extension of it. Terrorists treat a willingness to negotiate as a sign of weakness. Negotiations are their punctuation marks between bombings. The negotiations don’t end or even interrupt the conflict, they perpetuate it.</p>
<p>Arafat and Abbas never abandoned terrorism. Not only did they fight like terrorists, but they also negotiated like terrorists. And terrorists can’t be negotiated with because they don’t view negotiations as a long term peace process, but as a short term means of achieving their latest demand.</p>
<p>Abbas approached the latest pre-negotiating negotiations with Israel the same way that his terrorists approached airplane hijackings. Instead of seeking a final outcome, he instead took the negotiations hostage repeatedly to secure the release of some of his terrorists. Having achieved that goal, he then took the process hostage again to extract the release of even more important terrorists.</p>
<p>Israel and the United States have long term goals, but Abbas only has short term goals. He isn’t out to “liberate” Palestine, but to score some easy victories that will let him coast along as a terrorist leader.</p>
<p>Unlike Arafat or Bin Laden, Mahmoud Abbas is not an ambitious man and that’s a very good thing. Ambitious terrorists are much more trouble. Abbas is content with the status quo, but always looking for an angle. He may get around to getting statehood for his piece of the West Bank as long as it can include enough Israeli territory that his responsibilities and his power structure don’t have to change.</p>
<p>Abbas is not interested in change. Neither are most of his comrades who live very comfortably at the top of the Fatah heap. That is also why he isn’t interested in the peace process.</p>
<p>Israel and the United States want to end the conflict, but Abbas wants to keep it going. The conflict has been good to him. Ending it would stick him with a tiny country, accusations of treason and the tedious tasks of government.</p>
<p>And what’s in it for him?</p>
<p>The teenager who has been educated and indoctrinated by the system set up by Arafat and run by Abbas believes in dying for Palestine, but Abbas knows quite well that Palestine is just Greater Syria misspelled and that Syria isn’t looking too promising these days.</p>
<p>He doesn’t believe in Palestine. He believes in terrorism. He believes in Abbas.</p>
<p>Abbas knows his own limitations. He’s not a great leader. He isn’t capable of running a country and when it comes to playing politics, he isn’t very good at it. If the Palestinian Authority had anything like real democracy, it’s doubtful that anyone would elect him dogcatcher.</p>
<p>The president of the Palestinian Authority is a very lucky man and he knows it. He has wealth, power and foreign leaders take him seriously. But that’s only because he holds the key to the peace process. Fast forward another five years into some imaginary utopia in which a final settlement has been achieved and he would have trouble getting anyone to return his phone calls, let alone provide him with the foreign aid that allows him to live in the manner that he has become accustomed to.</p>
<p>Peace has nothing to offer Abbas. It has nothing to offer Fatah. It’s just the bait in the trap that keeps money flowing into their pockets.</p>
<p>Arafat didn’t have a plan for a country. He had a plan to for an international mercenary force that would fight and die in the name of a country that never existed and that he had no expectation of ever creating. The peace process didn’t change that. What it did was increase his leverage over Israel, the United States and the world.</p>
<p>The peace process always ends in conflict because the side that cares least about peace has all the leverage. That is why no matter how many times the negotiations begin, they always end in war.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/negotiating-with-terrorists-doesnt-work-2/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>19</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Arab Rejectionism from Khartoum to Ramallah</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/arab-rejectionism-from-khartoum-to-ramallah/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=arab-rejectionism-from-khartoum-to-ramallah</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/arab-rejectionism-from-khartoum-to-ramallah/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2014 04:02:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arab league]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[declaration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KHARTOUM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meeting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[three no's]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221908</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Abbas carries on the Arab League's absolute refusal to make peace with Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/1395071177000-GTY-479263775.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221909" alt="1395071177000-GTY-479263775" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/1395071177000-GTY-479263775-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel offered to return land acquired during the conflict to her defeated Arab enemies in exchange for peace. On September 1, 1967 the Arab League, convening in Khartoum, Sudan drafted its predictable response to the Israeli overture in the form of the now infamous “Three No&#8217;s” proclamation: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it…”</span></p>
<p>Nothing has changed since then. Arabs still maintain their rejectionist attitudes toward reconciliation with Israel as evidenced by Mahmoud Abbas’ own version of the Arab League’s Khartoum declaration.  A <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/tv-report-abbas-said-no-to-obama-on-3-core-peace-issues/">recent report</a> indicated that Abbas rejected Israel’s three core demands that represent red lines for the Jewish state. Abbas refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, refused to abandon the so-called Palestinian “right of return” and refused to commit to an end of conflict or claims. Refusal to meet any one of the three conditions severely undermines prospects for peace. Refusal to accept all three however, all but torpedoes the process.</p>
<p>President Obama has all but chosen to ignore Palestinian rejectionism in favor of heaping criticism on the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel. Obama suffers from an acute case of tunnel vision when it comes to Israel focusing on ancillary matters, like the so-called settlements, instead of focusing attention on the real stumbling blocks to peace, namely, the consistent refusal of the Palestinian Arab leadership to accept any Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. This rejectionism has manifested itself in the anti-Jewish Arab pogroms of 1921-22, 1929 and 1936 as well as the Arab rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, the Arab aggression that precipitated the Six-Day War and the wave of terror unleashed by Yasser Arafat following <a href="http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=101041">his sabotage of the Camp David summit</a> in 2000.</p>
<p>The Palestinians have only themselves to blame for their stagnation and sorry state of affairs. Their corrupt and venal leaders care more about accumulating wealth and power than about advancing civil rights for their people. Indeed, the unelected, autocratic “President” Abbas is now in the midst of his 9<sup>th</sup> year in office when his term should have terminated after four. Freedom of the press and dissent are virtually nonexistent and incitement to violence and anti-Semitism continue unabated.</p>
<p>This is the force of “moderation” that the Obama administration expects Israel to contend with. Israel of course must also contend with Hamas, which unlike Abbas and his Palestinian Authority offers <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/24/we-must-massacre-them-hamas-politician-says-palestinians-must-kill-humiliate-and-tax-the-jews/">frighteningly honest opinions</a> about how it intends to deal with Jews should it ever get the opportunity. For the Palestinians, whether Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah or Ismail Haniyeh’s Hamas, nothing has changed since the days of the infamous Palestinian leader and Nazi collaborator, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The goal of eradicating Israel and replacing it with yet another dysfunctional Arab state remains the same.</p>
<p>The Obama administration, fixated with Israel’s development of Judea &amp; Samaria and besotted by the idea of making Israel minuscule and indefensible, has chosen to ignore <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=Q86jQX6GJKA">subtle</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRaKwJu_2Fk">not so subtle</a> proclamations by senior Palestinian ministers and law makers concerning their pernicious objectives. This flawed and one-sided policy in turn serves only to embolden and harden Palestinian intransigence making compromise and peaceful resolution impossible.</p>
<p>Israel has sacrificed much over the years for the cause of peace and has received nothing but worthless guarantees and groundless criticism in return. Israel, under Prime Minister Netanyahu has wisely adopted the policy of reciprocity. The days of unilateral Israeli territorial concessions are over. No longer will Israel hand over chunks of its ancestral land for vague assurances and worthless promises. It is time for the Obama administration to recognize the Palestinian Authority for what it truly is; an entity that does not seek peaceful relations with its neighbor but rather one that seeks the eradication of an existing democracy in favor of yet another dysfunctional Islamist theocracy.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/arab-rejectionism-from-khartoum-to-ramallah/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Worst Alternative</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-worst-alternative/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-worst-alternative</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-worst-alternative/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:31:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meeting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PLO]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221631</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why a one-state solution is the only viable option Israel has left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/abbas_obama_400.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221636" alt="abbas_obama_400" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/abbas_obama_400.jpg" width="280" height="210" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-One-The-worst-alternative-346054">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas must have gotten a kick out of it on Monday when he visited the White House and President Barack Obama praised him as “somebody who has consistently renounced violence, has consistently sought a diplomatic and peaceful solution that allows for two states, side by side, in peace and security.”</p>
<p>After all, the same day the men met, Abbas’s regime continued its week-long celebration of the deadliest Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel to date.</p>
<p>On March 11, 1978, PLO terrorists commandeered a passenger bus on the coastal highway and massacred 37 people, including 12 children.</p>
<p>Dalal Mughrabi, a female terrorist, led the raid. Ever since, she has been lionized by the PLO.</p>
<p>While he met with Obama, Abbas’s adviser Sultan Abu al-Einein proclaimed that Mughrabi was the ultimate role model for Palestinian women.</p>
<p>In Einein’s words, (reported by Palestinian Media Watch), “In March, [we mark] Palestinian Women’s Day, in March, Palestinian Mother’s Day also occurs, in March… [we remember Dalal Mughrabi] who would not agree to anything other than to establish her state between Jaffa and Lebanon in her special way.”</p>
<p>Einein urged Palestinian youth to follow Mughrabi’s example of mass murder. “Let the young people hear me: Allah, honor us with Martyrdom, Allah, give us the honor of being part of the procession of Martyrs.”</p>
<p>The Israeli Right didn’t need the Mughrabi festival to understand that Obama’s claim that Abbas wants peace is ridiculous. As Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon explained last Saturday, Abbas is “a partner for taking, not for giving.”</p>
<p>Israeli Leftists, who have slavishly championed Abbas, are finally catching on. Last month, in an op-ed in Haaretz, long-time PLO champion Shlomo Avineri acknowledged the dynamic at work in the two-state policy model and how Abbas uses it to Israel’s disadvantage.</p>
<p>Avineri wrote that it is not that Abbas “is no partner for talks, but that he is an excellent partner for talks — as long as they are talks designed to lead Israel to make more and more concessions, and to put them in writing. Then, on one pretext or another, he is unwilling to sign and brings the negotiations to a halt, so they can be restarted in the future ‘where they left off’: with all the previous Israeli concessions included, and no concessions having been put forward by the Palestinian side.”</p>
<p>In other words, Abbas negotiates not to achieve peace, but to weaken Israel.</p>
<p>But the Americans remain oblivious to all of this. And by now it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Obama’s ignorance of the nature of Abbas’s game is deliberate. His apparently deliberate blindness to the obvious indicates that Obama doesn’t have a problem with Abbas’s behavior and goals.</p>
<p>The lesson from Abbas’s real game and Obama’s apparent support for it is that the status quo is devastating for Israel.</p>
<p>For the past 20 years, Israel has confined itself to a paradigm of two-states. Under this model, since 1994 it has shared control over Judea and Samaria with the PLO.</p>
<p>As statements like Ya’alon’s and Avineri’s make clear, their experience with this model has shown Israelis across the political spectrum that the Palestinians’ primary goal is not to build a Palestinian state. It is today what it has always been: the eradication of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>For the Palestinians, the two-state strategy isn’t about receiving land from Israel in exchange for peace. The two-state strategy is about undermining Israel’s relations with the US and other Western allies and weakening Israeli society’s resolve to defend itself while the PLO builds its terrorist infrastructure for use when deemed appropriate.</p>
<p>Abbas’s unique contribution to this strategy is that he places economic, diplomatic and legal attacks on Israel rather than terrorism at the forefront.</p>
<p>Not that he opposes terrorism. Just like his predecessors, Abbas believes that all means for achieving Israel’s destruction are legitimate. And Israel cannot help but assist him.</p>
<p>Due to Israel’s continued acceptance of the two-state policy model it continues to share control over Judea and Samaria with the PLO. This joint control encourages acceptance of the PLO’s propaganda claim that Israel is a foreign occupier of the areas, and that they rightfully belong to the Palestinians who are dominated by an illegal Israeli occupation.</p>
<p>Israel’s continued abidance by this paradigm makes it impossible for its representatives to defend the country against PLO challenges to its legitimacy. Hence most Israelis assume, rightly, that Israel is powerless to defend itself from the PLO’s political warfare at places like the UN and the International Court of Justice.</p>
<p>The only way that Israel can defend itself against these PLO abuses, the only way it can stop the PLO from continuing to undermine its alliances with the US and friendly parts of Europe, is by ending its embrace of the status quo. So, too, the only way Israel can stop the PLO’s expansion of its security forces into a full-fledged military force, armed and trained by the US and Europe, is by abandoning shared control and ditching the two-state model.</p>
<p>In my new book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, I advocate for Israel to end the current situation, which erodes its ability to survive, by applying its laws to Judea and Samaria and providing the Palestinians who live there with permanent residency status and the right to apply for Israeli citizenship.</p>
<p>Obviously, I recognize and discuss at length the challenges this policy will present. And I also explain, at length, why the dangers inherent to this clearly imperfect policy are smaller than those Israel faces from the status quo.</p>
<p>Critics of my policy like Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin have dismissed my policy as “fantasy” and insist that the best option for Israel is the status quo of shared control over the areas with the PLO.</p>
<p>Among other things, Tobin and others insist that since there is no support for the option of Israel applying its laws to Judea and Samaria in the US today, the plan should be ignored.</p>
<p>But it is far from clear why this is the case. A better plan is to build support for this option in the US and in Europe as the only viable alternative to the two-state paradigm which has failed for 90 years and will continue to fail for the foreseeable future because the Palestinians reject the Jews’ right to self-determination.</p>
<p>Like the rest of the world, today, due to its abidance by the two-state formula, Israel’s default position is that it is the occupier of its own historic homeland without which its borders are indefensible and its existence is incomprehensible.</p>
<p>The only way for Israel to defend itself competently in the international arena is for its default position to rest on Israel’s historic and legal rights to the areas – that is, to stop accepting that these areas, to which Israel has a stronger legal claim that the Palestinians, belong to the Palestinians and begin asserting Israel’s positive case for sovereignty.</p>
<p>Other critics of the Israeli one-state plan like Hillel Halkin argue that if Israel applies its laws to the areas, all of the Palestinians will immediately apply for Israeli citizenship and vote in Knesset elections.</p>
<p>The problem with this argument is that it assumes that Israel’s experience with implementing the one-state policy – in unified Jerusalem in 1967 and in the Golan Heights in 1981 – is irrelevant.</p>
<p>This assumption is hard to understand.</p>
<p>As I show in my book, Jerusalem’s Arabs only applied for Israeli citizenship when they feared that Israel would surrender their neighborhoods to the PLO. And the Golan Heights Druse only began applying for Israeli citizenship in significant numbers after the Syrian civil war broke out.</p>
<p>Since an Israeli decision to apply its laws to Judea and Samaria is a clear statement that Israel has no intention of leaving, history indicates that there is no reason to assume that the Palestinians will apply for Israeli citizenship en masse.</p>
<p>Another criticism is that it is too late in the game for Israel to end PLO rule in Judea and Samaria. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak.</p>
<p>There are two problems with this contention.</p>
<p>First, it assumes that Israel must agree to remain confined to a policy model that undermines its ability to survive and damns it to an eternal erosion of its national resolve and relations with the rest of the free world while building the military capabilities of an enemy dedicated to its destruction.</p>
<p>The second problem is that it assumes that applying Israeli civil law to the areas involves reverting to the past.</p>
<p>But the Israeli one-state plan is not a reversion to the military government. It is a progression to the rule of civil law, under which the Palestinians and the Israelis in the areas will be governed as the rest of the citizens of Israel are governed, under a liberal legal code which provides full legal protections to all.</p>
<p>Critics extrapolate from Israel’s current diplomatic helplessness under the weight of the twostate paradigm that Israel will necessarily and forever be incapable of defending itself. And so they assume that Israel will be powerless to offset the economic devastation of European economic sanctions that they believe will necessarily follow an Israeli decision to apply its laws to Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>This claim ignores three important issues. Its proponents assume the US will back a European trade war against Israel. Is this really the most likely scenario? Second, they ignore the fact that Europe initiated its economic war against Israel now, as Israel maintains its allegiance to the two-state paradigm.</p>
<p>Obviously maintaining this faith isn’t getting Israel to a better place.</p>
<p>By changing its default position to one based on asserting Israel’s rights rather than ignoring them, Israel will have the capacity to defend against Europe’s political and economic warfare.</p>
<p>Finally, they assume that Israel has no ability to withstand a European economic war. But this assessment ignores Israel’s burgeoning trade with Asia. China is building a rail link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean through Israel as an alternative to the Suez Canal. Israel is India’s largest military supplier. Israel’s energy independence and emergence as a major exporter of natural gas similarly decreases its reliance on European markets.</p>
<p>To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the Israeli one-state plan is the worst possible plan for managing the Palestinian and pan-Arab conflict with Israel, except for every other plan that has been tried from time to time. It presents Israel with considerable threats and challenges. But on balance, as I show in my book, these threats are less acute and less dangerous than the ones Israel now faces. Moreover, the Israeli one-state plan is a viable prospect, which similarly distinguishes it from all the other ideas on offer.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-worst-alternative/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Abbas to Obama: No &#8216;Peace&#8217; Without 26 Freed Terrorists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/abbas-to-obama-no-peace-without-26-freed-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=abbas-to-obama-no-peace-without-26-freed-terrorists</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/abbas-to-obama-no-peace-without-26-freed-terrorists/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2014 04:51:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meeting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prisoners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White House]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221236</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Extortion attempt at the White House.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2121664613.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221238" alt="2121664613" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2121664613-402x350.jpg" width="281" height="245" /></a>One wonders if, during his meeting with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas at the White House on Monday (reports </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-to-abbas-palestinians-must-take-risks-for-peace/">here</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Abbas-to-Obama-Time-is-not-on-our-side-for-two-state-solution-345624">here</a>), President Obama ever felt he was being subjected to a shakedown. In front of the press, Abbas expressed his concern about Israel’s freeing of a fourth and last batch of 26 convicted Palestinian terrorists on the scheduled date, March 29, saying this would “give a very solid impression about the seriousness of the Israelis on the peace process.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This latest “process,” which began for a nine-month period last July, is due to end—unless extended—in April. To put it mildly, it would not go over well in Israel, and certainly not in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition, if the prisoners were freed carte blanche, without even the talks’ continuation as a supposed recompense.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Abbas, of course, is under pressure from home to get the 26 sprung from jail. He is not under pressure to “make peace” with Israel, a Western concept foreign to the Palestinian population, which has been fed—under Abbas’s tutelage—a diet of pure hatred and delegitimization of Israel. </span></p>
<p>Abbas further pursued the shakedown effort by claiming the Palestinians had already recognized Israel in 1988 and 1993. It was an attempt to evade Israel’s demand for recognition as a Jewish state. It was also untrue.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://jcpa.org/article/arafat-jewish-state-setting-record-straight/">noted</a> by Alan Baker, a former legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the supposed 1988 recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by Yasser Arafat, Abbas’s predecessor, was rejected as totally inadequate by the U.S. at the time. As for 1993, at that time Arafat <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/the-oslo-process-and-the-jewish-state-issue/">purportedly recognized</a> Israel’s “right to exist”—but with no mention of its Jewish character.</p>
<p>That ongoing evasion has a simple basis: acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state would—albeit only semantically—entail an end to demands to flood it with “refugees.” It is something Abbas is <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Why-Abbas-thinks-Jewish-state-is-a-delusional-myth-345549">adamantly unwilling</a> to do—not even to promote that other supreme value of getting the convicted terrorists released.</p>
<p>It sounds, in other words, like a deadlock—as just about everyone knowledgeable in these matters predicted back when this latest “process” was getting underway.</p>
<p>Obama, for his part, praised Abbas as “someone who has renounced violence” and did not subject him to any of the <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-02/obama-to-israel-time-is-running-out">belligerent criticism</a> to which he subjected Netanyahu as he made his way to the White House two weeks ago.</p>
<p>Again, some things are predictable; no one expected the “violence-renouncing” Abbas, who earlier this month <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=135&amp;doc_id=10872">sent a wreath</a> to honor a suicide bomber who in 2002 killed eight people by blowing himself up on an Israeli bus, to catch any of the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/25/president-allegedly-dumps-israeli-prime-minister-dinner/">special antagonism</a> Obama reserves for the Israeli leader.</p>
<p>A note of realism did seem to creep in when Obama called peace an “elusive goal” and said, “It’s very hard. It’s very challenging. We’re going to have to take some tough political decisions and risks if we’re able to move it forward.”</p>
<p>A few days earlier Israel’s straight-talking defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16171">put it bluntly</a> and—to his credit—undiplomatically when he said:</p>
<blockquote><p>Unfortunately, an agreement will not happen in my generation…. Abbas is a partner who takes, not a partner who gives. He is not a partner for a permanent peace agreement that includes recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people. He just takes back prisoners….</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, what is known as a shakedown. The next couple of weeks should tell which of two unpalatable possibilities faces Israel: the shakedown continues; or it ends, with the Palestinian Authority turning to the UN to wage diplomatic war against Israel, and Israel hardly assured of U.S. support.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/abbas-to-obama-no-peace-without-26-freed-terrorists/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>35</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Jeffrey Goldberg, Jackson Diehl and Obama’s Targeting of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/jeffrey-goldberg-jackson-diehl-and-obamas-targeting-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jeffrey-goldberg-jackson-diehl-and-obamas-targeting-of-israel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/jeffrey-goldberg-jackson-diehl-and-obamas-targeting-of-israel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:43:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diehl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Goldberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220797</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A clear-eyed Washington Post editor tells the truth about Obama's bullying of Israel.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220829" alt="obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data-450x331.jpg" width="270" height="199" /></a>In his recent hour-long White House interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama once more unleashed a biased, dishonest attack on Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Goldberg, like all too many high-profile writers and commentators, gave the president a pass on his anti-Israel riff and even seconded it. A striking contrast, demonstrating incisive, reality-based coverage of Obama’s anti-Israel slant and its inevitable negative consequences, has been provided over the past five years by the <i>Washington Post</i>’s Jackson Diehl.</p>
<p>Goldberg’s interview received wide attention for the president’s warnings to Netanyahu that he must quickly reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians or Israel could face dire consequences from a world impatient with the Jewish state’s supposed foot-dragging in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the tenth year of a four-year term, the president had only positive things to say, including definitively characterizing him as ready for a peace deal.</p>
<p>The Goldberg interview, broadcast on Bloomberg News, was wide-ranging, touching extensively on Iran and Syria as well as Israel, and Goldberg has been praised by some for his handling of the hour. Elliot Abrams, on <i>The Weekly Standard </i>website, wrote: &#8220;&#8230; kudos to Goldberg; he pressed Obama repeatedly, challenging vague formulations and seeking clarity. Goldberg pushed Obama hard, especially on Iran and Syria.</p>
<p>But on Israel Goldberg pushed Obama not at all, even when the president made assertions untethered from reality.</p>
<p>Abbas has said that he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a recognition that Obama has himself acknowledged is necessary for any meaningful peace. Abbas has said he will not give up the so-called &#8220;right of return&#8221; of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel, a formula for the dissolution of the Jewish state. He has denied any Jewish connection to the land and insisted the Jews are mere colonial interlopers whose state is illegitimate. He has praised murderers of Israeli civilians as heroes who should be emulated and has overseen the naming of schools, sports teams, and other public entities in their honor. He has presided over an education system that teaches all of &#8220;Palestine&#8221; &#8211; meaning the West Bank, Gaza and Israel &#8211; properly belongs to the Palestinians and that Palestinian children must dedicate themselves to liberating it from the Jews and eradicating the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Yet when Obama declared, &#8220;I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist,&#8221; and offered other comments in the same vein, Goldberg mustered no question invoking the counter-evidence. On the contrary, he essentially endorsed the president’s ludicrous assessment and only raised the question of whether Abbas could deliver, despite his good intentions: &#8220;Abu Mazen [Abbas] &#8211; all these things you say are true, but he is also the leader of a weak, corrupt and divided Palestinian entity&#8230; Do you think he can deliver more than a framework agreement?&#8221;</p>
<p>In contrast to Goldberg’s meekly echoing the president’s distortions, <i>Washington Post </i>editor and columnist Jackson Diehl has repeatedly offered clear-eyed assessments of Obama’s anti-Israel bias and misguided views on the path to peace.</p>
<p>In May, 2009, in an op-ed entitled &#8220;Abbas’s Waiting Game,&#8221; Diehl observed, &#8220;[President Obama] has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud.&#8221; To Diehl, the president’s tack was obviously wrong-headed and counter-productive.</p>
<p>At the time, the Obama administration was already focusing on a settlement freeze as the key to moving the peace process forward. In subsequent weeks, the administration ratcheted up this demand, and defined the insisted upon &#8220;freeze&#8221; in all-inclusive terms that were unprecedented either for any American administration or in the context of any previous Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In addition, Obama did so without mention of need for a single concession on the part of the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Once again Diehl was direct and clear, in an article written a month after the previous piece and entitled &#8220;End the Spat with Israel.&#8221; Diehl points out how unprecedented the demands regarding settlements were, and how unnecessary given previously agreed upon limitations to settlement growth, limitations to which the Israelis were adhering. He also notes concessions Netanyahu had made in recent weeks, including for the first time agreeing to Palestinian statehood. He reiterates that Obama’s stance was allowing the Palestinians, and the Arabs more broadly, to avoid making any necessary concessions of their own. His point once more was how Obama’s anti-Israel approach, if left unmodified, was doomed to fail.</p>
<p>In fact, when Netanyahu did subsequently agree to a ten month moratorium on all settlement construction, Abbas refused to restart negotiations until two weeks before the moratorium’s end, persisted in offering no concessions of his own, and demanded an extension of the building freeze as a pre-condition to continuing negotiations. Diehl was, of course, proved right in his criticism of Obama’s strategy.</p>
<p>Yet again, two years later, in a May, 2011 op-ed entitled &#8220;Mahmoud Abbas’s Formula for War,&#8221; Diehl takes Obama to task for his ongoing, wrong-headed bias. He notes the president was still focusing on pressuring Israel, while &#8220;short shrift is given, as usual, to Netanyahu’s putative partner. Yet the leader of the Palestinian ‘moderate’ branch, Mahmoud Abbas, is not only refusing to make any concessions of his own but is also turning his back on American diplomacy &#8211; and methodically setting the stage for another Israeli-Palestinian conflict.&#8221;</p>
<p>Diehl goes on to cite Abbas’s recent public commitment to seek a UN General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood the following fall. Diehl quotes Abbas to the effect that, rather than pursuing a state through a negotiated peace with Israel, &#8220;Palestine would then be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another.&#8221;</p>
<p>This tack is consistent with what had always been Yasser Arafat’s intent. Arafat was never going to sign an &#8220;end-of-conflict&#8221; agreement, and neither will his long-time friend and ally Abbas. It was because such an agreement was demanded of them in return for the far-reaching Israeli territorial concessions offered by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001 and by Ehud Olmert in 2008 that Arafat walked away from the former and Abbas from the latter. Arafat then launched his terror war and at the same time sought international recognition of &#8220;Palestine&#8221; without committing to a final status agreement and without closing the door to ongoing pursuit of Israel’s annihilation. Abbas is intent on following the same playbook.</p>
<p>Diehl, writing in 2011, notes that &#8220;the Obama administration and its allies appear suitably alarmed by [Abbas’s UN strategy]. But their principal reaction so far might be summed up as, ‘Now we really have to put the screws to Netanyahu.’&#8221;</p>
<p>In the context of giving Secretary of State Kerry his requested nine months to solve the conflict, Abbas agreed to forego returning to the UN last fall to seek additional trappings of nationhood there. But he is clearly determined to continue avoiding concessions to, and an end-of-conflict agreement with, Israel, and instead to seek international recognition of statehood in all of the West Bank and Gaza and the freedom to use those territories for pursuing Israel’s destruction.</p>
<p>President Obama, in his Jeffrey Goldberg interview, has now essentially legitimized the Arafat strategy. Abbas, Obama insists, is committed to an agreement with Israel. The problem is the settlements built in support of Israeli claims to areas of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. If Israel fails to meet Palestinian demands, Obama continues, it is hard to see how the United States can go on protecting Israel from anti-Israel measures taken by, for example, the United Nations and the European Union.</p>
<p>In a subsequent interview with talk show host Charlie Rose, Goldberg said he took Obama’s comments <span style="font-size: small;">&#8220;</span>&#8230;to be a little bit of a veiled threat, to be honest&#8230; It’s almost up there with, you know, nice little Jewish state you got there, I’d hate to see something happen to it.&#8221;</p>
<p>But when it counted, during the interview, Goldberg did not challenge Obama on his threat. Nor did he raise the issue of Israel’s legitimate security concerns and its right to claim in negotiations strategic areas of the West Bank, as acknowledged, for example, in UN Security Council Resolution 242. Nor did he refer to the Palestinians’ continuing refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy within any borders, or their indoctrinating their children to wage war on Israel until it is annihilated. No; he essentially let Obama’s biased attack on Israel and apologetics for the Palestinians stand unchallenged.</p>
<p>There are many more Jeffrey Goldbergs than Jackson Diehls among Middle East commentators inside the Beltway. Their obsequiousness to Obama and to his hostility vis-a-vis Israel helps assure that, in the administration’s remaining three years, the Jewish state will endure additional besiegement and the prospect for genuine peace will only recede further.</p>
<p><em>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of &#8220;The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.&#8221;</em></p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss him discussing his work on The Glazov Gang:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Pr8GHhrXoMA" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
</div>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/jeffrey-goldberg-jackson-diehl-and-obamas-targeting-of-israel/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>238</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Israel Won&#8217;t Submit to Boycott Threats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/israel-wont-submit-to-boycott-threats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-wont-submit-to-boycott-threats</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/israel-wont-submit-to-boycott-threats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:20:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[peace plan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218330</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Kerry’s efforts to intimidate the Israeli leadership won't succeed.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ben.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218419" alt="ben" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ben-450x304.jpg" width="315" height="213" /></a>The speech given by Secretary of State John Kerry at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, February 1, 2014, created quite a stir in Israel. The media debated Kerry’s intent and politicians from across the political spectrum reacted to what they perceived as threats of boycotts against Israel. It is clear that Kerry’s statements were intended to intimidate the Israeli leadership into falling in line with the framework for peace he will be delivering in the near future.</p>
<p>In Munich, Kerry stated, “Everywhere I go in the world, wherever I go – I promise you, no exaggeration, the Far East, Africa, Latin America – one of the first questions out of the mouths of a foreign minister or a prime minister or a president is, ‘Can’t you guys do something to help bring an end to this conflict between Palestinians and Israelis?’ Indonesia – people care about it because it’s become either in some places an excuse or in other places an organizing principle for efforts that can be very troubling in certain places.  I believe that – and you see for Israel there’s an increasing de-legitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it. <a title="http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/02/221134.htm" href="http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/02/221134.htm" target="_blank">There is talk of boycotts</a> and other kind of things. Are we all going to be better with all of that?”</p>
<p>Secretary of State Kerry spoke of consequences for Israel should the current peace talks fail. He warned that “Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable. It’s illusionary…”</p>
<p>Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded on Sunday, February 2, 2014 to Kerry’s speech. He said, “Boycott attempts are <a title="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/02/02/netanyahu-dismisses-kerry-warning-about-boycott-threat/" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/02/02/netanyahu-dismisses-kerry-warning-about-boycott-threat/" target="_blank">immoral</a>, unjust, and will not achieve their goal.” Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz argued that “Israel can’t conduct negotiations with a gun pointed to its head.” He went on to say that Kerry’s comments were “offensive.”  Naftali Bennett, the Economics Minister, charged that Kerry’s statements show him as siding with Israel’s foes. “We expect our friends around the world to stand beside us, against anti-Semitic efforts targeting Israel, and not for them to be their amplifier.” Ethiopian-born Member of Knesset Pnina Tamano-Shata, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, observed that Kerry’s statements at the Munich Conference “are irresponsible in my view and harm the State of Israel.”</p>
<p>Israeli voices on the political left including Justice Minister Tzipi Livni defended Kerry saying, “When the leader says to us friends, the reality is going to change in the event of a political deal, this does not constitute a <a title="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177045#.UvAUXeQo6nA" href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177045#.UvAUXeQo6nA" target="_blank">threat</a> to the State of Israel, but rather defines reality as it is.”</p>
<p>What Livni neglected to explain however, is why Kerry failed to mention what consequences the Palestinians would suffer if the talks failed. It is the Palestinians under Mahmoud Abbas (not to mention the Palestinians of Hamas in Gaza) who have been the rejectionist party in these negotiations (scheduled to end on April 29, 2014, unless extended). In an interview with the New York Times on Sunday, February 2, 2014, Abbas was asked by a reporter about recognition of Israel as a Jewish State. He replied, “This is <a title="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/world/middleeast/palestinian-leader-seeks-nato-force-in-future-state.html?_r=0" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/world/middleeast/palestinian-leader-seeks-nato-force-in-future-state.html?_r=0" target="_blank">out of the question</a>,” noting that “Jordan and Egypt were not asked to do so when they signed peace treaties with Israel.”</p>
<p>According to Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who also spoke at the Munich Security Conference, “(Israel) was not willing to talk about giving up one inch unless the Palestinians agree that at the end of the process, the framework of the negotiations will include the recognition of our right to exist as a nation-state of the Jewish people, a finality of claims, (meaning an end of conflict-JP), <a title="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/1-340094" href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/1-340094" target="_blank">giving up the right of return</a>, (of Palestinian refugees to Israel-JP) and addressing our security needs.”  Yaalon added, “Hopefully we’ll get it, if not, we will manage.”</p>
<p>It is unlikely that Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians will compromise on the “right of return,” which might be a deal breaker. They know full well that such an agreement would be akin to Israel committing demographic suicide. Nor will the Palestinians show flexibility with recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Mahmoud Abbas told the NY Times that Israeli soldiers could remain in the West Bank for up to five years and that Jewish settlements should be phased out of the new Palestinian state. He proposed that NATO forces should be responsible for security on the West Bank and in preventing terror attacks against Israel. He also promised a demilitarized Palestinian state with only “police” forces to keep order.</p>
<p>Israel’s experience with foreign forces policing against terror or preventing war is rather bitter. In Lebanon, UNIFIL forces enabled Hezbollah to accumulate over 100,000 missiles now aimed at Israel, and allowed Hezbollah terrorists to fire at Israeli communities across the border. In the Sinai, UN troops folded as soon as Nasser ordered them out in May, 1967. And, NATO forces did little to prevent the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. Even if Israel agreed to the infringement on its right to self-defense and accepted NATO forces, the Palestinians will not compromise on all the other issues mentioned by Yaalon.</p>
<p>Palestinian NGO’s and labor unions initiated the call for Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel in 2005, and managed to bring anti-Semites, and extreme-leftist groups in Europe and America under their umbrella. Ironically, while in South Africa (a BDS movement stronghold) for the funeral of Nelson Mandela last December, President of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas said that he does <span style="text-decoration: underline;">not </span>support a <a title="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/mahmoud-abbas-rejection-israel-boycott" href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/mahmoud-abbas-rejection-israel-boycott" target="_blank">boycott against Israel</a>.</p>
<p>The mere mention of boycotts by Kerry was a way of taking sides &#8211; the Palestinian side. Boycotts, however, are nothing new. The Jews in Palestine lived with them even before the Jewish state was established. Much like in Nazi Germany, Zionist institutions and Jewish businesses were boycotted by the Arab establishment in Mandatory Palestine. Soon after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the Arab League imposed its boycott, which lasted until the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. In 1994, the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council countries ended their boycott of Israel.</p>
<p>On campuses across the country there are <a title="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/IsraelonCampusReport2012.pdf" href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/IsraelonCampusReport2012.pdf" target="_blank">two specific groups</a> responsible for waging BDS campaigns: The Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). What goes unreported and what Kerry neglects to acknowledge is that <a title="http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-1000679786" href="http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-1000679786" target="_blank">85%</a> of Palestinian residents on the West Bank are interested in economic cooperation with Israel.</p>
<p>Then, there are Europe’s traditional anti-Semites in academia and business who have embraced the opportunity to harm the Jewish state, allegedly in the name of peace. European bankers are now queuing up in Tehran for post-sanctions business, while at the same time, boycotting Israeli banks that do business on the West Bank. They should be publicly shamed and targeted for counter-boycotts.</p>
<p>The Arab/Muslim world has tried war, terror, and economic warfare against Israel and has failed. The Jewish state is more prosperous now than ever, while the Arab world is mired in poverty and misery. The Europeans murdered Six Million Jews, but failed to destroy the Jewish people. A strong and flourishing Israel is an anathema to the Europeans, and to the anti-Semites on campuses in Europe and America. John Kerry must understand that his insinuation of the boycott threat against Israel can only evoke the dark memories of the past, and will not bring Israel to submission, or force it to sacrifice its vital interests.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <b> Mudar Zahran, </b>a secular leader of Palestinians in Jordan who has been living in exile in the UK since 2010. He calls out John Kerry on his Mideast  &#8220;Peace&#8221; Plan &#8212; and asks why a U.S. Secretary of State is threatening Israel to commit suicide:<em><br />
</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2AjTjpmC5q4" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/israel-wont-submit-to-boycott-threats/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Abbas the &#8216;Moderate&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/abbas-the-moderate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=abbas-the-moderate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/abbas-the-moderate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 05:10:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extremist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holocaust]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moderate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Despite his polished appearance, the Palestinian leader’s words betray his true intentions.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/abbas-resistance-2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218206" alt="abbas-resistance-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/abbas-resistance-2.jpg" width="300" height="237" /></a>Holocaust denial is not the sort of thing one normally associates with moderation. It is associated with unbridled hatred, ignorance, irrationality and xenophobia. Deniers usually fall into two groupings. There are the crass boors who spew forth whatever refuse enters their vapid minds without even the slightest attempt to provide empirical data to substantiate their odious views. And then there are the more sophisticated types whose denials are generally accompanied by fabricated evidence and couched in terms of scholarly pursuit and historical review.</span></p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mLKzzW-t4g&amp;feature=c4-overview-vl&amp;list=PLD94E630BF1C97436">rantings</a> of “Dr.” Issam Sissalem, a Palestinian academic who claimed on Palestinian Authority TV that Auschwitz and other death camps merely served as “disinfection” facilities, provides a clear example of the former grouping. The unelected, autocratic “president” of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas provides a good example of the latter.</p>
<p>In the 1980s Abbas <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/exposing-abbas-5335">authored</a> a Ph.D. thesis in which he referred to the systematic murder of 6 million Jews as a “fantastic lie” and claimed that the actual death toll was barely a sixth of that amount and that in any event, their murder was provoked by the “Zionist movement.” He further alleged that gas chambers were never utilized to murder Jews.</p>
<p>So there you have it. The leader of the Palestinian Authority shares the same beliefs and values as the likes of former Islamic Republic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former grand wizard, David Duke. This is the man that Israel is expected to trust with signed treaties. This is the man that Israel is expected to cede its ancestral land to. And this is the man entrusted by John Kerry to end Palestinian incitement.</p>
<p>It is beyond astonishing that neither the EU’s Catherine Ashton nor John Kerry have addressed the disconcerting issue of Holocaust denial with Abbas. The matter is even more pressing when one considers that Holocaust denial is pervasive among Palestinians due to systematic efforts by Palestinian Authority officials (often facilitated by Western financing) to promote incitement and hatred. Even more disturbing is the fact that Abbas, who is hailed as a “moderate” by Ashton and Kerry, continues to spew forth repugnant and highly revisionist views that are incongruent with peace-making and coexistence.</p>
<p>In a telling <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/opinion/17abbas.html?ref=opinion&amp;_r=2&amp;">op-ed piece</a> for the New York Times, Abbas bemoans the loss of his purported homeland but forgets to mention the inconvenient truth that it was the Palestinian Arabs who rejected partition and who fired the first shots of aggression. He also reaches the zenith of mendacity when he claims that “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.”</p>
<p>The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs left on their own volition with the belief that they would return once Arab forces were triumphant. That of course never materialized because despite all odds, it was the Jews who were the victors. It is also noteworthy that among the first of the Palestinians to flee were the leaders and more affluent, who had the means to do so. This flight further demoralized the Palestinian Arab peasantry and middleclass and adversely affected the Palestinian economy, leading to further flight by the masses.</p>
<p>Abbas’ stubborn adherence to a false and misleading narrative and continued refusal to accept responsibility and to acknowledge even the slightest culpability for the current Palestinian predicament is indicative of one who will never relinquish his claims to the whole. Abbas is intent on using the peace process as a tactic with the overall strategic goal of eliminating Israel. Should Israel ever decide to succumb to John Kerry’s pressure and relinquish Judea &amp; Samaria, Abbas would be one step closer in attaining this pernicious objective.</p>
<p>Abbas has in the past expressed <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjEO_eoX594">deep admiration</a> for Haj Amin el-Husseini, an evil and deeply anti-Semitic character whose <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbP2EyF8d34">past Nazi connections</a> are well documented. He has <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-authority-gives-freed-prisoners-50000-each/">provided cash</a> and cushy government jobs to murderers convicted of the most barbaric crimes, courtesy of the American and EU taxpayer. But most telling of all was an incident which occurred last year and represents one of the clearest examples yet of why Abbas cannot be trusted.</p>
<p>Abbas was present and seated in the front row during a sermon given by PA Religious Endowments Minister, Mahmoud al-Habbash. Habbash <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=Q86jQX6GJKA">compared</a> the current negotiations with Israel to a medieval pact signed between Muhammad and his rivals, the Quraysh, which Muhammad subsequently violated once achieving military parity. Abbas offered no rebuke or condemnation of his minister. On the contrary, the views expressed by Habbash are consistent with those of his boss.</p>
<p>John Kerry and many of his allies on the hard left are placing enormous pressures on Israel to engage in mammoth concessions and vacate strategic areas vital to Israel’s security. Moreover, they are asking Israel to surrender land to those sworn to her destruction. Abbas has proven to be a duplicitous, forked-tongue leader, slightly more polished than his predecessor but sharing the same ideology and genocidal aims. The cause of peace is noble and just but should not come at the cost of national suicide.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/abbas-the-moderate/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>27</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1538/1659 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 02:47:45 by W3 Total Cache -->