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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; palestinians</title>
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		<title>Why Do 80% of Palestinians Support Murder?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/moshe-phillips-and-benyamin-korn/why-do-80-of-palestinians-support-murder/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-do-80-of-palestinians-support-murder</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:03:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247961</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The one issue that unifies Palestinians more than any other. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/F121214IR01-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247962" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/F121214IR01-1-450x299.jpg" alt="F121214IR01-1" width="342" height="227" /></a>In most parts of the world, it&#8217;s not easy to find a major issue on which 80% of the population agrees. An election victory in the United States is considered a &#8220;landslide&#8221; if the winner receives more than about 60% of the vote. (Such as Richard Nixon winning 65% of the vote against George McGovern in the 1972 presidential race.)</p>
<p>But among Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza, it turns out there is one issue on which there is more support than any other: randomly murdering Israeli Jews.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research last week asked a sample of 1,270 Palestinian Arab adults in the territories what they thought of the recent wave of attacks in which Palestinians stabbed Israelis or ran them over with their cars. Fully 80% responded that they support such attacks.</p>
<p>Note that the respondents weren&#8217;t talking about theoretical future attacks. They were commenting on recent attacks which they know all about. Here is what they are endorsing:</p>
<p>&#8211; Ramming a car into a crowd at a train station in Jerusalem. The fatalities included a three-month old infant.</p>
<p>&#8211; Stabbing an unarmed young woman standing at a bus stop in Gush Etzion.</p>
<p>&#8211; Axing and machine-gunning four rabbis at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue.</p>
<p>Could the 80% endorsement be a fluke? A one-time aberration? A momentary lapse in good judgment, spurred by recent tensions?</p>
<p>Hardly. There is a remarkable consistency in Palestinian public opinion. The same polling institution surveyed 1,200 Palestinians in the territories in late September and found that 80% support resuming the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel.</p>
<p>Why is it that 80% of Palestinians embrace the brutal murder and terrorization of Israeli civilians?</p>
<p>Three reasons stand out.</p>
<p>First, there is the general brutality of Palestinian Arab society. Violence by relatives against women suspected of immorality, violence by Muslim extremists against Christian Arabs, violence by the Palestinian Authority regime against dissidents&#8211;it&#8217;s all commonplace in the territories. That makes it easier for the average citizen to see violence as acceptable.</p>
<p>Second, there is a sense that violence works. Kidnapping Israelis led to the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists from prison. Decades of bombings and hijackings led to widespread international support for Palestinian statehood. The recent attacks in Jerusalem have led to calls to redivide the city (including, most recently, by U.S. Mideast envoy Martin Indyk).</p>
<p>Third, and perhaps most important, is the influence of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement by the Palestinian leadership. Secretary of State John Kerry has correctly pointed out that the Jerusalem synagogue slaughter was, as he put it, &#8220;a pure result of incitement.&#8221; The constant declarations by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas and other leaders praising terrorists as heroes and accusing Israel of desecrating Muslim religious places, have created an atmosphere in which support for murdering Jews has become the norm.</p>
<p>The normally alleged justification for Palestinian violence – a reaction to “the occupation” – does not stand up. Since 1995, over 95% of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) Palestinians have lived under the administration of the Palestinian Authority, which controls all aspects of Palestinian life except for visas and external security. And since 2005, Palestinians in Gaza have controlled even these.</p>
<p>The Oslo Accords were supposed to have put an end to all that. Palestinian leaders were supposed to educate the public to embrace peace. They promised to change the hearts and minds of average Palestinians, to raise a generation ready to live in peace with Israel. Instead, they decided to do exactly the opposite. And, as the new poll demonstrates, they succeeded.</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>
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		<title>Andrew Klavan: Defend Cancer Against the Jews!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-defend-cancer-against-the-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-defend-cancer-against-the-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:56:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247764</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><strong>In this special episode, our host sides with the under-privileged victim of the Israeli occupation of science &#8212; Cancer! See the video and transcript below:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3r8B6C6YiGE" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p>I’m  Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p>Today a disturbing story from across the sea.  International news sources are reporting that Israeli scientists have been plotting to kill cancer.  That’s right, sinister Jewish researchers who are Jewish have unleashed several new and deadly weapons in their insidious war against cancer.  They’ve developed a revolutionary new protein that could cause cancer cells to destroy themselves in what can only be described as a massacre of the innocent&#8230; cancer cells.  Israelis have also developed the first blood test for breast cancer and new techniques using extreme cold that could viciously murder lung and breast cancer cells with minimally invasive techniques. Needless to say, since these techniques are being developed by Israeli Jews, we must defend cancer!</p>
<p>After all, there were cancers living in the Middle East before the Israelis got there.  By what right did the imperialist forces of the west decree that Jews could simply move into cancer’s territory and start killing off these peaceful indigenous disease cells left and right?  Are we in the international community going to stand by and allow cancers that are just going about their humble business in someone’s breast or lung to be suddenly uprooted and destroyed by the kind of high tech weaponry only Israel would deploy.  Every television network should be leading their newscasts with graphic pictures of the pitiful dead and dying cancer cells that have come under relentless attack by Israeli researchers.  The New York Times, a former newspaper, should keep a running count of how many cancer cells have been killed in this invasion.  After all, only about 40-thousand Israelis die of cancer every year; whereas hundreds and hundreds of millions of cancer cells are killed by Israeli doctors.  Do those numbers seem fair to you?</p>
<p>Fortunately, I am able to report that our moral guardians on the political left are taking action as they always do to try to stop the Jews.  Or as the left calls them:  the JEEEWS!!!</p>
<p>For instance, brave students at UCLA and NYU are calling on their universities to pull their investments from Israel.  After all, who can make expert life and death judgements on international hot zone situations better than courageous 20-somethings ensconced in the safety and luxury of university life in Westwood and Greenwich Village?  Sure, some might say that they’re spoiled, privileged under-educated children conned into moral absurdity by one-sided propaganda… [thinks this over]  But no, no, no, they just want to make sure that Israel is deprived of the funds and support it’s only going to use to wage its unconscionable war on innocent cancer.</p>
<p>Butt you know, the problem isn’t just Israel.  In some sense, it’s fair to say that Israel is the bloody tip of western civilization’s cancer-slaughtering spear.  After all, over 40 percent of the Nobel Prize winners in physiology and medicine have had Jewish heritage.  So I think we know who’s behind the international conspiracy to kill off innocent disease.  Therefore let me call on all left wingers everywhere to defend cancer against the Jews of Israel as you’ve defended and continue to defend Israel’s other enemies.  If we can stop Israel from attacking cancer then maybe cancer will have a chance to spread worldwide.</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p>
</div>
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		<title>Something Is Rotten in UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mitchellgbard/something-is-rotten-in-uclas-center-for-near-east-studies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=something-is-rotten-in-uclas-center-for-near-east-studies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mitchellgbard/something-is-rotten-in-uclas-center-for-near-east-studies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:52:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mitchell G. Bard]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BDS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Center for Near Eastern Studies]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247778</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can you guess which country gets consistently picked on? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/James-Gelvin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247782" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/James-Gelvin-450x299.jpg" alt="James-Gelvin" width="295" height="196" /></a>Recently, UCLA’s federally subsidized Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) has come under fire by a pro-Israel watchdog that conducted a review of the Center’s programs from 2010-2013 and concluded that many featured “anti-Semitic discourse and anti-Israel bias.”</p>
<p>Among the findings of the report by the AMCHA Initiative:</p>
<p><strong>CNES Israel-related events had an overwhelmingly anti-Israel bias:</strong> Of the 28 Israel-related events, 93% were anti-Israel;<strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p><strong>CNES favors speakers who engaged in anti-Semitic activity prior to speaking at CNES: </strong>Of the 31 speakers at the CNES Israel-related events, 84% have engaged in Anti-Semitic activity, including the demonization and delegitimization of Israel, denying Jews the right to self-determination, comparing Israelis to Nazis and condoning terrorism;<strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p><strong>Each CNES director had engaged in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity: </strong>All three CNES directors from 2010-2013 publicly opposed the UC Israel Abroad Program, despite touting the public abroad program as part of the center’s fulfillment of the Title VI funding requirement. In addition, each of the directors endorsed boycotts of Israel, and one is a founder of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel.</p>
<p>Professor James Gelvin, a historian studying the Middle East, wrote a spirited defense of CNES on behalf of the Faculty Advisory Committee, which, oddly enough, appeared in an Arabic publication. Gelvin focused his rebuttal on AMCHA’s statistics regarding the number of programs regarding Israel; however, he presents no evidence to dispute the fundamental charge of anti-Israel bias. His answer to the failure to bring speakers who might balance some of the panels critical of Israel is to say that CNES also does not feel the need to “balance” the criticism of Arab states. He further justifies the faculty invited by CNES by asserting that they are “accomplished scholars presenting original work.” If you look at much of what the invited guests have said about Israel, it is highly questionable whether they deserve to be called accomplished and certainly are not presenting original critiques of Israel.</p>
<p>Gelvin becomes positively Orwellian when he tries to explain how a center purportedly devoted to academic freedom can tolerate directors who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, including the current director who, in 2014, signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and pledging not to collaborate with Israeli institutions, attend their conferences or publish in Israeli journals. Gelvin’s response is that the BDS movement, which calls for the destruction of Israel, “is not out of the mainstream within the scholarly community” because a few hundred faculty Israel deniers support singling Israel out for special treatment.</p>
<p>One can’t help but wonder how “accomplished” a professor can be if they can’t recognize they are part of a concerted campaign to destroy the only democracy in the Middle East while having no qualms about the activities of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the rest of the serial human rights abusers. Then again, Gelvin claims the BDS movement isn’t anti-Semitic because it is not on a State Department list of anti-Semitic activities. Rather than look to the State Department with its own dark history of anti-Semitism, he might look at the statement signed by more than 60 international Jewish organizations representing the spectrum of Jewish opinion that denounced the BDS movement as “counterproductive to the goal of peace, antithetical to freedom of speech, and part of a greater effort to undermine the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their homeland, Israel.” The cosigners acknowledged that “individuals and groups may have legitimate criticism of Israeli policies,” but added that “criticism becomes anti-Semitism…when it demonizes Israel or its leaders, denies Israel the right to defend its citizens or seeks to denigrate Israel’s right to exist.” A similar statement was signed by 38 Nobel Prize winners.</p>
<p>As AMCHA reported, two former CNES directors called on the University of California to stop Education Abroad Programs in Israel. Gelvin’s excuse? They were protecting the rights of Palestinian-American students who he alleges were “either harassed or prevented entry into the country.”</p>
<p>Rather than take issue with professor Gelvin’s own statistics defending the programs at CNES, let’s consider just one example of a symposium that took place in 2009, before the period examined by AMCHA. This public event, “Gaza and Human Rights” featured four outspoken critics of Israel. CNES director Susan Slyomovics opened the session by telling the audience they would learn the “truth” about Gaza that had been hidden or distorted by the media. UCLA historian Gabriel Piterberg compared Zionist policy since 1900 to European colonialism that led to the extermination and enslavement of the indigenous peoples. UCSB’s Lisa Hajjar, who chairs a Law and Society Program, accused Israel of war crimes. Richard Falk, who taught international law at Princeton before being named UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Nazi extermination of Jews, insisted that Hamas and its missiles posed no security threat to Israel, and labeled Israeli action in Gaza as a “savagely criminal operation.” The fourth speaker, UCLA English literature professor Saree Makdisi, said that it was Israel’s “premeditated state policy” to kill Gazans and stunt the growth of their children.</p>
<p>The event was later referred to as an “academic lynching,” a “one-sided witch hunt of Israel,” a “Hamas recruiting rally” or, at the very least, “a degradation of academic standards.” UCLA Chancellor Block responded to the controversy by restating UCLA’s commitment to the “free exchange of ideas &#8230; as a core value of academic freedom” and praised UCLA as one of the most invigorating intellectual campuses in the world.</p>
<p>The event may have violated the congressional mandate that federally supported outreach programs promote intellectual diversity and balanced debate. When asked if CNES would plan any events to present an alternative point of view, the center’s director, Susan Slyomovics, reportedly said no. Sondra Hale defended the one-sided panel and said it was necessary to criticize the “state policies that have led to this calamity.” In another example of the fox guarding the henhouse, Hale, chair of the center’s faculty advisory committee at the time, was an organizer of the academic boycott of Israel.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Israel Headed Toward Right or Left?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/israel-headed-toward-right-or-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-headed-toward-right-or-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2014 05:05:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247409</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can Israeli alter the motives of the Jewish State's enemies?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/israeli-elections.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247414" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/israeli-elections-450x315.jpg" alt="israeli-elections" width="273" height="191" /></a>Last weekend the <em>New York Times</em> featured what it called “The Opinion Pages &#8211; Room for Debate.” The topic was “If Israel Turns Right, Where will it End Up?” The assumption (Israel Turns Right) was probably motivated by a recent (November 30, 2014) <em>Ha’aretz</em> poll that indicated that if elections were held now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would gain seats, the Jewish Home party will gain even more, while Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party would diminish as previous centrist parties have done, including his father’s (Joseph or “Tommy”) Shinui party. In the same poll, Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party would barely pass the threshold for securing seats. The new Governance Law would raise the threshold to 3.25% of the total vote from the previous 2%.</p>
<p>The poll conducted by the left-leaning <em>Ha’aretz</em> newspaper concluded that the Right–Religious parties together would master 65 seats in the 120 seat Knesset (Israeli parliament) with Likud receiving <a href="http://knessetjeremy.com/2014/11/30/dialoghaaretz-poll-likud-24-bayit-yehudi-16-labor-13-kachlon-12-yesh-atid-11-yisrael-beitenu-11/">24</a> seats, Naftali Bennett’s Beit Yehudi (Jewish Home) 16, Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu (Israel Our Home) 11, Torah Judaism 8, and Shas, the Sephardic religious party 6.</p>
<p>The new centrist party being formed by Moshe Kahlon, the former Communications Minister in the Likud government is slated by the poll to receive 12 seats, while Lapid’s Yesh Atid would fall from 19 seats to 11. Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah will get 4 down from 6.</p>
<p>The left bloc will continue to shrink with Labor falling from 15 seats to 13, Meretz maintaining its 6 seats, and the Arab lists combined at 9 down from 11. The date for the next election has been set for March 17, 2015. Given the vicissitudes of the region, and the many points of crisis the Israeli government may have to face, the recent poll might undergo considerable changes.</p>
<p>One thing is clear however, an Israeli government turned Right or Left would face an existential threat from Iran. A left-of-center government would have to face the Iranian challenge, once in power, as much as any right-of-center is likely to. The Palestinians, whether as a unity government (Hamas and Fatah) or the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas, are determined to get their way to statehood through the UN Security Council rather than negotiate with Israel. Abbas and the Palestinians are not so much interested in running a state as they are in isolating and delegitimizing Israel. A left-of-center Israeli government led by Labor’s Yitzhak Herzog will not fare better than Netanyahu with a Palestinian unity government or the PA. Mahmoud Abbas will not and cannot forgo the tactical use of the “Palestinian right of return.” For both, Herzog or Netanyahu, the “right of return” is a non-starter.</p>
<p>Diana Buttu, former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, commented in the <em>NY Times</em> (updated December 7, 2014) on her debate page, charging, “But make no mistake: There are no ‘<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/07/if-israel-turns-right-where-will-it-end-up-12/there-are-no-centrists-in-israel">centrists</a>’ in Israel. All Zionist politicians support Israel’s continued military occupation, the construction and expansion of Israeli colonies, the attacks on and siege of the Gaza Strip and, most important, the denial of freedom and equality to Palestinians. For example, Tzipi Livni, the justice minister fired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly voted against Knesset bills seeking to enshrine equality in Israeli laws. In other countries, these politicians would be considered “right-wing extremists,” not centrists.”</p>
<p>Buttu clearly expressed the mindset of Mahmoud Abbas. Using such an expression as “military occupation” is a blatant exaggeration, typical of a Palestinian professional propagandist. She appears to be ignoring the facts, that in <a href="http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/books/maps.htm">Area A</a> (as designated under the Oslo Accords), the Palestinians hold both civilian and security/military control. This includes all the cities of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) with the exception of Jerusalem and the Jewish part of Hebron. In <a href="http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/books/maps.htm">Area B</a>, Palestinians have civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control. This area contains 440 Palestinian villages and their surrounding lands. Area C, which contains the Jewish settlement adjacent to the Green Line, but has a small number of Palestinians, is controlled by Israel. The vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank are under the PA control. Buttu has ignored the fact that in 2005, Israel relinquished the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. Israel moreover, demolished all the Jewish settlements there. Gaza is totally controlled by the Palestinians, and specifically, by the Palestinian Islamist Hamas terrorist organization.</p>
<p>The bills that Buttu refers to are those which seek to undermine the Jewish character of Israel, and have nothing to do with the civil, religious, and human rights of Israeli Arab citizens. The vast majority of the Palestinians, as mentioned, are under the control of the PA, not Israel. The so called “attack and Gaza siege” is another perversion of reality. Hamas terrorists have lobbed over 10,000 rockets on Israeli civilians, and last July, the latest war was provoked by Hamas rocketing Israeli cities.</p>
<p>Buttu reveals her disinterest in Palestinians negotiating peace with Israel when she states that, “It is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/07/if-israel-turns-right-where-will-it-end-up-12/there-are-no-centrists-in-israel">nonsensical</a> that Palestinians, occupied and stateless, must negotiate their freedom with their occupier and oppressor.” She and her Palestinian terrorist leadership are playing the “victimhood card” to a western world that craves assuaging its own guilt for colonialism, capitalist success, and being supposedly privileged. The truth however is that Palestinians have had endless opportunities to assert their self-determination. In 1937, under the British Peel Commission recommendations, Palestine would have been divided into an Arab and Jewish state, with the Arabs receiving <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/partition_plan.html">26,700</a> square kilometers of a shrunk Palestinian Mandate (in 1922, Britain sliced off 2/3 of Palestine Mandate to create the Emirate of Trans Jordan), while the Jews would have received a ghettoized area of only 5,000 square kilometers. The Arabs rejected it, and continued their anti-Jewish terror well until the start of WWII in 1939.</p>
<p>Opportunity for an independent Palestinian state came again a decade later in the form of the 1947 UN Partition. It sought to divide Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Once again the Arabs rejected it because they would not tolerate a Jewish state of any size. The Oslo Process, negotiated by the Labor Party, not the Right, turned sour. Hamas unleashed a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians with a nod of approval from P.L.O. Chairman Yaser Arafat. When President Bill Clinton sought to settle things between the Palestinians and Israel in a July, 2000 Camp David Summit, Israel’s Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered far reaching concessions, including 95% of the West Bank and Gaza and land swaps for the remaining 5%. In addition, it was agreed to establish the Palestinian capital around Jerusalem. Arafat rejected this chance for statehood the same way his Palestinian-Arab predecessors did. He chose instead to launch the Intifada.</p>
<p>It is because the Palestinian leadership failed to educate its people to accept the idea of peace with the Jewish state as a legitimate neighbor, and instead incited its people to consider a Jewish state of any size as illegitimate, that Arafat rejected an opportunity in 2000 to inaugurate a Palestinian state. Had he signed a document that committed him to “end of conflict,” he would probably have been assassinated. That unfortunately is the price of decades of anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic incitement and intolerance. In the end, it does not matter whether Israel turns Right or Left, the same results will occur. A Palestinian rejection of genuine peace with Israel can be counted on.</p>
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		<title>What Israeli Elections Mean for Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/what-israeli-elections-mean-for-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-israeli-elections-mean-for-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:40:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246982</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama tried to weaken Netanyahu, but only made him stronger.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/bet.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246987" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/bet.jpg" alt="Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu waves to supporters at the Likud party headquarters in Tel Aviv" width="286" height="194" /></a>While in most countries immigration moves the electorate to the left, in Israel immigration moved the country to the right. In the United States the left is counting on demographics to make it easier for them to win elections, but in Israel demographic shifts have made it easier for the right to win.</p>
<p>But the biggest problem for the Israeli left is that it’s tethered to its own version of ObamaCare in the form of the Palestinian Authority which won’t make peace, won’t stop funding terrorism and won’t stop playing the victim. As with ObamaCare, the Israeli left teeters between running on the disastrous peace process that everyone hates and pivoting away from it toward economic bread and butter issues.</p>
<p>For Obama and European leaders, Israel is reducible to the peace process. And the Israeli left depends on the support of foreign governments for its network of foreign funded non-profit organizations. The Israeli left can’t let go of its exploding version of ObamaCare because the left is becoming a foreign organization with limited domestic support. Its electorate isn’t in Israel; it’s in Brussels.</p>
<p>The Israeli left is short on ideas, both foreign and domestic, and its last remaining card is Obama.</p>
<p>Escalating a crisis in relations has been the traditional way for US administrations to force Israeli governments out of office. Bill Clinton did it to Netanyahu and as Israeli elections appear on the horizon Obama would love to do it all over again.</p>
<p>There’s only one problem.</p>
<p>The United States is popular in Israel, but Obama isn’t. Obama’s spats with Netanyahu ended up making the Israeli leader more popular. The plan was for Obama to gaslight Israelis by maintaining a positive image in Israel while lashing out at the Jewish State so that the blame would fall on Netanyahu.</p>
<p>That was what Obama’s trip to Israel had been about. While his approval ratings in Israel briefly picked up, they clattered down again over his attitude during the recent Hamas war. Polls show that the majority of Israelis don’t trust him to have their back on Islamic terrorism or Iran. And that’s bad news for him and for an Israeli left that needs to sell the image of a good Obama and a bad Netanyahu.</p>
<p>The foreign policy crowd is divided on whether Obama should intervene in Israel’s elections and how much. Trial balloons being floated show that Obama Inc. is at the very least willing to play coy about suggestions of sanctioning Israel. The sanctions are unlikely to ever get past Congress, but they never have to exist. Obama’s people are letting the Israeli left and their media outlet Haaretz do the heavy lifting by drawing up political doomsday scenarios and then issuing non-denial denials.</p>
<p>The idea is to undermine Netanyahu without getting Obama’s hands dirty. Anonymous leaks provide plausible deniability without anything that can officially be traced back to Obama. While Obama, Biden and Hillary spin the attacks as “normal disagreements between friends” for the consumption of Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, the Israeli left warns that the relationship between America and Israel has been completely wrecked.</p>
<p>While Jewish Democrats have remained oblivious, as intended, these tactics have only hurt Obama’s image among the Israeli target audience. And that has strengthened Netanyahu’s image as a strong leader willing to stand up for his country’s interests.</p>
<p>In trying to weaken Netanyahu, Obama only made him stronger.</p>
<p>The Israeli left however isn’t done yet. Unpopular with the public, its members still control the police, the judiciary, the media, academia and the entertainment industry. They form the Israeli “Deep State” made up of everyone from top security officials to the media who are constantly warning about the threats to democracy from democracy, the dangers of right-wing extremism and the need to crack down on “incitement” which usually means any view that diverges from that of the left.</p>
<p>When it comes to elections, the left compensates for its unpopularity with fake third parties that claim to be centrist or reformist. Yesh Atid, the current incarnation of the fake third party built around an anchorman who went from high school dropout to the Minister of Finance, is sinking, but it had already fulfilled its purpose. The next incarnation of the fake third party will be headed by Moshe Kahlon.</p>
<p>Moshe Kahlon is a familiar figure, a defector from the conservative Likud party, a fake moderate who claims that the “extreme right” has taken over his old party. Swap out Reagan for Begin and it’s the exact same rhetoric you can hear from a Charlie Crist or a Larry Pressler.</p>
<p>The left may not be able to win a popularity contest, let alone a contest of ideas, but it has been agile at manipulating Israel’s multi-party system to its advantage. It doesn’t need to beat the right. It just needs to build a coalition out of fake third parties fueled by public frustration with the existing dominant parties while finding ways to splinter the right. And that’s where Obama can do the most harm.</p>
<p>Obama has failed at winning over Israelis, but he doesn’t need to if he can force Netanyahu to make enough concessions to destroy his image. And then the right begins to eat itself. It’s the same tactic that Obama used against Congressional Republicans. Uniting the left and dividing the right had worked well in America. Netanyahu’s willingness to compromise has lost the right without winning over anyone else.</p>
<p>Netanyahu may not be beatable this time around, but if his coalition can be watered down with enough leftists then it compromises his ability to get anything done while creating a ticking time bomb. New elections are the result of the ticking time bomb finally going off. The “inclusive” coalition favored by this administration last time around effectively undermined the Netanyahu government.</p>
<p>If a more solid conservative coalition emerges from the election then Obama will have lost. But the overall relationship would remain unchanged even if the left won.</p>
<p>No Israeli government can deliver the things that Obama wants because they are physically impossible. The PLO does not want peace. It will not agree to any final deal that ends all future demands on Israel and all justifications for violence against the Jewish State. And even if such a deal were reached, it would have no impact on Hamas which controls Gaza and will control the West Bank. Nor would it make the regional Muslim violence that the conflict is frequently blamed for vanish into thin air.</p>
<p>Even a government of the left would still be berated because there are Jews living in Jerusalem and across Israel in places that Obama disapproves of. No Israeli government could ethnically cleanse a quarter of a million Jews. And even if it did, new demands and claims of occupied territory would follow.</p>
<p>A government of the left can however give Obama political cover. It would avoid making statements about Iran and freely put Israeli lives at risk to meet administration demands. Its members would help Obama maintain the illusion of a friendly relationship no matter how ugly things become behind the scenes. There would be no more public tension and nothing to raise questions for American Jews.</p>
<p>And that’s what Obama really wants. Israel is meant to be a scapegoat in foreign affairs and a safe fundraising line for Democratic politicians. It’s supposed to take the blame for Obama’s foreign policies while posing for photos with him for Jewish audiences.</p>
<p>That’s where Netanyahu rocked the boat by speaking out. That’s what infuriates Obama.</p>
<p>Obama’s ideal Israeli government would allow itself to be berated and blamed for everything without ever speaking up in its own defense. It would be pathetically grateful for any attention from Obama. That’s all the Israeli left can offer him and it can’t even deliver that because it can’t win.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <strong>The</strong> <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad:</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/28J1kYbaqbc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
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		<title>Fighting Jihad with Education</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dr-shmuel-katz/fighting-jihad-with-education/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fighting-jihad-with-education</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2014 05:06:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Shmuel Katz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246483</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A guide for the concerned global citizen.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/12p_terror600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246484" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/12p_terror600-450x336.jpg" alt="12p_terror600" width="340" height="254" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.aish.com/jw/me/Fighting-Jihad-with-Education.html">Aish.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In this time of great danger – with Iran <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/15339/iran_s_top_leader_spells_out_plan_for_the_elimination_of_israel_" target="_blank">threatening</a> Israel with nuclear annihilation, and jihadists on borders north and south – Israel&#8217;s efforts to tell its story to the world are simply not taking hold. The classic approach of explanatory &#8220;hasbara&#8221; has repeatedly failed to break through the clutter of disinformation.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It is time for a new approach – one in which the world understands that they also have “skin in the game.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Middle East conflict is not simply &#8220;Arab versus Jew.&#8221; Rather this is a &#8220;holy war&#8221; being waged by jihadists against all people of good will – Jews, Christians and moderate Muslims.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The key, I believe, is education. Once good people are informed about the facts, we have a much better chance of standing up to evil and achieving our mission of keeping the world free.</p>
<p><strong>Threat of Jihad to the West</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It is crucial that we clearly understand the goals and ideals of the budding <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/12/the-caliphate" target="_blank">Muslim Caliphate</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Jihad is not merely some force &#8220;across the ocean.&#8221; Muslim leaders have declared their aim of <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmGRshS0PAw" target="_blank">world domination</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Part of the jihadist strategy is to plant cells in every country. Even the United States, with its huge territory and strong military, is part of the <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XUub1no1qw" target="_blank">jihadist plan</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">At particular risk is America&#8217;s long-standing ally, Israel, whose <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths3/MFroots.html" target="_blank">historical roots</a> in Israel date 2,000 years before the advent of Islam. The 20th century <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.mythsandfacts.org/conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm" target="_blank">Mandate</a>conferred modern legitimacy on the <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths3/mftoc.html" target="_blank">Jewish state</a>, and Israel&#8217;s <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/dont-confuse-me-with-the-facts-israel-and-international-law/2014/01/05/" target="_blank">legal rights</a> to the land are unassailable.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Yet due to intimidation and threats, many Western leaders support corrupt Arab regimes, thinking that by sacrificing the <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.standwithus.com/booklets/IL101/" target="_blank">State of Israel</a> they will somehow pacify the jihadists and avoid becoming victims themselves.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In fact the opposite is true. The more we placate and cajole these bullies, the more we embolden them. As we saw with <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement" target="_blank">Hitler and Czechoslovakia</a>, giving in to the wicked led to the invasion of Europe. The U.S. woke up quite late, and defeating the Nazis was no simple matter.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In many respects – e.g. nuclear weapons – today&#8217;s threat is much greater.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If we don&#8217;t deal with the jihadist threat now, we will have to deal with it later when they will likely have more land, more resources, and far more devastating weapons.</p>
<p><strong>Extreme Violence</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Wherever radical Islam takes hold – whether via ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas or Boko Haram – horrific abuse is directed against Infidels (e.g. <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beheading_in_Islamism" target="_blank">beheadings</a>) and even their own people.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: inherit;">Hamas recently executed</a> 21 suspected informers in an extra-judicial action, while al-Qaeda perpetrated a gruesome <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2009/10/al-qaedas-schoolyard-massacre.html" target="_blank">schoolyard massacre</a> (graphic warning).</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Should the wicked prevail, no Christian, Buddhist or even Moderate Muslim will be spared – neither in the Middle East nor elsewhere in the world. Today, thousands of <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msYGb5k6dkQ" target="_blank">Christians are fleeing</a> under death threats from tyrannical jihadists, and <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/antisemitism-rise-europe-worst-since-nazis" target="_blank">anti-Semitism across Europe</a> is at its worse since the Nazi era.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">By supporting the villains who willfully distort facts, they ultimately undermine their own future and that of their children.</p>
<p><strong>Corruption of Jihadist Regimes</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Corrupt leaders across the Muslim world are exploiting their populations, in favor of solidifying their own power and personal financial wealth, leaving their constituency to wallow in despair.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Palestinians have particularly suffered, with their <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-z-chesnoff/gaza-and-palestinian-leadership_b_5589766.html" target="_blank">leadership</a> continuing to <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4022/palestinian-corruption" target="_blank">divert civilian aid</a> to more nefarious ends.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Palestinian refugees have long remained <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/refugees.html" target="_blank">political pawns</a> of Arab regimes. In today&#8217;s terror war, they are even used as <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://christianchat.com/christian-news-forum/97240-hamas-fighters-manual-found-clear-instructions-use-human-shields.html" target="_blank">human shields</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">How can we justify our own indifference to these <a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.aish.com/ci/s/Human-Rights-Human-Shields-Human-Indifference.html">human rights violations</a>?</p>
<p><strong>Armed with Information</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Today, the media is the primary disseminator of information. To regulate this power, monitoring organizations are documenting the facts:</p>
<ul style="color: #000000;">
<li><a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.camera.org/" target="_blank">Camera</a> – monitoring the Western media</li>
<li><a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.honestreporting.com/" target="_blank">HonestReporting</a> – fast-action global media watch</li>
<li><a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.palwatch.org/" target="_blank">Palestinian Media Watch</a> – translations and monitoring of Palestinian sources</li>
<li><a style="color: #551a8b;" href="http://www.memri.org/middle-east-media-research-institute.html" target="_blank">Memri</a> – exposing the messages that jihadists share with their own people</li>
</ul>
<p style="color: #000000;">What can you do?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In disseminating information, each of us plays an important role. We never know when we&#8217;ll be called upon to use our knowledge, and we must have the ability to speak with confidence.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The more &#8220;truth ambassadors,&#8221; the better the chance of us all living in a peaceful world.</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>
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		<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>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2014 05:02:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<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>
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		<title>Peace With Islam in Our Time</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/peace-with-islam-in-our-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=peace-with-islam-in-our-time</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:58:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245975</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Muslims see peace as the end of the West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/koran-kalashnikov-500x332.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245976" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/koran-kalashnikov-500x332.jpg" alt="koran-kalashnikov-500x332" width="340" height="263" /></a>Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau, the crackhead turned Jihadist spawned by the mating of a Canadian immigration official and a Libyan Muslim Jihadist, just wanted peace.</p>
<p>He <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/11/canada-jihad-murderer-there-cant-be-world-peace-until-theres-only-muslims"><span style="color: #0433ff;">told a co-worker</span></a>, “There can’t be world peace until there’s only Muslims.” Then he tried to usher in peace, the Islamic way, by opening fire near the Canadian parliament.</p>
<p>Meanwhile in Israel a reporter interviewing Arab Muslim settlers in Jerusalem found that they too wanted peace. On their terms.</p>
<p>“Yes we want peace,” one of them said, “but peace means no Jews.”</p>
<p>When negotiating peace with other cultures it’s a good idea to make sure that the words you are using mean the same thing. Most Muslims and Westerners want peace. But to Westerners peace means co-existence. To Muslims, peace means the end of your existence.</p>
<p>Ideas carry heavy cultural baggage. Peace in the West summons up images of Armistice Day, of the Christmas Truce of WW1 in which French, German and English soldiers could share meals and play soccer together. It carries with it the subversive idea that both sides realize the war isn’t worth fighting.</p>
<p>Such a subversive idea has no place in Islam. The Jihad is at the heart of Islam. To question the holy war is to also question the faith. When war is religion then peace through setting aside war is heresy.</p>
<p>The Western idea of peace is a wholly alien one to Islam. In Islam, peace does not come from men transcending their differences, but from destroying men who think and live differently. That is the function of the religious police of our allied “moderate Muslim” countries who seek out the practice of other religions and other ways of living in places like Saudi Arabia and suppress their practitioners.</p>
<p>Islamic peace does not come from diversity, from accepting the existence of other nations, religions and peoples, but from unity through Islam and eliminating as many differences as possible. If Islam is the source of peace, then all that which is “not Islam” is the cause of war.</p>
<p>Kill the Jews. Kill the Christians. Then there will be peace.</p>
<p>The Islamic idea of peace was aptly expressed by Zehaf-Bibeau and our anonymous Jerusalem Jihadist. It is not based on a recognition of the humanity of one’s fellow man, but on a rejection of their humanity.</p>
<p>As Mohammed curtly put it in missives to the leaders of non-Muslim countries in the region, “Aslim, Taslam.” Convert to Islam and you’ll have peace. The same message has been dispatched by Muslim leaders today to popes and presidents. It’s a message of peace on the only terms that Islam allows.</p>
<p>Islam is the religion of peace. For there to be peace, Islam must be supreme. Within the Islamic worldview, conflict is caused by the existence of dissent. The only way to achieve peace is by forcing the submission of every human being to the correct strain of Islam. “Moderates” may agree to let Jews and Christians live as inferior second-class citizens if they submit to Muslims. “Extremists” will skip straight to raping and beheading them. And once that ugly business is done, there will be peace.</p>
<p>Or there will be peace once the “moderates” and “extremists” have finished killing each other, once the Sunnis and Shiites have finished beheading each other, and once every single Muslim has finished slaughtering every other Muslim who in any way dissents from his understanding of Islam.</p>
<p>That’s the brand of peace we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria today. Or the peace process between Israel and the Arab Muslims who were rebranded as “Palestinians” because it made them seem like a local flavor.</p>
<p>Islam rejects the idea that mutual empathy should transcend conflict. Instead it believes that war should transcend humanity. Or as the Koran puts it, “Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.”</p>
<p>The Western tradition is biased toward the peace of co-existence. It applies the logic of armistice toward all areas of life leading to the championing of multiculturalism and immigration. Its siren song is John Lennon’s<i> Imagine</i> with its call for an end to borders, nations, religions and property. Its ideal of peace comes from the end of structure and separation between people.</p>
<p>The Islamic idea of peace however affirms a structure and separation based on the Koran. It believes that there will be peace when everyone is forced to live within the strictures of Islam. And therefore there can be no genuine peace with non-Muslims who do not submit to Islam.</p>
<p>These two incompatible notions of peace continue to collide. Imagine if French soldiers had clambered out to sing and play soccer only to be gunned down by German soldiers who had a fundamentally different idea of peace. This was actually how WW2 was shaped as the victorious side played by outdated rules while Nazi Germany, Japan and the USSR shifted to a thoroughly totalitarian mentality.</p>
<p>Munich was a disaster because Hitler was not the Kaiser. The other side was no longer willing to play by any rules, even in diplomatic negotiations, or to accept anything short of total victory. The Allies were forced to match their enemies in a ruthless war that saw entire cities destroyed.</p>
<p>The Nazis and Communists were the products of years of indoctrination that taught them to see opponents as less than human and peace as being obtainable only through their destruction. Japan, which had a longer history of dehumanizing outsiders, proved to be an even tougher nut to crack.</p>
<p>Islam has a history of over a thousand years of continuously dehumanizing non-Muslims and identifying peace and their enslavement as one and the same. It is impossible to live in peace with Muslims who think that there can be no peace as long as non-Muslims continue to live independent lives.</p>
<p>In the Muslim worldview, war happens because non-Muslims exist. War is caused by the infidel, the disbeliever and the Muslim hypocrite who does not truly commit to the practice of Islam. The Jihad purifies the world of non-Muslims; it eradicates the “moderate” Muslims who have been compromised by Western culture. It is a war of extermination against the un-Islamic.</p>
<p>When Westerners propose peace, Muslims reject them as hypocrites for speaking of peace, but refusing to accept the only religion that can bring peace. They feel no obligation to honor any peace agreements since peace can only come from Islam and the Western rejection of Islam proves our deceitfulness and bad intentions. This dynamic is inherent in the Koran and the entire history of Islam.</p>
<p>Islam does not obtain peace through peace, but through war. It seeks a world without conflict by killing anyone who might disagree with its totalitarian ideology.</p>
<p>Proposing the peace of co-existence to an ideology to which peace means its own supremacy is a foolish and deranged act.  Our outreach to the Muslim world does not lack for a common language, but for common ideas. Both sides may speak of peace, but for one side peace really means war.</p>
<p>Languages are not only made up of words, but of values. It is not enough to bring a dictionary to a negotiation if the two parties are reading from different moral and ethical traditions. Just because we translate “Salaam” as peace and agree that we both want peace does not mean that we have the same idea of what peace is.</p>
<p>The West sees peace as living side by side with Muslims. Muslims see peace as the end of the West.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad:</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/28J1kYbaqbc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
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		<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>
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		<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>
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		<title>Responding to the Slaughter</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/responding-to-the-slaughter/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=responding-to-the-slaughter</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:26:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[massacre]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rabbi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Synagogue]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245745</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Immediate measures Israel should take to stop the Islamic jihad against the Jewish people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/635518979796654817-GTY-459169342.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245746" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/635518979796654817-GTY-459169342-450x337.jpg" alt="635518979796654817-GTY-459169342" width="395" height="296" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Responding-to-the-slaughter-382423">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">What we are seeing in Jerusalem today is not simply Palestinian terrorism. It is Islamic jihad. No one likes to admit it. The television reporters insist that this is the worst possible scenario because there is no way to placate it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There is no way to reason with it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So what else is new? The horrible truth is that all of the anti-Jewish slaughters perpetrated by our Arab neighbors have been motivated to greater or lesser degrees by Islamic Jew-hatred. The only difference between the past hundred years and now is that today our appeasement-oriented elite is finding it harder to pretend away the obvious fact that we cannot placate our enemies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No “provocation” by Jews drove two Jerusalem Arabs to pick up meat cleavers and a rifle and slaughter rabbis in worship like sheep and then mutilate their bodies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No “frustration” with a “lack of progress” in the “peace process,” can motivate people to run over Jewish babies or attempt to assassinate a Jewish civil rights activist.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The reason that these terrorists have decided to kill Jews is that they take offense at the fact that in Israel, Jews are free. They take offense because all their lives they have been taught that Jews should live at their mercy, or die by their sword.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They do so because they believe, as former Jordanian MP Ya’qub Qarash said on Palestinian television last week, that Christians and Muslims should work together to forbid the presence of Jews in “Palestine” and guarantee that “not a single Jew will remain in Jerusalem.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Our neighbors are taught that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, signed the treaty of Hudaybiyah in 628 as a ploy to buy time during which he would change the balance of power between his army and the Jews of Kuraish. And 10 years later, once his army gained the upper hand, he annihilated the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout the 130-year history of modern Zionism, Islamic Jew-hatred has been restrained by two forces: the desire of many Arabs to live at peace with their Jewish neighbors; and the ability of Israeli authorities and before them, British authorities, to deter the local Arab Muslims from attacking.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The monopoly on Arab Muslim leadership has always belonged to the intolerant bigots. Support for coexistence has always been the choice of individuals.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Haj Amin el-Husseini’s first act as the founder of the Palestinian Arab identity was to translate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and serialize them in the local press.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During the Arab jihad of 1936-1939, Husseini’s gangs of murderers killed more Arabs than the British did. He targeted those who sought peaceful coexistence with the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His successor Yasser Arafat followed his example.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During the 1988-1991 Palestinian uprising, the PLO killed more Palestinians than the IDF did. Like Husseini, Arafat targeted Palestinians who worked with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since Israel imprudently embraced Arafat and the PLO in 1993 and permitted them to govern the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and exert direct influence and coercive power over the Arabs of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority’s governing institutions have used all the tools at their disposal to silence those who support peaceful coexistence with Israel, and indoctrinate the general public in Islamic and racial Jew-hatred.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Much has been made of the recent spike in incitement of violence by Palestinian leaders led by Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. But the flames Abbas and his comrades are throwing would not cause such conflagrations if they hadn’t already indoctrinated their audience to desire the destruction of the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">You cannot solicit murder among those who haven’t been taught that committing murder is an act of heroism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today Israel must take swift, effective action to stop the slaughter. The damage that has been done to the psyches of the Arabs of Jerusalem and their brethren in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, cannot be repaired in a timeline relevant to the task of preventing the next massacre.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This means that for the time being, on the tactical level, Israel’s only play is strengthening its deterrence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel faces two major constraints in meeting this challenge.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, the European Union and the Obama administration, as well as the US foreign policy elite, are obsessively committed to a policy of empowering the Palestinians against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Spanish parliament’s decision to go ahead with its planned vote to recognize the “State of Palestine,” just hours after the massacre at the Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood shows that the EU’s dedication to strengthening the Palestinians against Israel is entirely unrelated to events on the ground.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They don’t care who the Palestinians are or what they do. For their own reasons they have made supporting the Palestinians at Israel’s expense their top foreign policy priority.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Similarly, US President Barack Obama couldn’t contain his compulsion to pressure Israel even in his statement condemning the massacre. Even there, Obama called on Israelis and Palestinians equally to restrain themselves.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s unabated hostility toward Israel was brought to bear on Tuesday afternoon when the State Department restated its rejection of Jewish property rights in Jerusalem and its desire to see the homes of terrorist murderers left intact for the welfare of their terror-supporting families.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Tuesday, Israel’s social media outlets were filled with angry rebukes of Western media outlets from CNN to MSNBC to CBS, to the BBC. All these networks, and many others, did everything in their power to explain away the synagogue slaughter as just another instance of a cycle of violence. That is, they all sought to frame the discussion in a way that would lead their viewers to the conclusion that the slaughter of praying rabbis was justified.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While appalling, the coverage was not the least surprising. The Western elite media’s devotion to their false narrative of Israeli culpability for all the problems in the region is absolute. Networks would rather wreck their professional reputations than tell the truth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Together with the EU, the American policy elite and the Obama administration, the media place Israel’s leaders in a bind. Every step they take to defend the country and protect the rights of Jews meets with automatic and libelous condemnation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The other impediment Israel faces in deterring anti-Jewish violence against its citizenry is its own weakness. Since the inception of the phony peace process, Israel has continuously rewarded the Palestinians for their murderous violence against its citizenry.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From Israel’s transfer of control over all the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria, to its forcible expulsion of its own people from Gaza, to its repeated releases of terrorists from prison, to its continued transfer of hundreds of millions of shekels in tax revenues to the PA, Israel has showed the Palestinians at every turn that far from being punished for murdering Jews, they will be rewarded for doing so.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given the US and European support for the Palestinians, Israeli declarations that there will be no future releases of terrorists have no credibility. If terrorists aren’t killed on the spot, they can assume that they will eventually be released; if not in exchange for an Israeli hostage, Israel will release them in an attempt to placate the White House.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But even with these constraints on its actions, Israel can take steps to deter its hate-filled enemies from attacking.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since the current campaign of murder is being carried out by terrorists largely acting on their own accord, the measures Israel adopts to stop the attacks should be directed primarily against individual terrorists. As for action against the PA, it needs to be credible, consistent and directed to where it will hurt Palestinian leaders the most: their wallets.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With regard to the individual terrorists, the government has made much of its intention to destroy the homes of terrorists. While it sounds good, there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of this punitive measure, which is a relic of the British Mandate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather than destroy their homes, Israel should adopt the US anti-narcotics policy of asset seizure.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All assets directly or indirectly tied to terrorists, including their homes and any other structure where they planned their crimes, and all remittances to them, should be seized and transferred to their victims, to do with what they will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If Israel hands over the homes of the synagogue butchers to the 24 orphans of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi Kalman Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky and Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, not only will justice be served. The children’s inheritance of the homes of their fathers’ killers will send a clear and demoralizing message to other would-be killers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only will their atrocities fail to remove the Jews from Israel. Every terrorist will contribute to the Zionist project by donating his home to the Jewish settlement enterprise.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Just as Israel has repeatedly buckled under US pressure to release terrorists from jail, so it has bowed to US pressure to continue to fund the PA by transferring the tax revenues it collects on goods imported to the PA.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Assuming that the government is too weak to stand up to the Americans, at a minimum it can see that the money is properly used.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To that end, the Knesset should pass a law permitting Israeli terror victims to sue the PA for actual and punitive damages in Israel courts. The sums awarded to the victims should be taken from the tax revenues Israel collects for the PA. The law should apply retroactively to all victims of Palestinian terror carried out since the establishment of the PA in May 1994.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only should the law permit Israeli terror victims to sue the PA. It should dictate actions the Justice Ministry must take to assist them in bringing suit.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel should also revoke citizenship and residency rights not only from terrorists themselves, but from those who enjoy citizenship and residency rights by dint of their relationship with the terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Wives who received Israeli residency or citizenship rights though marriage to terrorists should have their rights revoked, as should the children of the terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since Tuesday’s massacre, aside from Abbas’s phony condemnation, the Palestinian leadership and public from Fatah to Hamas have been unanimous in their praise for the atrocity.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today Israel is powerless to influence the hearts of our Arab neighbors. But we can influence their minds. We can deter them from attacking us.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The actions set forth above: asset seizure, revenue seizure and citizenship/residency abrogation for terrorists and their dependents are steps that Israel can take today, despite the hostile international climate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If the government and Knesset adopt these measures, they will rectify some of the damage Israel has inflicted on itself by showing the Palestinians over two decades that they will be rewarded for their aggression.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If our leaders fail to take these or similar actions, and suffice with complaining about incitement, their condemnations of the murder of Jews will ring as hollow as those sounded by the BBC, Obama and Abbas.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama Helps Terror Go Nuclear</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/noah-beck/obama-helps-terror-go-nuclear/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-helps-terror-go-nuclear</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/noah-beck/obama-helps-terror-go-nuclear/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:10:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Noah Beck]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245719</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president's desperate drive to achieve a deal with Iran at any price. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hi-obama-iran-852-03932845.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245720" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hi-obama-iran-852-03932845.jpg" alt="hi-obama-iran-852-03932845" width="354" height="286" /></a>Last Tuesday’s terror attack on a Jerusalem synagogue killed five people: four rabbis (including three born in the USA) and a Druze police officer. Two Palestinians entered during morning prayers and attacked worshipers with knives, meat cleavers, and a handgun. <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-washington-terror-attack-focuses-lens-on-pa-incitement/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Congress showed moral clarity when blaming the horrors on Hamas and Palestinian Authority incitement</span></a>, but Obama’s statements were perfunctorily “balanced.” <a href="http://www.c-span.org/video/?322810-2/president-obama-remarks-jerusalem-synagogue-attack-ebola"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Obama warned of a “spiral” of violence</span></a> – an obtuse refrain of those suggesting <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/dershowitz-rips-obama-on-synagogue-slaughter/">moral equivalency</a> between terrorism and the fight against it. Obama also misleadingly claimed that “President Abbas&#8230;strongly condemned the attacks” omitting that <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Analysis-Abbas-forced-by-Kerry-condemns-attack-382225"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Abbas did so only after pressure from the administration and with equivocation</span></a> (Abbas suggested a link between recent terrorism and visits by Jews to the Temple Mount, as if to justify the attacks). It’s also worth noting that <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=21571"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Palestinians celebrated the massacre</span></a> (as they did <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/palestinians-cheer-while-america-mourns/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">after the 2013 Boston bombing</span></a> and <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&amp;x_issue=17&amp;x_article=265"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the 9/11 attacks</span></a>).</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama’s weak reaction is consistent with his mostly <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/10/president_obama_s_campaign_against_isis_lacks_a_strategy_the_united_states.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">impotent response to ISIS terrorists who behead Americans</span></a> and <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-beheads-7-men-and-3-women-in-syria-us-led-airstrikes-hit-stronghold-127367/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Mideast Christians</span></a> and grow their Islamist empire by the day. Frighteningly, his approach to Iranian nukes follows the same meek pattern, but the stakes are exponentially higher, because when Iran goes nuclear, so does terrorism.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/sites/default/files/Iranian-Support-For-Terrorism.pdf">Iran is already the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism</a></span>, without nuclear weapons. <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/07/10/day-of-bombardment-in-israel-nears-nuclear-reactor/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Iran-supported Hamas has already tried to commit nuclear terror</span></a>: last summer, Hamas launched rockets at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. How much more dangerous will Iran become when it has nukes? Even if Iran doesn’t directly commit nuclear terrorism, an Iranian nuclear umbrella will embolden the regime and the terrorist organizations it sponsors.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama has a long record of weakness towards Iran. In 2009, when Iran’s Basij paramilitary force brutalized demonstrators protesting Iran’s fraudulent presidential election, <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/10063438/the_iranian_election_barack_obamaas_cowardly_silence/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Obama kept his response irrelevantly mild</span></a> for the sake of “engaging” Iran. That surely helped Iranian voters understand the risks of protesting the “free” election of 2012 (<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113324/iran-elections-2013-khameneis-engineered-elections-become-reality"><span style="color: #1255cc;">involving eight regime-picked candidates</span></a>). It was indeed a very orderly rubberstamp.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">In 2011, when a U.S. <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2011/12/13/iran-mocks-obama-after-he-asks-for-downed-drone-back-says-he-begs-to-give-him-back-his-toy-plane/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">drone went down on Iranian soil</span></a>, Obama cordially requested it back. The regime recently scoffed at such impotence by <span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/iran-claims-video-shows-reverse-engineered-us-drone/story?id=26858830">showcasing its knock-off based on that drone</a> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="color: #333333;">and some <a style="color: #1155cc;" href="http://news.yahoo.com/iran-firm-displays-us-made-helicopters-103647430.html" target="_blank">U.S.-made helicopters that it purchased</a>, highlighting just how useless sanctions have become</span></span></span>.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">President Hassan Rouhani’s election vastly improved the public face of Iran’s nuclear program, and Obama was charmed too. Obama has <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/08/obama-is-lying-about-iran-sanctions/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">been unilaterally weakening the sanctions against Iran</span></a> by not enforcing them. He has threatened to thwart any Congressional attempt to limit his nuclear generosity by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/us/politics/obama-sees-an-iran-deal-that-could-avoid-congress-.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">simply lifting sanctions without Congressional approval</span></a>. Yet despite these concessions and Rouhani&#8217;s smiles, <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/11/02/360775656/after-acid-attacks-and-execution-iran-defends-human-rights-record"><span style="color: #1255cc;">human rights abuses in Iran have actually worsened.</span></a></p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama declared in 2012 (while running for reelection) that <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/obama-to-iran-and-israel-as-president-of-the-united-states-i-dont-bluff/253875/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">he doesn’t bluff when it comes to stopping Iranian nukes</span></a>, and that containment was not an option, unlike military force. But the credibility of that statement collapsed after Obama shrunk away from his “red line” against Syrian chemical weapons use. In 2013, Basher Assad gassed his own people and Obama took no military action. So if Obama cowers against a disintegrating state, what are the chances that he’ll militarily prevent Iranian nukes?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">And Obama has dangerously undermined the only military threat to Iranian nukes that anyone still takes seriously: Israel. On the Iranian nuclear issue, Obama has <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-denies-israel-and-us-disagree-on-iran-bomb-timeline/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">isolated Israel on how close Iran is to a nuclear capability</span></a> with estimates that are far laxer. And as long as Obama continues negotiating (even if Iran is clearly playing for time as <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/20/gop-rejects-obama-s-creative-iran-nuclear-compromises.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the U.S. offers ever more desperate proposals</span></a>) or reaches a deal allowing Iran to become a threshold nuclear weapons state, an Israeli military option to defang Iranian nukes appears less legitimate.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://tabletmag.com/scroll/185121/former-ap-reporter-confirms-matti-friedman-account">The media’s anti-Israel bias</a></span> is well known (they <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/A-Dose-of-Nuance-Can-we-please-stop-talking-about-hasbara-381004"><span style="color: #1255cc;">can’t even get a simple story about vehicular terrorism against Israelis correct</span></a> (compare how <i>The Guardian</i> writes accurate headlines when <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/21/canada-soldier-convert-islam-hit-and-run-quebec"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Canada suffers an Islamist car attack</span></a> but <a href="http://honestreporting.com/the-guardians-car-crash-headline/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">not when Israel does</span></a>). So if Obama accepts Iran’s nuclear program and Israel then attacks it, the media will be even harsher on Israel (even though the world will be silently relieved, if Israeli courage succeeds at neutralizing what scared everyone else).</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Downgrading US-Israel relations seems to be part of Obama’s détente with Iran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei recently <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-supreme-leader-touts-9-point-plan-to-destroy-israel/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">tweeted his plan for destroying Israel</span></a>, but Obama grows even more determined to reach an accord that legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program. And the Obama administration’s diplomatic abuse of America’s closest Mideast ally is unprecedented – from <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/25/president-allegedly-dumps-israeli-prime-minister-dinner/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">his humiliation of Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2010</span></a>, to Secretary of State <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/john-kerry-the-betrayal/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">John Kerry’s betrayal of Israel during Operation Protective Edge</span></a>, to <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/29/weinstein-5-takeaways-from-top-obama-official-calling-netanyahu-chickenst/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">calling Netanyahu a “chickenshit”</span></a> a few weeks ago, <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/10/29/white-house-distances-itself-from-chickenshit-insult-leveled-at-netanyahu-stops-short-of-apology/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">without even apologizing later</span></a> (note the irony of calling Netanyahu a coward anonymously). Obama seems far more concerned by <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-rejects-netanyahus-dismissal-of-e-jerusalem-housing-criticism/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Israeli construction of apartments in Jerusalem</span></a> than a nuclear Iran. And he has been pressuring Israel to retreat from more disputed territory, effectively rewarding Palestinians for launching the third missile war against Israel from Gaza in five years last summer and now <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/third-intifada-jerusalem-violence-temple-mount-religious-war.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the third Intifidah inside Israel</span></a> in 17 years. That puts Obama just behind <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.626383"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the European appeasers who think Palestinian bellicosity merits statehood</span></a>. They all naively think &#8212; at Israel&#8217;s peril &#8212; that peace is possible with <a style="color: #1155cc;" href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-19/jerusalems-new-holy-war" target="_blank">raw hatred</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama indeed appears desperate to get a nuclear accord with Iran at any price. He has written <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/13/iran-responds-to-barack-obamas-letter-about-fight-against-isis-and-tehrans-nuclear-ambitions/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">letters</span></a> asking for Iran’s help against ISIS after they <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/26/iran-hints-at-interest-in-nuclear-trade-off-for-isis-help/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">hinted at an ISIS-for-nukes exchange</span></a>, and has pursued an agreement at all costs. Obama’s top aide, <a href="http://freebeacon.com/columns/the-coming-detente-with-iran/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Ben Rhodes, was caught saying how a nuclear accord is as important to Obama as “healthcare”</span></a>; at least there’s a fitting slogan to sell the deal to Americans: “If you like your nukes, you can keep them.”</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Russia, the serial spoiler, suggested extending <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/13/us-russia-iran-nuclear-idUSKCN0IX1H420141113"><span style="color: #1255cc;">nuclear talks past the November 24th deadline</span></a>. Iran will undoubtedly agree to more enrichment time (while it keeps <a href="http://www.thetower.org/1097oc-western-officials-iran-stonewalling-iaea-investigation-endangering-talks/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">stonewalling the IAEA’s investigations into it nukes</span></a>), as it did last July. For Obama, a bad agreement or an extension looks far better than concluding that talks have failed and issuing more empty threats to stop Iran militarily. And so U.S. foreign policy will continue its freefall, as the world’s bad actors will want to see what they can extort from a leader even weaker than President Carter. While Carter permitted Iran to hold 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days, Obama may allow Iran to hold the world hostage with nuclear terrorism. It&#8217;s now dreadfully obvious: without massive public pressure, Obama will help Iran get nukes; anyone concerned about nuclear terrorism should sign this petition: <a href="http://www.nobombforiran.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">http://www.nobombforiran.com</span></a></p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Noah Beck is the author of </b><a href="http://thelastisraelis.com/buy-the-book/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><b><i>The Last Israelis</i></b></span></a><b>, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.</b></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>
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		<title>Harvard&#8217;s Reckless Sponsorship of Anti-Israelism</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:35:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Greenberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[BDS legitimized at the Ivy League school. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/widener.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245524" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/widener-450x337.jpg" alt="widener" width="327" height="245" /></a><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/11/18/harvard-bds-panel-support/">Harvard Crimson</a>. </em></p>
<p>I never imagined that a day would come when some of the world’s leading corporations would fund calls for Israel’s destruction, let alone at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But that is exactly what happened last week at Harvard.</p>
<p>My invitation to “Harvard Arab Weekend” promised to provide a “mosaic of perspectives and insights on the most pressing issues in the Arab world.” Many of the panels appeared worthy of the conference’s corporate support from McKinsey &amp; Co, The Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bank Audi, Strategy&amp;, and the energy giant Shell. And yet featured prominently on the conference agenda was a panel devoted to the destruction of Israel: “<a href="http://harvardarabweekend.org/panels/">The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement: Accomplishments, Tactics and Lessons</a>.”</p>
<p>The panel’s moderator, Ahmed Alkhateeb, began by noting that a primary goal of the BDS movement is “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties” in what is today Israel. As President Barack Obama pointed out in 2008, this goal stands in opposition to a “two state solution” and “would extinguish Israel as a Jewish State.” And in an op-ed published in Al Akhbar newspaper, Cal State professor As’ad AbuKhalil, an outspoken advocate of the BDS movement,<a href="http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/angry-corner/critique-norman-finkelstein-bds"> affirmed</a> that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.” This is the “unambiguous goal…[and] there should not be an equivocation on the subject.”</p>
<p>He’s right. While Jews are the majority in the democratic state of Israel today, the BDS movement imagines and seeks a state in which Jews would ultimately become the minority, implying the end of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.</p>
<p>Of course, students have a right to speak their minds freely, and corporate sponsors have a right to donate their money and institutional backing to any political view. But is it appropriate for Harvard University to lend its facilities to a group of activists who are working to eradicate the one Jewish state?</p>
<p>Not everyone at Harvard thinks so. Former Harvard president and current professor, Lawrence H. Summers, spoke out in 2002 against calls for Harvard to divest from Israel. When I asked him about last week’s panel, he told me that “promoting BDS is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind when I warned years ago about actions that were anti-Semitic in effect, if not intent.”</p>
<p>“Avoiding censorship, which is right, should not equal sponsorship, which is wrong,” Summers explained. “I am sorry that Harvard, not for the first time, has allowed its good name to be associated with calls to delegitimize Israel.”</p>
<p>The panel at Harvard was not a debate about the goals and merits of BDS—it was an endorsement. <a href="http://harvardarabweekend.org/panels/">Panelists</a> included a <a href="http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/d/EventDetails/i/46854">vocal supporter</a> of BDS who frequently accuses Israel of “apartheid,” a professor who initiated the American Studies Association academic and cultural boycott, a Presbyterian minister who led the Church<a href="http://www.ecclesio.com/2012/03/the-long-road-to-bds-by-jeff-deyoe/"> boycott</a> of Israel, as well as MIT professor Noam Chomsky.</p>
<p>Student organizers of the panel told me that Chomsky would provide the “anti-BDS” perspective, and he was introduced as the only voice on the panel to be critical of BDS “tactics.” But Chomsky would have none of it: “It’s interesting that I’m introduced as someone that has criticized BDS tactics; actually I have strongly advocated for BDS.”</p>
<p>Chomsky also encouraged anti-Israel activists to take a phased approach toward the annihilation of Israel as a Jewish state: “The one-state option is a good idea in the long run but there’s only one way that I can imagine we can reach it, and that’s in stages.”</p>
<p>The panel discussion left me with an overwhelming sense of sadness: I was sad to see firsthand how BDS encourages Palestinians to reject compromise in pursuit of the destruction of Israel; sad that the student organizers of the conference were unwilling to create a panel of diverse, honest views that would have led to true dialogue; sad that Harvard administrators allowed an event promoting an end to the national existence of the Jewish people to take place under Harvard’s auspices; and sad that the names and institutional prestige of major corporations were used to give legitimacy to the BDS campaign.</p>
<p>I sent inquiries to senior executives at every sponsor company before the conference, but the panel went on. After the conference, a senior McKinsey spokesman wrote to me to apologize for the firm’s involvement with the conference: “The firm does not knowingly associate its name with political issues and debates.” I believe it is likely that the other corporate sponsors also did not intend to have their funds used to promote the BDS movement.</p>
<p>Corporations and universities should not lend mainstream legitimacy to such a radical and odious movement, nor should they provide funding or resources to events that demonize Israel as this one did.</p>
<p>I hope Harvard and the corporations that sponsored Harvard Arab Week—and in doing so sponsored the BDS panel—will publicly pledge to be more vigilant in the future and never again associate their names or provide funding to any movement that seeks to destroy Israel.</p>
<p><em>Sara K. Greenberg is a joint masters degree student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. You can listen to the full audio of the BDS panel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmM3KIRop-c">here</a>.</em></p>
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		<title>Brookings Institution’s New Idea: Try Failed Solutions Again</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/brookings-institutions-new-idea-try-failed-solutions-again/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brookings-institutions-new-idea-try-failed-solutions-again</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:50:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brookings]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The influential Qatar-funded think tank scapegoats Israel and ignores history.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cia_vet_bruce_riedel_the_brookings_institution.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245181" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cia_vet_bruce_riedel_the_brookings_institution.png" alt="cia_vet_bruce_riedel_the_brookings_institution" width="243" height="203" /></a>Bruce Riedel, senior fellow and director of the Brookings Institution’s Intelligence Project, published a piece in the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/09/why-s-al-qaeda-so-strong-washington-has-literally-no-idea.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Daily Beast</span></a> last Sunday with the provocative title, “Why’s Al Qaeda So Strong? Washington Has (Literally) No Idea.” That is certainly true, but Riedel’s recommendations for how the political establishment can get a clue and finally defeat the jihadis are nothing but tired retreads of analyses that have been tried and have failed again and again. Coming from a think tank as influential as Brookings, this goes a long way toward explaining why neither party seems able to reevaluate and discard political points of view and plans of action, no matter how many times they lead to disaster.</p>
<p>Riedel rightly faults the U.S. for not meeting the ideological challenge that groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State pose, but then he advocates essentially what mainstream analysts on both the Left and the Right have advocated for years: establishing a State of Palestine, supporting “reform and justice” in Muslim countries, and working to end Sunni-Shi’ite sectarianism. These solutions have been tried, repeatedly, and every time they failed abysmally.</p>
<p>While Riedel is correct that the U.S. hasn’t countered the ideology of jihad groups, he shows no sign of knowing what that ideology really is. In fact, he demonstrates that he shares the same false premises that have led the U.S. government to its abysmal failure to understand why jihad groups are so strong and how they can be countered. Both Riedel and Washington policymakers assume that the appeal to Muslims of the stated goals and motivations of jihad groups — establishment of the caliphate, destruction of non-Sharia regimes, and ultimately global Islamic dominance — can be blunted, if not extinguished altogether, by essentially giving jihadis and Islamic supremacists some of what they want. They assume that in that event, the larger aggregate of Muslims will respond the way Westerners in secular democracies would respond: by accepting the compromise and rejecting more extreme solutions.</p>
<p>We have the record of the last thirteen years and more to show that this assumption is false.</p>
<p>First and foremost among Riedel’s faulty analyses is his scapegoating of Israel for the failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians. “Unfortunately,” Riedel laments, “for six years the Obama team has tried to push the two-state solution without any success. It rightly blames both Israeli and Palestinian intransigence for its failure. But the core issue is Israel’s refusal to end the occupation of the West Bank.”</p>
<p>One word exposes the falsity of this analysis: Gaza. Anyone who still thinks after the Gaza withdrawal that a Palestinian state would bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians (and yes, I know they are legion, and in both parties, and in all the corridors of power in the U.S. and Europe) hasn’t been paying attention. We were told in 2005 that “occupation” was the problem, and if Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Gazans would turn to peaceful pursuits. Only a few people, including me, warned that Gaza would just become a jihad base for newly virulent attacks against Israel. Events proved us correct.</p>
<p>Now Riedel wants Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, and assures us that <i>this</i> withdrawal from <i>this</i> “occupation” is really the one that will finally bring peace and take the wind out of the jihadis’ sails. A Palestinian state, he says, will “severely undermine” al-Qaeda’s appeal “and over time dry up its base” — and he claims this even after acknowledging that “Israel’s destruction” is al-Qaeda’s goal.</p>
<p>Why would the establishment of a Palestinian state now, after the Arab Muslims rejected it in 1948 and the “Palestinians” rejected it in 2000 (and other times) bring peace when the goal of Israel’s total destruction, which Hamas has repeatedly and recently reiterated, would remain? Why would another Israeli withdrawal accomplish what earlier Israeli withdrawals — not just from Gaza, but also from Sinai and southern Lebanon — did not?</p>
<p>Riedel doesn’t consider these questions. He can’t, because any honest answer would show his analysis to be false and based on wishful thinking.</p>
<p>Then Riedel goes on to advocate another failed remedy, claiming that “the extremists’ narrative argues that only violent jihad can bring about change and justice in the Islamic world. They argue the Arab spring proves that peaceful protests and demonstrations, elections and democratic change don’t work in Arabia and the world of Islam. The failure of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt is cited as evidence that ‘moderate’ Islam is too weak to fight the Zionist-Crusader conspiracy and it’s [sic] Quisling allies like Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian army.”</p>
<p>Consequently, he says, “chaos and failed states, not democracy, are what the foreseeable future holds for Arabia. But a Western policy that is blind to the urgent need for reform and justice is certain to end in catastrophe. More immediately, it cedes the ideological battle to al Qaeda’s simple solution that only jihad brings change. Close attachment to autocratic regimes by the West pays short-term dividends but will antagonize generations of Muslims.”</p>
<p>Yet this was precisely the Obama Administration’s policy when it turned against Hosni Mubarak and warmly endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. This was the analysis Obama was following when he aided the Libyan jihadis against Gaddafi and the Syrian jihadis against Assad (although in the latter case the rise of the Islamic State has exposed his Syria policy as confused and incoherent).</p>
<p>Riedel mentions the fall of the Ikhwan regime in Egypt as part of the jihadis’ recruitment rhetoric, but he misses its real import: when the U.S. followed his recommendations and stopped backing dictators in Muslim countries, favoring instead popular revolutionaries and the “democratic process,” the result was not stability and the weakening of jihad groups, but chaos and anarchy in Libya, unrest and instability in Egypt, and the strengthening of jihad groups the world over. The Brotherhood regime in Egypt fell because many secular Muslims don’t want to live under Sharia oppression. However, Sharia advocates are numerous in Egypt and other Muslim countries — so the result of backing “democracy” in Egypt and other Muslim countries was not the establishment of peaceful, stable Sharia regimes (which would not be a desirable outcome anyway, cf. Saudi Arabia and Iran), but more violence. The dictators were bloody and reprehensible; the “democratic process” in all too many Muslim countries has resulted in regimes that are scarcely less bloody and far less stable.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Riedel says, “Full speed ahead.” What would he say if there were a free election in Iraq and Syria now and the Islamic State won, or even got a significant percentage of the vote? He seems to assume, as George W. Bush and so many others assumed, that elections in Muslim countries would lead to the establishment of pro-Western, secular, stable republics. It has never happened. Why will it happen next time?</p>
<p>Riedel then offers yet another faulty analysis: “The extremist message also encourages sectarianism and intolerance. The Shia are portrayed as false Muslims and brutally attacked to encourage Sunni-Shia hatred. Sectarian strife now empowers the civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and Al Qaedaism flourishes in the chaos. The West says far too little about the cancer of sectarianism.”</p>
<p>Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/world/19rice.html?n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fR%2fRice%2c%20Condoleezza&amp;_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said this about it in 2007</span></a>: “There’s still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms. But the Middle East is going to have to overcome that.” The Bush Administration tried in numerous ways to help them overcome it in Iraq. It held one-person, one-vote elections that resulted in a Shi’ite regime in Baghdad — an outcome that was absolutely predictable, since Shi’ites are a majority in Iraq. That regime was supposed to include Sunnis. It was absolutely predictable also that it did not manage to do so, both because it didn’t want to and Sunnis didn’t want to participate anyway.</p>
<p>The Sunni-Shi’ite divide is 1,400 years old. The history of Islam is filled with occasions when it erupted into violence. The idea that the non-Muslim West can heal this or should even try to do so is as hubristic as it is myopic, and shows that Riedel (and Condoleezza Rice, and myriad others) have no idea of the history or beliefs of either group.</p>
<p>That is no surprise. The real reason why the U.S. and the West in general haven’t confronted the ideology of jihad groups is because they refuse to admit that it even exists. They insist that Islam is peaceful and that groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam. They don’t have any curiosity about how this supposed misunderstanding of Islam came to be so widespread and powerful, and they have never pressed Muslim groups that ostensibly reject it to do anything to blunt its appeal for young Muslims.</p>
<p>So Riedel is right: Washington has no idea why al-Qaeda is so strong. Neither does he. And a strong indication of why is Riedel’s affiliation with Brookings, a Qatar-funded group that <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/10/how-qatari-donations-turned-the-brookings-institution-into-an-apologist-for-jihad-terror"><span style="color: #0433ff;">publishes justifications for jihad terror</span></a> and <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/10/supporters-and-enablers-of-jihad-terror-join-global-elite-at-brookings-institution-forums"><span style="color: #0433ff;">gives jihad terror supporters and enablers access to the world’s most powerful people</span></a>. It also is <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/4640/brookings-scholars-hawk-qatar-hamas-talking-points"><span style="color: #0433ff;">strongly pro-Hamas and anti-Israel</span></a>.</p>
<p>Brookings is responsible to an immense degree for the application of these failed policies over the last few years. It should be recognized for what it is and not allowed to lead the U.S. over the cliff yet again.</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>
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		<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>
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		<title>Quakers, Ferguson and Palestinians</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-d-tooley/quakers-ferguson-and-palestinians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=quakers-ferguson-and-palestinians</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2014 05:10:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[struggle]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245042</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The twisted myth of a "common struggle."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/gaza_ferguson.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245047" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/gaza_ferguson-450x299.jpg" alt="Pro-Palestinian protesters take part in a demonstration against the violence in the Gaza strip, in Lyon" width="296" height="197" /></a>The multimillion dollar American Friends Service Committee, with offices in several dozen U.S. cities and 14 other countries, is the nearly century old political advocacy arm of Quakers in the U.S. Rooted in the Quaker pacifist tradition, AFSC advocates a form of &#8220;peace&#8221; that has aligned it with countless dubious international causes over the decades, usually anti-American, anti-Western and often anti-Israel.</p>
<p>AFSC touts accommodation of Iran, for example, naturally more concerned about U.S. or Israeli military action than about a nuclear armed Iran. And AFSC endorses Palestinian nationalism in ways that of course demonize Israel while minimizing Palestinian terror.</p>
<p>But AFSC offered a somewhat new twist when recently highlighting a young Palestinian-American activist&#8217;s solidarity visit to, and arrest in, racially charged Ferguson, Missouri.</p>
<p>&#8220;When Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson my people in Gaza were being slaughtered by Israel in Operation Protective Edge,&#8221; <a href="http://afsc.org/friends/ferguson-i-am-reminded-palestine">explained Bassem Masri</a> on AFSC&#8217;s blog.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The timing of the two events woke up a lot of people. When Mike was killed, much of the media started demonizing him and the protestors, often the same sources that blamed Palestinians for their own deaths in Gaza. People naturally saw the connections.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Masri, a self-described “pissed off citizen,&#8221; said Americans have long &#8220;maligned&#8221; the Palestinian struggle for liberation, but at least the people of Ferguson now understand their common struggle.</p>
<p>&#8220;On those terrible nights in Ferguson when the police were attacking peaceful civilians with tear gas, Palestinians under Israeli occupation offered advice on how to deal with the effects of the gas,&#8221; Masri recounted.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Facing violence from an occupying force, whether in Palestine or Ferguson, forges a mindset that demands resistance and standing up for one’s community. When the police used military tanks and checkpoints to imprison the residents of Ferguson, I was reminded of life in the West Bank where I saw the Israeli military use the same tactics of repression.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Masri said while in Ferguson for protests he&#8217;s been &#8220;tear gassed, shot at with rubber bullets, and physically assaulted by the police&#8221; before his eventual imprisonment and &#8220;interrogation,&#8221; apparently just like his kindred on the West Bank. The commonality between the the two similar oppressions, he concluded, is clear: racism.</p>
<p>Arrested at a Walmart with a dozen other demonstrators, Masri was, unlike others, jailed over night, for having spat at a police officer. He denied the charge, admitting that he &#8220;curses and levels vulgar insults at police officers,&#8221; as evidently confirmed proudly on his own film, but no spitting. According to him, the police contrived the charge so as to browbeat him into becoming their &#8220;collaborator&#8221; against fellow resistance fighters, which naturally he bravely declined.</p>
<p>No doubt Masri enjoys the street theater, and no doubt the chronically aggrieved AFSC was moved by the shared struggles of Ferguson and the West Bank.  The ostensible Israeli repressions of Palestinians are virtually the only form of human rights abuses that typically interest Religious Left outlets like AFSC. But if the West Bank is egregiously suffering, it was not illustrated by a <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/30/people-in-emerging-markets-catch-up-to-advanced-economies-in-life-satisfaction/">Pew Research global survey</a> of health and happiness in various countries, including the Palestinian Territories that released only days after Masri&#8217;s vivid report for AFSC.</p>
<p>According to the Pew study, Palestinians see themselves as better off compared to five years ago at higher rates than do other Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. Forty three percent of Palestinians said they were better, compared to 36 percent of Tunisians. Palestinians also reported higher satisfaction with their health, safety, education, standard of living and jobs than did Jordanians and Egyptians. Twice as many Palestinians reported overall happiness than did Jordanians, and Palestinians were nearly four times likelier to be happy than Egyptians. They were one third likelier to be happy than Tunisians.</p>
<p>None of which proves or even suggests that the Palestinians are living in Nirvana. But living standards and quality of life are better on the West Bank than in much of the developing world. Palestinians receive more international aid per capita than almost any other people group. There also likely are per capita more international human rights monitors among the Palestinians, from anti-Israel groups like AFSC, than almost anywhere else in the world.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the AFSC blog, for which Masri wrote, features a special &#8220;Israel/Palestine&#8221; section, an honor not accorded to any other region. For the Religious Left, Israeli infractions against Palestinians merit very special attention.</p>
<p>Masri&#8217;s and AFSC&#8217;s correlation of Israeli oppression with oppression in Ferguson fits the Religious Left narrative that Israel and America are uniquely set apart in their moral failures. As Masri explained:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Our goal is to dismantle apartheid regimes wherever they exist. That is the most important link between Palestine and Ferguson, and it is the link that will make both struggles stronger.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
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		<title>An American Joins the &#8216;PC Terrorists&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/moshe-phillips-and-benyamin-korn/an-american-joins-the-pc-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-american-joins-the-pc-terrorists</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2014 05:10:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[molotov cocktails]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Orwa Abdel Hammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psaki]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244424</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Some terrorists are more sympathetic than others -- especially if their victims are Jewish Israelis. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1753084290.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-244425" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1753084290.jpg" alt="1753084290" width="300" height="173" /></a>Another young American man has given his life while fighting in the ranks of Islamist terrorists abroad. But this time, instead of being met with universal condemnations and scorn, the young terrorist is being greeted with sympathetic news accounts and &#8220;even-handed&#8221; statements from the State Department &#8212; all because he joined the politically correct terrorists, that is, the Palestinians.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Just think. When Eric Harroun of Arizona joined an Al Qaeda group fighting in Syria last year, he was arrested as soon as he tried to re-enter the United States.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When Douglas McCain of Minnesota was killed in August while taking part in an ISIS attack in Syria, a senior Obama administration official told NBC that &#8220;the threat we are most concerned about to the homeland is that of fighters like this returning to the U.S. and committing acts of terrorism.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When three young Muslim women from Colorado were caught on their way to try to join ISIS, the Obama administration strongly condemned them.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But when U.S. citizen Orwa Abdel Hammad, a former resident of New Orleans, took part in an Islamist terrorist attack in the Middle East in October, the response from the Obama administration was oh so different.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Hammad was a Palestinian Arab with American citizenship. On Friday, October 24, decided to take part in the wave of Islamist violence against Jews that has been engulfing Israel in recent weeks.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Hammad positioned himself alongside Highway 60, north of Jerusalem, and prepared a Molotov cocktail. Spotting an approaching Israeli motorist, Hammad rose to hurl the flaming bottle of gasoline. The goal was to set the Israeli car on fire, so that its drivers and passengers would be burned alive.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Because they were Jews.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Fortunately, Israeli soldiers on a stakeout shot Hammad dead.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It turns out that Hammad was the cousin of a Palestinian terrorist who murdered ten Israelis in an attack in 2002. He was the nephew of a terrorist who died in a terrorist attack in 1989. And one of Hammad&#8217;s own cousins admitted to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he and Hammad were among a group of Palestinian Arabs who were taking part in attacks on Israeli motorists.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The New York Times&#8217; account of the attack did not mention anything about Hammad&#8217;s quite relevant family lineage or his cousin&#8217;s testimony. The Times&#8217; headline on the story began &#8220;Israeli Troops Kill Palestinian Teenager…&#8221; &#8211;not &#8220;Palestinian Teenager Tries to Burn Israelis Alive…&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And while the dead terrorist Douglas McCain was denounced by the Obama administration as a grave threat to America, the dead terrorist Orwa Hammad was warmly embraced by the Obama administration.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that the administration had sent its &#8220;deepest condolences&#8221; to the Hammad family. Psaki demanded that the Israeli government undertake &#8220;a speedy and transparent investigation&#8221; of the killing of Hammad. She called on &#8220;all parties to help restore calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of the tragic recent incidents in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Psaki in no way called on the Palestinian Authority &#8212; in whose territory Hammad resided &#8212; to investigate its young people who are trying to burn Israelis alive.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Nor did Psaki make any distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Israelis acting in self-defense. Instead, it was the fearsomely familiar Obama moral equivalency: &#8220;all parties&#8221; should be &#8220;calm&#8221;; &#8220;all parties&#8221; should &#8220;avoid escalating tensions.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Psaki called the killing of Orwa Hammad &#8220;tragic.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">She got her tragedies wrong.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It&#8217;s a tragedy that the Palestinian Authority actively incites its young people to try to murder Israelis.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It&#8217;s a tragedy when American citizens take part in Islamist terrorism, whether in Syria or Israel.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And it&#8217;s a tragedy &#8212; actually, an outrage &#8212; when the United States government cannot distinguish between victim and aggressor, between right and wrong, or between good and evil.</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>
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		<title>U.S.-Israel Relationship in Crisis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/u-s-israel-relationship-in-crisis-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-s-israel-relationship-in-crisis-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2014 04:57:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Atlantic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chickenshit]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[jeffrey goldberg]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The sickness behind Washington's verbal assault on Netanyahu.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ShowImage.ashx_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244114" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ShowImage.ashx_-434x350.jpg" alt="ShowImage.ashx" width="301" height="243" /></a>The Obama administration’s contemptible hostility towards Israel has descended into the proverbial cellar.  According to an October 28<sup>th</sup> article appearing in <i>The Atlantic</i> by Jeffrey Goldberg, a high-level Obama administration official has recently added &#8220;chickensh*t&#8221; to other derisive terms used in ad hominem verbal attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, such as “recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and ‘Aspergery.’”</p>
<p>Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to the latest diatribe in his remarks to the Knesset on October 29<sup>th</sup> that &#8220;I am being attacked because I am willing to defend the State of Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>Needless to say, other Israelis were more direct in expressing their outrage at the reported epithet. For example, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said that “severe curse words against the Israeli prime minister are harmful to millions of Israeli citizens and Jews worldwide.&#8221; Former Israeli United Nations Ambassador Dan Gillerman described such name calling as “shameful,” “abusive,” and “counter-productive.”</p>
<p>The White House has tried to do some damage control regarding the &#8220;chickensh*t&#8221; remark, as it usually does after stepping into its own mess. U.S. National Security Spokesperson Alistair Baskey said in response to the latest imbroglio that “such comments are inappropriate and counter-productive. We do not believe there is a crisis in the relationship. The relationship remains as strong as ever and the ties between our nations are unshakable.&#8221;</p>
<p>With all due respect, Mr. Baskey, the relationship between Israel and the United States is at a historic low. The White House’s petty vindictiveness was illustrated again just last week when Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon was given a cold shoulder by various high-profile Obama administration officials, who were instructed not to meet with the defense minister during his visit to Washington. These officials included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice.  Aside from a routine meeting with his counterpart Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Defense Minister Ya’alon did manage to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, despite attempts by the administration, which came too late, to block the meeting. In any event, Ambassador Power focused her attention during the meeting on the settlements issue.</p>
<p>As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his article in <i>The</i> <i>Atlantic</i>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The relationship between these two administrations &#8212; dual guarantors of the putatively &#8220;unbreakable&#8221; bond between the U.S. and Israel &#8212; is now the worst it&#8217;s ever been, and it stands to get significantly worse after the November midterm elections. By next year, the Obama administration may actually withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations, but even before that, both sides are expecting a showdown over Iran, should an agreement be reached about the future of its nuclear program.</p></blockquote>
<p>While Jeffrey Goldberg correctly identified the problem, he mistakenly blamed Prime Minister Netanyahu as the main cause of the problem. Goldberg parroted the Obama administration line that, if it were not for the Israeli government’s settlements policies, a peaceful two-state solution would be achievable. He referred to what one Obama administration official described as the administration’s “red-hot anger” at the Israeli prime minister “for pursuing settlement policies on the West Bank, and building policies in Jerusalem, that they believe have fatally undermined Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process.”</p>
<p>Indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry has gone public in blaming the Jewish state and its settlements policies for the failure of his feckless pretentions to be a peacemaker between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  He even went so far as to repeat without any rebuttal, at a White House reception earlier this month held in honor of a Muslim holiday, a contention that Israel’s intransigence was contributing to the rise of jihad in the Middle East.</p>
<p>The crisis in the once close relationship between the two countries originates from the very top of the Obama administration. President Obama himself has set the tone for the unprecedented verbal assaults from members of his administration on the leader of the only real democracy in the Middle East, and one of the United States’ closest allies – until now.</p>
<p>Back in November 2011, for example, Obama and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy were caught on an open microphone complaining about the Israeli prime minister. After Sarkozy said that he “can’t stand” Prime Minister Netanyahu and called him a “liar,” Obama replied: &#8220;You&#8217;re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 2010, Obama is reported to have snubbed Prime Minister Netanyahu, declining to join the Israeli leader and his delegation for a White House dinner.</p>
<p>Obama came into office in 2008 with a decidedly pro-Palestinian bias. He absorbed the anti-Semitic rhetoric of his long-time pastor in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright, and of his friend from his teaching days at the University of Chicago, Rashid Khalidi.</p>
<p>Khalidi was a big fan of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist organization, the PLO.  He described Israel as a “racist” state and “basically an apartheid system in creation.” In 2003, at a farewell dinner for Khalidi, who was about to leave the University of Chicago for a position at Columbia University, Obama hailed Khalidi’s insights as an influence on his own thinking. Khalidi later returned the favor, telling pro-Palestinian audiences that Obama deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat, stating: “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances.”</p>
<p>From the beginning of his first presidential term, President Obama signaled his intention to come down hard on Israel by initially demanding a complete freeze on settlements – including on any growth in existing settlements. He also outlined his concept of a final peace agreement that would require Israel to withdraw virtually entirely to the pre-June 1967 lines, but with no reciprocal requirement that the Palestinians renounce completely once and for all its assertion of a so-called “right of return” of millions of &#8220;refugees&#8221; to lands within pre-June 1967 Israel.  He has clearly bought into the self-serving narrative of Palestinian victimhood.</p>
<p>All that the Obama administration wants to talk about are Jewish settlements, failing even to distinguish between actual settlements in the West Bank and expansion of housing for Israelis living in certain Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem that happen to fall within the revisionist construct of a divided “East Jerusalem” that the Obama administration helps to perpetuate. Historically, Jerusalem has been an undivided city that has had a Jewish majority population and has in the past been the capital for the Jewish people. Jordan’s illegal occupation between 1948 and 1967 resulted in the artificial division of Jerusalem that the Palestinians, with help from the Obama administration, seek to make permanent. Jerusalem is whole again as it should be, but – unlike during the years of Jordan’s occupation – the holy sites are open to worshipers of all faiths.</p>
<p>During an “emergency” United Nations Security Council meeting convened on October 29<sup>th</sup> to discuss Israeli plans to build more Jewish housing in “East” Jerusalem, the U.S. representative speaking to the Council called Israel’s “unilateral” actions, including in Jerusalem, “deeply concerning” and provocative. This followed the usual Israeli-bashing by the United Nations bureaucracy. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, said during the meeting that &#8220;Israel&#8217;s construction plans in East Jerusalem &#8211; if they go ahead &#8211; raise grave doubts on its willingness to promote peace.&#8221;</p>
<p>Israel wants peace, but not how the Palestinians, backed by the Obama administration and the Palestinians&#8217; allies at the United Nations, would define it.</p>
<p>Gaza was a test case of the Palestinians’ ability and willingness to establish a model for an independent state after Israel withdrew completely in 2005 and turned over economic resources and responsibility for security to the Palestinian Authority. As has happened so often when the Palestinians had a chance for a truly peaceful two-state solution, they blew the opportunity. Hamas, whose genocidal charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide, took over Gaza in 2007 and turned it into a launching pad for above-ground rocket and underground tunnel attacks against Israeli civilians living in Israeli towns and cities. In Jerusalem itself, just last week, a Hamas affiliated jihadist deliberately drove his car into a group of pedestrians, killing a 3-month old baby, who, it turns out, was an American citizen. The response from Palestinian President Abbas’s Fatah party was to call the baby murderer a “heroic martyr.” A Hamas spokesman called the murder a “natural response” to the “invasion of our land by the Jews.”</p>
<p>Abbas did not express outrage or remorse over the senseless murder of the baby. Indeed, his own incendiary remarks calling for the use of “any means” to stop Jews from visiting or worshipping at the Temple Mount may have helped incite this violent attack. Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent member of the PLO Executive Committee, added her own fuel to the fire by saying that allowing Jews to visit the Temple Mount (which is holy to Jews as well as to Muslims) is a “declaration of war against Islam.” President Obama himself did not speak out publicly regarding such inflammatory rhetoric, the subsequent murderous attack itself or the disgusting reaction of the Palestinian leadership to the attack.</p>
<p>Abbas and the Hamas leadership play “good cop-bad cop” in terms of tactics, but their end-game is the same – the extinguishment of Jewish self-determination in any lands the Palestinians falsely consider their birth-right. There is no room for any Jewish state anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, in their own vision of the region.</p>
<p>The Obama administration turns a blind eye to the Palestinian pathology of hatred of Jews, some of which is rooted in Islamic supremacism. Preached in mosques and taught in Palestinian schools to poison the minds of generations of Palestinians, such hatred prevents the realization of any true two-state solution which recognizes the right of self-determination of the Jewish people as well as the Palestinian people to live side by side in peace and security.</p>
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		<title>Benny Gantz’s Troubling Assessments</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/benny-gantzs-troubling-assessments/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=benny-gantzs-troubling-assessments</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 04:46:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benny Gantz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Borders]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IDF]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242998</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Israel's IDF chief of staff is facilitating the opening of Gaza's borders. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/3277243153.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242999" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/3277243153-444x350.jpg" alt="3277243153" width="320" height="252" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Benny-Gantzs-troubling-assessments-378793">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The outcome of the donor conference for Gaza reconstruction that was held in Cairo on Sunday was not surprising.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Representatives of 50 countries convened to pledge funds to Hamas and the PLO. The Palestinians had hoped to receive $4 billion in pledges. They raised $5.4b.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Most of the money will be transferred to the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas. But at least $1b. will go directly to Hamas, from its primary financier, Qatar.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With its $1b. Hamas will be able to pay its terrorist operatives and rebuild its terrorist forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The air force revealed last week that Hamas is rebuilding its rocket arsenal already.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for the money that will be transferred to Abbas, the billions in funding will give the PLO the money it needs to finance Abbas’s rapidly escalating political war against Israel in the international arena.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At least some of the money will also go to Hamas, Abbas’s partner in the unity government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The entire nature of the conference was surreal, but again predictable.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Surreal because it was based on a total disregard for reality.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In last summer’s war, Hamas wantonly and deliberately waged an unprovoked, illegal missile campaign against Israel for the third time in five years. It fired 4,500 projectiles at Israeli territory. It also used tunnels it dug into Israeli territory to attack Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Had Hamas not attacked, Israel would not have counterattacked. There would have been no damage to repair in Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If the US, Europe and the Arab world were interested in actually helping Gaza, rather than organize a conference to fund Hamas and the PLO, they would have enjoined Israel to finish the job two months ago and end Hamas’s criminal, terrorist state in Gaza once and for all.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, they did no such thing. Throughout the war, the US and the EU joined Qatar and Turkey in blaming Israel for Hamas’s illegal war.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And on Sunday, they put their money where their mouths are. They pledged billions to the PLO and its political war against Israel. And they funded Hamas – both directly and indirectly. Moreover, they gave Hamas a political victory by agreeing to fund Abbas, even though he is the head of a PLO-Hamas government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All of this was predictable because it happens every time Israel is attacked, whether by terrorist armies in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, or in Lebanon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Every time the Palestinians and Lebanese Hezbollah attack Israel, the US and Europe eventually side with the Arabs and demand that Israel stop defending itself.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only difference between the most recent war with Hamas and its predecessors is that this time, the US was even more adamantly opposed to Israel’s attempts to defeat Hamas than the Europeans and many Arab governments.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the only difference between the most recent war and its predecessors is that the level of hostility towards Israel – and conversely support for Hamas – among leading members of the international community was unprecedented.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel’s job in contending with this hostile environment should have been similarly unprecedented.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel should have been offering to lead an international force in Gaza to overthrow Hamas and arrest its leaders pending war crimes trials. It should have been sticking the international community’s nose in the stench of its hypocrisy and anti-Israel bias.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Operationally, it should have recognized that Israel’s chief achievement in the war was its ability to withstand US pressure and maintain Gaza’s physical isolation by maintaining the borders shut, and so preventing the terrorist regime from resupplying and rearming.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At least on the last count, keeping Gaza sealed was Israel’s unflinching position throughout the war. To prevent the opening of Gaza’s borders, and through it, the rebuilding of Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure and political power, at great diplomatic cost, Israel repeatedly rejected US demands for an open border.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But today, this position is collapsing. True, Israel is insisting officially that stringent controls be placed on all dual use goods brought into Gaza. But officials openly acknowledge that there is no way to enforce the controls once the goods are imported.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Far worse than accepting that its position is difficult to enforce, Israel is actually facilitating the opening of Gaza’s borders. In so doing, Israel is giving Hamas the victory it failed to achieve on the battlefield.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And worst of all, the chief proponent of this policy is not Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, or even Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. Its chief advocate is IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout the war, tremors of criticism were heard in governing circles and the media against the IDF leadership in general, and against Gantz, in particular.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a series of media interviews on the eve of Yom Kippur, Gantz showed that not only was the criticism warranted – it was far too mild.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For years, it has been rightly said that Israel suffers from a chronic shortage of strong leaders. But what Gantz showed in his interviews is that even if Israel was blessed with the strongest leaders in Jewish history, it is far from clear that they would have the capacity to act on their convictions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In Israel, as in all countries, for a government to get things done political leaders require the assistance of professional echelons who develop tactical options for achieving strategic goals and implement government policies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The chief criticism of Gantz during the war was that he failed to present the government with options for defeating Hamas or that when he did present them, he did so in ways that made it impossible for the government to adopt options he opposed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was also said that he failed to respect the government’s sovereign authority to determine policy, and interjected his position on issues that were well beyond the professional authority of the IDF.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his interview with Maariv, Gantz said that the only way to guarantee that the cease-fire will hold is by paying off Hamas. That is, he made clear that he sides with the US and the rest of the international community against the government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “At the end of the day, 1.8 million Palestinians live there, and the quiet is also dependent on the trend of creating economic hope there.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gantz placed the blame for their supposed hopelessness on Israel, and its measures to contain Hamas’s threat to Gaza. In his words, “The people there need to live, and they are caught between Egypt on one side, us on another side and the sea with a six mile fishing zone on the other side.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Later in the interview, Gantz insisted that Israel’s interest is in enabling the international community to fund Hamas, arguing that terrorism is simply the result of economic privation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As he put it, “The Palestinians also do not want to see terrorism operating from within them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas absorbed a mighty blow and sustained great damage. It needs to see economic recovery, and this need, for economic growth is an opportunity for us.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The question of whether or not Gaza should be enriched is not a military one. But that doesn’t bother Gantz. After dictating what the government’s position must be, he then coyly winked, “I leave this for the elected leadership.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout the war, Israel’s elected leadership insisted that Gaza remain sealed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Left has followed Gantz’s lead and attacked the government for not opening Gaza’s borders and even participating in the Cairo conference.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But again, reality tells a different tale.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel has nothing to gain from participating in a Hamas funding drive.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It does however have an interest in influencing the international agenda. To do so, the most basic requirement for the government is to reject the lie that Israel is to blame for Hamas’s aggression. Israel’s leaders – elected and appointed – need to internalize the fact that the war this summer, like all previous acts of Hamas aggression against Israel stemmed not from privation and hopelessness, but from empowerment and hopefulness.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas doesn’t attack Israel because it needs money. It attacks Israel because doing so empowers it and weakens Israel – as we saw in Cairo on Sunday.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, for as long as our unelected professional class is led by men who have internalized our enemies’ narratives, there is no way that Israel can act on these basic strategic truths regardless of whom voters elect. And as a result, we shall continue to witness our soldiers’ hard won victories being squandered by our leaders – in and out of uniform.</span></p>
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		<title>Sweden&#8217;s Tilt Toward the Palestinians</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/swedens-tilt-toward-the-palestinians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=swedens-tilt-toward-the-palestinians</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:30:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prime Minister Stefan Lofven]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sweden]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242880</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Pushing off peace. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sw.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-242906" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sw.jpg" alt="sw" width="275" height="183" /></a>The newly elected Swedish government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven began its term with a clear pro-Palestinian tilt. In his inaugural speech on October 3, 2014, PM Lofven declared that his left-center Social-Democrat party led government would recognize the state of Palestine. “The conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be solved with a two-state solution, negotiated in accordance with international law. The two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to co-exist peacefully. Sweden will therefore <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/03/us-sweden-politics-palestinians-idUSKCN0HS0XN20141003">recognize</a> the state of Palestine.”</p>
<p>Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the Swedish government’s statement the following day saying that “<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/sweden-palestine-recognition-meant-to-jumpstart-talks/">Unilatera</a>l steps would not advance peace, but would, rather, push it off.”</p>
<p>The US was also unhappy with the unilateral Swedish move. US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called international recognition of a Palestinian state “premature,” and said, “We believe that the process is one that has to be worked out through the <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/sweden-palestine-recognition-meant-to-jumpstart-talks/">parties</a> to agree on the terms of how they will live in the future of two states living side-by-side.”</p>
<p>Responding to the Swedish Prime Minister’s announcement, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman wrote an exclusive Op Ed in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. “This announcement” Lieberman wrote, “was not intended to serve as a <a href="http://www.dn.se/debatt/unilateral-swedish-moves-will-not-promote-a-solution/">genuine solution</a> to a foreign problem. It was intended, so it seems, to placate a certain sector in Swedish public opinion. It is to be regretted when internal considerations determine a counterproductive and irresponsible foreign policy.”</p>
<p>Lieberman added, “With the entire Middle East aflame, not to mention other regions in the world experiencing strife and instability, the undue focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict runs counter to all logic. Beyond reflecting internal matters, it seems that this focus serves to compensate for the many failings that the organized international community has encountered in attempting to resolve the many complex problems on the global agenda. For some reason, five words are spoken of time and again as both an imperative and as a magical solution to many other problems in the region: resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”</p>
<p>Lieberman went on to say, “In recent years the Middle East has been swept by an ocean of violence and bloodshed, <a href="http://www.dn.se/debatt/unilateral-swedish-moves-will-not-promote-a-solution/">none of which has anything to do with Israel</a> or the Palestinians. Three years of civil war in Syria have seen over 200,000 Syrians lose their lives. Iraq is on the verge of disintegration and since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, has witnessed over 130,000 Iraqi citizens killed. Libya has already broken apart, its revolution resulting in some 15,000 Libyan killed. In Darfur, some 400,000 people have been killed since 2003, and since the eruption of civil war in South Sudan in 2013, some 10,000 people have lost their lives.”</p>
<p>Clearly showing the hypocrisy of the Swedish government policy toward Israel, FM Lieberman continued, “Since (President) Hassan Rouhani’s assumption of office, over 800 Iranians have been executed by the Iranian regime, including journalists, poets, intellectuals and women accused of ‘immodesty.’ Where is Sweden’s outrage? Where is the call for an urgent solution to this burning matter? In addition, as the world has witnessed all too vividly in recent weeks, fanatic (Muslim) terrorist organizations such ISIS (now called Islamic State-IS), Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Hamas have been committing countless atrocities, some of them even aspiring to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”</p>
<p>Lieberman questioned why the new Swedish Prime Minister chose to ignore these developments and chose instead to hone in on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He called it not merely a matter of “imbalance,” but a matter of fundamental “unfairness.” Lieberman attacked the hypocrisy of the loud European (and Swedish) voices protesting “disproportionality” regarding Palestinian casualties in Gaza, when the Palestinians themselves initiated the violence against Israel and its civilians. Lieberman undoubtedly raged in his mind over the Swedish obsession with blaming Israel “when much of the world around us is blazing.”</p>
<p>In concluding his Op Ed piece in the Swedish Dagens Nyheter, Lieberman wrote: “Friendly governments do not act so as to undermine the national security of their friends, and do not presume to know better than their friends how they should contend with the many challenges they face. The Swedish government would do well to rethink its intention to act in this way towards its friend Israel. In doing so, it will not only correct an unfortunate error, it will contribute to the promotion of an agreed upon settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”</p>
<p>To understand why Sweden is tilting toward the Palestinians, it is important to note that the problem today is not with traditional anti-Semitism, but rather a new kind of hate, which is derived primarily from the failure to distinguish between Israel, Zionism, and the local Jewish communities, when it comes to political discourse. In fact, anti-Zionism has morphed into anti-Semitism. Moreover, the existence of a large Muslim immigrant community in Sweden, mostly from North Africa and the Middle East is certainly a major factor. Particularly, since the Social Democratic party in Sweden has co-opted the Muslim vote, and anti-Israel announcements resonate well with the Muslim constituency.</p>
<p>In Malmo, Sweden, a recent Israeli-Swedish Tennis match had to be played behind closed doors for fear of Arab and Muslim rioters engaging in violence. In Malmo, where Muslims account for more than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_European_Union_by_Muslim_population#tablemalmo">20%</a> of the population, Jews and Israelis are unwelcome, and are threatened with violence. The Swedish government is either intimidated or reluctant to implement the rule of law. The Mayor of Malmo stated recently that Malmo “does not accept Zionism,” and that Swedish Jews can avoid anti-Semitism by publicly opposing the occupation of the West Bank. The left-wing Swedish media, especially the printed press from mainstream Social-Democrat to the Marxist and Communist fringe, are rabidly anti-Israel.</p>
<p>On a recent trip to Stockholm, Sweden, this writer heard from local Jews, especially young people, about their intent to leave Sweden for either Israel or America. The reason given was anti-Semitism. They feel besieged by the increasingly violent and hateful Arab-Muslim community and the reluctance of the Swedish authorities to enforce the law. Sweden has become known as the <a href="http://shariaunveiled.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/muslims-earn-sweden-the-title-of-rape-capital-of-the-world/">rape</a> capital of the world, but you would not know that from the Swedish press. The rapes are committed almost exclusively by Muslims. Hosted by Kurdish Muslims in the city, this writer witnessed Swedish authorities’ fear of confronting Muslims, who live in segregated ghettos where no Swedish police can enter.</p>
<p>Former Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazal, pointed out that “as far as Swedes are concerned, Israel is always guilty. It does not matter to them that Israel is being attacked by Hezbollah and Hamas, or that the Palestinian Authority has failed to comply with the Oslo Agreement. Also, Swedes, like other Europeans, feel guilty towards the Third World because of the colonial past. The alliance between radical Islam and the Swedish Marxist left, figures in Sweden’s policy toward Israel. According to Mazal, the Swedish PM’s statement was prompted by an influx of a large <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/influx-of-refugees-blamed-for-sweden-recognizing-palestinian-state/">Arab minority</a> into Sweden this year.</p>
<p>According to the <em>Times of Israel</em>, the New Leftist Swedish government Housing Minister, Mehmet Kaplan, of Sweden’s Green Party, was arrested in 2010 by Israeli forces as a participant in the Mavi Marmara flotilla, which was headed to the Gaza Strip. The Turkish born Swedish MP was later deported from Israel. Sweden’s new Education Minister Gustav Fridolin, was detained by Israeli forces in 2004 for protesting Israel’s security barrier near Ramallah.</p>
<p>With such characters in the Swedish government, is there any wonder as to why Sweden is tilting toward the Palestinians?</p>
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		<title>The Silent Intifada</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arlene-kushner/the-silent-intifada/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-silent-intifada</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arlene-kushner/the-silent-intifada/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:15:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arlene Kushner]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intifada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riot]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A disturbing wave of violence unleashed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/r.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242406" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/r-450x300.jpg" alt="Palestinians hurl stones during clashes with Israeli police in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Wadi Joz" width="318" height="212" /></a>The perpetrators in the main of the new silent intifada are male Arabs, mostly young, with Jerusalem residency cards.  They have the right to live in Jerusalem, and receive the perks of citizens, but – tellingly – for political reasons have declined to become full citizens.</p>
<p>With increasing frequency in recent weeks, they are out on the streets of eastern Jerusalem and at key eastern Jerusalem locations, actively participating in violent and destructive behaviors.  Sometimes they wrap scarves around their faces so they cannot be identified.</p>
<p>Some Arab “unrest” occurs from time to time in the city.  Perhaps a demonstration protesting a perceived grievance suddenly turns into a riot.  Molotov cocktails might be thrown, or rocks large enough to kill.  Municipal infrastructure might incur some damage.</p>
<p>None of this is acceptable, but for the most part, these have been intermittent and localized occurrences.  What is happening now is something else: a form of behavior that is more persistently violent and more pervasive.</p>
<p>It comes as a shock to learn, for example, that at least 30% of the cars of the Jerusalem Light Rail are out of commission because of vandalism that takes place at the Light Rail station located in Shu’afat, an Arab neighborhood.  This is not a matter of delinquent kids with time on their hands. This is focused behavior intended to undermine the authority of the municipality.</p>
<p>This past week, on the second night of Rosh Hashana, Chanan Kupietzky, 25, and two others were walking towards the Kotel (the Western Wall) when they were accosted by some four Arabs, who began by calling, “Dirty Jews!”  At a signal from yet another Arab, they approached Kupietzky and his companions and launched a physical attack.  Other Arabs in the area began throwing rocks at the three, and at other Jews who were nearby, wounding one man in the chest.</p>
<p>“It was like an ambush,” Kupietzy said.  One Arab came at him with a two-by-four that had nails protruding from it, which was used to strike him repeatedly; ultimately his hand was so badly fractured that he required surgery.</p>
<p>One of the locations that has been most problematic is Har Hazeitim – the Mount of Olives.  This is the site of Judaism’s most ancient cemetery, with 150,000 graves. This past week, on one night alone, 40 graves were vandalized.</p>
<p>Nearby is Ma’aleh Hazeitim, a Jewish neighborhood that has been the site of stonings.  Arabs – likely from the nearby Arab neighborhood of Ras al-Amud – target cars on the road that have Jewish drivers.</p>
<p>This past week, however, a new low was reached when Arab stone-throwers made a nursery school the target of an attack.  As rocks pelted the outside of the nursery building, the teacher quickly brought the children into an air-raid shelter for safety and summoned the police.</p>
<p>These stories and many more like them have been insufficiently publicized.</p>
<p>Multiple observers have noticed that the attacks seem organized rather than random, and that there is never one person acting alone.  There are groups operating, under instruction.</p>
<p>According to one very reliable individual with direct connections to the Israeli government, what we are seeing is a limited intifada.  The Palestinian Authority has decided that a wide-scale intifada in Judea and Samaria would not be a good idea now: they have opted for one focused exclusively on Jerusalem instead.</p>
<p>It makes perfect sense. In the struggle between Israel and the PA, Jerusalem is the heart of the matter.</p>
<p>In July 1980, the Knesset passed a bill in Basic Law that reads: “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” There is no such place as “East Jerusalem;” there is one, undivided city.  Nonetheless, the Palestinian Authority continues to promote the fiction of “East Jerusalem” as a separate place that is destined to become its capital.  In the end, the sovereignty of Jerusalem – as the sovereignty of any place – is directly connected to control on the ground.  The PA goal is to make eastern Jerusalem so difficult for Jews to live in that they will withdraw.</p>
<p>Were this to happen, it would be an unmitigated disaster, particularly as the very core of Jewish tradition in the city – including the Temple Mount – is in its more ancient eastern part. It would mean relinquishing that core, with all the implications that would follow.</p>
<p>The overriding question now is what is being done to guarantee that this does not happen.</p>
<p>There are many fine police officers at work in Jerusalem, and, in fact, their numbers have been augmented recently. But there remains a persistent unease that what may be happening when the police act is more in the way of containment than enforcement of the law to the fullest extent possible.  Sometimes violent groups are scattered and chased away rather than arrested.  At other times arrests are made but prosecutions do not follow.</p>
<p>While these instances have been observed, what is not clear is whether they are just that – separate instances, or whether they are the result of orders from above, from Minister of Internal Security, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, or police officials.</p>
<p>It is not difficult to understand the inclination to fall back on containment, no matter how ill-advised it is in the long run: The world watches Israel as it watches no other nation. One false arrest, one injury or death of an Arab during attempts to make arrests, will result in headlines and international protests.  It feels safer to go easy.</p>
<p>But it is exceedingly important for Jews to make their presence known in all parts of Israel’s capital; and they must be able to do so free of harassment or physical risk.  Protecting its citizens is a primary responsibility of the government.</p>
<p>In this instance, when the government of Israel acts to protect its citizens, it is also protecting its rights as a sovereign nation and its future in the land.</p>
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