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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; United Nations</title>
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		<title>A UN Timetable for Israel’s Destruction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/a-un-timetable-for-israels-destruction-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-un-timetable-for-israels-destruction-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:53:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[europeans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247556</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And Obama's betrayal. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4hxon.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247524" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4hxon-410x350.jpg" alt="rtr4hxon" width="302" height="258" /></a>The Obama administration is shamelessly outsourcing the United States&#8217; historic leadership in facilitating negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel of a workable, secure two-state solution to the United Nations and European governments. In putting its trust in these two centers of anti-Israel sentiment, the Obama administration refuses to say categorically that it would veto a UN Security Council resolution setting some sort of deadline for the creation of a Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines.</p>
<p>In the words of an unnamed senior U.S. State Department official quoted by Reuters, &#8220;These things are all very much in flux, it&#8217;s not as if we&#8217;re being asked to take a position on any particular Security Council resolution right now. It would be premature for us to discuss documents that are of uncertain status right now.&#8221;</p>
<p>Any Security Council resolution the Obama administration would agree to, which imposes pressure only on Israel to make more unilateral concessions for an illusionary “peace,” will serve to legitimize a United Nations timetable for Israel’s surrender to forces that wish to destroy it. The Gaza debacle following Israel’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza in 2005 and give the Palestinians a chance to build a prototype Palestinian state illustrates the danger Israel would face from being pressured into more withdrawals at this time.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority leadership is pressing for action on just such a Security Council resolution as early as this Wednesday, according to a Palestine Liberation Organization official and Palestinian U.N. Ambassador Riyad Mansour. The Palestinian resolution, to be sponsored by Jordan (a non-permanent member of the Security Council), would reportedly set a two year deadline for complete Israeli withdrawal from all “occupied” territories, although Jordan’s UN ambassador told reporters it was news to her that any action to vote on the resolution would be taken as soon as the Palestinians are demanding. There is some speculation amongst UN insiders that a vote on a Palestinian resolution could be put off until early in the new year. The Security Council makeup will then be even more inclined towards the Palestinian position, because Malaysia will be replacing South Korea as a non-permanent member of the Security Council.</p>
<p>The Palestinians are finding a very receptive audience in Europe for their use of the United Nations to sidestep direct negotiations with Israel. As the tide of anti-Semitism is rising to the surface and spreading once again throughout Europe, a number of European countries&#8217; parliaments have adopted non-binding resolutions calling upon their respective governments to recognize a Palestinian state. Sweden went further with official recognition of a state of Palestine. France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is taking the lead in crafting a European version of a Palestinian state resolution. The idea reportedly would be to set out an expectation for a final peace agreement to achieve a two-state solution within two years. During the two year interval, the United Nations might accord full UN membership rights to an officially recognized Palestinian state. The text is still a subject of consultations in European capitals, according to the United Kingdom&#8217;s UN Ambassador Lyall Grant.</p>
<p>The Obama administration, which would like nothing better than to see its nemesis Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defeated in the upcoming March 2015 Israeli elections, is calibrating a position that appears intended to send a pointed message to the Israeli electorate. This message is not to count on the administration standing steadfastly with Israel on sensitive security concerns if Prime Minister Netanyahu is re-elected. The Obama administration is willing to consider a &#8220;compromise&#8221; Security Council resolution to pressure Israel into resuming negotiations against a backdrop of a framework withdrawal timetable, so that the administration can say it did all it can to avoid an immediate two year deadline and thereby not have to use its veto power to “protect” Israel.</p>
<p>Thus, Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting early this week with European foreign ministers, Arab League officials, and Israeli and Palestinian officials to &#8220;hear from and engage with other stakeholders&#8230;and to the best of our ability work toward a common path forward,&#8221; according to a senior State Department official.</p>
<p>Israeli civilians under relentless attack by Palestinian jihadists are the main &#8220;stakeholders&#8221; whom the United States should be worried about. If there is to be a &#8220;common path forward&#8221; to peace, it requires Palestinian negotiating partners who are willing to publicly give up their claim to a right of return of millions of so-called Palestinian refugees to pre-June 1967 Israeli cities and towns, and who recognize Israel&#8217;s right to self-determination as a Jewish state that can co-exist securely side by side with a peaceful Palestinian state. There has been no such partner to engage in genuine negotiations for more than six decades. There remains no such partner today, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>Hamas has made clear its intention time again, by word and deed, to destroy the state of Israel and kill as many Jews as possible. Following, for example, are excerpts from an interview with Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on May 11, 2011 (courtesy of MEMRI):</p>
<blockquote><p>The [Jews] are brought in droves to Palestine so that the Palestinians – and the Islamic nation behind them – will have the honor of annihilating the evil of this gang…All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews…When Palestine is liberated and its people return to it, and the entire region, with the grace of Allah, will have turned into the United States of Islam, the land of Palestine will become the capital of the Islamic Caliphate, and all these countries will turn into states within the Caliphate.</p></blockquote>
<p>Hamas’s barrage of rocket attacks launched from Gaza against Israeli civilians since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007 attests to its deadly intentions. Just last Sunday, Hamas marked its 27<sup>th</sup> anniversary by parading 2,000 of its armed fighters and truck-mounted rockets. A senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said: &#8216;This illusion called Israel will be removed.”</p>
<p>Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has thrown in his lot with Hamas in forming a so-called “unity reconciliation” government and has himself incited sectarian violence in and around Jerusalem with incendiary rhetoric.  But even Abbas has expressed frustration with what he called Hamas’s continued “shadow government&#8230; running the territory&#8221; in Gaza on its own.</p>
<p>In the real world, which is alien to the United Nations, the Arab world, European governments and the Obama administration, simply saying something is so doesn&#8217;t make it so. Diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state does not change the reality on the ground. Nor does a pie-in-the-sky declaration of a “unity” or “reconciliation” Palestinian government that exists only on paper. For example, in delivering his regular briefing to the Security Council on the situation in the Middle East, Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, admitted to Security Council members on December 15<sup>th</sup> the lack of a functioning Palestinian reconciliation unity government to replace Hamas’s governance in Gaza. He said that delivery of thousands of tons of construction materials into Gaza is being permitted by Israel under the temporary Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism agreed upon by Israel, the so-called Palestinian Government of National Consensus and the UN, even though the “Government of National Consensus in Gaza has still not taken up its rightful governance and security function” that is a critical part of the arrangement.</p>
<p>The Palestinians’ own internal power struggle between Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, which currently dominates the West Bank, means that there is no real unified state government apparatus. Hamas won’t give up its military control in Gaza and is seeking to expand its influence in the West Bank at the Palestinian Authority’s expense. There can be no real foundation for a workable Palestinian state under international law when there is no single governing authority in a position to effectively exert sovereign control over all of a putative Palestinian state’s territory and people. Nor can there be a real state under international law that does not have the capacity to ensure compliance with any bilateral or international agreements such a state may enter into in the future.</p>
<p>No matter what kind of “common path” Secretary of State Kerry thinks he can achieve with the Palestinians and their Arab and European supporters on a Security Council timetable resolution, Israel must reject the path of forced withdrawal that could lead to its own destruction. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said during the regular Israeli cabinet meeting on Sunday, a UN Security Council-imposed deadline for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines would bring &#8220;Islamic extremists to the suburbs of Tel Aviv and to the heart of Jerusalem. We will not allow this. We will rebuff this forcefully and responsibly. Let there be no doubt, this will be rejected.&#8221;</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Reyhaneh Jabbari&#8217;s Execution Shows Emboldened Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/reyhaneh-jabbaris-execution-shows-emboldened-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reyhaneh-jabbaris-execution-shows-emboldened-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:30:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abuse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[execution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Human Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reyhaneh Jabbari]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244655</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the weakness of the U.S. is creating more victims inside the Islamic Republic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1412068835096_wps_19_A_picture_taken_on_July_8.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244656" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1412068835096_wps_19_A_picture_taken_on_July_8-409x350.jpg" alt="1412068835096_wps_19_A_picture_taken_on_July_8" width="290" height="248" /></a>Despite the surge in executions and human rights violations in the Islamic Republic, the mainstream media and some Western politicians still depict the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and his governmental technocrat team as moderate or reformist.</p>
<p>Recently, a 26-year-old Iranian woman, Reyhaneh Jabbari, was executed in Iran’s prison for allegedly killing the man who raped her. Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, the alleged rapist, was a former employee in Iran’s intelligence ministry. The trial of Jabbari lacked fair and due process.</p>
<p>The intriguing issue is that this execution led to a considerable amount of international outcry from human rights groups. Many requested that the Islamic Republic’s president, Hassan Rouhani, rescind the death sentence against Jabbari.</p>
<p>Normally, when there is significant international pressure, the Islamic Republic has tended to shift the death sentence or postpone it. But the fact that the Iranian government went ahead and executed this women highlights the increasing empowerment and emboldened sentiments of the Iranian regime as it defies, as well as disregards, the international condemnation.</p>
<p>Several crucial factors, including President Obama’s projection of weak foreign policy, leadership, as well as his administration’s appeasement policies toward the Islamic Republic’s domestic and foreign policy, play crucial roles in emboldening and empowering the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>In addition, the new wave of acid attacks against Iranian women appear not to raise any concerns in the Iranian government with regards to its  global and regional image.</p>
<p>A new report by a United Nations Human Rights investigator further highlights the surge in executions and human rights violations, and it underlines the fallacy of the narrative that President Hassan Rouhani is distinct from other Iranian politicians, such as his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p>
<p>The new report was provided by a United Nations human rights investigator, Ahmad Shaheed, who was a former diplomat from the Maldives and currently special rapporteur on human rights issues in the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>Shaheed, who has been denied to entry into the Islamic Republic, conducted his report by amassing hundreds of interviews and substantiated records of human rights abuses, including those executions officially reported by the Iranian government. Although he did not directly blame Rouhani, Shaheed recently addressed and briefed the United Nations General Assembly on Iran’s human rights record, which corresponds with the timing that Rouhani had been in office.</p>
<p>The surge in human rights abuses appear to have been carried out on several crucial platforms. First of all, there is an alarming increase in the number of prison and public executions in comparison to the prior year.</p>
<p>In 2012, under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recorded number of executions was 580 people. This indicates that there has been an increase of approximately 45 percent in executions under Rouhani. In 2013, 687 people were executed.</p>
<p>In addition, the range of charges for executing Iranian citizens appears to have been widened. The legal reasons behind executions include political, economic, human rights activism, and drug trafficking. Addressing a General Assembly human rights committee this week, Ahmad Shaheed pointed out this &#8220;surge in executions in the country over the past 12-15 months.&#8221; Shaheed added, &#8220;At least 852 individuals were executed in the period since June of last year, including eight juveniles.&#8221;</p>
<p>The second manner of human rights violation is targeted at those who are engaged in freedom of information, particularly journalists. In addition, other reporters and posters, such as bloggers, Facebook users, and people who are active on social media, have been restricted as well. The number of journalists who have been detained in the Islamic Republic have also ratcheted up. According to Shaheed, there are currently 35 journalists under detention in Iran.</p>
<p>The third phenomenon appears to represent the concerns regarding the persecution of religious minorities, including the Christians, Sunnis, Dervishes, and Baha&#8217;i community. Currently, 120 people of the Baha&#8217;i community, as well as 49 Christians, have been documented to be in prison in Iran solely for religious practices.  Some members of the Arab community, characterized as “cultural rights activists,” as well as juveniles, have also been put to death sentence.</p>
<p>The fourth category of human rights abuses is linked to the restrictions on and deterioration of women&#8217;s rights in the Islamic Republic. For example, the Iranian government has also imposed a quota on the admission of Iranian girls to universities. According the UN human rights reports, the number of Iranian women being enrolled at universities has come down to 48 percent.</p>
<p>President Rouhani was elected by the majority of Iranian people as a moderate candidate who would potentially promote civil liberties, social justice, and individual freedoms (including freedom of speech, assembly and press).</p>
<p>Instead of taking a more robust position towards the Islamic Republic when it comes to dealing with the Islamic Republic, President Obama will more likely disregard the recent surge in egregious and appalling human rights abuses due to the administration&#8217;s extreme focus on striking a final nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. The comprehensive nuclear deal would ultimately remove political and economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The United States should concentrate more on human rights violations in Iran by incorporating this issue with the country’s nuclear defiance.</p>
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		<title>The Palestinian Hijacking of Rachel&#8217;s Tomb</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dbedein/the-palestinian-hijacking-of-rachels-tomb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-palestinian-hijacking-of-rachels-tomb</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:05:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Bedein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mosque]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian authority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rachel's tomb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[text book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UNRWA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244479</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How UN-funded textbooks are teaching children that the Jewish holy site is a shrine to a Muslim. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/RachelsTomb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244480" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/RachelsTomb-450x294.jpg" alt="RachelsTomb" width="395" height="258" /></a>On the 11th of Heshvan, which this year falls on November 4, Jews observe the &#8220;yaarzeit&#8221; memorial for Rachel, the Biblical matriarch who bore Joseph and died in child birth as Benjamin was born.</p>
<p>As part of our agency&#8217;s continuing reportage of the PA school books now used in the UNRWA educational facilities, funded by the US, the EU and other western nations, we have come across a newsworthy phenomenon: UNRWA schools now teach that Rachel&#8217;s tomb is a shrine to a Moslem.</p>
<p>This is consistent with PA educational policy, which does not recognize any area in any part of Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, as Holy to Jews. UNRWA students learn that the Western Wall, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron are exclusively holy and special to Moslems, and devoid of anything Jewish.<br />
However, after the founding of the PA in 1994, the initial Palestinian Authority textbook recognized Rachel&#8217;s tomb, described as &#8220;Qabr Rahil&#8221; in a chapter about Bethlehem (pp. 87-90) in a paragraph titled &#8220;the most important historical and religious sites&#8221; (pp. 88-89), second to the Church of the Nativity. That text, on top of p. 89 is translated as: &#8220;Rachel&#8217;s Tomb: The mother of our lord Joseph and the wife of Jacob, peace be upon them both.&#8221; The textbook in which this sentence appears is titled &#8220;Palestinian National Education” for grade 6 and it was published by the Ministry of Education of the Palestinian National Authority in 1996.</p>
<p>However, The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education has now transformed the “Tomb of Rachel” into “The Mosque of Bilal bin Rabbah&#8221; in the &#8220;National Education&#8221; textbook which is used by the 492,000 students in the UNRWA camps for grade 7.</p>
<div id="attachment_244482" style="width: 263px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/rachels-tomb.jpg"><img class="wp-image-244482 size-medium" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/rachels-tomb-253x350.jpg" alt="rachel's tomb" width="253" height="350" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">P. 55, &#8220;National Education&#8221; textbook</p></div>
<p>In the chapter titled &#8220;Attempts at Obliterating the Palestinian Heritage&#8221; (pp. 54-57) there are features on p. 54 &#8211; photos of four places of which one is Rachel&#8217;s Tomb which the PA subtitled as &#8220;the Mosque of Bill bin Raba (Bethlehem)&#8221;. On p. 55, in a sub-chapter titled &#8220;The attempts at obliterating the Palestinian heritage include the following manifestations:&#8221; one can find the following: &#8220;The attempt to Judaize [tahwid] some of the Muslim religious places such as the Ibrahimi Mosque [the Cave of the Patriarchs] and the Mosque of Bilal bin Rabbah (near Bethlehem)&#8221;.</p>
<p>On p. 56, there is a tendentious paragraph which declares that: &#8220;Several Palestinian, Arab and Islamic centers and associations were established and they work to revive the Arab-Palestinian heritage in order to keep Palestine, and Jerusalem specifically, Arab”.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Ministry of Education has also issued educational pamphlets about Palestine and its “heritage”, such as: the Al-Buraq Wall – the Western Wall, the Mosque of Bilal bin Rabbah – Rachel&#8217;s Dome [Qubbat Rahil]&#8220;. At the bottom of the same page there are four questions for all students to answer. No. 2 reads: &#8220;Give the names of mosques and [other] Muslim and Christian religious sites of which the features the Israelis have tried to change.&#8221;</p>
<div id="attachment_244485" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/rachel-mosque.jpg"><img class="wp-image-244485 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/rachel-mosque-306x350.jpg" alt="rachel mosque" width="300" height="343" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Photo of Rachel&#8217;s Tomb and the inscription &#8220;Mosque of Bilal bin Rabbah (Bethlehem)&#8221;</p></div>
<p>On p. 57 there is an assignment in which the student is requested to write &#8220;Yes&#8221; or &#8220;No&#8221; next to various statements.</p>
<p>No. 3 in this assignment reads: &#8220;The holy site of Bilal bin Rabbah is located near Bethlehem&#8221;.</p>
<p>As for Bilal bin Rabbah, he was an Ethiopian (male, not a female) slave in Mecca who heard Muhammad preaching there and became a Muslim.</p>
<p>He was then severely tortured by his master but stayed a devoted Muslim. One of Muhammad&#8217;s companions, Abu Bakr, bought and freed him and Muhammad made him the first muadhin (caller to prayer).</p>
<p>Some sources say that he accompanied Caliph Omar on the latter&#8217;s trip to Jerusalem following its conquest in 636 and on their way back the time of prayer came and he called to prayer at the place that was always known as Rachel&#8217;s Tomb – until the Palestinian Authority arrived on the scene.</p>
<p>An aside: These new PA textbooks were financed by Ireland, Holland, Belgium and Finland. Italy had initially committed itself to help finance the new PA school books.</p>
<p>However, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, of blessed memory, who served as the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican ambassador in Jerusalem, between 1998 and 2006, reviewed the new Palestinian Authority school books and described them as “anti-Israel war manuals” and asked the Italian government to withdraw support for the new Palestinian school book project. Italy, indeed, cancelled its sponsorship of the publication of the new Palestinian Authority school books, at the request of the Vatican</p>
<p><em>Dr. Arnon Groiss did the research for this article. He holds a PHD in Islamic Studies from Princeton and has worked as senior correspondent for the Arabic language service of the Israel Broadcasting Authority for the past forty years.</em></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>Netanyahu’s Statements and Policies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/netanyahus-statements-and-policies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=netanyahus-statements-and-policies</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:50:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242293</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Decoding the Israeli prime minister's message to the Obama administration. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5618435092089408259no.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242294" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5618435092089408259no.jpg" alt="5618435092089408259no" width="315" height="200" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Netanyahus-statements-and-policies-377946">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Although commentators overlooked it, the Obama administration did it again. They blindsided Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the eve of his trip to Washington.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The last time it happened was in May 2011 when US President Barack Obama set out his policy toward Israel and the Palestinians as Netanyahu was in flight, en route to Washington to meet with him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In that speech Obama announced his support for an essentially full Israeli withdrawal to the entirely indefensible 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. Obama adopted this position despite the fact that Netanyahu and the Israeli public rejected it and viewed it as a threat to Israel’s survival.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This time the Obama administration didn’t blindside Israel on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit with another hostile pronouncement in relation to the Palestinians. This time they did so in relation to Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In an address on Saturday night before the National Iranian-American Council, Phillip Gordon, the White House’s coordinator for the Middle East, said that if US-Iranian talks on Iran’s nuclear weapons program lead to an agreement, they can pave the way for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In his words, “A nuclear agreement could begin a multi-generational process that could lead to a new relationship between our countries.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gordon’s statement was a blunt departure from the White House’s previous position that the only gain Iran would make by obeying binding UN Security Council resolutions that prohibit the Islamic theocracy from enriching uranium would be the abrogation of economic sanctions that were adopted to force Iran to end its illicit nuclear activities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In accordance with US law, diplomatic relations with Iran are contingent on Iran’s cessation of support for terrorist organizations and other unlawful activities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his remarks to NIAC – a group that the vast majority of Iranian-Americans view as the unofficial lobby of the Iranian regime – Gordon said that due to the importance of the nuclear issue, to make progress in nuclear talks, the US is willing to ignore Iran’s support for terrorism and other crimes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “The nuclear issue is too important to subordinate to a complete transformation of Iran internally.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">FACED WITH this boldfaced US declaration that it will not only do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but is also endorsing continued Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah, Netanyahu opted to avoid yet another direct confrontation with the White House. Rather than directly call the administration out for its role in enabling Iran to become a nuclear state, Netanyahu sufficed with his usual rhetoric. He gently chided Obama for his pro-Iranian policy during his public remarks at the White House. And in all of his public statements, Netanyahu underlined how and why Iran and its nuclear weapons program are a greater threat to the free world than Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are probably two reasons for Netanyahu’s reticence. First, a confrontation would be futile.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Even before Gordon’s speech, it was obvious to Netanyahu that Obama’s goal is not to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs. The goal of Obama’s Iran policy is to reinstate US-Iranian relations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama sees himself as a reincarnation of Richard Nixon. He will be for US-Iranian relations what Nixon was for US relations with Communist China.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama doesn’t mind if Iran has a bomb in the basement so long as he can drink tea with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the drawing room.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given Obama’s absolute commitment to his goal, there was no point in having a confrontation with him. Netanyahu’s rejection of Obama’s position, made through his repeated warnings, was directed toward other ears. Netanyahu’s statements and warning were directed toward the American media, the American public and the American political class. His goal is to develop and strengthen support for an Israeli policy that would run counter to Obama’s policy of embracing Iran even at the cost of enabling Iran to become a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only problem with Netanyahu’s rhetoric is that it isn’t credible. At this point, it is hard to believe Netanyahu has a policy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During his five-and-a-half years in office, Netanyahu has taken only sporadic action against Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The cumulative impact of those actions has been limited, in part due to the Obama administration’s policy of leaking Israeli operations to the media.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, in light of the episodic nature of these actions, it is hard to view them as integrated components of an overall strategy whose aim is to destroy or significantly degrade Iran’s nuclear installations. In other words, it doesn’t appear that Israel has a policy of any kind for dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All we have is Netanyahu’s Churchillian rhetoric, which in itself will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the media analysts were quick to point out, whereas Netanyahu sought to focus his discussions with Obama on Iran, Obama was keen to focus his discussions with Netanyahu on the Palestinians.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s unwillingness to focus specifically on the Palestinian issue was notable mainly because in his limited remarks on the issue, he signaled that he has a new strategic vision and policy for contending with the Palestinian conflict with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The first aspect of Netanyahu’s apparently emerging policy came out on Monday during his speech at the UN General Assembly. There Netanyahu criticized PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas more honestly and assertively than he ever has before.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Slamming Abbas for his libelous charge that Israel enacted a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, Netanyahu said that the deranged moral universe in which Israel can be accused of genocide is “the same moral universe where a man [Abbas] who wrote a dissertation of lies about the Holocaust, and who insists on a Palestine free of Jews, judenrein, can stand at the podium and shamelessly accuse Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu then further distanced himself from the PLO-centric framework for building peaceful relations between Israel and its neighbors. He noted that the rise of Sunni jihadist forces and the Iranian nuclear threat have brought major Sunni Arab states to the conclusion that their best bet is to work with Israel to meet and surmount the growing dangers. This new regional landscape in turn can provide a means of resolving the Palestinian conflict with Israel in a manner that will not endanger Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s suggestion, repeated at the White House Wednesday, that neighboring Arab states may develop new means of resolving the Palestinian issue, rings true in light of the diplomatic support Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates gave Israel in its war against Hamas this summer. And even though the Egyptian government later denied the reports, talk persists that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi did in fact offer the Palestinians sovereignty over a large swathe of Sinai adjacent to Gaza as a means of establishing a viable Palestinian state without sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The assessment that a policy is slowly being developed along these lines was reinforced on Tuesday by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Repeating Netanyahu’s reference to a regional alliance structure that can be used to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel, Ya’alon said that it is irrational to even consider an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The emerging policy apparently involves the application of Israeli sovereignty over all or parts of Judea and Samaria, along the lines I set out in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, in combination with an Egyptian offer of Sinai territory to the Palestinians in conjunction with the demilitarization of Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From the administration’s behavior following Obama’s meeting with Netanyahu on Wednesday, we learned that the administration is adamantly opposed to any revision of the current PLO-centric framework, which is predicated on Israeli concessions to an intransigent PLO.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shortly after Netanyahu left the White House, the administration bitterly attacked and threatened Israel, because the Jewish state refuses to obey the administration and deny Jews the right to buy and own property in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. The administration was enraged because in line with Israel’s refusal to adopt anti-Semitic housing policies, the Jerusalem Planning Board approved the construction of housing for Jews and Arabs in the city.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Also on Wednesday, Channel 10 reported that Secretary of State John Kerry is seeking to scuttle the developing Israeli alliance with Egypt and other anti-jihadist Sunni states by bringing Qatar, Hamas’s principal Sunni state-sponsor, into the mix. Kerry is reportedly trying to organize a regional peace conference that would coerce Israel into accepting the so-called Saudi Peace Initiative from 2002. That initiative would require Israel to surrender to all the PLO’s territorial demands and accept millions of foreign, hostile Arabs into its shrunken, indefensible territory.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In light of Obama’s absolute commitment to the anti-Israel, PLO-centric policy model for dealing with the Palestinian rejection of Israel, for the next two years there will be no change in US policy on the issue.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Under these circumstances, Netanyahu’s task is to lay the foundation in Washington for support for an Israeli policy that abandons the PLO as a partner and moves beyond the failed two-state model. Here, Netanyahu’s statements at the UN and the White House indicate that this is the path he has embarked upon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, while Netanyahu may prefer to lay the groundwork for a new policy indirectly and cautiously, Abbas’s bid to convince the US to support the passage of a Security Council resolution that would require Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem a week after the 2016 presidential elections will likely force Netanyahu present an alternative to the PLO-centric two-state plan sooner rather than later.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the 2016 elections, Obama will be unconstrained by concerns for Democratic candidates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Most of the Security Council resolutions against Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria were passed after the 1980 presidential elections when the then lame duck Jimmy Carter felt free to attack Israel at will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To avoid a repetition of that experience in late 2016, Netanyahu will have to offer an alternative to the failed two-state plan ahead of the 2016 presidential nominating conventions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s statements in the US this week present us with a mixed picture of his leadership.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu appears more resolute on the Palestinian threat than he has in the past. This is a good thing. But on the most pressing threat Israel faces today, his strong words rang hollow. The only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power is for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Until Israel adopts a policy for doing so, words will not suffice.</span></p>
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		<title>The Throat-Clearing President vs. the Throat-Cutting Terrorists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-throat-clearing-president-vs-the-throat-cutting-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-throat-clearing-president-vs-the-throat-cutting-terrorists</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2014 04:51:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242103</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's foreign policy of empty threats and pathetic wheedling. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-01-at-1.29.25-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242105" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-01-at-1.29.25-AM-383x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-10-01 at 1.29.25 AM" width="326" height="298" /></a>Last week, President Obama spoke to the United Nations about the growing threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In the course of that speech, he discussed a wide variety of threats to Western civilization, ranging from Ebola to global warming, from chaos in Syria to China&#8217;s incursions in the South China Sea. The speech seemed unfocused, meandering. But it held together thanks to one common thread: Barack Obama believes that words solve everything. Particularly his own.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s narcissism isn&#8217;t mere arrogance. It&#8217;s messianism. It&#8217;s pure faith that his verbiage can alter the course of history. &#8220;We are here,&#8221; Obama said, &#8220;because others realized that we gain more from cooperation than conquest.&#8221; Well, actually, no — the United Nations exists because evil nations were forced through conquest to admit that cooperation might be a more advantageous strategy.</p>
<p>&#8220;While small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun,&#8221; Obama said, &#8220;they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions.&#8221; Not exactly — millions of voices in North Korea have not altered the fate of those stuck in the world&#8217;s largest gulag, nor have millions of voices in Iran freed them of the tyranny of the mullahs.</p>
<p>&#8220;The ideology of ISIL or al Qaeda or Boko Haram will wilt and die if it is consistently exposed, confronted, and refuted in the light of day,&#8221; Obama spouted. If good argument killed bad argument, Islamism wouldn&#8217;t be on the march, but on the ash heap of history. Global politics, it turns out, is not a Harvard Law mock trial.</p>
<p>&#8220;We believe that right makes might,&#8221; Obama summed up, &#8220;that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones, that people should be able to choose their own future.&#8221; Hogwash would be too kind a word to describe this sort of highfaluting idiocy — if right made might, millions of Jews would still populate Europe.</p>
<p>In reality, right dictates that right arm itself — right must become might in order to emerge victorious. Americans know that.</p>
<p>Because Americans know that, Obama must occasionally bow to reality. And so, in the same speech in which Obama called for Russian, Chinese and Syrian conflicts to be resolved through diplomacy, he uttered the most un-Obamaesque comment of his entire presidency with regard to ISIS: &#8220;The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is eminently true. It is also so far out of Obama&#8217;s wheelhouse that he almost strained an oblique in making that statement. And, in fact, when polling doesn&#8217;t apply to him, Obama is happy to pressure other nations not to use the language of force — in the same speech, Obama pressured Israel to negotiate with its enemies, even though its enemies are of the exact same ilk as ISIS. If Obama does not bear a striking animus for the Jewish state, the best that can be said is that he wants Israel to be on the cutting edge of Western civilization&#8217;s rhetoric-first throat-cutting. After all, Obama tells Israel, too many Israelis are &#8220;ready to abandon the hard work of peace.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yes, the hard work of peace. With people who want to slit their throats.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the real Obama, not the puffed-chest commander-in-chief threatening to bomb virtually everyone in virtually every country in the Middle East.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s the problem. Lack of foreign policy comes from lack of belief in the principled use of force. And so Obama, the messianic narcissist, vacillates between two extremes: empty threats and pathetic wheedling. Neither works.</p>
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		<title>Kicking the PLO Habit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kicking-the-plo-habit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kicking-the-plo-habit</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2014 04:53:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse with the successors of Arafat in power.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si_-432x350.jpg" alt="abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si" width="285" height="231" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-world-Kicking-the-PLO-habit-376614">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The signs are everywhere that the time has come for Israel to abandon the PLO.</p>
<p>So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.</p>
<p>PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s speech last Friday at the UN General Assembly where he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide was not merely an abandonment of direct peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas abandoned the very concept of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Abbas called for the UN to pass a resolution that will require Israel to cede Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in their entirety to the PLO within a set period of time. No Israeli consideration can be taken into account. No Israel concern can be attended to.</p>
<p>As he put it, “Palestine refuses to have the right to freedom of her people, who are subjected to the terrorism by the racist occupying Power and its settlers, remain hostage to Israel’s security conditions.”</p>
<p>As is always the case, the immediate victims of Abbas’s blood libels are the Israeli Left. The politicians and media elite that have hitched their horse to the PLO were again left stuttering by the wayside.</p>
<p>For some, like Meretz chair Zehava Gal-On, stuttering is a fine option. So she pushed out an endorsement of Abbas’s genocide speech.</p>
<p>Gal-On said, “Meretz supports Abbas’s international efforts to bring the end of the occupation and to get international recognition as a [Palestinian] state and member of the UN before and as a corridor to reaching peace in bilateral negotiations between equals,” And she joined Abbas in blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for Abbas’s rejection of peace.</p>
<p>As the center-left commentator Dan Margalit noted in Yisrael Hayom, Gal-On and Meretz are basically alone in their embrace of Abbas today.</p>
<p>But they are far from alone in maintaining their slavish devotion to the idea that the only way to improve the situation is by giving Abbas whatever he wants.</p>
<p>And here the circle of victims of Abbas’s hostility expands from the Left to the entire country.</p>
<p>In a Facebook post on Saturday, Opposition leader and Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog latched all of Israel to the Left’s position by seeming to condemn Abbas while insisting that he is Israel’s only hope.</p>
<p>Herzog wrote that Abbas’s remarks, “were disappointing but not surprising.</p>
<p>“I have met with [Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen dozens of times: He is not a friend or a sympathetic ally. He is someone we have to make a deal with,” Herzog insisted.</p>
<p>Herzog then repeated the same points he and his fellow leftists have made for decades: that Abbas is better than Hamas, that Israel’s security cooperation with the PLO is really great, and that he only way to get the world to be nice to us is by maintaining our allegiance to Abbas and the PLO.</p>
<p>Herzog concluded by joining Gal-On and Abbas in attacking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and blaming him for Abbas’s open transformation into Israel’s enemy.</p>
<p>The first problem with Herzog’s statement is that if it is true that he has always known that Abbas is our enemy, then he just told us that he is a liar.</p>
<p>Like all his friends on the Left, Herzog has continuously embraced Abbas and insisted that he is a man of peace and a moderate and interested in making a deal with Israel.</p>
<p>Yet far worse than his apparent serial dishonesty is Herzog’s insistence that Israel remain in the same policy straitjacket of embracing the PLO.</p>
<p>It is true that Israel gets some security cooperation from the Palestinian security forces. But it is also true that the only guarantor of Israel’s security is the IDF. Were the Palestinian security forces to disband tomorrow, Israel would be better off, not worse off.</p>
<p>This is the case because as Abbas showed, the PA views Israel as its enemy. For tactical reasons PLO militias do work with the IDF from time to time. But their strategic goal – Israel’s destruction – is unchanging. Any doubts that this is the case were dispelled by Abbas’s remarks in New York.</p>
<p>As for the PLO being preferable to Hamas, the PLO is Hamas’s coalition partner. Abbas staunchly expressed his commitment to the unity government he forged with Hamas in his UN speech.</p>
<p>Supporting the PLO in Gaza is the same as supporting Hamas.</p>
<p>Finally, Israel’s international position is continuously degraded, and has been since 1993 as a direct result of its embrace of the PLO. As Abbas showed yet again on Friday, the PLO is leading an international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. By embracing the PLO, Israel is legitimizing the campaign against it.</p>
<p>Due to our adoption of the Left’s catechism, that Israel has no choice but to continue its embrace of the PLO, we find ourselves at this juncture &#8212; where the PLO no longer even tries to hide its rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state &#8212; unable to mount a concerted defense of our rights and legitimate concerns.</p>
<p>If we have no choice but to cut a deal with a group that openly seeks our annihilation in collaboration with Hamas, a terrorist group supported by Iran, then how can we defend ourselves and ensure our rights are respected and our interests are secured? The short answer is that we cannot. Since the PLO seeks our destruction, everything we do to strengthen it weakens us. Abbas made clear in his UN speech that he is playing a zero-sum game with Israel. Everything he gains comes at our expense.</p>
<p>Herzog and his comrades are right about one thing. Chances for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians will increase in an environment where the Palestinians enjoy civil rights and economic opportunities. The problem is that the PLO has harmed, and will continue to harm both for as long as it remains in power.</p>
<p>In large part because the PLO recognizes that freedom and economic opportunity engender social happiness and peace, for the past 21 years they have taken active steps to repress freedom and strangle economic opportunities. Only a Palestinian society that is poor, immiserated and indoctrinated to hate Jews will agree to serve as foot soldiers in a perpetual war.</p>
<p>To this end, the PLO has stolen billions in international aid funds, imprisoned and tortured its critics, built an economy based on graft and protection, and brainwashed the Palestinians with a narrative of hating Jews and blaming Israel for the misery to which the PLO has reduced them.</p>
<p>Israel has two options going forward to secure its rights and protect its interests. Both options are preferable to remaining where we are. But to adopt either of these policies, we first need to abandon the pretense that the PLO is a credible, legitimate actor.</p>
<p>The first option is to adopt Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s plan to apply Israeli law over Area C of Judea and Samaria – that is, the land lacking a significant Palestinian population, and agreeing to Palestinian self-rule in the Palestinian population centers.</p>
<p>For this option to work, Israel will have to cultivate a security and social environment among the Palestinians that is conducive to the emergence of a genuinely moderate leadership. This new leadership could replace the PLO and lead the Palestinians to a better, freer life based on peaceful coexistence with Israel and freedom in a self-governing territory.</p>
<p>The second option is to adopt the policy I set out in my recent book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. That policy involves implementing Israeli law over all of Judea and Samaria and providing the Palestinians with equal rights under Israeli law.</p>
<p>Palestinians will receive permanent residency status as the Arab residents of Jerusalem and the Druse of the Golan Heights received in 1967 and 1981. Like them, Palestinians will have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship. Those who abide by the criteria of Israel’s citizenship laws will receive citizenship.</p>
<p>Both of these options will improve chances for peace. Both policies with secure the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and foster their rights and prosperity.</p>
<p>Friday Abbas told clearly that he is our enemy, and indeed the enemy of the Palestinians whose lives he insists on imperiling and embittering by locking them into a perpetual war for the destruction of Israel.</p>
<p>He told us to move on.</p>
<p>And move on we must, first and foremost by kicking our PLO habit.</p>
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		<title>UN Appoints Great-Grandson of Caliph Who Opposes Free Speech as Human Rights Chief</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/un-appoints-great-grandson-of-caliph-who-opposes-free-speech-as-human-rights-chief/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=un-appoints-great-grandson-of-caliph-who-opposes-free-speech-as-human-rights-chief</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2014 16:28:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jordan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235202</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who better than a descendant of a Caliph to push for a global Islamic Caliphate.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/un_human_rights.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-235203" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/un_human_rights-438x350.jpg" alt="un_human_rights" width="438" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>The UN is not just a joke. It&#8217;s also a really expensive waste of money. <a href="http://vladtepesblog.com/2014/06/19/sunni-muslim-is-next-united-nations-human-rights-chief/">But sometimes it can be hard to </a>remember that.</p>
<blockquote><p>Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al Hussein was officially appointed by the 193-Nation UN General Assembly to become the next United Nations human rights chief in Geneva.</p>
<p>“Prince Zeid’s work on sexual violence and his leadership on the international criminal court give a good foundation for this new role,” said Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.</p></blockquote>
<p>I bet.</p>
<blockquote><p>Jordanian law protects the perpetrators of honor crimes.</p>
<p>The section of the penal code most frequently invoked on behalf of perpetrators of “honor” killings is article 98. This statute mandates reduction of penalty for a perpetrator (of either gender) who commits a crime in a “state of great fury [or “fit of fury”] resulting from an unlawful and dangerous act on the part of the victim.</p>
<p>Moreover, courts may further halve the sentence if the victim’s family “waives” its right to file a complaint of the crime.</p>
<p>In murders for “honor,” given the family’s complicity in the crime, the family nearly always “waives” the right to file a complaint.66 Thus, “honor” killers may receive sentences of six months—and often do. If a killer has served that much time awaiting trial, the sentence may be commuted to time served and he may walk away a free man.</p>
<p>Article 98 was applied, for example, in a 2001 case in which the defendant had killed his sister “after seeing a man leave her house</p></blockquote>
<p>Prince Zeid&#8217;s work on sexual violence has obviously been exemplary.</p>
<p>So what are Zeid&#8217;s qualifications for the job? Well he is a cousin of the King of Jordan. As a result he&#8217;s been appointed to a variety of positions. He&#8217;s also a great-grandson of Caliph Hussein bin Ali, who claimed to rule all the Arabs, before he got taken down by the House of Saud.</p>
<p>(And if you think the Saudi gang still don&#8217;t resent all Europeans over it and want revenge, you don&#8217;t know the Middle East well.)</p>
<p>The UN has often been a joke, but appointing a member of an unelected monarchy (who is also a claimant for the thrones of Iraq and Syria, good luck with that) as human rights chief is a sublime gag.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s like the UN is desperately trying to let us all in on on the joke.</p>
<blockquote><p>A strong advocate of international justice, Prince Zeid had extensive involvement in the creation of the International Criminal Court.</p></blockquote>
<p>I feel so much better now. But don&#8217;t get any ideas about the Prince. His <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/26/the_scandal_of_ambassador_zeid">royal highness remains a firm Cartoonophobe</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Jordan&#8217;s voting record on the highly divisive attempt to force U.N. states to criminalize the &#8220;defamation of religion&#8221; leaves a huge question mark about how aggressively Ambassador Zeid will defend free speech in the sphere of religion, where this right is constantly under attack at both the national and international level.</p>
<p>During both of Ambassador Zeid&#8217;s periods as Jordan&#8217;s ambassador to the U.N., Jordan voted in favor of these resolutions when they were introduced at the General Assembly.</p>
<p>Jordan&#8217;s voting record in the U.N. is consistent with the country&#8217;s domestic record on blasphemy. In 2006, two newspaper editors who reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad previously published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were sentenced to two months of imprisonment. In 2011, Jordan initiated a trial in absentia against Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, the creator of the offending cartoon, as well as 19 Danish journalists and editors who had published the cartoon in various news outlets. In 2009, Jordanian poet Eslam Samhan was sentenced to imprisonment and a fine for blasphemy after having included Quranic verses in his poetry. It was developments such as these that the 2010 resolution on defamation of religion hailed and sought to enact at the international level, turning human rights into a weapon against religious dissent and nonconformism rather than principles protecting the freedom of conscience and pluralism.</p></blockquote>
<p>Who better than a descendant of a Caliph to push for a global Islamic Caliphate.</p>
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		<title>An Emboldened Iran Takes the Stage at the United Nations</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/an-emboldened-iran-takes-the-stage-at-the-united-nations/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-emboldened-iran-takes-the-stage-at-the-united-nations</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:48:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear deal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rouhani]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241812</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why prospects for cooperation with the Islamic Republic look dimmer than ever. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rouhani_3048708b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241813" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rouhani_3048708b-411x350.jpg" alt="rouhani_3048708b" width="281" height="239" /></a>On Thursday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani addressed the United Nations in a <a href="http://www.un.org/en/ga/69/meetings/gadebate/25sep/pdf/IR_en.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">speech</span></a> replete with anti-Western sentiments, anti-Semitism, tiresome tropes regarding the genesis of terror, and promises to continue pursuing his nation’s nuclear program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">While acknowledging that terror had become a global issue, Rouhani sought to put the blame everywhere else. “Today’s anti-Westernism is the offspring of yesterday’s colonialism,” Rouhani insisted, proceeding to take a none-too-subtle shot at America, noting that “certain intelligence agencies have put blades in the hands of madmen, who now spare no one.” Apparently omitted from this list of madmen is Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has received direct support from Iran in the form of financial assistance, and despite all denials to the contrary, hundreds of Revolutionary Guard troops <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-670210937"><span style="color: #1255cc;">fighting</span></a> in that nation. Iran also supports <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/senate-sanction-bill-target-hezbollah.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Hezbollah</span></a> and <a href="http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/65462.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Hamas</span></a>, both of whom have been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Thus, it was no surprise that Rouhani characterized the last war between Hamas and Israel as a conflict in which “thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza” were victims of the “Zionist regime’s aggression,” even as he characterized his own nation—the one that has <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183332#.VCRAc-fFm3c"><span style="color: #1255cc;">openly boasted</span></a> about sharing missile technology with Hamas to improve their ability to hit Israeli cities—as one of “tranquil secure and stable nations&#8221; in the Middle East.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani also aligned himself with the American left’s thoroughly misguided notions about the root of terror, “that germinates in poverty, discrimination, humiliation and injustice” that “grows in a culture of violence.” <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183332#.VCRAc-fFm3c"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Several studies</span></a> have thoroughly debunked that contention, yet it provides Rouhani and other apologists the opportunity to obscure the reality that Islamic fundamentalism is the primary driver of terror throughout the world. Thus, Rouhani expresses “astonishment” that groups like ISIS “call themselves Islamic” and that the Western media “repeats this false claim, which provokes hatred of all Muslims” and is &#8220;part of a (sic) Islamophobic project.” Like every other religion, Rouhani insists Islam is peaceful, and like every other prophet, the taking of even one innocent life is condemned by the prophet Mohammed.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Not quite. The Qur’an is <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">filled</span></a> with verses promoting violence and death against unbelievers, all the innocence in the world notwithstanding. Furthermore, the concept of <a href="http://www.inquiryintoislam.com/2010/06/what-is-abrogation-in-islam.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">abrogation</span></a> explains that later verses in the Qur’an take precedence over earlier ones. Almost all of the violent verses appear later in the book.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani nonetheless continued his deceptive characterization of the real problems of the Middle East. “The strategic blunders of the West in the Middle-East, Central Asia and the Caucuses have turned these parts of the world into a haven for terrorists and extremists,” he insists, citing Iraq, Afghanistan and the “improper interference in Syria” as examples. He further insists the Middle East wants democracy—even as it impossible to believe he is unaware of the reality that democracy and Sharia Law are fundamentally incompatible systems of governance.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That reality made itself plain last week, when six Iranians were given <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/09/iran-happy-dancers-get-suspended-sentences-201491913331993392.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">suspended</span></a> sentences of six months and 91 lashes for “obscene behavior” for appearing in a video singing the American pop song “Happy.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">They got off easy. In August, 16-year-old Ateqeh Rajabi was <a href="http://www.meforum.org/1000/why-do-muslims-execute-innocent-people#_ftnref2"><span style="color: #1255cc;">hanged</span></a> in the Iranian town of Neka. She was executed for having sex with her boyfriend. She was one of several victims executed for sexual “crimes” that violated Sharia Law.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, Rouhani addressed the issue of sanctions, calling them a “strategic mistake against a moderate and independent nation under the current sensitive condition of our region.” He falsely framed the issue as one where the “will of Iranian people,&#8221; rather than the economic squeeze imposed on his country, reinvigorated the current negotiations that were continuing in good faith, even as he warned that any other solution to Iran’s pursuit of nukes would be a “grave mistake.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani made it clear that his nation remains &#8220;committed to our peaceful nuclear program” and that the &#8220;avoidance of excessive demands in the negotiations by our counterparts is the prerequisite for success in the negotiations.” He then tied those negotiations to the “beginning of a multilateral collaboration aimed at promoting security, peace and development in our region and beyond.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In short, Iran wants to use nuclear negotiations as a bargaining chip in the fight against terror.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Obama administration has sent out <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/25/rouhani-ties-iran-cooperation-on-mideast-violence-to-nuke-deal/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">conflicting signals</span></a> with regard to such a scenario. Publicly they claim they will not share intelligence, or coordinate military activity, with the nation <a href="http://www.state.gov/p/us/rm/2013/202684.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">still designated</span></a> &#8220;world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism&#8221; by the State Department. Yet prior to bombing ISIS in Syria, the administration notified Iran about it, and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/23/us-syria-crisis-usa-iran-idUSKCN0HI2F220140923"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reassured</span></a> them they would not target the government of Bashar Assad, who remains a terrorist-abetting proxy of Iran. Furthermore, an unnamed Iranian official told Reuters that &#8220;military and security issues are being shared to fight against IS.” Secretary of State John Kerry also revealed he was &#8220;open to have a conversation at some point in time if there&#8217;s a way to find something constructive.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani reiterated that a “historic” nuclear agreement with Iran is one where the West can show “that it does not oppose the advancement and development of others and does not discriminate when it comes to adhering to international rules and regulations.” He doubled-down on those questioning his nation’s motives, insisting “the notion that Iran seeks to control other Muslim countries in the region is a myth fanned in the recent years in the context of an Iranophobic context,” and that those who do so “breed imaginary enemies to sustain tensions and sow division and conflict.” He called for a “right approach” to the terror problem, insisting the proper solution comes from “within the region and regionally provided solution (sic) with international support and not from the (sic) outside the region.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As it stands now, Rouhani’s “solution” aligns perfectly with an Obama administration seemingly convinced it can fight a proxy war from the air, while the nations of the Middle East ostensibly cobble together the “boots on the ground” necessary to degrade and destroy ISIS and other terror entities congealing in the caliphate that straddles Iraq and Syria. In the meantime, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-abaci <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/islamic-state-said-to-plot-subway-attacks-in-u-s-france.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealed</span></a> that ISIS terrorists captured in his nation said the group is planning subway attacks in Paris and the United States.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One wonders when—or is that if—it will occur to the Obama administration that prolonging this conflict emboldens terrorists, not only in the Middle East, but all over the world, including the 40 ISIS fighters from America the administration <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2765635/Obama-administration-confirms-American-ISIS-fighters-returned-US-FBI-looking-congressman-spilled-beans-week.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">admits</span></a> have returned home. With regard to Iran, prolonging the conflict allows them to use it as leverage in what ought to be seen as fruitless negotiations over Iran&#8217;s nuclear program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In fact the negotiations are now bordering on the absurd, as the administration has reportedly floated a proposal that allows Iran to <a href="http://www.manilatimes.net/breaking_news/republicans-worry-us-let-iran-disconnect-scrap-nuclear-centrifuges/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">disconnect</span></a> thousands of centrifuges, rather than dismantle them. A senior administration official offered the administration’s rationale to the <i>New York Times,</i> insisting that “it takes a lot of time to put a cascade together, and piping is one of the most time-consuming parts of that laborious process.” Yet other experts noted this idea has been floated many times over the last decade, a reality that likely indicates a certain level of desperation on the part of the P5+1 nations who are under pressure to complete a deal—even a bad one&#8211;by Nov. 24.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Toward that end, the Obama administration has been touting the idea that Rouhani is a “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359045/rouhani-obamas-moderate-iranian-lifeline-anne-bayefsky"><span style="color: #1255cc;">moderate</span></a>,” a notion that calculatingly ignores his abysmal human rights <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/irwin-cotler/human-rights-rouhani_b_5283081.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">record</span></a> and the reality that he is little more than a front man for the genuine seat of power in Iran: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his band of nihilistic mullahs. Mullahs who yearn for the re-emergence of the Twelfth or Hidden Imam that will bring about a period of chaos. In 2010 Khamenei <a href="http://www.thememriblog.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">claimed</span></a> he met the Hidden Imam and said he was assured that his reemergence would occur while Khamenei was still Supreme Leader.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani’s speech at the U.N. should be seen for exactly what it is: a more aggressive &#8220;charm offensive&#8221; by the latest representative of the world’s foremost sponsor of state terror. Moreover, a nuclear Iran would precipitate a nightmarish nuclear arms race in the most unstable region in the world. And despite every obfuscation on the part of the Obama administration, and their equally weak-kneed European allies, those are the real stakes. Stakes that include the real possibility of Iran supplying such weapons to terrorists.</p>
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		<title>The Incredible Lightness of Being Barack Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:56:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cliche]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241762</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A speech of clichés, platitudes and moral idiocy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/85.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241763" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/85-433x350.jpg" alt="85" width="318" height="257" /></a>Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.</p>
<p>First was the obligatory call “to renew the purpose of the U.N.’s founding,” which apparently is “to observe and enforce international norms,” the most important being “to ensure that no nation can subjugate its neighbors and claim their territory” and to promote “the path of diplomacy and peace and the ideals this institution is designed to uphold.” Such phrases are so common and uncritically received that we forget “international norms” do not exist. Different peoples have different “norms” about, for example, the use of violence to achieve their aims. Nations will sign treaties that seemingly express our norms, but that doesn’t mean they believe in them. More often, such treaties are mere mechanisms for one nation to get what it wants from another. The sorry history of U.S. arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union and then Russia, treaties the Russians violated for decades to improve their nuclear arsenal at our expense, is just one example.</p>
<p>As for seizing territory by force, the U.N. did nothing to prevent Turkey from seizing northern Cyprus, or China from seizing Tibet, and more recently Russia from seizing Crimea. The Serbs’ attempts in the &#8217;90s to “claim territory” were stopped not by the U.N., but by American bombs. So too was Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. Nor should we be surprised at the serial failure of the U.N. to enforce its lofty founding principles. Nations belong to the U.N. because they think they can use it to advance their interests, not “to enforce international norms,” especially when their own “norms” see nothing wrong with using duplicity and force to achieve their aims. Indeed, the continuing violence justified by other “norms” since the U.N.’s founding has claimed some 41 million lives. The U.N. serves the conflicting, zero-sum interests of the member states, not the “path of diplomacy and peace.”</p>
<p>From that preposterous beginning, the speech went downhill. “Islam teaches peace,” the President intoned. No, Islam teaches <i>submission</i>. There is no peace for those who refuse to submit, even for Muslims considered heretics by other Muslims, but especially for “polytheists” or “infidels.” In their case, Islam teaches jihad against them if they refuse to accept the “call” to convert. Far from being extremists “who have perverted one of the world’s great religions,” as Obama scolded, the proliferating jihadist outfits that are kidnapping, torturing, raping, beheading, and enslaving people around the globe are acting on the doctrines and past practices of Islam’s founding fathers.</p>
<p>So Obama might think that their “nightmarish vision . . . would divide the world into adherents and infidels,” but it is traditional, orthodox Islam that divides the world into the <i>dar al harb</i>, the “house of war” against which the faithful must wage jihad, and the <i>dar al islam</i>, the “house of Islam,” the ummah of faithful Muslims. Obama may really believe that “No God condones such terror” like the beheadings perpetrated by Islamic State, but it is the Koran, the literal words of Allah, that says <span style="color: #272727;">at 8.12: “</span>I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”</p>
<p>Such “willful blindness,” as Andrew McCarthy has called it, to the traditional motivations of today’s jihadists depends on clichéd lies like those Obama trades in. Perhaps that blindness explains his astonishing praise in his U.N. speech for Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, whose group has endorsed Hamas, who supported a 2004 fatwa calling on the faithful to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq and another forbidding any “normalization” of Israel, and was associated with an organization whose founder called for “<span style="color: #2f2d2f;">the death of Jews and Americans.”</span></p>
<p>Then there is the last refuge of the morally addled, moral equivalency. In his remarks on the Arab war against Israel, Obama can’t resist this cowardly cop out. Speaking of the endless and fruitless “peace process,” Obama intones, “We cannot afford to turn away from this effort––not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza.” Of course, it is not Israelis “taking” these children, it is the Hamas jihadists who use them as human shields, sacrificing their own children in order to gin up international condemnations in order to isolate Israel. Worse yet, such a sentence completely ignores the most important dimension of this violence: the decades of wars and terrorist attacks instigated by Arabs whose doctrinal hatred of Jews has compelled them since 1947 &#8212; when they violated a U.N. resolution with impunity–– to serially refuse a state for the Palestinian Arabs or agree to “two states living side by side, in peace and security,” yet another stale cliché useful for pretending to say something when one has nothing important to say. In reality, the Palestinian Arabs have made it clear that what they want is to destroy Israel.</p>
<p>Yet nothing matches the surreal moral idiocy of Obama’s next indulgence of moral equivalency:</p>
<blockquote><p>I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri––where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here is one of the staple dogmas of the Progressive mind: the sins and crimes of America that require apologies and reparations, even as the millions of dead, tortured, and imprisoned in other nations are shrugged off. Obama began his presidency with the “apology tour” in which he donned the hair shirt of American guilt for its imperialist depredations, its racist sins, and its global exploitation of others. Then as now, Obama ignores important distinctions. To equate the atrocities of Islamic State or Hamas, or the shooting down of a passenger jet in Ukraine that cost nearly 300 lives, with what probably will turn out to be the justified shooting of a lawbreaker assaulting a police officer, bespeaks either delusion or the sophistic pandering to an audience comprising the representatives of nations most of which are some of the planet’s most brutal and murderous regimes.</p>
<p>This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clichés that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.</p>
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		<title>Tolerating Hate Is Not an Option</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/brigitte-gabriel/tolerating-hate-is-not-an-option/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tolerating-hate-is-not-an-option</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:07:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brigitte Gabriel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[acceptance speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brigitte Gabriel]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240665</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[My speech to the United Nations against the evils of anti-Semitism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Hamas.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240746" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Hamas.jpg" alt="Hamas" width="303" height="202" /></a><em>Editor&#8217;s note: The keynote speech below was delivered by <strong>Brigitte Gabriel</strong> at the United Nations on September 8, 2014 during a symposium on <strong>Global Anti-Semitism: A Threat To International Peace And Security</strong>.</em></p>
<p>Ladies and Gentleman,</p>
<p>It is an honor and privilege to be here today speaking in defense of Jews worldwide and against the evils of anti-Semitism. As you notice, I am wearing a Star of David. This necklace was given to me during a book signing in Dallas, TX by a man who lost his beloved wife in a tragic crash. He said to me crying,</p>
<blockquote><p>“This necklace was my wife’s favorite, she died wearing it. She considered you her hero for your stand for the Jewish people. I want you to have it. Promise me you’ll wear it.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I couldn’t find a more befitting time to honor her, than now &#8212; wearing this Star of David as a Lebanese giving a keynote speech at the United Nation in defense of the Jewish people.</p>
<p>We are here to address the rise of global anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, Natan Sharansky explained:</p>
<blockquote><p>“[C]lassical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, ‘new anti-Semitism’ is aimed at the Jewish state.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Mr. Sharansky devised what he called the “3D test.” The three Ds are “demonization,” “double standards” and “delegitimization.”</p>
<p>“Demonization” is making bizarre, ugly claims that have no basis in reality. Comparisons between Israel and the Nazis, or assertions that Israel has been committing “genocide” against the Palestinians are examples of “demonization.” Such claims are nonsense. If Israel has been committing “genocide” against the Palestinians, then why has the population of Palestinians increased more than 600% since 1948? Israel must be the most incompetent mass murderer in the history of the world.</p>
<p>When Israel is held to a standard that no other country in the world would be expected to meet, that double standard is itself anti-Semitism. For instance, Israel is a vibrant democracy where human rights are protected and respected. And yet the United Nations&#8217; so-called Human Rights Commission spends most of its time and effort investigating and condemning Israel, while they gloss over or ignore the massive and continuing human rights violations that occur in Iran, Cuba, China and many other brutal repressive autocracies.</p>
<p>Delegitimization of Israel is to assert that, of all the peoples in the world, only the Jewish people do not have a right to statehood. In fact, Israel’s historical, legal and moral right to exist as a Jewish State is a codified principle of international law. This codification is explicitly based on the long, continuous and well-documented connection of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel. To deny the connection of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel is anti-Semitism in its purest form.</p>
<p>But why should anti-Semitism matter to the rest of the world? It should &#8212; not merely because it’s morally repugnant, which it most definitely is.</p>
<p>The world should care about anti-Semitism because of fundamental self-preservation.</p>
<p>The stark truth is that the world stands at the edge of a deep, dark precipice. At the bottom lurks another Holocaust that has already begun. This time the genocide is <em>not only</em> against the Jews. The so-called “Islamic State” has made it abundantly clear it can be committed against non Jews. ISIS is persecuting and killing members of every religious, ethnic and nationalist community it encounters.</p>
<p>ISIS is slaughtering Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Druze, and Yazidis.</p>
<p>ISIS floods the Internet with stomach-churning images and videos of mass executions, severed heads and crucifixions. We see children slaughtered in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. This viciousness is part of a calculated strategy explicitly intended to terrorize anyone and everyone who does not submit to their version of Islam.</p>
<p>ISIS has officially declared its intent to rule the world. Their founding document, the declaration of their caliphate, bears the modest title of [Arabic], “This Is The Promise of God.” They declare that God promised to Muslims, quote, “leadership of the world and mastership of the earth.” End quote.</p>
<p>Their declaration of a world-wide caliphate reveals their governing philosophy:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;By Allah, if you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and west will submit to you.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Remember, ladies and gentlemen, savagery is not merely their strategy. It is an article of their faith. They commit genocide in the name of Allah.</p>
<p>Israel has been familiar with the concept, and the reality, of genocide in the name of Allah for a long time. The war that ISIS has declared on the world is the same as the war that Hamas has been waging against Israel for decades. The only difference, again, is focus. ISIS seeks a world-wide caliphate. Hamas is focused on the destruction of Israel.</p>
<p>However, their motivation, methods, and morals are the same.</p>
<p>In terms of brutal methods and lack of morals, ISIS has recently shot, hacked and killed its way to the top of the world’s terrorist organizations. Meanwhile Hamas has been committing mind-numbing mass atrocities for decades. They use to wrap their children in dynamite and nails, and send them to blow up Israeli buses and restaurants. They rejoiced at the death of Israeli children, and glorified the death of their own. Today they use them as human shields</p>
<p>I know something about children being used as human shields. In 1976 when I was 11 years old, Palestinians in South Lebanon used me and my family as human shields. They employed exactly the same technique that Hamas uses in Gaza today. They set up artillery or rocket launchers in front of my bomb shelter and fired a barrage towards Israel.   They would pack up and run as quickly as possible, leaving my family to the devastation of return fire.</p>
<p>Today, Hamas hides behind human shields on a much larger scale. Hamas routinely uses schools, mosques, hospitals and other civilian locations for weapons storage, missile launch sites, and other military purposes. They fire rockets and mortars from these places with the explicit intention of drawing return fire from the Israelis, hoping that will produce photogenic civilian corpses for display in the media.</p>
<p>Hamas and ISIS share a common motivation. They want to impose Islam. This is in the charter of Hamas as it is in ISIS’s declaration of the “caliphate.” The charter of Hamas declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”</p>
<p>The most revealing words in the Charter of Hamas are a quotation from Islamic scripture:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.&#8221; [Hadith of Sahih Muslim, BOOK 41].</p></blockquote>
<p>But Hamas has a problem.</p>
<p>In Israel, Jews don’t hide behind stones or trees. They stand up and defend themselves. Israelis have learned from history that if someone repeatedly says they’re going to kill you, <em>they mean it</em>. A lesson the world is only now learning.</p>
<p>Seventy years ago the world stood by as the Jews of Europe went up the chimneys.   Today, the Jews of Israel aren’t going to go quietly to the slaughter as they sit on the front line of fighting for Western civilization. Those who seek to exterminate the Jews are not going to stop with the Jews. That should have been the lesson of the Holocaust. That must be the lesson of the rise of ISIS.</p>
<p>Once the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians was legitimized against Israel, it was legitimized <em>everywhere</em>, constrained by nothing more than the strong-held beliefs of those who would become the mass murderers.  Because the Palestinians were encouraged by most of the world to believe that the murder of innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic to advance the Palestinian nationalist cause, the Islamists believe that they may commit mass murder anywhere in the world to advance their holy cause. As a result, we suffer from a plague of Islamic terrorism, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan, from Nairobi to New York, authored and perfected by the Palestinians. Israel and the United States are not separate targets of Islamic terrorism. The whole world is their target.</p>
<p>Evil dwells when courageous men become bystanders. Lies spread when the informed become silent. Society deteriorates when apathy replaces activism. Tyranny comes when leaders become mediocre and haters become organized.</p>
<p>Today we are summoned to lead in our communities and our nations. We are summoned to wake up the apathetic and inspire the despaired, to silence the liars and educate the concerned, to speak tolerance instead of resentment, forgiveness instead of revenge, love instead of hate, and peace instead of war. We are here at the United Nations today because each one of us is a leader and an instrument of change with history as our final judge.</p>
<p>I, as the leader of ACT! for America.org, the largest national security organization in America with chapters in 11 countries around the world, am committed to do whatever possible to stand up with the Jewish people and defend them.</p>
<p>The civilized world must band together in solidarity to ensure that people of all faiths can live in peace and harmony and that Jews are never persecuted and victimized by barbaric, murderous ideologies ever again. That Jews can walk in any street in the world with their head held high and safe. That Israel, the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East, continues to shine as a beacon of light in the darkest region in the world.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
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		<title>The UN&#8217;s Perversion of Human Rights</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/the-uns-perversion-of-human-rights/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-uns-perversion-of-human-rights</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Sep 2014 04:02:02 +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=240428</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Investigating the IDF instead of Hamas for "war crimes."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/22nd-session-of-the-human-rights-council-at-the-united-nations-in-geneva.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240429" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/22nd-session-of-the-human-rights-council-at-the-united-nations-in-geneva-450x328.jpg" alt="Delegates talk before the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva" width="296" height="216" /></a>If one doubted that the world has gone topsy-turvy, where good is being persecuted and evil labeled as victim, all that is needed for proof is to consider the behavior and actions of the United Nations (UN), and especially the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), where non-democratic regimes hold sway, and Israel is the habitual scape-goat. What is over the top, however, is the UN decision to send an Inquiry Committee to investigate alleged “war crimes” committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the recent Protective Edge operation in Gaza.</p>
<p><i>Reuters</i> reported (Monday, August 11, 2014) that the UN named experts to an international commission of inquiry into possible human rights violations and war crimes committed by both sides during Israel&#8217;s military offensive in the Gaza Strip. The so-called “experts” include William Schabas, a Canadian professor of international law who will head the panel, and Doudou Diene, a Senegalese veteran UN human rights expert.  Amal Alamuddin, a British-Lebanese lawyer engaged to be married to Hollywood actor George Clooney was also named, but Alamuddin has announced she will not be participating in the inquiry.</p>
<p>While the fighting in Gaza was ongoing and Hamas was firing rockets daily at civilians throughout Israel, the UNHRC had already condemned Israel. Its resolution was adopted by a vote of 29 states in favor, 1 against, and 17 abstentions. It stated that “The Council strongly condemns the failure of Israel, the occupying power, to end its prolonged occupation of occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem; and condemned in the strongest terms the widespread, systematic, and <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14897&amp;LangID=E"><span style="color: #0433ff;">gross violation</span></a> of international human rights and fundamental freedoms arising from the Israeli military operations carried out in the occupied Palestinian Territory since 13 June 2014 that may amount to international crimes, directly resulting in the killing of more than 650 Palestinians, most of them civilians…” Throughout the resolution Hamas’ name was not mentioned nor was it pointed out that Hamas provoked the conflict by deliberately firing rockets at Israel.</p>
<p>Even before the Israeli–Hamas ceasefire agreement went into effect, the UNHRC in Geneva rushed to set up a kangaroo court headed by the blatantly anti-Israel William Schabas. The same Schabas said last year that he “would like to see <a href="http://mida.org.il/2014/08/13/schabas-netanyahu-head/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Netanyahu</span></a> within the dock of the International Criminal Court.” Confronted by a reporter on his visceral hatred of Netanyahu, Schabas explained that he was echoing the Goldstone Report that related to Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009, except that it was Ehud Olmert and not Netanyahu who served as Prime Minister then. When asked if he considered Hamas a terrorist organization and whether Hamas too, will be investigated, Schabas declined to respond.</p>
<p>Speaking before Israeli naval cadets on Tuesday (September 2, 2014), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the UN hypocrisy. He stated that “All of you IDF soldiers are part of the most moral army in the world, and we will stand against any attempts of hypocritical organizations to criticize you. If the <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/184691"><span style="color: #0433ff;">UN</span></a> wants to set up a commission of inquiry – let them investigate Hamas’ war crimes instead of the Israeli soldiers who behaved in an exemplary manner.”</p>
<p>In the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), both the coalition and the opposition criticized the UN for dispatching a commission of inquiry to Gaza to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. They were likewise critical of the appointed head of the commission William Schabas, whose biased statement against Israeli leaders made the commission nothing but a kangaroo court.</p>
<p>During the Protective Edge operation in Gaza last month, the IDF dropped leaflets in 14 areas in Gaza, urging residents to temporarily leave their homes. The IDF provided instructions as to which areas civilians may go to in order to seek safety. Juxtapose that with the Hamas’ behavior of deliberately risking the lives of its people by using them as human shields, which is in contravention of international law and constitutes a war crime.</p>
<p>British army Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan had this to say (July 27, 2014) about the IDF, “I believe that on the basis of everything that I&#8217;ve seen, that everything the IDF does to <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4548821,00.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">protect civilians</span></a> and to stop the death of innocent civilians is a great deal more than any other army, and it&#8217;s more than the British and the American armies.”</p>
<p>What is most disturbing about the UNHRC is the hypocrisy when it comes to Israel. The UNHRC Commission of Inquiry on Syria presented its findings on August 27, 2014. In it was a detailed human cost of the Syrian conflict. It charged that both the Assad regime and the opposition groups, and in particular the fanatical jihadist ISIS, were responsible for mass killings (170,000 at the minimum), civilian suffering and disregard for the safety of women and children. ISIS in particular committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, murder, enslavement of women, public executions, amputations, lashing in public squares, and training children as young as ten in military camps.</p>
<p>While the truth about ISIS committing war crimes and crimes against humanity have been largely revealed, those committed by Hamas (publicly executing 20 Palestinians for alleged collaboration with Israel) in Gaza have not, at least not by UNHRC. Professor Michael Curtis pointed out that Hamas’ relentless aggression against Israeli civilians was publically exposed on July 9, 2014 by Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian representative to the UNHRC. Khraishi stated that “The rockets fired from Gaza toward Israel are each and every one a <a href="http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5197/comparing_crimes_against_humanity_hamas_and_isis"><span style="color: #0433ff;">crime against humanity</span></a> whether they hit or miss, because they are directed at civilian targets. That is why Israel resorted to an attack against Gaza.”</p>
<p>Hamas, with total disregard for its civilian population, stored rockets in hospitals, schools, and mosques, as well as in apartment buildings and private homes. It used the civilians at these locations as human shields, anticipating that an Israeli retaliation (following over 4000 rockets fired at Israel) would kill Palestinian civilians, particularly women and children. Hamas sacrificed its people in order to win the public relations war. Still, the international media by and large bought into Hamas’ charade. Hamas’ cynical exploitation of its civilian deaths, its use of human shields, and the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.</p>
<p>To understand the perversion that is the UNHRC, let us look at the UN as a whole. Of the 193 member states, 120 belong to the Non-Allied Movement (NAM) and of the 120, 57 are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which in turn is dominated by the 22 Arab League states. Arab/Muslim leverage has turned the UN into a blunt instrument against Israel. The 29 states who voted in favor of the blatantly prejudiced resolution are non-free states according to the Freedom House. The U.S. was the only state to vote against the resolution. The European Union states of Britain, France, Germany and Italy, all with a colonial past, and beset by guilt, abstained. They were fearful to upset the NAM.</p>
<p>The UNHRC is probably the best example of a world gone topsy-turvy. The non-free nations run the show at the UN while the free democracies cower before them. In the process, Israel, a country with a just cause, a praise worthy democracy in a sea of oppression, is being scapegoated and condemned. It is time for nations seeking justice and fairness to end this bizarre show called UNHRC, and reestablish a UNHRC based on nations with bona fide human rights credentials.</p>
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		<title>Putin’s Unchecked Aggression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/putins-unchecked-aggression/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=putins-unchecked-aggression</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2014 04:12:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crimea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[invasion]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239947</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How to avoid Russia's checkmate. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1392924232400.cached.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239961" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1392924232400.cached-400x350.jpg" alt="1392924232400.cached" width="307" height="269" /></a>Russia has expanded the scope of its military intervention in Ukraine. Following on the heels of its illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea and arming of the separatists fighting the Ukrainian government in eastern Ukraine, Russian regular troops have now joined the separatists’ fight. They are equipped with heavy weaponry, including armored personnel carriers. And a new southeastern front has been opened by the Russian-backed separatists which would enable Russia to gain effective control over a vital land link between Russia and Crimea.</p>
<p>Determined not to allow Ukrainian forces to quell the separatist rebellion, which they were well on their way to doing, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to use more Russian military might to tip the scales in the separatists’ favor.</p>
<p>On August 26<sup>th</sup> – the same day that Putin was meeting with Ukrainian President Poroshenko in Minsk, Belarus to talk about peace &#8211; satellite imagery showed Russian combat units southeast of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.  Ukraine also detained regular Russian Army personnel from the 9th brigade, whom Russia claimed had mistakenly wandered into Ukraine.</p>
<p>A separatist leader boasted that three or four thousand Russian soldiers have joined their fight, whom he claimed were using their vacation time to help their comrades. NATO has estimated that at least 1,000 Russian troops were present in Ukraine. Dismissing Russia’s “hollow denials,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on August 29<sup>th</sup> that</p>
<blockquote><p>it is now clear that Russian troops and equipment have illegally crossed the border. This is a blatant violation of Ukraine&#8217;s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It defies all diplomatic efforts for a peaceful solution.</p></blockquote>
<p>United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, in his briefing to an emergency session of the UN Security Council on August 28th, referred to the “deeply alarming reports of Russian military involvement in this new wave of escalation. If confirmed, it would constitute a direct contravention of international law and of the UN Charter.”</p>
<p>Mr. Feltman added that, “as arms and heavy weaponry reportedly continue to flow unabated into Ukraine from Russia,” illegal armed groups operating in the Donetsk region</p>
<blockquote><p>have reportedly intensified their activities over the last two days, spreading violence along Ukraine’s southern coast, in the direction of the key strategic port of Mariupol…The southward spread of fighting, along the border with the Russian Federation and the Sea of Azov, marks a dangerous escalation in the conflict.</p></blockquote>
<p>After Mr. Feltman spoke, each member of the Security Council, as well as the Ukrainian UN representative, chimed in with their remarks. Lithuania, which had requested the emergency meeting, went first. Its ambassador accused Russia of committing multiple violations of international law in its “aggression” in Ukraine. She demanded that Russia remove its fighters from Ukraine.</p>
<p>U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power lambasted Russia for ignoring the repeated calls of the Security Council to stop its aggressive actions. “Instead of listening, instead of heeding the demands of the international community and the rules of the international order, at every step, Russia has come before this Council to say everything except the truth,” Ambassador Power said. “It has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied.”</p>
<p>Ambassador Power warned that the United States and its partners will work together &#8220;to ratchet up the consequences on Russia.&#8221; France’s UN representative concurred.</p>
<p>British UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, the Security Council president during August, said: &#8220;Now we see irrefutable evidence of regular Russian forces operating inside Ukraine.&#8221; He reeled off numbers of heavy weaponry in the hands of the separatists, most of which was supplied by Russia, including 100 tanks, 80 armored personnel carriers, 500 anti-tank weapons and more than 100 artillery pieces.</p>
<p>During the Security Council meeting, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin did his best to fend off the condemnations of Russia’s actions coming from other members of the Council and the Ukrainian representative.  Sure, there were Russian “volunteers” present in eastern parts of Ukraine, Ambassador Churkin said. &#8220;No one is hiding that,&#8221; he claimed. But then, in an apparent game of turnabout is fair play, Ambassador Churkin called on the United States to be more forthcoming about what he asserted to be the presence of 1000 Western advisers in Ukraine. He said that he wanted to &#8220;send a message to Washington: Stop interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states.&#8221;</p>
<p>Russia will be sending another “humanitarian” convoy into Ukraine, Ambassador Churkin declared. And he challenged the other members of the Security Council to adopt the text of his proposed press statement calling for an immediate unconditional ceasefire, inclusive dialogue and stepped up humanitarian relief. The Lithuanian ambassador said that her country would need more time to review the text, but it appeared to be deficient in not calling specifically for the separatists to stop impeding the flow of humanitarian aid.</p>
<p>Ambassador Churkin tried to maintain an even demeanor as he delivered the official Russian line in response to the sharply critical speeches that preceded his remarks. His strongest rhetoric was reserved for the Ukrainian government in Kiev, which he accused of engaging in “a war against its own people.” Ambassador Churkin also dismissed the Ukrainian government’s call for a ceasefire and for the separatists to lay down their arms as a sham.</p>
<p>President Putin’s decision to up the ante has reversed the tide of momentum that had been going the Ukrainian government’s way. Now the Ukrainian military forces are on the defensive and at risk of losing control of a wide area of coastal territory. Putin praised the separatists’ resurgence “in intercepting Kiev’s military operation.” He called the separatists the fighters of Novorossiya – meaning the territory Putin likes to refer to as “New Russia,” based on what he claims belongs historically to Russia.</p>
<p>Putin talks out of both sides of his mouth. While single-handedly providing enough weapons and troops to keep the rebellion going against the duly elected government of Ukraine in Kiev, he talks about opening humanitarian corridors and wanting peaceful dialogue. Putin has no interest in peace except on his terms. His goals are to take effective control over as much of the eastern portion of Ukraine as he can, keep the remainder of Ukraine as weak as possible to make it too much of a burden for Western Europe to bail out, and continue to expand the territory of “New Russia.”</p>
<p>“The question is to ensure the rights and interests of the Russian southeast,” Putin said in a nationally televised interview last April after his aggressive occupation of Crimea. He continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>It’s New Russia. Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in czarist times, they were transferred in 1920. Why? God knows. Then for various reasons these areas were gone, and the people stayed there. We need to encourage them to find a solution.</p></blockquote>
<p>Expanding the reach of the Russian empire to that of the czarist glory days is Putin’s idea of the right solution. And nobody should even think of taking any military actions against Russia in return. &#8220;It&#8217;s best not to mess with us,&#8221; he warned on Friday. “I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.&#8221;</p>
<p>To justify his imperialistic ambitions, Putin brazenly invoked Russia’s own suffering at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Referring to Ukrainian current military actions against Ukraine’s southeastern cities, he told students last week that “[I]t reminds me of World War II, when German forces encircled Russian cities like Leningrad and hit residential quarters with heavy artillery.”</p>
<p>Putin’s Nazi reference in his remarks to students is ironic to the say the least, considering that his own Ukraine strategy is an echo of Hitler’s Anschluss. Also, he had no comment on the civilians killed by rockets imported from Russia or the depraved public parading and humiliation of captured Ukrainian soldiers by the separatists in violation of the Geneva Conventions. And Putin has apparently moved beyond the tragedy of the passengers and crew who lost their lives aboard the commercial Malaysian plane shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists.</p>
<p>The United Nations Security Council has met 24 times on the subject of Ukraine. It has turned into bad theater. All we hear is the predictable rhetoric from Russia and its critics. Russia’s veto power prevents anything of real substance from being accomplished.</p>
<p>Increasingly severe economic sanctions have been imposed by the United States and its Western European allies against Russian individuals, businesses and the financial and arms industries. However, aside from some tough-sounding rhetoric, European leaders are equivocating on exactly what new stronger economic measures they would be willing to take against Russia and when they would do so, worrying about the impact of such measures on their own economies. President Obama may impose more sanctions on his own if need be, but he would prefer to reach a consensus with Europe on next steps. Either way, as a senior U.S. diplomat told me, sanctions do not appear to be making much of a difference in changing Putin’s calculations.</p>
<p>President Obama has ruled out any direct overt U.S. military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, which makes sense. But with economic sanctions not fazing Putin and direct military confrontation out of the picture, one U.S. official was quoted by The Telegraph as saying: &#8220;If Putin is immune to economic pain and we are not willing to use military force, then he&#8217;s got us in check mate, doesn&#8217;t he?&#8221;</p>
<p>Putin has us in check mate only if we ignore what Winston Churchill counseled about the Russians in his 1946 “Sinews of Peace” speech. He said that “there is nothing they admire so much as strength.”</p>
<p>What we need to do is to find creative ways to display the kind of strength that will get Putin’s attention and give him pause.</p>
<p>First, we can provide more sophisticated arms and training to Ukraine’s beleaguered military forces together with more sharing of intelligence information. Second, we can utilize covert operations in support of dissidents in Crimea and anti-Russian Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine to create a counter-force that would undercut Putin’s assumption of a low-cost occupation.</p>
<p>Third, and perhaps most important of all, Obama should now deploy the mobile missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, which he had mistakenly decided not to do in his first term as part of his failed attempt to “re-set” relations with Russia in a more positive direction. In fact, Obama should add Hungary and the Baltic states to the list. In other words, do to Putin what he has been most afraid of. Contain him with an encirclement strategy.</p>
<p>There are no guarantees that these measures will work.  But one thing is for sure. If we do nothing but add a few more sanctions, Putin will not stop his aggression with eastern Ukraine.</p>
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		<title>A President&#8217;s Global Warming Treaty Tyranny</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/a-presidents-global-warming-treaty-tyranny/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-presidents-global-warming-treaty-tyranny</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:50:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Submitting the U.S. to the international community's will -- without the consent of Congress. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Politics_1114_Obama_ClimateChange_480x360.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239682" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Politics_1114_Obama_ClimateChange_480x360-450x337.jpg" alt="Politics_1114_Obama_ClimateChange_480x360" width="312" height="234" /></a>In yet another demonstration of contempt for the Constitution, President Obama and his administration are pursuing what the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">characterizes</span></a> as a &#8220;sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions” &#8212; absent any input from Congress.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority approval by the Senate to ratify any legally binding treaty. The Obama administration plans to sidestep that requirement by calling the agreement a “politically binding” deal that would substitute for an actual treaty. It would consist of voluntary pledges, combined with obligations from a 1992 U.N. treaty known as the <a href="https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetailsIII.aspx?&amp;src=TREATY&amp;mtdsg_no=XXVII~7&amp;chapter=27&amp;Temp=mtdsg3&amp;lang=en"><span style="color: #1255cc;">United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Control</span></a>. That 22-year-old agreement was reached at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The U.S. Senate <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=j57VaLBSGogC&amp;pg=PA58&amp;lpg=PA58&amp;dq=climate+change+treaty+1992,+Senate+ratification&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=I3UtYpHb3n&amp;sig=5YqN6K8eGpJTNZ_tEyG202v7vfM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=l_r9U4DJHtTmoAS574GwBA&amp;ved=0CE4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=climate%20change%20treaty%201992,%20Senate%20ratification&amp;f=false"><span style="color: #1255cc;">ratified</span></a> the agreement on October 7, 1992, and President Bush Sr. signed it six days later, making it legally binding.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Obama administration contends that simply adding the additional voluntary pledges to the agreement obviates the need for another ratification process. “There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Natural Resources Defense Council</span></a>, a leftist advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Not magic. Just another attempt by the Obama administration to kick Congress to the curb in pursuit of an agenda that has absolutely no chance of getting majority approval in Congress, much less a two-thirds vote of approval in the Senate. In 1997, the Kyoto climate control treaty was rocketed into oblivion with a 96-0 bipartisan vote. Another effort was undertaken in Copenhagen in 2009, but once again the attempt to forge a legally binding agreement failed. Obama attended that conference, hoping to put America in alignment with the global community, but he did so with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekinreview/13broder.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">no support</span></a> whatsoever from Republicans, along with opposition from several Democrats representing states that rely heavily on coal power for energy and jobs. Democrats made it clear they wouldn’t accept any treaty or agreement threatening that status quo. In 2010, “cap and trade” legislation <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/henninger-obamas-troublesome-congress-1404342045"><span style="color: #1255cc;">failed</span></a> in the Senate for the same reason.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Obama administration is undeterred by such inconvenient realities. In June, once again absent any input from Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) <a href="http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/dem-senator-epa-will-come-for-natural-gas-next.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">proposed</span></a> regulations aimed at cutting existing greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants 30 percent by 2030. The move has <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-epa-lawsuit-20140805-story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">engendered</span></a> lawsuits in the in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia from at least a dozen coal-reliant states. It has also engendered a <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/209186-heitkamp-to-gas-industry-when-coal-is-dead-they-will-come-for-you"><span style="color: #1255cc;">warning</span></a> from North Dakota Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, whose state relies on coal-generated electricity for a whopping 80 percent of its power needs. &#8220;When that is done, and the stake is through the heart of coal, they will come for you next,” Heitkamp told representatives from the natural gas industry. She also added a dose of reality to the mix. &#8220;In my lifetime we will not transition away from coal,” she contended.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That remains to be seen, given the Obama administration’s penchant for “transitioning” away from the rule of law. Yet even this patchwork quilt of an agreement will suffer the same affliction that bedevils many of the administration’s efforts, as in a disconnect from geopolitical reality. The premise behind this pact is to “name and shame” countries who do not meet their reduction requirements. Thus the administration is relying on the idea that “embarrassed” nations will fall back in line, regardless of the economic consequences for doing so.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s not going to happen. As the <i>Washington Times</i> correctly <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/26/obama-seeks-bypass-congress-un-climate-change-deal/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&amp;utm_medium=RSS"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a>, &#8220;China and India, each with more than a billion people and swathes of horrific poverty of a sort not seen in the West, have been particularly outspoken in their refusal to agree to any mandatory carbon-emission cuts, which would limit their development and prosperity.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In addition, the poorer nations of the world are also unlikely to abide by any agreement that does not bind richer nations to a massive wealth transfer aimed at assisting their development of dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas, or provide food aid during droughts that are invariably attributed to global warming.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Global warming itself has been subjected to a series of “readjustments” in recent years. In 2009, there was the “Climategate” scandal in which the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was found to have <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/18555-global-warming-hoax-unraveling-someone-tell-obama"><span style="color: #1255cc;">suppressed</span></a> data contradicting their assessment of global warming. Last year, a series of leaked emails revealed that scientists working on a U.N. climate change report were <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/09/20/warming-lull-since-18-haunts-climate-change-authors/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">struggling</span></a> to explain why global warming has decreased over the last 15 years, even as greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. That same year, a paper asserting that there was a 97-percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming<b> </b>was revealed to have been <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">doctored</span></a> by warming alarmists and their media allies. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) quietly <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/30/noaa-quietly-reinstates-july-1936-as-the-hottest-month-on-record/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reinstated</span></a> data showing July 1936 as the hottest month on record, after insisting in 2012 that July of that year was the &#8220;all-time warmest month on record for the nation in a period of record that dates back to 1895.” And last week in Australia, scientists with the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) were <a href="http://www.thegwpf.org/australian-met-office-accused-of-manipulating-temperature-records/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">accused</span></a> of manipulating data to create an artificial warming trend, using a process called “homogenization” that ostensibly corrects anomalies in raw temperature data. The BOM insisted that it was “very unlikely” that such homogenization affected overall outlooks.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Countering such realities requires a certain level of hysteria. The so-called paper of record was more than up to the task. &#8220;The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century,” the <i>New York Times</i> reports.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A U.N. report to be released in early November is equally dire, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/science/earth/greenhouse-gas-emissions-are-growing-and-growing-more-dangerous-draft-of-un-report-says.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">noting</span></a> that the world is on the cusp of “irreversible change” due to global warming.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Hence the “last chance” efforts continue. Last year, dozens of countries <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/191264-climate-negotiators-strike-last-minute-deal"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reached</span></a> a deal in Warsaw that allow them to make “contributions” to reducing global warming, as opposed to “commitments&#8221; for doing so. Thus countries like China and India won more lenient guidelines for reducing emissions than desired by the United States and Europe. This deal was seen as a springboard for the upcoming one, to be hammered out next year in Paris, following a December meeting in Lima, Peru to draft the agreement.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Republicans have little use for a pact that ignores the rule of law and tramples the concept of national sovereignty in the process. “Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like&#8211;and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a statement.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When there’s a planet to save—and an American economy to ruin in the process—such “banal&#8221; considerations must be cast aside. Obama and his administration are determined to fulfill his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?Source=GovD&amp;v=CNSZ62xiD4M"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promise</span></a> of “skyrocketing” electricity prices, along with his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrefKCaV8m4"><span style="color: #1255cc;">one</span></a> to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Delivering the nation into the clutches of UN bureaucrats, while kicking Congress and the Constitution to the curb, is the latest effort to fulfill that agenda. It won’t be the last.</p>
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		<title>Hillary’s Two-Faced Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2014 04:53:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239113</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama rerun.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hill3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239152" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hill3-450x270.jpg" alt="hill3" width="293" height="176" /></a>Ever since Hillary broke with Barack over the virtues of doing stupid stuff, the editorial columnists have been pretending that she has some new and exciting foreign policy.</p>
<p>She doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>The left has denounced her as an interventionist. They just can&#8217;t explain how she is any more of an interventionist than her boss who bombed Libya, is bombing Iraq and wanted to bomb Syria. And all that is without mentioning his attempt to implement the Arab Spring&#8217;s regime changes.</p>
<p>The closest thing to a disagreement between them was over Syria and considering that Obama was days away from getting into Syria, that&#8217;s not much of a firewall.</p>
<p>Hillary took a cheap shot at Obama. The media spent so much time discussing the hugging summit that it completely ignored the fact that it was a cheap shot with no substance to it. Hillary and Obama have the same ideological DNA and get their ideas from the same narrow circles. Hillary doesn&#8217;t have a better or worse foreign policy. They both have the same foreign policy.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is trying to distance herself from the foreign policy of an administration in which she served as Secretary of State. Hillary is trying to distance herself from her own approach to international relations. That&#8217;s a level of schizophrenia that is a bit extreme even for a woman who sheds accents, identities and sports team affinities the way that a snake sheds its skin.</p>
<p>Hillary isn&#8217;t disavowing Obama. She&#8217;s disavowing Hillary.</p>
<p>The new Hillary is suddenly pro-Israel after spending years berating the Jewish State. She suddenly realized the importance of having a coherent foreign policy after having the same confused position on Iraq as John Kerry. And she&#8217;s somehow more of an interventionist than Obama even though they were both intervening in the exact same places.</p>
<p>Hillary is an interventionist. But so is Obama.</p>
<p>The non-interventionist, like the pacifist, is a mythical woodland creature who appears in the fables of many cultures. He isn&#8217;t however to be found in the vicinity of Washington D.C.</p>
<p>Break down the arguments of the non-interventionist and you will find a set of conspiracy theories explaining why every previous intervention was motivated by bad faith, secret agendas and racism. The non-interventionist doesn&#8217;t reject intervention; instead he contends that every previous intervention failed because it was carried out at the behest of the banks, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the Jews, American arrogance and the oil industry.</p>
<p>But the non-interventionist who makes it into the White House is free to intervene as much as he likes because his motives are pure. He isn&#8217;t trying to secretly build oil pipelines or put money into Haliburton. By assigning evil motives to all his predecessors, he never actually learns anything from them and instead intervenes out of an unrealistic sense of self-confidence in his own judgment.</p>
<p>Because he is certain that they were evil and he isn&#8217;t, he believes that he can do no wrong.</p>
<p>A true non-interventionist would reject intervention wholesale. Our fake non-interventionists turn up their noses at it when their political opponents do it. But once they have the power, they intervene out of entirely pure motives like helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over countries.</p>
<p>Obama is a non-interventionist because he spends a lot of time hesitating and apologizing for each intervention. He doesn&#8217;t however bother getting permission from Congress or even UN approval. Why should he? His motives are pure.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s crime is that she currently sounds somewhat less apologetic and uncertain about intervention, but that&#8217;s not policy, that&#8217;s pose. Hillary&#8217;s husband boasted on the day before September 11 that he passed on killing Bin Laden because of the collateral damage. And Bill Clinton is more of a hawk than his wife.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks that Hillary is a hawk has forgotten how American personnel in Benghazi were left in a precarious security situation on her watch. It&#8217;s quite possible that Hillary might decide to bomb Syria. But don&#8217;t expect her to bomb in defense of American national interests.</p>
<p>She&#8217;s not that kind of interventionist.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton knows that many voters are unhappy about American weakness. They don&#8217;t actually want war, but they want someone in the White House whom Putin will take seriously. And they know that isn&#8217;t Obama.</p>
<p>Hillary is temporarily talking tough to convince them that she&#8217;s the woman to make Vladimir respect America again. That doesn&#8217;t mean that she can stand up to Putin any better than Obama. Or that she will. But she needs uncertain Democrats to believe that the new boss will be different than the old boss, when the new boss is really the old boss in a pantsuit and with worse posters.</p>
<p>Unfortunately Democrats and Republicans don&#8217;t currently differ very much on foreign policy. Where they differ is orientation. And that&#8217;s more significant than it sounds.</p>
<p>Both Obama and McCain would have backed the Arab Spring, but McCain would have done it out of a misguided sense that it was in America&#8217;s national interest, while Obama did it to undermine American national interests.</p>
<p>The significance is not so much in the outcome as in attitude and in the tools that they use.</p>
<p>Obama and McCain would have both bombed Libya, but Obama holds the military in contempt and treats it that way. Obama and McCain would have both endorsed the Arab Spring, but Obama did it in a way that signaled American weakness. That is why Obama&#8217;s approach has weakened America even more than the actual outcome of his policies.</p>
<p>A country can survive bad policy. We&#8217;ve had bad foreign policy for much of the 20th century. But a leader who communicates that the bad policy is a symptom of national weakness is a disaster on a whole other scale. Both Carter and Reagan made mistakes, but Carter and Reagan sent two very different messages about American power even while they made their mistakes.</p>
<p>Leadership isn&#8217;t always about what you do. It&#8217;s about how you communicate your values.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is trying to package her old Obama policies with a new attitude, but underneath is the same old lefty radical who smooched Arafat&#8217;s wife, brought a Reset Button to Russia and apologized to Pakistan for a YouTube video.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve already seen Hillary&#8217;s foreign policy on display in Pakistan, Russia and Benghazi. All the cheap shots at Obama won&#8217;t change the fact that Hillary&#8217;s foreign policy is another Obama rerun.</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>Did UN Corruption Help Build Hamas Terror Tunnels?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/did-un-corruption-help-build-hamas-terror-tunnels/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=did-un-corruption-help-build-hamas-terror-tunnels</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2014 01:14:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238387</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[That authorization still did not exist at the time the report was written]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/MaxW640imageVersiondefaultAR-140729589.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-238388" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/MaxW640imageVersiondefaultAR-140729589-450x299.jpg" alt="&amp;MaxW=640&amp;imageVersion=default&amp;AR-140729589" width="450" height="299" /></a></p>
<p>With the UN everything is possible and this<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/11/gaza-construction-funds-incorrectly-handled-by-non-staff-un-personnel-report/?intcmp=latestnews"> Fox News report by George Russell certainly raises</a> some questions.</p>
<blockquote><p>While controversy continues to swirl around the huge Hamas tunnel network in Gaza, an internal United Nations audit report reveals that a U.N. Development Program office that funds and monitors spending on construction in the territory allowed at least five non-staff contract employees to handle “core” procurement  processes that only staffers are supposed to handle, including those for ordering up “significant” civil construction activities.</p>
<p>At the same time, the office’s internal financial tracking system — a UNDP-wide system known as Atlas — was improperly recording at least $8 million worth of civil construction spending at far less than its full value, a practice that UNDP auditors noted could keep the activity under the radar of higher-level U.N. officials who must approve purchase orders above defined cost threshold levels.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Palestinian program office was not properly keeping track of expenditures or receipts in the financial system. The auditors noted that in a sampling of 41 payment vouchers, 12 purchase orders did not have receipts recorded in the system. “This practice,” the report noted, “increases the risk of paying for goods that are not delivered.”</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>The report adds a new level of potential credibility to Israeli accusations that internationally-managed relief supplies to Gaza were diverted into construction of the elaborate and highly-engineered tunnels under the territory that were used by Hamas terrorists to launch and coordinate rocket attacks and incursions into Israel that dramatically escalated in March.</p></blockquote>
<p>The question though is how much of an accident is this really. International aid agencies routinely find ways to make payoffs to terrorists in exchange for being allowed to operate. The UN&#8217;s finances are more open than some, but that just makes the process trickier.</p>
<blockquote><p>According to the audit report, the UNDP Palestinian program’s “direct implementation” authorization expired on June 30, 2012, and “the office did not seek its renewal until March 2014” — roughly around the time that Hamas commenced its latest large-scale rocket assault on Israel.</p>
<p>Moreover, that authorization still did not exist at the time the report was written; based on internal evidence, apparently in June. (The document was finalized in early July, and posted on UNDP’s website over the past weekend.)  It says only that “management is following with Headquarters” to get direct implementation renewed “as soon as possible.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Interesting timing&#8230;</p>
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		<title>UN Secretary General Promises This is the Last Time He Will Rebuild Gaza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/un-secretary-general-promises-this-is-the-last-time-he-will-rebuild-gaza/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=un-secretary-general-promises-this-is-the-last-time-he-will-rebuild-gaza</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 09 Aug 2014 18:15:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ban ki moon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238107</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can we get that in writing?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/gaza-ban1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-238108" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/gaza-ban1-450x279.jpg" alt="gaza-ban" width="450" height="279" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183800#.U-QGhflr7J8">Can we get that in writing</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>United Nations (UN) chief Ban Ki-moon declared on Wednesday that the organization is ready to help rebuild Gaza but it would be “the last time”.</p>
<p>Ban opened a special meeting of the United Nations General Assembly with an appeal for a lasting peace as a 72-hour ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was holding for a second day.</p>
<p>&#8220;The senseless cycle of suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in Israel must end,&#8221; he was quoted by AFP as having told the 193-nation assembly.</p>
<p>After three wars in Gaza in six years, the UN secretary general warned that the world&#8217;s patience with the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs was being tested.</p>
<p>&#8220;Do we have to continue like this &#8212; build, destroy, and build and destroy?&#8221; Ban asked.</p>
<p>&#8220;We will build again but this must be the last time &#8212; to rebuild. This must stop now,&#8221; he declared.</p></blockquote>
<p>All we have to do is say stop&#8230; why didn&#8217;t we think of that before?</p>
<p>Then next year or the year after that Hamas will begin firing off rockets again, Israel will try to take them out and the UN will trawling countries for handouts to its officials so they can fundraise to rebuild Gaza.</p>
<p>By then Moon may be a Samsung lobbyist and writing his memoirs.</p>
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		<title>Ringleader Admits: Hamas Funded Kidnapping and Murder of Israeli Teens</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/ringleader-admits-hamas-funded-kidnapping-and-murder-of-israeli-teens/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ringleader-admits-hamas-funded-kidnapping-and-murder-of-israeli-teens</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:50:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abducted]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fund]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israeli]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[teen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238114</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inconvenient admissions contradict media’s spin exonerating Hamas.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140630183743-israeli-teens-found-dead-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238115" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140630183743-israeli-teens-found-dead-story-top-450x253.jpg" alt="140630183743-israeli-teens-found-dead-story-top" width="288" height="162" /></a>Media bias against Israel continues apace.  Even the recent apparent confirmation from the alleged ringleader that Hamas funded the abduction of the three murdered Israeli teenagers this past June gets hardly a mention or is derided in the press.</p>
<p>Some mainstream media outlets were quick from the get-go to cast the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli teenagers as essentially a rogue operation undertaken without Hamas authorization or backing. New York Magazine, for example, published an article on July 25, 2014 entitled “It Turns Out Hamas May Not Have Kidnapped and Killed the 3 Israeli Teens After All.”</p>
<p>Buzzfeed posted an article late last month that essentially exonerated Hamas of any responsibility, citing unnamed Israeli sources to back up its claim.</p>
<p>Al Jazeera, which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said offers &#8220;real news,&#8221; published an article last month charging, without any evidence to support its accusation, that “Israel knew full well that neither Hamas nor its armed wing (al-Qassam Brigades) were behind the boys’ disappearance.”</p>
<p>Then came along Hussam Qawasmeh, the alleged ringleader of the kidnapping operation whom Israeli authorities now have in custody. He is reported to have pointed the finger at Hamas jihadists in Gaza as the source of the money to pay for the operation.</p>
<p>Instead of objectively writing about Qawasmeh’s reported reference to Hamas’s involvement, Buzzfeed chose on August 6<sup>th</sup> to compound its biased anti-Israel reporting. It focused in its lead paragraph on accusations by Qawasmeh’s lawyer and relative working on the case that Qawasmeh’s statement was obtained as a result of “heavy torture.” Buzzfeed devoted substantial space for Qawasmeh’s lawyer to air his dismissal of any Hamas connection. “Israel is trying to tie this to Gaza, by saying the money for the operation came from Gaza,” the lawyer said. “But that is not exactly true. This is something they [Qawasmeh’s family] could have planned to boost their own family’s name, for their own motives.”</p>
<p>Incredibly, Buzzfeed also quoted Ala Rimawi, a Hamas member in the West Bank, who unsurprisingly disputed any involvement of Hamas in the kidnappings and murders:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It is obvious that what happened in Hebron was an individual incident. If it had been organized by Hamas, the kidnappers would not have been allowed to kill the three boys — they would have wanted to keep them alive in order to bargain and try to use them to release prisoners.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Al Jazeera did not see fit to retract its previous unsubstantiated accusations of fabrication against Israel despite Qawasmeh’s reported revelation of Hamas funding. Rather than offer the “real news” that Hillary Clinton credited al Jazeera with providing, this propaganda outlet controlled by Hamas backer, Qatar, continues to cast Hamas in the most favorable light and Israel as the villain.</p>
<p>The New York Times published on June 17<sup>th</sup> what it purported to be a news article on the abduction under the headline “Abduction of Young Israeli Hitchhikers Spurs Debate on Conduct.”  Mind you, this headline was not referring to Hamas’s conduct. It was a reference to the “conduct of Jewish settlers in the West Bank — particularly what many consider the cavalier practice of hitchhiking.”  In other words, blame the victims for their “cavalier” behavior.</p>
<p>When it came to reporting about Qawasmeh’s capture and reported statement regarding Hamas funding of the abduction, the New York Times buried the story on p. 9 of its August 6<sup>th</sup> print edition.</p>
<p>The Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren has consistently cast Israel in an unfavorable light. One of her most blatantly biased articles was entitled “In Gaza, Epithets Are Fired and Euphemisms Give Shelter,” which appeared on p.1 of the July 21<sup>st</sup> print edition of the New York Times. More than three times as much space in Rudoren&#8217;s article “focused on Israel allegedly demonizing and inciting against Hamas (509 words) than on Hamas engaged in PR efforts, boasts or threats to Israel (149 words),” according to an analysis done by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.</p>
<p>“With her inversion of reality, selective citations, withholding of relevant and crucial information, and the sort of hollow comparisons that any elementary social science student would recognize as invalid and flawed, Rudoren&#8217;s ‘analysis’ is an example of shoddy, biased journalism at its worst,” the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America concluded.</p>
<p>Rudoren showed her pro-Palestinian leanings when she first took on the Jerusalem bureau chief post, in her exchange of tweets with Ali Abuminah, a Palestinian-American anti-Israel activist who has advocated for a third intifada:</p>
<blockquote><p>Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah  · 14 Feb 2012</p>
<p>As new @nytimes bureau chief, Jodi @Rudoren will get to move into this lovely property stolen from Palestinians in 1948 http://electronicintifada.net/content/ny-times-jerusalem-property-makes-it-protagonist-palestine-conflict/8705 …</p>
<p>Jodi Rudoren@rudoren   @AliAbunimah Hey there. Would love to chat sometime. About things other than the house. My friend Kareem Fahim says good things</p></blockquote>
<p>Rudoren’s “friend” Kareem Fahim, who also reports for the New York Times, has written critically of Arab nations’ apparent support for Israel over Hamas.  Writing from Cairo, Fahim expressed shock that “Egypt even blamed Hamas, the Islamist movement in Gaza, rather than Israel, for dozens of Palestinian deaths.” But then again, why listen to those who know the jihadists’ murderous ways the best?</p>
<p>Such coverage tends to treat the conduct of the latest war in Gaza by Israel and Hamas as morally equivalent at best. Often, Israel is painted as the prime violator of international law. The reason often cited by Israel bashers for portraying Israel this way is the supposed “disproportionate” force used by Israel to conduct attacks in civilian neighborhoods where Hamas militants hide and keep their weapons, causing the loss of hundreds of innocent Palestinian lives. Hamas is portrayed as the underdog, which is resisting the “occupying power.”</p>
<p>The Associated Press, for example, sent out the following tweet on July 29th, criticizing members of Congress for daring to support Israel over Hamas: <sup> </sup>“As much of world watches Gaza war in horror, members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel.” Apparently, someone at the Associated Press realized that this tweet may have gone too far since it was retracted a few hours later.</p>
<p>CNN came under criticism from Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer for not reporting in an even-handed manner. Ambassador Dermer properly noted CNN’s failure to state that Hamas was storing rockets in United Nations schools as part of its reporting on Israeli military activities in Gaza, including the alleged Israeli shelling of a UN school.</p>
<p>It is true that Israel is militarily superior to Hamas. It is also true that, in the course of Israel’s military operation in Gaza to destroy the tunnels and rockets being used by Hamas to deliberately target Israeli civilians, a substantial number of Palestinians have lost their lives, including civilians.  And yes, Israel does have the technology to protect its own citizens from Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks. Iron Dome has helped to keep Israeli civilian deaths to a minimum.</p>
<p>Some in the mainstream media seem to think that the lopsided comparison of the very low number of Israeli casualties with the far larger number of Palestinian casualties resulting from the fighting in Gaza proves Israel’s culpability. It’s just not a fair fight, they believe. And they get support for that bizarre point of view from senior United Nations officials and world leaders who regularly condemn Israel for alleged “war crimes.” As reported by Breitbart, for example, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay had the audacity to recently criticize Israel for refusing to share its Iron Dome technology with the “governing authority” of Gaza – i.e., Hamas. &#8220;No such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling,” she is reported to have declared.</p>
<p>If Hamas were not deliberately using the civilian Gaza population as human shields and had accepted the Egyptian ceasefire proposal weeks ago that it has now tentatively accepted, ninety percent of the fatalities in Gaza could have been avoided. The mainstream media prefers to show dramatic pictures of Palestinian women and children caught in the cross-fire, implying, or sometimes stating explicitly, that it is all Israel’s fault. There is hardly any intellectually honest attempt among many journalists and analysts covering the Gaza conflict to grapple with what Hamas has done to bring those tragic circumstances about. And Hamas has threatened to end the current ceasefire and attack Israelis with even more powerful rockets if its demands are not met. If that happens and Israel is forced to resume its ground operations in Gaza in order to protect its civilians from indiscriminate attacks, guess who will be blamed for the consequences?</p>
<p>Despite the United Nation’s repeated demonstrations of bias against Israel, reporters often take their numbers of civilian Palestinian casualties from the UN, which in turn relies on data from the Hamas-run health ministry and from various human rights groups who generally oppose Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Moreover, the mainstream media often parrots condemnations of Israel by UN officials and world leaders and opinion-makers without considering the full context of Hamas’s urban war strategy to exploit Gazan civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.</p>
<p>Incredibly, for example, there has been scant reporting of what appears to be a Hamas manual on urban warfare entitled “Introduction to the City War,” which the Israeli military said it seized. The New York Post did report on it, but it was in a distinct minority.</p>
<p>“The destruction of civilian homes: This increases the hatred of the citizens toward the attackers and increases their gathering around [to support] the city defenders,” the manual stated, according to the Israeli Defense Force. “The soldiers and [IDF] commanders must limit their use of weapons and tactics that lead to the harm and unnecessary loss of people and [destruction of] civilian facilities. It is difficult for them to get the most use out of their firearms, especially of supporting fire [e.g. artillery].”</p>
<p>This document does need to be independently verified as genuine. But the quotes above are certainly consistent with Hamas’s pattern of conduct, in which it operates in heavily populated areas and attempts to draw Israeli fire in response to Hamas military action in the vicinity of UN schools and the like. The silence of the mainstream media in essentially ignoring the existence of the alleged Hamas manual is deafening. Indeed, it shows yet again the complicity of much of the mainstream media in Hamas’s propaganda war.</p>
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		<title>Obama and the U.N.’s Alternate Universe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obama-and-the-u-n-s-alternate-universe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-and-the-u-n-s-alternate-universe</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:55:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237215</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The administration turns 2,500 years of human knowledge on foreign affairs on its head. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PH2008011001836.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-237280 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PH2008011001836.jpg" alt="NA-PETRAEUS" width="313" height="243" /></a>Barack Obama has managed to push American foreign policy into an alternate universe in which everything the human race has learned over the past 2500 years about human nature, aggression, and its deterrence has been stood on its head. He is not solely to blame for this. For 150 years the West had indulged the illusion that human nature is progressing away from our violent past toward a world of reason in which conflict can be resolved and negotiated away without force or the credible threat of force. But Obama and his foreign policy team have completely detached this idea, serially mugged by the violent reality of the last century, from any recognition of morality or even fact. The result is the disastrous decline in American global authority and influence.</p>
<p>The administration’s handling of the current war between Israel and Hamas is no doubt one of the most shameful examples of such a corruption of intellect and failure of moral nerve. Indeed, one has to go back to September 1938 and the despicable British and French abandonment of Czechoslovakia during the run-up to the Munich conference to find supposed allies treating a friend so shabbily and working on the side of its enemies. As Germany bullied and threatened Czechoslovakia, the British thought the solution was “for Prague to get a real twist of the screw,” while the French threatened that if the Czechs were “unreasonable” about defending their country, France “considered herself released from her bond.”</p>
<p>Fast-forward 76 years to Obama’s FAA forbidding U.S. flights to Ben Gurion airport, giving Hamas a propaganda victory; John Kerry’s off-mike mocking of Israel’s historically unprecedented attempts to avoid civilian casualties; and both Obama and Kerry pressuring Israel for “an immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire,” which evokes England’s demand in 1938 that the Czechs “go forthwith to the very limit of concession.” The only effects of such a “cease fire” would be to rescue Hamas by leaving its remaining rockets and tunnels in place, and those already destroyed to be replenished by Iran and funded by the subsequent “humanitarian aid” that would flow into Gaza.</p>
<p>Yet Obama’s behavior today is more despicable than was England’s in 1938, even if it is unlikely to have consequences as globally destructive as Chamberlain’s appeasement. At that time Hitler was an autocrat and thug, yet he was the legitimately elected head of the biggest state in Europe. Hamas is nothing other than a tiny gang of fanatic murderers, a group sanctioned as a terrorist organization by our own State Department. Its major state sponsor, Iran, is identified by that same State Department as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, with American blood on its hands for the last 35 years. Hamas’s charter identifies its purpose as the genocidal destruction of Israel, and the group has never shown any interest in the fantastical “two-state solution” or in living “side by side with Israel in peace.”</p>
<p>Only in an alternate universe does an American administration have even indirect diplomatic contact with such terrorists, or with its state sponsors and funders, let alone pressure a loyal and valuable ally into offering concessions to a common enemy, an outlaw that scorns the international laws of war, willingly sacrifices its own children and wives, and has made it clear that it does not ever want any accommodation with Israel, only its destruction. Only in an alternate universe does a liberal democracy ruled by law send $47 million to a gang of murderers, and indulge a cowardly moral equivalence that does not discriminate between genocidal terrorists and a legitimate state exercising its right to defense. Only in an alternate universe does a president who sends drones thousands of miles to kill terrorists and everybody around them, including 250 civilians by some <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/01/23/more-than-2400-dead-as-obamas-drone-campaign-marks-five-years/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">estimates</span></a>, criticize Israel’s “disproportionate response” when it seeks to destroy terrorists who live next door and rain rockets down on its people, and unlike Obama, it tells civilians the attack is on the way.</p>
<p>The bizarrerie, however, extends far beyond the morally bankrupt policies of the Obama administration. We also had this past weak another surreal spectacle at the laughably denominated U.N. Human Rights Council. It issued a resolution titled “Ensuring Respect for International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which alone is replete with Orwellian distortions of reality, since Gaza is not “occupied” by the Israelis. They turned it over to the Palestinians in 2005, after dismantling 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza and 4 in Judea and Samaria. What they got in return has been over 11,000 rockets fired against their citizens.</p>
<p>As for “respect for international law,” other than a brief, general condemnation of Hamas’s barrage of rockets fired against Israel’s cities and civilians, the whole resolution focuses on Israel’s alleged violations, such as the “deliberate targeting of civilians and other protected persons and the perpetration of systematic, flagrant and widespread violations of applicable international humanitarian law and international human rights law in situations of armed conflict constitute grave breaches and a threat to international peace and security.” As Churchill said of Hitler’s preposterous lies about his bullying of the Austrian chancellor, “One can hardly find a more perfect specimen of humbug and hypocrisy . . . What is astounding is that it should have been regarded with anything but scorn by men and women of intelligence in any free country.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we don’t have leaders of Churchill’s calibre to expose the UNHRC’s nonsense and duplicity in its resolution. The word “deliberate” is a lie, of course. Civilians are dying in Gaza because Hamas deliberately and flagrantly uses them as shields, places its ammo dumps, rockets, and fighters in and under mosques, residences, hospitals, and schools, and prevents Gazans from heeding Israel’s many and varied warnings that a site is going to be destroyed, even <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=835910373087389&amp;id=213694968642269"><span style="color: #0433ff;">beating them</span></a> when they try to flee. As for violations of “international law,” Andrew McCarthy <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383808/laws-war-matter-gaza-andrew-c-mccarthy"><span style="color: #0433ff;">details</span></a> specifically how everything Israel has done in its defence is consistent with international law, and everything the “unlawful combatants” of Hamas has done is in deliberate and flagrant violation of it.</p>
<p>But despite the clear and unambiguous truth that Israel is waging a legal defensive war, in the alternate universe of the U.N., the Human Rights Council votes “to urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry, to be appointed by the President of the Human Rights Council, to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law” and “to establish the facts and circumstances of such violations and of the crimes perpetrated and to identify those responsible, to make recommendations, in particular on accountability measures.”</p>
<p>If such an investigation does take place, expect a reprise of the discredited Goldstone Report, issued by the U.N. after the Israelis’ 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead against Gaza’s rockets, and later renounced by its own author. As Goldstone himself admitted, the UNHRC’s “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted,” so can we can expect this new report to slander Israel in order to prepare the way for international lawfare against its leaders, including war-crimes charges and suits filed in the International Court of Justice. But past history does not cut any ice in the alternate universe of the U.N. Where else could anyone pass with a straight face a resolution on human rights from a council that includes notorious human-rights violators like China, Congo, Cuba, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela? At least the U.S. voted against the resolution, unlike Euro-weasels like France, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, and Italy, who bravely abstained.</p>
<p>Yes, we all know the U.N. is a morally bankrupt, corrupt congeries of international thugs and creeps, along with invertebrate Western states who mask their fear and appeasement with the Kabuki dance of international diplomacy. But only in an alternate universe does the U.S. spend one minute on a nakedly ideological outfit like the UNHRC, or give half a billion dollars a year to an organization like the U.N., the purpose of which is to damage America’s security and interests at every turn.</p>
<p>And let’s not forget the media. They report casualty numbers from the current conflict, including the number of civilians killed, without a caveat that these numbers come from Hamas or their U.N. minions, or that terrorists don’t wear uniforms and hence are frequently counted as “civilians.” The media abandon their critical faculties despite the Palestinian Arabs’ long history of <a href="http://arabisraeliconflict.info/arab-israel-facts/fact-7-palestinian-suffering"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exaggerating</span></a> such statistics, faking photogenic atrocities like the Jenin massacre and the IDF’s killing of Mohammed Dura, and tweeting gruesome images of dead women and children killed in other conflicts like <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/07/09/Pro-Hamas-Use-Pictures-From-Syria-Haiti-Against-Israel"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Syria</span></a>, or even taking scenes from horror <a href="http://pamelageller.com/2014/07/relying-bbc-propaganda-methods-hamas-uses-horror-film-still-fake-teenager-killed-gaza-israel.html/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">movies</span></a>, and claiming they happened in Gaza. Only in an alternate universe would a media presumably dedicated to getting the story right and distrustful of information it can’t confirm themselves repeat as fact what actually is propaganda, or at least preface such information with a statement like, “According to Hamas spokesmen” when reporting casualty numbers.</p>
<p>A foreign policy based on illusion leaves our country vulnerable to various global autocrats, thugs, and terrorists. Those shrewd, hard men (see Putin, Vladimir) know how to manipulate our delusions and exploit our weaknesses, particularly our leaders’ penchant for substituting diplomatic words for military deeds to serve their short-term political needs. This illusion of action creates complacency of the sort we experienced in the 90s, when we lived in an alternate reality where al Qaeda’s declarations of war and terrorist attacks were treated as criminal matters rather than acts of war. And we all remember how gruesomely we were reintroduced to reality.</p>
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		<title>Defund the UNRWA</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/defund-the-unrwa/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=defund-the-unrwa</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:50:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[UNRWA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237595</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An arm of Hamas inside the United Nations. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/UNRWA-bags-of-building-material-in-Gaza-tunnels-Photo-IDF-300x225.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237596" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/UNRWA-bags-of-building-material-in-Gaza-tunnels-Photo-IDF-300x225.jpg" alt="UNRWA-bags-of-building-material-in-Gaza-tunnels-Photo-IDF-300x225" width="267" height="200" /></a>The UNRWA is on the front lines of the Hamas War in Gaza. In the headlines, its schools are forever being fired on or found to be stockpiling rockets. If individual Gazans are being used as human shields, the UNRWA often seems as if it is one big organizational human shield.</p>
<p>But the UNRWA isn&#8217;t Hamas&#8217; human shield. The UNRWA is Hamas.</p>
<p>The &#8220;UN&#8221; part of the UNRWA, the blue logos and symbols, fool us into thinking of it as an international humanitarian organization. But the UNRWA in Gaza functions as a large Palestinian Arab organization with a smattering of foreign supervisory staff.</p>
<p>And those foreign staffers often tend to leave during a conflict.</p>
<p>The UNRWA is not an international organization operating in the Middle East. Effectively it&#8217;s a local Arab Muslim organization funded and regulated internationally. Since the UNRWA classifies 80% of Gazans as &#8220;refugees&#8221;, it administers the biggest welfare state in the world on their behalf.</p>
<p>The UNRWA is the biggest employer in the West Bank and Gaza after the Palestinian Authority and the vast majority of its employees are &#8220;locally recruited&#8221;. Varying figures place the share of local employees at between 90 and 99 percent.</p>
<p>Even though there are more Arab Muslims living in the West Bank than in Gaza, there are more &#8220;official&#8221; refugees in Gaza, which means that more UNRWA funding and efforts are directed there. The UNRWA only runs 96 schools in the West Bank, but it runs <a href="http://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/2014_01_uif_-_english.pdf"><span style="color: #0433ff;">245 schools </span></a>in Gaza. It employs less than 3,000 education staffers in the West Bank, but over 10,000 in Gaza.</p>
<p>Why does Hamas, which is obsessed with brainwashing the next generation into martyrdom, allow a foreign organization to run an educational system for 232,000 pupils?</p>
<p>It&#8217;s because in Gaza, Hamas and the UNRWA are the same thing.</p>
<p>The UNRWA’s Gaza staff has its own union. In the 2012 election, <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-hamas-bloc-wins-control-of-unrwa-in-gaza/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">a pro-Hamas bloc won</span></a> the support of most of the union <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/09/21/un-agency-faces-criticism-after-candidates-with-ties-to-hamas-win-majority/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">with 25 out of 27 seats </span></a>on a union board.</p>
<p>When there was talk of reforming the UNRWA by removing Hamas members from its ranks, the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">editor of a Hamas paper wrote that</span></a>, &#8220;Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance,’ in its various forms.&#8221;</p>
<p>The official word from Hamas was that it and the UNRWA are the same thing. The UNRWA’s vast majority of locally sourced Gazans are part of Hamas.</p>
<p>The UNRWA does not see that as a problem.</p>
<p>&#8220;I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll,&#8221; a former UNRWA Commissioner General said, &#8220;and I don’t see that as a crime.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant, and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another,&#8221; he added.</p>
<p>Also if the UNRWA fired Hamas members from its Gaza staff, it would have no one left.</p>
<p>Hamas control over the UNRWA in Gaza is reflected in the schools <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/733/unrwa-its-role-in-gaza"><span style="color: #0433ff;">which promote Islamic terrorism</span></a>. UNRWA schools have become flashpoints in conflicts between Israel and Hamas because the <a href="http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/53/how-unrwa-supports-hamas"><span style="color: #0433ff;">UNRWA schools</span></a> are Hamas bases of recruitment and operation.</p>
<p>The current accusations and counter-accusations over attacks on and from UNRWA schools are a reenactment of the same set of events taking place in 2009. Only the locations and the names have changed.<a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&amp;x_issue=2&amp;x_article=1625"><span style="color: #0433ff;"> The same headlines</span></a>, “Israeli shelling kills dozens at UN school in Gaza,” and “Massacre of Innocents as UN school is shelled” are repeating all over again.</p>
<p>Then, as now, Hamas launched attacks on Israeli forces from around a UNRWA school. Then it turned out that the attack had happened outside the school and <a href="http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/account-of-israeli-attack-doesnt-hold-up-to-scrutiny/article4286191/?service=mobile"><span style="color: #0433ff;">no one had actually died inside the school</span></a>. Nothing has changed since then. The &#8220;massacres&#8221; in which Hamas terrorists using UNRWA schools as a base are killed pop up in every paper. The UNRWA repeats the same lies.</p>
<p>Then<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/rockets-found-in-unrwa-school-for-third-time/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"> it &#8220;discovers&#8221; Hamas rockets</span></a> in three of its schools. And that&#8217;s just the tip of the iceberg because every UNRWA school is a Hamas school.</p>
<p>The UNRWA has admitted that Hamas uses its schools to store rockets. It admits that it has Hamas members in its ranks. It <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/07/31/Israel-Shaming-Persists-Even-as-UN-Admits-Hamas-Uses-UN-Areas-for-Rocket-Launches"><span style="color: #0433ff;">admits that rockets have </span></a>been fired &#8220;into Israel from the vicinity of UN facilities and residential areas.&#8221;</p>
<p>What it refuses to admit is that it should in any way be held accountable for functioning as an arm of a terrorist organization.</p>
<p>If an organization consists largely of Hamas members who use it pursue Hamas goals, then the organization is Hamas.</p>
<p>The UNRWA is Hamas.</p>
<p>Hamas use of the UNRWA as its public face is a war crime, but terrorists commit war crimes without a second thought. The UN and the UNRWA however are complicit in the war crime by allowing Hamas to go on exploiting the UN brand.</p>
<p>Hamas is listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It&#8217;s against the law for the United States to fund it. By funding the UNRWA, the United States is paying Hamas and participating in its war crimes. Using civilian and humanitarian facilities for military purposes is a war crime. Using them to stage attacks against civilians by attackers out of uniform adds further crimes to the total.</p>
<p>The United States provided $130 million to the UNRWA in 2013. The UNRWA&#8217;s operations in Gaza would not be viable without that money.</p>
<p>When Kerry visited Gaza in 2009, <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/1000/hamas-takes-advantage-of-us-diplomacy"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the UNRWA&#8217;s Gaza chief </span></a>passed along a letter to him from Hamas. The incident showed that not only was the locally recruited staff working for Hamas, but the UNRWA leadership was clearly cooperating with the terrorist group.</p>
<p>The original &#8220;refugees&#8221; that the UNRWA was set up to cater to are for the most part dead. The UNRWA has become another UN boondoggle funding a welfare state for “refugee camps” that are older, bigger and more developed than many Middle Eastern cities.</p>
<p>UNRWA staff act as terrorists when they use UNRWA facilities for military purposes, but then switch back to UNRWA when Israel fights back. Hamas carries out attacks. The UNRWA demands ceasefires. Hamas uses UNRWA schools and the UNRWA denounces Israel when an attack happens.</p>
<p>The UNRWA has become the mask that Hamas wears.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a tactical asset for a terrorist group that empowers its human shield strategy. The UNRWA is not only endangering Israeli civilians, but it is also endangering Gazans who are exploited as human shields by members of a terrorist group masquerading as the staff of an international humanitarian organization.</p>
<p>This issue has come up before and the UNRWA&#8217;s long record of evasions and denials, admitting the substance of the claims about the Hamas takeover of the UNRWA, while insisting that its Hamas members are neutral and that all the rocket stores and rocket attacks around UNRWA facilities are unrelated to the Hamas members on its staff, are not good enough anymore.</p>
<p>The United States should not be in the business of funding the corruption of young minds. Money should not be taken from American schools to fund the spread of hatred and terrorism.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s time to defund the UNRWA.</p>
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		<title>The UN&#8217;s Propaganda War Against Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/the-united-nations-propaganda-war-against-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-united-nations-propaganda-war-against-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jul 2014 04:58:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war crimes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237064</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As Israel defends itself from terror, the international community supports a death cult. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/7d215580659df628b27ae1fb0ba7796a_964043.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-237079" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/7d215580659df628b27ae1fb0ba7796a_964043-429x350.jpg" alt="Disarmament Conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations" width="286" height="233" /></a>As usual, the United Nations has the Palestinians’ back while repeatedly stabbing Israel in the back. Hamas not only uses civilian human shields in Gaza to protect its operatives and weapons. It hides behind the diplomatic propaganda shield that the UN too willingly provides.</p>
<p>Most notably, the United Nations kangaroo court, known officially as the Human Rights Council, has decided to launch its own investigation into Israel’s actions in Gaza. In its one-sided resolution, adopted in Geneva on July 23<sup>rd</sup> by a vote of 29 states in favor, 1 against and 17 abstentions, the Human Rights Council “condemned in the strongest terms the widespread, systematic and gross violations of international human rights and fundamental freedoms arising from the Israeli military operations carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 13 June 2014.”</p>
<p>The Human Rights Council also “demanded that Israel immediately and fully end its illegal closure of the occupied Gaza Strip.”</p>
<p>Never mind that Gaza, which is under Hamas’s control, has not been occupied by Israel since 2005. And never mind that the closures of border crossings have been necessitated by Hamas’s aggressive attacks launched against Israeli civilians. Truth is never a consideration when the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p>
<p>In its perversion of truth, the UN human rights body provided Sudan, whose government has the blood of hundreds of thousands of civilians from decades of documented genocide and ethnic cleansing on its hands, with a platform to accuse Israel of maintaining a “policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide.” Iran, whose ruling thugs regularly imprison, torture and execute political dissidents, got a platform to claim that Israel was engaged in “massacres and crimes against humanity.” On the same day that Iran’s representative was fulminating against Israel in Geneva, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that “Israel’s annihilation is the only real cure.”  Is it any wonder that Israelis are very concerned that Iran is getting closer and closer to achieving its nuclear arms ambitions while Iran buys more time in phony negotiations that have just been extended?</p>
<p>The United States was the only Human Rights Council member to vote against the travesty of a human rights resolution passed by the UN’s three-ring circus. Russia, the enabler of the pro-Russian separatists who blew the Malaysian civilian passenger plane out of the sky with 298 innocent civilians on board, was among those countries that voted for the resolution. The dhimmi European member states abstained in fear of violent reactions from their own Muslim populations if they opposed the anti-Israel resolution.</p>
<p>The Human Rights Council acted against Israel, following an outrageous statement on the Gaza fighting by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. She equated Israel’s defense of its citizens from rocket attacks deliberately aimed at Israeli population centers with Hamas’s launching of those rockets and using Palestinian civilians’ homes, schools, hospitals and mosques as hiding places for Hamas’s deadly weapons and operatives. She cavalierly dismissed Israel’s unprecedented attempts to warn civilians to get out of harm’s way before Israel took any military action against those sites. She said that the warnings were insufficient. One wonders whether she would like unarmed Israelis to politely knock at the front door of a house concealing caches of weapons with a warrant to search the place.</p>
<p>“Civilian homes are not legitimate targets unless they are being used for, or contribute to, military purposes at the time in question,” Pillay stated, which is precisely how the Gaza homes and other facilities that Israel goes after are being used. However, she brazenly accused Israel of overreacting in confronting the situation that Hamas has created by using Palestinian civilians as human shields. She demanded proof beyond any doubt that the Gaza facilities are being used for military purposes before any force can be used against them. Even then the response by Israel must be “proportionate,” whatever that means, in the situation that Israel finds itself.  In the case of Israel’s response and the ensuing civilian casualties, Pillay claimed that “there seems to be a strong possibility that international humanitarian law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes.”</p>
<p>At best, Pillay is uninformed. Far more likely, she is simply reflecting the UN’s ingrained institutional bias against Israel which she shares. Indeed, she need look no further for proof of what Hamas is up to than the UN’s own schools which its runs in Gaza. At least two such schools have been identified so far as hiding places for Hamas rockets. The first batch of rockets was handed over to what the UN has described as the “local authorities” – i.e., Hamas, which is the governing authority in Gaza. After the discovery of rockets in the second school, they have supposedly gone missing. That’s because they were left overnight unguarded for all intents and purposes by the UN agency in charge (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency). Pillay conveniently left this bit of conclusive proof of Hamas’s civilian exploitation strategy out of her statement, although UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon did issue a statement of his own on July 23<sup>rd</sup> expressing “his outrage and regret at the placing of weapons in a UN-administered school.&#8221;</p>
<p>Pillay not only ignores the facts in her zeal to condemn Israel. She ignores the relevant law as well. Under international law, the civilian population may not be made the object of attack. Acts of violence intended primarily to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited. That is precisely what Hamas, not Israel, has done and proudly brags about. Moreover, under international law, civilians may not be used to conceal military positions, or to serve as shields against an attack or military response. Again, that is precisely what Hamas, not Israel, has done. When a traditionally civilian object (such as a civilian house) is occupied and used by combatants, it becomes a legitimate military target under international law so long as precautionary measures are taken to minimize civilian casualties, such as the advance warnings to occupants that Israel has provided.</p>
<p>In terms of the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, the UN’s figures of approximately 600 killed and 3500 injured cannot be taken simply at face value. The loss or maiming of even one innocent civilian life, particularly a child, is tragic to be sure. But even the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which compiles the data, has stated that its figures are preliminary and subject to further verification. What’s more, OCHA has admitted that its data on the number of civilian injuries “is provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.” The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas’s very own Mufiz al-Makhalalati. OCHA could not have chosen to rely on a more biased source which uses numbers and images of alleged civilian casualties as propaganda fodder.</p>
<p>For his part, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been visiting the Middle East region this past week in an effort to broker an immediate ceasefire. The ceasefire proposed by Egypt more than a week ago could have already been in place, saving many lives, but it was Hamas and Hamas alone that rejected it. Hamas’s leadership continues to rebuff ceasefire proposals. It is only willing to consider brief “humanitarian pauses,” which Hamas has broken before and uses simply to regroup.</p>
<p>The Secretary General compromised his ability to serve as a neutral mediator when he accepted a Qatari-chartered plane for his air transportation to the Middle East region. He started his trip in Qatar.</p>
<p>Qatar and Hamas are joined at the hip. Some of Hamas’s political figures, including Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal, have been living in the lap of luxury in Qatar. Qatar is Hamas’s main funder. In 2012, the emir of Qatar became the first head of state to visit the Gaza Strip since Hamas assumed full control of Gaza in 2007, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for Hamas’s Gaza. The emir used the occasion to lash out at Israel’s “Judaization in the occupied West Bank and especially in Jerusalem.&#8221;</p>
<p>Last June, Qatar attempted to transfer money to cover the monthly salaries of the civil servants of the Hamas-run government in Gaza that preceded the so-called “unity” government. The Arab Bank rejected the transfer under U.S. pressure.</p>
<p>Hamas and Qatar operate from the same jihadist playbook. Thus, it was no surprise that Qatar’s own version of a ceasefire proposal adopted virtually all of Hamas’s demands, including release of its operatives detained by Israel and the unconditional opening of all border crossings by Israel and Egypt.</p>
<p>Ban Ki-moon’s statements that Israel has the right to defend itself and his condemnations of Hamas rocket firings targeted at Israeli civilians ring hollow when he begins his mediation trip in the Hamas jihad-sponsoring country that has funded his journey there.</p>
<p>Since in 1977, the United Nations has sponsored the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its partition resolution. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called November 29th a “day of mourning and a day of grief.”   The event takes place every year at UN headquarters in New York and at the UN offices at Geneva and Vienna and elsewhere. If that were not enough, on November 26, 2013, the General Assembly decided to proclaim 2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.</p>
<p>In other words, every November 29th, the United Nations publicly mourns the passage of its own original two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute that could have resulted in an independent Palestinian state more than six decades ago. Israel accepted it. The Palestinian leadership and neighboring Arab countries rejected it. Instead, they sought but failed to make Israel a still-born state. Time and again since, Israel has offered land for peace. Time and again, the Palestinians have refused unless all of their demands are met – including their preposterous assertion of the right to return millions of so-called Palestinian refugees to live and effectively take over pre-1967 Israel. When Israel unilaterally pulled all of its forces and settlers out of Gaza in 2005 and left behind greenhouses and other facilities that the Palestinians could have used to begin building independent state infrastructure and a prospering economy, the answer was Hamas’s reign of terror. Hamas decided instead to use valuable resources and time to build a military infrastructure from which to launch unremitting attacks against Israeli civilians.</p>
<p>Even during the current Gaza conflict, Israel ceased its fire in response to Egypt’s ceasefire proposal. Hamas kept firing its rockets. And while Hamas has used a hospital to serve as a hiding place for its weapons and as a command center, Israel has built a real field hospital in Gaza to care mainly for injured Palestinian women, children and the elderly.</p>
<p>Hamas’s response to offers of cessation of hostilities is more hostilities directed at civilians and further crimes against humanity. Yet, in its perversion of the truth, the United Nations shamelessly sides with the jihadists against the rule of law and civilized behavior.</p>
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