Tag Archive for: HUGH FITZGERALD

Moshe Dayan’s Great Mistake

/in , , , , , /by

In June 1967, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Mordechai (Motta) Gur broke through the Jordanian defenses and captured the Old City, where the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism – are all contained. Many Israelis believed that after 19 years of being denied access, they, and Jews everywhere, would again have unfettered access to the Temple Mount, where they would be able to pray. Alas, it was not to be. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, a secularist, who was intent on mollifying the defeated Arabs, had other ideas. Meir Soloveichik writes about Dayan’s tragic blunder here: “Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder,” by Meir Y. Soloveichik, Commentary, February 2023:

There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.

Dayan had the perfect opportunity to end, once and for all, the Arab attempt to cut Jews off from the holiest site in Judaism. When east Jerusalem, and the Old City, were under Jordanian control, from 1949 to 1967, no Jews could visit the Temple Mount or the Western Wall. Dayan might, in the heady aftermath of that spectacular victory in June 1967, have declared that from now on, Jews could visit the Temple Mount, at any time of day, and on any day of the week, just as the Muslims could. He might have insisted that Jews could say their prayers on the Temple Mount, just as the Muslims did. But instead he strictly limited Jewish “visiting hours” on the Mount to four hours a day, and then on only five days of the week. And more terrible still, he decided to forbid Jewish prayer, open or silent, at the holiest site in Judaism, a policy that has been dutifully followed by every Israeli government since Dayan’s day.

Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world [but just how, following Israel’s stunning victory against three Arab states, would that Muslim world be able to summon the strength to “confront” Israel?], and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.

It was not wrong to let the Waqf continue to administer the Muslim holy sites. What was wrong was Dayan’s not asserting the right of Jews to visit the Temple Mount at any time, “just as Muslims do,” and especially, in not insisting that “Jews of course will now have the same rights as Muslims to pray on the Temple Mount.” Put that way, it would be hard for the Western powers to reject such a reasonable, and modest, request.

Netanyahu, David Horovitz [editor of the Jerusalem Post, writing in a recent article] continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” This is a reference to [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount. Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.

Horovitz, another left-wing secularist, calls on Netanyahu not to change Dayan’s policy on the Temple Mount, but to continue to limit Jewish access and to block Jewish prayer. He preposterously calls Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount an act of “potential pyromania.” There were all sorts of Arab threats, that if Ben Gvir made that visit, there would be an “explosion” of Arab violence. But he visited, walked around the perimeter of the Compound, steered clear of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, did not pray, made no statement, and left after 13 minutes. And no upsurge of Arab riots and violence resulted from this so-called “pyromaniac’s” visit.

After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?”As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:

Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”…

Dayan was a brilliant military commander, but otherwise he left much to be desired. He did not feel any religious attachment himself to the Temple Mount, which, given that he was an atheist, can be understood, but what he also lacked was any comprehension of how much that site meant to others, not just to religious Jews, but even to many secular Jews less dogmatic than he. He did not feel along his pulse that the Temple Mount was the holiest site in Judaism, and was unable to empathize with the millions of Jews who felt that it was such. Nor did he see the Temple Mount as the site not just of religious significance, but of the greatest historical importance to the Jews, the place where both the First and Second Temples had stood. Dayan’s description of the Temple Mount only as a “Muslim prayer mosque,” and his dismissal of the Jews’ 2600-year-old attachment to the site, are shocking. He famously, and unforgivably, wrote that “one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now” and “one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.” He was sympathetic to Muslim claims, but not to those of the Jews, to the Temple Mount; he was unable to grasp the depth of the Jewish attachment – that is, of Jews other than himself – to the Temple Mount. And that led to his unforgivable blunder, in forbidding Jewish prayer on the Mount, at the very time when allowing it would have been accepted by the defeated and thoroughly demoralized Arabs.

The Palestinian attempt to insist that there never was a Jewish connection to the Haram al-Sharif (as Muslims call the Temple Mount), even denying that there ever were two Jewish temples at the site, despite what even non-Jewish historians have written, has had the effect of pushing religious Jews, and some secular ones too, to more forcefully stake the Jewish claim by visiting the Mount in much greater numbers than before the Palestinian denial.

The hysteria over the “far-right” members of the Netanyahu government, expressed by Jews and non-Jews alike, is hardly warranted. And so far these incessant cries of alarm, that “Israel is no longer a democracy,“ that “Israel has lost its soul,” and suchlike alarm, overlook the obvious: the new government that is being called “an enemy to democracy” was itself elected democratically, and can be turned out anytime the voters of Israel chose to do so. That Israeli electorate has, after all, gone through ten governments since 2001.

Now is the time for Israel to state clearly its case for undoing Moshe Dayan’s historic blunder. Prime Minister Netanyahu can speak thus to the world:

“For 2600 years, even before the destruction of the First Temple on the Temple Mount in 586 B.C., and the destruction of the Second Temple on the same site in 70 A.D., what we Jews call the Temple Mount and the Muslims call Haram al-Sharif was the religious and historical center of Jewish life. Under the Babylonians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and the British, Jews maintained their right to visit and pray on the Temple Mount. During these thousands of years, it was only during the period from 1949 to 1967, when Jordan held east Jerusalem and the Old City, that Jews were forbidden to visit the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. In 1967, Israel came into possession of the Old City, and once again Jews could visit the Temple Mount. But it was the decision of one man, Moshe Dayan, in June of 1967, that deprived Jews of the right to pray on the Temple Mount. And ever since, we Jews have had to endure the paradox of not being able to pray at the holiest site in Judaism. Now that prohibition has been lifted, and Jews will again be free to pray — as Muslims have been able to — just as they did before 1949, on the Temple Mount.

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLE: Sweden permits Qur’an-burning, Turkey says Swedes must fight those who ‘target Islam’ if it wants to join NATO

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

The Graves of Academe: USC School of Social Work Bans ‘Field’

/in , , , , , , , /by

“Shall Paper live, or Ink/Since Brass and Marble Can’t Withstand/This Iron Age’s Violating Hand?” — Johannes de Bosco

The University of Southern California (that’s USC to you and me) has been thrust into the limelight yet again. In 2019, and for several years following, it was in the news as a major participant in the “Varsity Blues” scandal; rich parents were inveigled into paying bribes to the university’s water polo coach, so that their children might be admitted, as potential varsity players of the sport, to USC. It’s a university that as part of its online advertisement for itself says that “USC has conferred honorary degrees on 29 billionaires.” I’m not exactly sure why that should impress anyone, but some people at USC think it should; no doubt USC has its reasons that reason does not know. Some eyebrows were raised when USC agreed to pay its new football coach $10 million a year; not everyone on the faculty – you know, those old fogies who teach such frivolities as literature, history, and philosophy — were pleased by this demonstration of USC’s priorities. But what do those people know? Have they ever had to meet a payroll? A winning football team pays their salaries. They had better stop complaining.

And now the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (USCSDPSSW for short) has put USC the news again. The school has just announced that it has decided to ban the word “field” from its curriculum. No longer will anyone at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, whether faculty members, or staff, or students, be permitted to use the word “field.” From here on out, it’s strictly forbidden. The story of this remarkably thoughtful act of anti-racism can be found here: “Elite University Department Bans Use of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist,” by Alexa Schwerha, Daily Signal, 

The University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work will no longer use the word “field” in its curriculum or its practices as part of its anti-racist framework, according to an email reportedly sent Monday.

The school reportedly stripped the word from use due to alleged ties to “anti-Black” and “anti-immigrant” rhetoric, according to the email sent by the Practicum Education Department to the campus community, faculty, staff, and students. The school informed [sic] that the word “practicum” would be used instead to “ensure [its] use of inclusive language and practice.”

“This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the email reportedly reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”

The revised language aligns with several anti-racist initiatives the school abides by, including the Council on Social Work Education’s Advancing Antiracism in Social Work Education and the Eliminate Racism Grand Challenge for Social Work, according to the email.

“In solidarity with universities across the nation, our goal is not just to change language but to honor and acknowledge incline [sic] and reject white supremacy, anti-immigrant and anti-blackness ideologies,” the email continues. “Words are powerful, but even more so is action. We are committing to further align our actions, behaviors, and practices with anti-racism and anti-oppression, which requires taking a close and critical look at our profession—our history, our biases, and our complicity in past and current injustices.”

The email then claimed the school would “train social work students” to “understand and embody social and racial justice” and told the campus community to “hold each other accountable.”

USC, the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, and the Practicum Education Department did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Don’t forgive them, Lord, at the USCSDPSSW they know exactly what they do. They are beyond all appeals to common sense. They will not engage – because they don’t know how to do so – in discussions about the right use of words. Delicacy, tact, intelligence – don’t even ask. Their every comical word-banning – don’t think they will stop with “field” — should be held up for ridicule, every jot and tittle of idiocy exposed, while those who refuse to get with the program should move unobserved from campus to campus, quietly distributing copies of Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and even more important, Ian Robinson’s The Survival of English.

Shouldn’t we do away entirely with the word “field”? If it summons up, as we are being asked to believe, images of black slaves in fields of tall cotton (but it was Johnny Cash, a white man, who sang about “them old cotton fields back home”), and Mexican workers in the bean fields and orange groves of sunny California, then it shouldn’t be banned just from the USCSDPSSW. It should be banned everywhere. Anti-racism demands it.

Think of all the possibilities. In sports, the USC Trojans run out onto the football practicum. Everyone experiences the collective thrill of anti-racism as they hear the announcer shout “they’re on the Prac-Ti-Cum and ready to go.” Baseball – same thing. The practicum of dreams will now have players catching balls at center, right, and left practicums.

In USC art classes, students will study such works of Van Gogh as “Wheat-practicum with a lark,” “The green wheat-practicum behind the Asylum painting,” and “Wheat-practicum with crows.” It takes a little getting used to, but just keep at it, and you’ll soon get the hang of it. And each time you refrain from saying the word “field,” you will have won a little victory for anti-racism. Rosa Parks would be pleased.

In the Department of Physics at USC, that last lonely professor who refuses to get on board with string theory, that is still all the rage, should announce that he is still working on trying to come up with a Unified Practicum Theory. You’re unfamiliar with that? Here’s what it is: in particle physics, it’s an attempt to describe all fundamental forces and the relationships between elementary particles in terms of a single theoretical framework. In physics, forces can be described by practicums that mediate interactions between separate objects.” There. That shouldn’t be hard to understand. A special house blend of quantum mechanics and general — or is it special? — relativity.

And let’s not stop with banning only the word “field” from our collective vocabularies and consciousnesses. There are so many other words that need to be excised from our scandalously offensive lexicons. Take the word “bend,” as in “the slaves had to bend over as they picked the cotton in their practicums.” Let’s fix it: “the slaves had to ____their torsos as they picked the cotton in their practicums.” Fill in the blank. Anything you come up with will be better than “bend.” Then do the same to transform “a bend in the river” and “South Bend, Indiana” and “bend it like Beckham.” See – you can even have fun as you deracistize your language.

What about the word “cotton” itself? I bought a cotton polo shirt the other day, and when I got home I couldn’t stop thinking about those held in bondage in the antebellum South picking the very same stuff that my shirt was made of, and I felt so…so racist. I should have been more attentive to my language. I should have taught myself to think of my recent purchase as a “shirt made of a soft white fibrous substance that surrounds the seeds of a tropical and subtropical plant and is used as textile fiber and thread for sewing.” And from now on I will. Now, isn’t that better?

I fear there is no end to this. There are so many words — thousands, maybe tens of thousands — that will need to be replaced. Whole departments of language police will spend years to work on the problem. We’ll need to get rid of “master bedroom” and “master class” and “Master and Margarita.” We’ll need to ban “overalls” and “dungarees.” And “back” of course, which makes us think of “back of the bus.” We can’t have “back.” Oh, and “bus.” And “tree.” We can’t have “tree.” Do I have to draw you a diagram? Goodness, what work we have ahead of us. And not a moment too soon. Let’s be grateful to the hyper-vigilant people at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (USCSDPSSW) who led the way. And now we have a solemn duty to take what they’ve begun to another level.

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED TWEETS:

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Says ‘We’re Gonna Free Iran’ and Also ‘They’re Gonna Free Themselves Pretty Soon’

/in , , , , , , /by

At a campaign rally for Rep. Andy Levin, who is a J-Street “Zionist” opposed by AIPAC, but whom President Biden would like to see re-elected, Our President gave us all a brief display of his terminal confusion. This is what he said:

“Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran,” Biden told supporters in an aside during a campaign speech in California late Thursday, after audience members appeared to call on him to address the ongoing protests. “They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon,” he added.

Forgive me for asking, but which is it? Are “we gonna free Iran,” or are they, the Iranians, “gonna free themselves pretty soon”? And when might “pretty soon” be – in a month, or in six months from now, in a year, or ten years from now? And how precisely are we gonna, or are they gonna, do it?

You expect confusion from our Confuser-In-Chief, but this reversal of message within two six-word sentences takes some kind of – I’m gonna go out on a limb here and use a word that I think pretty much says it all – cake.

Now there are other great confusers. Let me offer two examples. There was Gracie Allen, of Burns & Allen fame, who wrote a play with the title “Before the Behind Yet Under the Vast Above, the World Is In Tears and Tomorrow is Tuesday.” I understand from his speechwriters that Biden is going to use that very title in his final pre-election speech-and-shoutout next Monday.

There was also Arthur Flegenheimer, the gangster also known as Dutch Schultz, who on his deathbed provided a Joycean, or now we might say Bidenite, stream-of-consciousness:

Schultz noticed a newspaper and spoke:

Has it been in any other papers? George, don’t make no full moves. What have you done with him? Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh stop it, stop it; eh, oh, oh. Sure, sure, mama.

Now listen, Phil, fun is fun. Ah please, papa. What happened to the sixteen? Oh, oh, he done it, please. John, please, oh, did you buy the hotel? You promised a million sure. Get out. I wished I knew.

Please make it quick, fast and furious. Please. Fast and furious. Please help me get out; I am getting my wind back, thank God. Please, please, oh please. You will have to please tell him, you got no case.

You get ahead with the dot dash system didn’t I speak that time last night. Whose number is that in your pocket book, Phi1 13780. Who was it? Oh- please, please. Reserve decision. Police, police, Henry and Frankie. Oh, oh, dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn’t get happy please, please to do this. Then Henry, Henry, Frankie you didn’t even meet me. The glove will fit what I say oh, Kayiyi, oh Kayiyi. Sure who cares when you are through? How do you know this? How do you know this? Well, then oh, Cocoa know thinks he is a grandpa again. He is jumping around. No Hobo and Poboe I think he means the same thing.

Will you help me up? O.K. I won’t be such a big creep. Oh, mama. I can’t go through with it, please. Oh, and then he clips me; come on. Cut that out, we don’t owe a nickel; hold it; instead, hold it against him; I am a pretty good pretzler -Winifred- Department of Justice. I even got it from the department. Sir, please stop it. Say listen the last night!

I don’t know, sir. Honestly I don’t. I don’t even know who was with me, honestly. I was in the toilet and when I reached the -the boy came at me.

No. If he wanted to break the ring no, please I get a month. They did it. Come on. (A name, not clear) cut me off and says you are not to be the beneficiary of this will. Is that right? I will be checked and double-checked and please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good ones and how many bad ones? Please I had nothing with him he was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fight. No business; no hangout; no friends; nothing; just what you pick up and what you need. I don’t know who shot me. Don’t put anyone near this check~ you might have -please do it for me. Let me get up. heh? In the olden days they waited and they waited. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. Sure, that is a bad. Well, oh good ahead that happens for trying. I don’t want harmony. I want harmony. Oh, mamma, mamma! Who give it to him? Who give it to him? Let me in the district -fire-factory that he was nowhere near. It smoldered No, no. There are only ten of us and there ten million fighting somewhere of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up the truce flag. Oh, please let me up. Please shift me. Police are here. Communistic…strike…baloney…honestly this is a habit I get; sometimes I give it and sometimes I don’t. Oh, I am all in. That settles it. Are you sure? Please let me get in and eat. Let him harass himself to you and then bother you. Please don’t ask me to go there. I don’t want to. I still don’t want him in the path. It is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control. My gilt edged stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please mother, don’t tear, don’t rip; that is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Please, look out. The shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life. No payrolls. No wells. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me, I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owed me money; he owes everyone money. Why can’t he just pullout and give me control? Please, mother, you pick me up now. Please, you know me. No. Don’t you scare me. My friends and I think I do a better job. Police are looking for you all over. Be instrumental in letting us know. They are English-men and they are a type I don’t know who is best, they or us. Oh, sir, get the doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it. I take all events into consideration. No. No. And it is no. It is confused and its says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. Did you hear me?

Two thousand. Come one, get some money in that treasury. We need it. Come on, please get it. I can’t tell you to. That is not what you have in the book. Oh, please warden. What am I going to do for money? Please put me up on my feet at once. You are a hard boiled man. Did you hear me? I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain’t the pay-off. Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander. I am sore and I am going up and I am going to give you honey if I can. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.

That is what caused the trouble. Look out. Please let me up. If you do this, you can go on and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are. They are French people. All right. Look out, look out. Oh, my memory is gone. A work relief police. Who gets it? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but look out. It can be traced. He changed for the worse. Please look out; my fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. It was desperate. I am wobbly. You ain’t got nothing on him but you got it on his helper.

Then pull me out. I am half crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing that I want. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Danny, please get me in the car.

I don’t know. I didn’t even get a look. I don’t know who can have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off. (He was told that they were off.) No. There is a handcuff on them. The Baron says these things. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn’t worth a nickel to two guys like you or me but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. I am going to turn it over to… Turn you back to me, please Henry. I am so sick now. The police are getting many complaints. Look out. I want that G-note. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he is an old pal of mine. Come on, come on, Jim. Ok, ok, I am all through. Can’t do another thing. Look out mamma, look out for her. You can’t beat him. Police, mamma, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please help me up, Henry. Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.

Gracie Allen, Arthur Flegenheimer, and now, our latest entrant, out of the left field of politics, President Joe Biden.

Let’s think. How are “we gonna free Iran”? Certainly not by going through with any Iran deal, which would trigger a removal of sanctions and hundreds of billions of dollars being restored to the regime that we are “gonna free Iran” from. So why not tell your audience and the world that “we” have no intention of removing economic sanctions unless, and until, the current regime is overthrown. That should hearten those Iranians who are now risking their lives to protest that unsavory regime.

But what else? How about Biden suggesting a blockade of tankers carrying Iranian oil? That should bring Tehran to its knees. But as he does it, Biden should warn the Iranians that any retaliation by them will be regarded as an act of war and would trigger a devastating response.

What “we gonna” do to “free Iran” should include encouraging separatist sympathies over the airwaves, and on social media, among the four main ethnic minorities. Does Biden remember who they are? In case he’s forgotten, or never knew, here they are: Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs. Biden could send weapons to any of those minorities should they request them: to the Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan, sent through Iraq, to the Arabs in Khuzestan via ship from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to the Azeris, with supplies from Azerbaijan next door, to the Baluchis in southeastern Iran, via airdrops of weapons to the 7.5 million fellow Baluchis in Pakistan for delivery just across the border in Iran. “We hear you and we’re gonna help you.” Also sprach Joe Biden.

And he should announce that as long as the protesters are being suppressed by the regime, American hackers will be disrupting the Iranian government, including the Supreme Leader’s office, and those of every member of the Majlis, as well as the IRGC and Basij command-and-control centers, the oil industry, the electricity plants, the transportation sector, the prisons, even the food distribution system. No part of the regime, or of Iran’s economy, will remain untouched.

And should “we” fail to free Iran as Biden promised we were gonna do, then how will “they” — the Iranians — “free themselves pretty soon”? They — those Iranians — can be provided with our satellite and other intelligence on the movement of the police, the Basij, the IRGC killers, to know where and when it is safest to march, and where to go to avoid a bloody encounter. We can help the protesters hack into systems that will allow them to take over for long periods Iran’s radio stations and television channels, as up till now they have managed to do only momentarily, and to seize control of Farsi-language social media, so that pro-government propagandists are silenced and only the protesters’ messages can be seen and heard. We can help them to “free themselves” by keeping up the diplomatic pressure at the U.N., where a resolution to expel Iran from the institution should be introduced; Iran now has only a handful of unsavory allies – Russia, China, North Korea, Syria – willing to stand up for it.

In other words, “we gonna free Iran ” by helping those Iranians who are “gonna free themselves.” Which is to say, avoid the confusion you created, and rely instead on a proverb that is as old as Aesop; “God helps those who help themselves.” Next time, Mr. President, say it exactly that way, without any Lunchbucket Joe “gonna’s.” A little dignity, please: “We and the rest of the civilized world are going to help the Iranians to help themselves. They don’t doubt that they will win. And neither should we.”

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Iran: Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps using Afghan Shia militia to quell protests

Iran: Top aide to Khamenei says ‘We must accept the differences and open a space for dialogue’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Surprisingly, an Actually Good Candidate is in the Running to Replace Boris Johnson

/in , , , , , /by

Tom Tugendhat has just announced his candidacy to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

While Ben Wallace, the current front-runner, has a record of antipathy toward Israel and curious sympathy for Iran, a country he claims proudly to have visited more than any other MP, Tom Tugendhat is among the most pro-Israel of MPs. And his background is also unusual for someone who supports Israel. Tugendhat has a degree in Islamic Studies, speaks Arabic and was a military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. While in Afghanistan, he was a Lieutenant Colonel; the commander of the British forces in Afghanistan at that time was his superior officer, Colonel Richard Kemp. Kemp is well-known for his testimony at the UNHRC: Commission on the Goldstone Report:

Based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Kemp went on to give a stirring defense of the Israel Defense Forces and the extremes to which it goes to protect civilian lives.

But as Kemp subsequently noted his remarks to the commission, though criticized in some quarters, were not at all unusual among his fellow officers. In fact, he said that many of his comrades in the British army share them.

“[While] I got quite a lot of criticism from within the U.K., I got a lot of support for what I said from other military people — people with military experience in the U.K.,” Kemp said. “In general terms, I find that my opinions on these matters … are shared by many British military officers and retired military officers. The reason for that is the IDF has for many, many years been very well respected by the British military; they have been looked at as a very effective fighting force and we’ve looked to see what kind of lessons we can learn from them.”

In fact, Kemp studied IDF operations while a cadet at Sandhurst — the British equivalent of West Point.

“It wasn’t just me; it was the British army as a whole that made a considerable study of the IDF,” Kemp has said. Indeed, the British studied the Israeli operations “probably above all other contemporary armed forces.”

“According to him, the civilian casualty rate during Operations Cast Lead and Piller of Defense — the code names for Israel’s last two conflicts with Hamas — was less than one civilian killed for every fighter. In Afghanistan, he noted, the rate was 3 to 1, by U.N. statistics and probably higher in Iraq.

“That’s a remarkable achievement,” Kemp said. “It shows the extent to which the Israelis went to gain the intelligence — precise intelligence — to be extremely careful about their targeting, to warn the civilian population off.”

Tom Tugendhat is among those retired British military men who served under Colonel Kemp when he was overall commander of the British forces In Afghanistan, and came to share his views on the IDF as a fighting force that was not only amazingly effective but also, as Kemp has often said, “the most moral army” in the world.

In 2016, the UN Security Council voted on Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a “violation of international law” and “of no validity.” Britain voted with the majority (and Obama, shamefully, instructed the U.S. delegate to “abstain” instead of vetoing the measure as was customary with such anti-Israel resolutions). Tugendhat rose in Parliament to denounce that British vote. There were not many Conservative members of Parliament willing to take issue with their own government’s UN votes. British supporters of Israel have not forgotten Tugendhat’s stand. Nor, of course, have the Palestinians.

Tugendhat wrote in The Spectator about that “wrong vote”:

Like all the best mistakes, it [the British vote for UNSC Resolution 2334] was done for the right reasons. Knowing that for once the US wouldn’t veto, the UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning settlement building in the occupied Palestinian Territories. The UK was no doubt keen to be with the consensus but we were wrong to back the Resolution. This time was different. Not because Israel has changed, nor the expansion of the settlements is exacerbating the efforts towards a settlement, but because the world has changed and so have we.…

Since voting to leave the European Union, the UK has needed a new grand strategy, one that promotes our interests and allows us to chart our own future. Resolution 2334 shows our foreign policy has not caught up. Backing an outgoing US administration, an anti-Zionist myth, and many dictators’ propaganda message doesn’t just undermine Israel and ignore recent tectonic change, it hurts our regional allies and weakens us. To write our own future we need to think more about the message our votes send and be prepared to stand against consensus. This time we got it wrong.

Tugendhat knew, four years before the Abraham Accords were born, that the question of Palestine doesn’t matter to the Arabs as it once did. Most of the Arabs have moved on, he maintains, and so should the British, instead of continuing to support “an anti-Zionist myth” and believing that everything that happens in the Middle East must somehow be connected to, or blamed on, Israel for its putative misdeeds. Israel is an important ally of Great Britain; its “intelligence and military technology” have helped to save countless British lives; it has taken “huge risks” for peace. The BDS movement undermines our friend, Israel. Arab despots, like Assad, use Israel to deflect attention from their own wretched rule. Sensible Arabs in the UAE and Bahrain have chosen to make peace with, and normalize ties, to Israel as members of the Abrahamic Accords. It should be our task in Britain to promote those Accords, and allow the Palestinian question to assume its proper, quite tiny, space in our attention and our geopolitics, or even, perhaps, be allowed to wither altogether on the vine.

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

UK: Muslim writer says the ‘right-wing extremist’ threat ‘pales in comparison to the Islamic threat’

Dutch airline Transavia omits Israel from its list of countries, but includes ‘Palestine’

Pakistan: Muslims abduct 15-year-old Christian girl, force her to convert to Islam and marry Muslim

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Introducing Mariam Barghouti, Washington Post Op-Ed Contributor

/in , , , , , , /by

Like the New York Times with its roster of anti-Israel contributors, such as the anti-Israel post-Zionist Peter Beinart, the Washington Post favors op-ed contributors on Israel-Palestine who are very much on the side of the Palestinians. A recent example, featuring the Palestinian Mariam Barghouti, is reported on here: “Washington Post Publishes Op-Ed by Mariam Barghouti, Who Compared Israel to Nazi Germany,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Algemeiner, April 1, 2022:

It would appear that having a documented history that has included comparing Israel to Nazi Germany does not preclude one from offering their opinions on the editorial webpages of The Washington Post, a publication that prides itself on a self-stated commitment to fairness.

Mariam Barghouti, who describes herself as a “writer and researcher based in Palestine,” was recently invited to share her views with Post readers, in a piece titled, “Another group recognized Israel’s Palestinian apartheid. How will the world react?”

Barghouti, who has also previously written for and contributed to outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Newsweek, came to HonestReporting’s attention last year after we uncovered a series of now-deleted tweets, such as one in which she asserted that “Israel has been beating Hitler at his own game since 1948,” and another that referred to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as being “nothing more than a war criminal and a Nazi.”

Barghouti declared in her tweets that Israel was even worse – more murderous, more evil – than the Nazis, for the Jewish state “has been beating Hitler at his own game since 1948.” And Benjamin Netanyahu is a “war criminal and a Nazi.” Yes, we all remember how the Israeli police rounded up hundreds of thousands, or was it millions, of Palestinians and then sent them off to a series of death camps that that “Nazi” Netanyahu had built. Of course, once this grotesque series of tweets was discovered, Barghouti did the only thing she could do: she quickly deleted the tweets, but it was too late; they had already been seen and recorded.

Such remarks are evidence of anti-Jewish bigotry, and are a breach of the IHRA’s internationally-recognized working definition of antisemitism, specifically making comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis and claiming that Israel’s very existence is in itself a racist endeavor.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism includes making comparisons between Israeli policy and the genocidal program of the Nazis, and insisting that Israel is in its very essence a “racist” undertaking. Barghouti’s tweets, now taken down, make both claims.

The IHRA definition has been either adopted or endorsed by dozens of countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Germany.

In her latest piece, Barghouti accuses the Jewish state of maintaining a “deep essence of apartheid;” suggests that Jerusalem’s decision to designate six Palestinian NGOs is part of a campaign to “discredit and vilify” critics; and claims that Israel “weaponizes charges of antisemitism to manipulate and gaslight.”

Hundreds of NGOs are active in Israel, many of them quite critical of the Jewish state. But they are not shut down. The six NGOs that Israel banned last fall were not merely critical of Israel, but their members had close ties to the internationally-recognized terrorist group the PFLP. In fact, there was an overlap of the personnel of these NGOs and the PFLP. These six NGOs were, in essence, working hand-in-glove with a known terrorist group, and thus deserved the “terrorist” designation themselves. Initially critical of Israel’s move, Washington asked Israel for more evidence to justify its banning of these six NGOs as “terrorist organizations.” Jerusalem supplied that evidence, which was apparently convincing enough for the Americans, for there have been no complaints ever since from Washington about Israel’s banning of those six NGOs.

Mariam Barghouti’s description of Israel maintaining a “deep essence of apartheid” reflects the latest fashion in anti-Israel propaganda: that Israel is an “apartheid” state. This charge is made ad nauseam, repeated all over social media. For too many, this charge is enough to blacken Israel’s image; the credulous, animated by hate, will believe. Not a shred of evidence is required.

There are a number of points that deserve to be noted in response to such allegations.

For starters, the accusation of apartheid, which has been primarily promulgated by three organizations — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and B’Tselem — has previously been thoroughly debunked by HonestReporting.

Let’s repeat that debunking of the “apartheid” charge here. There is no apartheid in Israel. Arabs serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, go abroad as Israeli ambassadors. The chairman of the largest bank in Israel, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs study in the same universities. Jews and Arabs work in the same offices and factories. Jews and Arabs are treated in the same hospitals, by the same Jewish and Arab medical personnel. Jews and Arabs play on the same sports teams (an Arab is the captain of Israel’s national soccer team), and in the same orchestras. Jews and Arabs own businesses together, everything from restaurants to high tech start-ups. Nothing here bespeaks “apartheid.” The only difference is that Israeli Jews must, while Israeli Arabs may, serve in the IDF.

In addition, two of the organizations, Amnesty and HRW, that have spread this libel have been accused of having a fixation on alleged misdeeds by Israel. For example, when Amnesty released its widely-publicized report last month, an analysis of its Twitter account over the next six days revealed it had posted no fewer than 132 tweets accusing the Jewish state of perpetrating various crimes, compared to just 13 about every other human rights issue in the world.

Human Rights Watch released a 5,000-word report about Israel in December last year, in which it claimed Israeli law enforcement responded to outbreaks of violence in May in an “apparently discriminatory manner.” Yet the same document completely ignored what had been described as “pogroms” by Arab-Israelis against Jews and their property during the same period.

Israel’s police did not “discriminate” in May when they arrested Jews and Israeli Arabs alike who had been attacking one another in such “mixed” cities as Lod and Ramle. But there were many more, and much more violent, attacks by Arabs on Jews than by Jews who, in response, attacked Arabs, during this unrest, which HRW did not see fit to disclose. And that’s why – the only reason – that more Arabs than Jews were arrested.

In April, HRW penned a 213-page report that peddled the “apartheid” canard and a third 6,500-word report was released in May that accused Israel of “war crimes” for its response to the barrage of indiscriminate rocket fire by Hamas during last year’s conflict.

It would be fascinating to see how HRW managed to support its “apartheid” charge when all the evidence – see above — undermines that claim. As for the “war crimes” supposedly committed by the IDF in the May war, there were none. Hamas deliberately placed its weapons, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, and fighters in civilian buildings, in schools, hospitals, apartment houses, office buildings. It is Hamas that thereby put civilians in danger. Furthermore, Hamas launched its rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities. The IDF made enormous efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. It warned civilians to leave, or get away from, buildings about to be targeted, using telephoning, emailing, and the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. No other military, according to Colonel Richard Kemp, commander of the British forces in Afghanistan and the veteran of a half-dozen military campaigns, makes such efforts to limit civilian casualties as does the IDF; it is, he has said, the “most moral” of militaries.

The NGOs that Barghouti claims Israel has unfairly targeted have proven links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terror group by most of the western world.

The six NGOs Israel banned as “terrorist groups” were not only were staffed by members of the PFLP, but served as the conduits for funds that they received from unsuspecting donors, and then were transferred to the PFLP.

The overlap of PFLP personnel with those staffing the six NGOs, and those NGOs also transferring donor funds to the PFLP, proved convincing enough for one European country, the Netherlands, which initially was doubtful about Israel’s charges against these six NGOs, to itself stop its funding of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) this past January; the UAWC is one of the six Palestinian NGOs Israel banned last year due to ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.

In a letter to the Dutch parliament, two ministers wrote that their investigation found that 34 UAWC employees were active in the PFLP in 2007-2020, some at the same time as holding leadership positions in the terrorist group.

And after it had initially insisted that Israel provide more proof of its allegations about the six NGOs, Washington has gone silent on the matter, presumably because that proof was provided by Israel. The Bidenites still don’t want to follow Israel’s lead and designate those NGOs as terrorist organizations; they are trying to appease the P.A. just as they have been appeasing Iran in Vienna.

Finally, there is an irony in Barghouti accusing Jerusalem of weaponizing antisemitism, when she has manifestly spread anti-Jewish hatred online.

Just this week — mere hours before a Palestinian gunman murdered five people in the central city of Bnei Brak and amid a wave of terrorism — Barghouti tweeted that every year around the time of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israel becomes “charged with intensified aggression” to create circumstances whereby Palestinians face violence or “the fear and crippling anxiety of anticipated attacks.”…

Ramadan is well known to be a time when Muslim violence erupts, and not just in Israel; it’s the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who during this Ramadan, as in all previous Ramadans, will demonstrate “intensified aggression” against the Israelis. Barghouti turns it upside down, claiming that the violence that erupts at Ramadan will come from the Israelis, and that is why the poor Palestinians, at such risk of terrible violence from the Jews, suffer this “fear and crippling anxiety of anticipated attacks.” That “fear and anxiety” is not felt by the Palestinians, but by their intended victims, Israel’s Jews, who know all too well how the Muslim Arabs customarily behave at Ramadan.

Will the Washington Post, following the “fairness doctrine,” allow an op-ed to be published in response to Mariam Barghouti? Such an article would answer her claim that Israel is an “apartheid” state, by citing all the ways that Israeli Arabs work, study, play, are treated medically, side by side with Jews, and serve in every part of Israel’s government, from the Knesset to the Supreme Court to the diplomatic corps.

And such an article would note that the evidence linking those six NGOs in Israel to the terrorist PFLP has now apparently been accepted by the Biden Administration, as it has ceased to criticize Israel’s banning of those six NGOs.

Finally, the editors of the Washington Post should ask themselves if they think it proper to run an op-ed on the sins of Israel by someone who clearly has exhibited a deep antisemitism, according to the IHRA definition. Shouldn’t such views have disqualified Mariam Barghouti from making her malevolent and baseless claims about Israel from the exalted heights of the Washington Post’s op-ed page?

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Ketanji Brown Jackson gives child rapist lax sentence, he is then arrested for assault

Washington State Man Reads the Qur’an, Gets the Idea to Kill a Woman

UK: Detective who ignored Muslim rape gang activity cleared of misconduct charges

Austria: Four Muslim migrants rape 16-year-old girl in broad daylight for over an hour

Communist Party of India top dog says many of Muhammad’s ideas are close to Communist ideals

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved,

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Wrong Again

/in , , , , , , , /by

Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who has a great deal of trouble getting his facts right about Israel and the Palestinians. He has had help from the rest of the resident staff, but that hasn’t rescued him from error. A report on the ineffable Kingsley is here: “How Many Helpers Does the New York Times Have to Hire for Error-Prone Jerusalem Bureau Chief?,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, February 14, 2022:

The New York Times’ error-prone Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, is at it again.

A full page of Sunday’s New York Times was devoted to a Kingsley dispatch from the West Bank, with reporting “contributed by Rami Nazzal and Hiba Yazbek from Burin, Myra Noveck from Yitzhar and Givat Ronen, Jonathan Shamir from Tel Aviv, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa.” What did this team of error-prone chief Kingsley and five helpers come up with?

More mistakes. Kingsley and Co. report:

Settlers injured at least 170 Palestinians last year and killed five, UN monitors reported. During the same period, Palestinians injured at least 110 settlers and killed two, UN records show. The Israeli Army said that Palestinians had injured 137 Israeli civilians in the West Bank last year.

But if the numbers are roughly comparable, the power dynamic is different … Settlers, unlike Palestinians, have the protection of the military and are rarely in danger of losing the land they live on.

It’s not accurate that Israeli settlers “are rarely in danger of losing the land they live on.”

Let’s look at the history.

In 586 BCE, when the first Temple was destroyed, the Jews were deported to Babylonia.

After 70 CE, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem and sacked the Second Temple, the Jews dispersed to various places. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Spain in 1492. Those who settled in central and eastern Europe had their property seized from them by the Nazis and the Communists.

Jews kept being expelled from one country after another in Western Europe, “losing the land” they lived on, as well as whatever other property they possessed: from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497. Those who lived in Central and Eastern Europe had centuries of persecutions an pogroms to contend with, losing their land and their lives during the Khmelnitsky Uprising in the Ukraine in the mid-17th century; Jews were again deprived of their land, and their lives, during the Nazi Holocaust; Jews again lost their property in Eastern Europe and Russia under the Communists.

In the land of Israel, Jews who lived in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and elsewhere in eastern Jerusalem had their property taken away by Jordan, which seized the territory in the war initiated by the Arabs in 1948 to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel.

Let’s also remember the 850,000 Jews who were either expelled or fled from Arab countries between 1948 and 1953. They lost their homes and land, their businesses, their property. That is why many Jews, including those in Israel, have internalized, as a kind of folk memory, the loss of their land over so many centuries, and in so many places.

Despite that history of Jews repeatedly having their land taken away from them, Patrick Kingsley insists that today’s Jewish settlers in Israel “are rarely in danger of losing the land they live on.” But that is not true, as the settlers well know.

Even the Israeli government has uprooted a series of settlements as part of a series of peace agreements.

In 1982, the Times itself reported that in turning over the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, Israel relinquished “16 civilian settlements.” The last of these was Yamit.…

“Tearfully but Forcefully, Israel Removes Gaza Settlers,” was the headline over another 2005 New York Times article. “By nightfall, the army said it had cleared the settlements of Morag, Bedolah, Kerem Atzmona, Ganei Tal, and Tel Katifa. Gadid, Peat Sadeh, Rafiah Yam, Shalev, Dugit and Nisanit were already empty or nearly so.”…

Loss of land in Gaza, where 9,000 Jewish settlers were forcibly uprooted in 2005; loss of land, too, in the West Bank, where some settlements were also closed down by the IDF. And every single one of the half-million Israelis living in the West Bank has to worry about a “peace” that will establish a Palestinian state that will include all of the West Bank and Gaza – squeezing Israel back within the 1949 armistice lines. Of course they fear “losing the land they live on.”…

The Times’ formulation that “Violence has long been deployed by both Israelis and Palestinians” makes no distinction between illegal terrorist violence and lawful warfare.

Palestinian violence is deployed in terrorist attacks on Jewish men, women, and children. Israeli violence is deployed by the police and the IDF who track down, and arrest, or kill those same terrorists. These are not equivalent uses o violence. But Kingsley doesn’t appear to see the difference.

Kingsley needs to remember that Israel has faced both enemy states and terrorist groups; it has never been the aggressor. The day after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the armies of five Arab states invaded to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state. Israel has had to fight three wars for its very survival, in 1948, 1967, and 1973. It has also had to fight eight other campaigns: in the Sinai in 1956, to stop the attacks on Israeli civilians in the Negev by Egyptian fedayin; a campaign to oust the terrorist PLO from Lebanon; two wars against the terrorist Hezbollah, and four campaigns against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. It is the Arabs who have constantly rejected a peace deal with Israel. They rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and in response to Israel’s invitation to make peace with the Arabs after the Six-Day War, the Arabs answered with the “three Nos” of Khartoum:”No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel.” Yasser Arafat walked away from a generous peace offer from Ehud Barak in 2000; Mahmoud Abbas walked away from an even more generous deal from Ehud Olmert in 2008. Since then Abbas has refused to deal unless Israel agrees that the “1967 borders” – that is, the 1949 armistice lines – will be the basis of negotiations.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians of Hamas, the PIJ, the PFLP, and those, too, who belong to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade of Fatah, carry on their terrorism against Israel. And the P.A. raises another generation to hate Israelis, and want to kill them, by continuing to use textbooks filled with antisemitic filth.. None of this Palestinian rejectionism, terrorism, and antisemitism, as Ira Stoll notes, makes it into Kingsley’s highly inaccurate reports. For him, it’s only the “occupation” and the “settler violence” that matters. There is scarcly a single report by Patrick Kingsley from Israel that has not had to be corrected. Given that record of bias and error, perhaps it’s time for the Times to replace him.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

France: Adidas ad features Muslima who denounces ‘France’s obsession with banning the hijab and niqab’

Iran: Converts from Islam to Christianity begin prison sentences for spreading ‘Zionist’ Christianity

India: Islamic seminary says necktie is Christian emblem that is unlawful and against the Islamic spirit

Pakistan: Court frees brother who confessed to murdering his sister, a social media star, in honor killing

Report shows that the Islamic State transferred large sums of money through Turkey

Germany: Muslim leader justifies murder attempt, rails against ‘Jewish dogs’ on social media

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

U.S. ambassador to Israel: ‘The Biden administration believes it must take care of the Palestinian people’

/in , , , , , , /by

At his first interview with the Israeli media in early January the new American ambassador was asked If he would be visiting any of the settlements. No, he said, “I absolutely will not.” This went over well in the Muqata in Ramallah, but left most Israelis feeling a blend of amazement, chagrin, and fury.

There was more to come. “New US envoy says ‘absolutely won’t’ visit settlements, to avoid inflaming tensions,” by Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, January 14, 2022:

Pointing to another difference between the current and previous American administrations, the US ambassador said, “The Biden administration believes it must take care of the Palestinian people. That is the difference between us and the Trump administration.”

“The Biden administration believes it must take care of the Palestinian people”? Since when did that become an American duty? We have no historic connection to, no special affection for, no duty towards, the soi-disant “Palestinian people,” who, thanks to UNRWA’s ever-increasing largesse, are better provided for than any of the hundreds of millions of real refugees created since World War II.

Some of us – the better-informed some of us — don’t accept the existence of a separate “Palestinian people” whom Ambassador Nides thinks we must “take care of.” We know that their invention was a propaganda effort, suggested to Arafat by the KGB. The head of the Palestinian terror group As-Saiqa, Zuheir Mohsen, explained in an interview he gave to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977: “Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation […] Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”

Mohsen repeated – and reinforced — the point: “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”

Nides may think “we have to take care of the Palestinian people,” but many will reject – as you and I do – both parts of that bizarre proposition.

Nides pointed to Biden’s renewal of hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to the Palestinians that was cut by Trump, amid Ramallah’s refusal to engage with his administration.

Asked if he’s had any meetings with Palestinian officials since his arrival, the envoy admitted that he had yet to cross the Green Line, but said he well might do so in the coming weeks if asked.

While the Palestinian Authority has renewed its ties with the Biden administration, it has maintained an overall boycott of the US embassy, objecting to its relocation from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The boycott hasn’t always been maintained though, and PA President Mahmoud Abbas has met with the head of the embassy’s Palestinian Affairs Unit George Noll — which operates in lieu of the Jerusalem Consulate that Trump shuttered in 2019.

Nides repeated the Biden administration’s assertion that the US plans to reopen the consulate that historically served as the de facto mission to the Palestinians. However, he did not provide any additional details, including a timeline for when the matter will be seen through.

Biden is a year into his term as President, and while he promised to reopen the consulate to the Palestinians very early on, it looks as if it’s not going to happen. Biden has a lot on his plate: a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Chinese threat to Taiwan, the North Korean missiles, the endless wrangling with Iran in Vienna. The Palestinians are small beer. The Abraham Accords show how little they matter to the other Arabs. He’s already thinking of the 2024 election, his sinking numbers in the polls, and likely Democratic losses in 2022. Why unnecessarily antagonize Israel’s supporters by trying – in vain — to reopen that consulate to the Palestinians in east Jerusalem?

Besides, Biden would need to obtain the approval of Israel to open that consulate, and he knows that under the Vienna Convention of 1963, to which both Israel and the US are signatories, a consulate cannot be opened without the agreement of the host state. A unilateral reopening of the consulate would contradict the convention, custom, and common sense. Both Prime Minister Bennett and Foreign Minister Lapid have insisted that Israel will never give such approval. Biden is stuck.

And the Bidenites have gotten the message.

Three sources familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel last month that Washington has effectively decided to shelve plans to reopen the consulate amid strong Israeli resistance to the move. The news has deeply angered PA leaders, who warned ToI [Times of Israel] that the move would have consequences on US-Palestinian relations moving forward.

Oh dear. America, you have been warned. There will be “consequences on [sic] US-Palestinian relations” if that consulate is not reopened. What might they be? Will the Palestinians refuse to cash those generous checks the Bidenites have been sending to Ramallah? No one in the U.S. will be losing sleep over that.

Nides asserted that despite declarative efforts to reopen the consulate, “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and the American ambassador works and lives there.”

Beyond that, he said that the US hopes the final status of Jerusalem will be determined through direct negotiations between the parties.

I hate to break it to Ambassador Nides, but the “final status” of Jerusalem was decided some 3000 years ago, when it became the center of Jewish life, the place where Jews lived uninterruptedly for thousands of years. There have been updates to the story since, as the city changed rulers, but not its central significance to Jews. The last major change was in 1980, when the modern state of Israel formally annexed all of Jerusalem. Its “status” is not subject to “negotiations between the parties.” Sorry, Mr. Ambassador. No can do.

As for the Biden administration’s support for Israel more broadly, Nides characterized it as “unconditional.”…

“Unconditional”? Not if the Bidenites are willing to violate the Taylor Force Act and provide hundreds of millions of dollars to the P.A. despite its continuing to reward past, and incentivize future, terrorist acts through the “Pay-For-Slay” program that is Mahmoud Abbas’ proudest achievement. Not if it is willing to let the PLO, which has Israeli blood on its hands, reopen an office in Washington.

“Unconditional”? Not If the Biden Administration refuses to admit that Israel has a very strong claim to retain all of Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank), based on Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, which encourages “close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? All the land that the League of Nations assigned to the Palestine Mandate for the Jewish National Home. That land extended from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. Have the Bidenites read, and understood what the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine signifies? Are they aware that Article 80 of the U.N. Charter committed the U.N. to fulfill the requirements of any League of Nations mandates still remaining? Does Biden, does Blinken, does Sullivan understand that Resolution 242 of the U.N. Security Council allowed Israel to retain the territory it deems necessary in order to have “secure [i.e. defensible] and recognized boundaries”? I have an awful feeling that Ambassador Nides has paid no attention to, inter alia, the Mandate for Palestine, the Treaty of San Remo, Article 80 of the U.N Charter, and Resolution 242 of the Security Council. It’s time, Ambassador Nides, for you to hit the books, and burn the midnight oil.

“Some of the conversations are meant to calm your anxiety. If I were Israeli, I would be anxious too. I respect that with all my heart,” Nides said.

They’d be a little less anxious in Israel, Mr. Ambassador, If you’d do the right and handsome thing, and announce that “upon reconsideration, I intend to visit the five settlement blocs that Israelis keep telling me, will remain part of Israel, whatever else may be subject to negotiation. Yes, I’d like to see some things in the West Bank for myself. And I will.”

Impotent rage from the rais in Ramallah, feeling betrayed. Quiet satisfaction in Jerusalem. A highly desirable denouement.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Terror Regime: Biden Halted Terror-Vetting Procedures Which Would Have STOPPED Texas Jihadi From Entering the Country

Palestinians refer to Jesus in terms reserved for jihad terrorists

After synagogue incident, Muslim spokesmen ignore Islamic antisemitism, focus on ‘Islamophobia’ and criticize Israel

Why Was Texas Synagogue Jihadi Allowed Into U.S. Two Weeks Ago Despite ‘Long Criminal Record’?

In Wake of Texas Synagogue Hostage-Taking, Anti-Defamation League Warns Against ‘Islamophobia’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Just When You Thought The World Couldn’t Get More Idiotic

/in , , , , , , , /by

Here’s the latest installment in the Annals of Idiocy: “Inclusiveness: a European Commissioner recommends no longer using ‘Christmas,’ ‘Christian’ names and the masculine,” translated from “Inclusivité : une commissaire européenne recommande de ne plus utiliser “Noël”, les noms “chrétiens” et le masculin,” Valuers Actuelles, November 29, 2021 (thanks to Medforth):

European Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli launched an internal guide for inclusive communication at the end of October. This prohibits a number of expressions deemed to be stigmatizing according to gender, sexual identities, ethnic origins or culture, the Italian daily Il Giornale revealed on Sunday (November 28). These recommendations aim to “reflect diversity” and to fight against “stereotypes deeply rooted in individual and collective behavior.”

One “stereotype” that racists have is that many black people have names like “Dequan” and “Lashonda” and “Takeesha.” So in order to combat that stereotype, all such names should be banned. No sense giving white racists grist for their mill.

Using Italian names for gangsters in movies about the Mafia simply reinforces stereotypes about “Italo-American” criminals. The only solution is to make sure that no Italian names are used for Mafia members. “Henry” and “Charles” are acceptable as gangster names, but “Enrico” and “Carlo” are not. No Mafia gangster should be shown either cooking, or eating, a plate of pasta. Garlic should also not be mentioned.

Similarly, in a movie about Mexican drug traffickers, their names must not lead anyone to think that they are in any way “Mexican”; that would not be fair, as such names would only reinforce a “stereotype” that far too many of us unthinkingly accept. Give them names like “Randolph” and “James” and “Alice.” Under no conditions should any Mexican drug trafficker be called “El Chapo” or “El Gordo” or “El Mata Amigos.”

In general, the report suggests that no one should be identified on the basis of their particularity or in a way that is not [sic] offensive. For example, the use of the masculine form “by default” should be prohibited and the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” should be replaced by “Dear Colleague.” Gender-specific terms such as “workmen” should also not be used. As the document – Dalli’s internal guide –is written in English, some recommendations are not applicable to other languages. The text also provides that one should never ” imply ” a person’s sexual orientation or even their gender identity. Similarly, it considers that a reference to elements of Christian culture “assumes that all people are Christians.” It therefore recommends deleting the reference to Christmas and speaking instead of “holidays.” Christian names such as “Mary” or “John” should be banned, according to the Commissioner.

But how can you write, say, an application letter for an academic job and use as your salutation — as Helena Dalli recommends – “Dear Colleague”? You aren’t anyone’s “colleague” yet – that’s what you are applying to be – and use of that salutation would merely come across as presumptuous, and likely nip in the bud your chances to be hired.

To eliminate all gender specific names, start with the easy ones. Thus “workman” can become “worker.” But what do we do when we come, say, to weddings, where there is an insufficiently “inclusive” focus on the “man” and the “woman”? Revise the text. “Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband” should instead become “Do you take this man or woman or non-binary other, to be your lawful wedded husband or wife or non-binary other”? Eventually it might be a good idea to provide a single word that can refer equally to both “husband” and “wife.” We’re working on it.

Using the “masculine” form “by default” should. be avoided, according to Helena Dalli, EU Equal Opportunities Commissioner, working tirelessly to make the world a better place by erasing all distinctions. But “Dear Sir or Madam” doesn’t use the “masculine” form “by default” – it carefully allows, in full diversity-inclusivity-equity mode, both the masculine and the feminine possibilities.

The claim that a reference to “elements of Christian culture” necessarily “assumes that all people are Christian” is utter nonsense. If I mention “the Bamiyan Buddhas,” does this make me guilty of assuming “that all people are Buddhist”? If I write that “the holiday of Diwali is observed differently by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists, creating a rich tapestry of cultural traditions and customs,” have I thereby assumed that everybody in the world is either “Hindu, Jain, Sikh, or Buddhist”? If I mention “Hanukkah” or a menorah, or show on YouTube a lesson on “how to spin a dreidl,” have I assumed that everyone in the world is “Jewish”? Should all references to the Bible be eliminated, because such references would be unacceptable, as “too Christian” or too “Judeo-Christian”? Surely we can’t have that in our brave new world that hath such creatures in it as Helena Dalli. Indeed, as the Bible itself is a venerable vehicle for what we now recognize as sexism, why not go beyond forbidding the reading of the Bible, and make possession of the book itself a crime?

Helena Dalli, the powerful EU Commissioner, thinks we need to rid the world of names that are too linked to Christianity. She mentions as examples of names that must no longer be used “Mary” and “John.” But these are just the names that come immediately to mind. We need to get rid as well of other names smacking of Christianity, including “Peter,” “Simon,” Thomas,” “Joseph,” “Martha,” “Christopher,” George” (which makes one think of “Saint George”), “Andrew,” “Samuel” and so many more names that are “too Christian” for Christians – or anyone else — to use.

But why does Helena Dalli not mention the need to abolish names that are “too connected” to the religion of Islam? Why should “Mary” and “John” be eliminated, but “Mohammed” and its many variants — Mahmoud, Ahmad, Muhammad, Magomed, Mahmad, Mehmet, Mamadou, Muhammadu, Mahamed, Mohamad, Mohamed, Mohammad, and so on – be tolerated inside the EU? Helena Dalli should provide us with a list of names that she believes are unacceptably linked to religions other than Christianity, the sole faith she mentions and for which she appears to bear a deep animus. Then we can get to work banning those names as well.

She’s also against mention of the very word “Christmas.”

Even the expression “colonizing of Mars” is considered negative, as it would be reminiscent of colonialism, and should be replaced by the phrase “sending people to Mars.” The report [by Helena Dalli] also advocates a form of positive discrimination. It suggests not convening working groups where only one gender is represented and thinking about inviting people from different ethnicities to events and photo shoots. Helena Dalli has already been criticized for the polemical campaign “Freedom with the Hijab” and the participation of Islamist associations in the campaign.

It will be fascinating to see if the EU Commissioner manages to make every single working group at the EU “gender diverse.” How will such a rule work in practice, particularly with the Muslims, whose unequal treatment of men and woman is legitimized in the Qur’an itself and who insist even on separating male from female worshippers in the mosque?

A verse in the Quran – 4:34 – gives husbands the right to “beat” their wives if they even suspect them of “disobedience.” Honor killings by Muslim men of their wives, daughters, sisters, and daughters-in-law – which may be prompted by a multitude of sins committed by females in the family, such as refusing to wear a hijab, or being seen talking to a non-Muslim boy – lead to very light punishment or in some cases to no punishment at all. The misogyny of Islam can also be seen in the fact that a Muslim woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man, and a daughter inherits only half what a son receives. Will Helena Dalli be able to force Muslim males to include females in their meetings? I suspect she will not even try. Her desire to impose restrictions of all kinds on “religions” ends up with her applying her humorless and bizarre restrictions to one religion only – Christianity.

As for doing away with the very word “Christmas,” the cast of Seinfeld, trying to be as ridiculous as possible, already provided some years ago a different word for that day, even less “Christian” than the word “holiday” (which derives from “holy day”); they called it “Festivus.” That should please Helena Dalli. A Festivus Tree, Festivus Lights, Festivus Presents, Festivus Cards. What’s not to like?

I know what you’re thinking. You are thinking that her idiocy will be rejected all those who have kept their wits about them, that the thinking world will rise up and laugh to scorn Ms./Mrs.Mr./Non-binary/Equal opportunity Helena Dalli. But she’s not just some Hyde Park Corner lunatic; she’s the EU Equal Opportunities Commissioner. In that post she can do – she’s already done — a lot of damage. She needs not just to be laughed at, but to be relieved of her position. Please, EU, put her, and therefore us, out of her misery.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

UK: Another Muslim rape gang busted, 39 men plus three women who allowed premises to be used

Turkey: One in three women has been a victim of domestic violence

France: Government organizes Islamic exhibitions to teach the French to accept cultural differences

Ilhan Omar plays audio of death threat she claims she received on her voicemail

Australia: Muslim family stabs daughter at shopping center because she was dating a Christian

UN holds pro-Palestinian conference on anniversary of recognizing Israeli statehood

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Bidenites Warn Israel to Stop its Attacks on Iran

/in , , , , /by

The U.S. has issued a warning about Iran’s nuclear program. No, it wasn’t a warning issued to Iran, telling the Supreme Leader that the U.S. was getting fed up with Iran’s stalling tactics, or that it was determined to “lengthen and strengthen” the 2015 Iran deal, or that it was now looking at “all other options” that it might employ to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Instead, it was a warning issued to Israel, the country that is in the gravest danger from Iran’ nuclear program. The Bidenites apparently do not think it “helpful” for Israel to continue its sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities and want it to stop. A preliminary Jihad Watch report on this scarcely believable development is here, and more on this is here: “US Warns Israel Attacks on Iran Nuclear Facilities ‘Counterproductive,’” i24 News, November 22, 2021:

US officials have warned Israel that attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities are “counterproductive” and are encouraging Tehran to speed up its nuclear program, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

So the Americans – that is, the Bidenites – apparently believe that every attack by Israel intended to slow down Iran’s nuclear program only prompted Tehran “to speed up its nuclear program,” as if it were not already moving as fast as it could. Israel manages to introduce the Stuxnet computer worm into Iranian computers that then cause 1,000 centrifuges to speed up so fast they destroy themselves, and what happens? Iran builds even more, and faster, centrifuges to replace those destroyed. But who is to say that they would not have built more, and faster centrifuges, even without Stuxnet? Israel destroys the nuclear facility at Natanz through sabotage by Mossad agents, and then builds another facility at Natanz, but this time it’s built 50 meters underground, and yet it is also destroyed. But this, we are supposed to believe, is what led Iran to build another facility deep inside a mountain at Fordow. No one can say that the Fordow facility was built because of Israel’s sabotage at Natanz. It might have been in the works before that sabotage. The Israelis are convinced that their many, and various, attacks are working; they have slowed down Iran’s progress toward a bomb, possibly by as much as several years.

I trust the judgement of the IDF and Mossad. They are convinced that attacks meant to slow down Iran’s nuclear project have indeed done exactly that instead of speeding up Iran’s program, as the Bidenites now want Israel to believe, and that Israel’s information from Mossad agents who report on deep demoralization within the Iranian military because of so much successful sabotage by Israel, should be believed. The Stuxnet computer worm, the saboteurs responsible for four major explosions, two of them destroying the nuclear facilities at Natanz, the killing of five top Iranian scientists, have done exactly what Israel hoped: set back Iran’s nuclear project by years. And the Israelis keep coming up with new ways to delay Iranian progress. Perform the gedankenexperiment, the thought experiment, and imagine that there had never been a Stuxnet computer worm, nor assassination of Iran’s best nuclear scientists, nor sabotage of the two Natanz centrifuge plants. Where would Iran’ nuclear program be today? The Bidenites insist we should believe them, not Israel’s Mossad, in their insistence that Israeli sabotage accomplished the reverse of what was intended. All those successful attacks by Israel on nuclear facilities and scientists, we are expected to believe, merely served to speed up, rather than slow down, Iran’s nuclear project. This not only sounds absurd – it is absurd.

Citing officials familiar with the private talks between Washington and Jerusalem, the report said that Israeli officials dismissed the warning and said that they have no intention of changing the strategy.

The Israelis, hard-headed as usual, simply waved away the Bidenites’ advice. They are not about to bring an end to their impressive record of throwing so many spanners in the works of Iran’s nuclear project. Even now they surely have a half-dozen “projects” in the works, including an attack on the facilities inside the mountain at Fordow, which will make use of a new compact MOP (Multiple Ordnance Penetrator), or bunker buster, weighing 5,000 pounds but packing the punch of the 30,000-pound bunker buster in the American armory, the latest advance by Israeli scientists that keeps Iranian generals up at night in Teheran.

The report [about the Bidenites insistence that Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear project were counterproductive] was published ahead of the resumption of talks between Iran and world powers on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal that former US president Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018. The negotiations are scheduled to take place in Vienna starting on November 29.

Talks stalled in June following the election of hardline president Ebrahim Raisi.

According to the report, the US cautioned that Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities may be “tactically satisfying,” but that Iran has been able to resume enrichment, often installing newer machines that can enrich uranium faster.

Iran can resume enrichment of uranium, but it takes time to build facilities to replace those destroyed. And time is what Israel is trying to buy, hoping to set back Iran’s program so that it keeps receding into the distance. And if Iran has newer machines that can enrich uranium faster than was previously possible, it will install them with or without Israel’s destruction of those slower models. The Americans are assuming that these “new machines” were put in service only because Israel had destroyed the previous model. This is the Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy with a vengeance. What are Biden and Blinken and Sullivan drinking these days?

The US cited four explosions at Iranian nuclear facilities attributed to Israel and the killing of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by Mossad operatives….

So contrary to the beliefs of the Israelis – what do they know, the Bidenites think, about what works and what doesn’t in trying to slow down Iran’s race to the bomb? – those four explosions that they set off at Natanz and elsewhere not only didn’t slow Iran down, but spurred it on, ever faster, as it hopes to race to the finish and to build that bomb. Also sprach Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan. And the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh? The Americans must think his reputation as Iran’s top nuclear scientist was exaggerated, or perhaps they believe he was replaced by someone even more impressive, who had been waiting in the wings.

Of all the things that the Biden Administration has done wrong, surely this attempt to convince the Israelis not to act against a mortal threat to the Jewish state is among the worst. The Bidenites’ attempt – I don’t know whether to call it Orwellian or Kafkaesque — to convince Israel that its attacks to slow down Iran’s nuclear project have only caused it to speed up, is both absurd and sinister. The Bidenites don’t want Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear project not because such attacks are counterproductive, but because they make Iran less likely to accept a return to the 2015 nuclear deal, and the Bidenites have their hearts set on achieving that goal. It would be a feather in Biden’s hat, and Blinken’s, they apparently think, to tell the world they “managed to persuade” Iran to return to the 2015 deal which “will accomplish all that we wanted,” because “Iran will now be committed to the original deal.”

In fact, an Iranian return to the terrible 2015 deal would not prevent Iran from its building a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, would do nothing to limit Iran’s aggressions in the Middle East through its allies and proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen, the Kataib Hezbollah militia in Iraq, the Alawite-led army in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and – most worrisome – would allow Iran in 2030 to produce nuclear weapons without any limit.

The Israelis were right to dismiss the Bidenites’ request that they stop attacking Iran’s nuclear sites. Prime Minister Bennett, and IDF Chief Aviv Kochavi and Mossad Head David Barnea know what they are doing while the Bidenites, it is my sad duty to report, know not what they do. Keep up those extraordinary acts of derring-do. Only the Israelis – not people sitting way out of Iran’s missile range in Washington, and desperately eager to make a deal with Iran — can decide what must be done to keep their state and people safe from possible catastrophe.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

German public broadcaster makes Jerusalem jihad mass murderer into a victim

Islamic States uses TikTok to recruit jihad suicide bombers for Christmas jihad massacres

UK: Mosque complains after councillor stops working with its manager, who praised Taliban prayer

Pakistan: Hindu community decides to pay fines imposed on 11 Muslim leaders involved in attack on Hindu temple

Iran deported over 1,000,000 Afghan migrants this year, 28,000 in one week

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Why Should Academic Departments Have Foreign Policies?

/in , , , , /by

When did academic departments decide they had to declare themselves on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute but on no other foreign policy question? And why are they so eager to express their visceral hatred of the Jewish state? A report on this disturbing phenomenon is here: “Academic departments must steer clear of anti-Israel activism,” by Richard L. Cravatts, Israel Hayom, November 12, 2021:

The obsessive loathing of Israel by large swathes of academia was evident this past spring as Hamas showered Israeli population centers with more than 4,000 rockets and mortars. Instead of denouncing genocidal aggression on the part of Hamas, these woke, virtue-signaling moral narcissists took it upon themselves to condemn – in the loudest and most condemnatory terms — the Jewish state, not the homicidal psychopaths intent on murdering Jews….

There is a difference between an individual expressing an opinion on, say, social media. That opinion is his alone. No pressure has been placed on him to express it. But when academic departments put out what are presented as that department’s — presumably unanimous — opinion, those who may not agree with the majority seldom dare to express their minority opinion in the daggers-drawn atmosphere of current academic life, where dissent is only for the tenured, and even they must be very brave, to express solidarity with, or sympathy for, the embattled Jewish state that has been so demonized in the swamps of academe.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and professor emeritus of English, challenged the propriety of departments authoring statements of support for the Palestinian cause while vilifying and denouncing Israel in the process. Four academic units at Illinois had issued anti-Israel statements in the spring – the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Asian American Studies, and the Department of History – prompting Nelson and 43 of his fellow faculty to write a letter to Chancellor Robert Jones and Provost Andreas Cangellaris.

In that letter, the faculty noted that “the statements in question were not issued by individual faculty or groups of faculty. They were subscribed to by departments … [and] have been placed on websites and disseminated through social media and email, which created the impression that the unit was speaking for all or most of the faculty within it. This represents a worrisome development. And it is worrisome irrespective of one’s views on the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”…

These “departmental opinions” are the result of an atmosphere of intellectual intimidation, with those not subscribing to the majority view nonetheless being “spoken for.” Did absolutely every faculty member, for example, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, agree that Israel is an arch-villain? Or was such an opinion presented by a handful of anti-Israel activists, without the agreement or even, possibly, the knowledge, of all of that department’s members? Did the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies decide, as in the Soviet Union, that “for the good of the Party” no dissent could be allowed and simply rode roughshod over those who dared to even mildly disagree with the kind of hysterical language that is used to blacken Israel’s image? And did the members of that same department not know, or not care, that it is the Palestinians who, as Muslims, allow husbands to “beat” their wives should they be even suspected of “disobedience”? It is the Palestinians who engage in “honor killings” of girls and women by their menfolk, who may then be let off with a short prison sentence, or too often receive no punishment at all. It is Israel that guarantees the legal equality of men and women, and it is the Palestinians who violate that equality at every turn, yet here is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies standing foursquare with those who mistreat women, while it rages against those who defend their rights.

Academic life is supposed to be dedicated, among other things, to the pursuit of the truth. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, professors have the great privilege of time – time to investigate matters of interest to them, time to weigh competing claims, time to analyze, to praise and to blame. The May conflict was only a few days old when academic departments issued their summary judgments against Israel. There is a rush to judgment when it comes to Israel. What led these departments to think they had to express the “department’s” opinion, instead of letting individual faculty members have their say, or if they wished, choose to say nothing at all? Why this insensate urge to force a false consensus, through veiled threats of retribution if someone fails to toe the anti-Israel line – threats that too often are successful? Those who disagree with the consensus find it more prudent to simply remain silent, rather than make enemies of fellow members of the department. For non-tenured faculty, it’s obvious why such a choice is made. But even tenured faculty may want to keep their heads down, avoid trouble, concentrate on their own work, and hope that the madness passes.

For academic departments to pronounce with such authority, on things they know so little, or nothing, about, is intolerable. Academics who have no special knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict presume that their opinions deserve special respect. They should be heeded simply because they are professors, no matter how distant their field may be from what they pontificate about. As an example, let’s look at how four departments at the University of Illinois presented what we were to assume were the collective views of its members.

Let’s start with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, which denounces Israel in hysterical terms, charging it with the “illegal occupation of Palestinian land”; a “siege, indiscriminate destruction and massacres in Gaza”; “state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people”; and, echoing the venomous blood libel promoted by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, among others, the “deliberate maiming of Palestinian bodies.”

First, there is no “illegal occupation of Palestinian land.” Israel, in a war of self-defense started in May by Gamal Abdel Nasser, won by force of arms both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank). The victory in the Six-Day War did not create Israel’s claim to these territories, but allowed it to exercise its preexisting claim. Israel has a right, under the Mandate for Palestine, Article 6, to establish “close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? All the land from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west – the land that the League of Nations intended to be part of the future Jewish National Home. Have these professors of urban planning read the Mandate for Palestine? The San Remo Treaty? Article 80 of the U.N. Charter? U.N. Security Council Resolution 242? Don’t be silly.

Israel gave up Gaza in 2005, pulling out all 8,500 Israelis who had been living the Strip. There is no “siege” of Gaza, as the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois insists. Electricity, water, and natural gas are all supplied by Israel to the people of Gaza. There is no attempt to keep out any medicines or food. There is a blockade, but that is on goods that can be used by the terror group Hamas, which has run Gaza since 2007, in attacks on Israel. Thus, the supplies allowed into Gaza of some building materials, such as cement, are limited. For they are deemed to be “dual-use” materials, because they can be used innocuously to build apartments, but can also be used to build such things as emplacements for rocket launchers and terror tunnels.

There are no “indiscriminate destruction and massacres in Gaza.” Israeli pilots pinpoint their targets; there is no carpet bombing. Hamas places its weapons, its rocket launchers, its command-and-control centers, in or next to schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, even mosques. Israel tries very hard to minimize civilian casualties. When a target has been chosen, the Israelis warn inhabitants to leave the building, through various means – telephoning, leafletting, emailing, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. Ordinarily the Palestinians have between 15 minutes and two hours to leave. There have been no “massacres in Gaza.” In the 11-day conflict this past May, of the 260 Palestinians killed, 225 of them were determined, through the tracking of death notices, to have been Hamas fighters; 25 of them were senior commanders of the terror group. Only a few dozen of those killed could have been civilians. And there were no reports of any “massacres.” The professors in the Department of Urban Planning were simply throwing in Israel’s direction whatever grotesque charges they could fabricate against the Jewish state, counting on some of it to stick.

Similarly, there has been no “state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people.” The IDF, as British Colonel Richard Kemp has noted, is the “most moral army in the world.” It makes heroic efforts to protect civilian lives through every possible method of warning inhabitants in or near buildings soon to be hit. Israeli pilots have been known to call off their mission if they spot children too near to the target; this happened several times during the May war.

Let’s look at the less extreme statement of the History Department at the same university.

The Executive Committee of the Department of History issued a briefer statement by email that condemned “the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza” and “standing in solidarity with Palestine and support for the struggle for Palestinian liberation” – “liberation” being a euphemism for the Middle East without Israel and free of Jewish sovereignty on Muslim land.

The statement was put out in an email, as if all members of the History Department agreed to its contents. By what right did the “Executive Committee” presume to speak for the whole department? And why does it describe as Israeli “state violence” a war that began on May 10, when Hamas launched hundreds of rockets at civilian areas of Israel, and Israel did what any nation-state would do – it fought back in defense of its people, hitting in response Hamas rockets, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, fighters, and a network of terror tunnels? What should Israel have done? Simply let those 4,500 rockets that Hamas flung toward Israeli cities such as Ashdod and Ashkelon land without trying to hit back, in self-defense, at Hamas – its weapons depots, its rocket launchers, its fighters – so that it could no longer launch those rockets? Why is this self-defense described as “state violence”? Would America have done differently?

As for that claim of “standing in solidarity with Palestine , and support or the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” as Richard Cravatts, correctly notes, that is code for the replacement of Israel, “from the river to the sea,” by a Palestinian state. That’s what the History Department’s members – all of them – are made to seemingly endorse. How many of them are happy with that?

Immersed in the ideology of multiculturalism and the intersectionality of oppression, the Department of Asian American Studies condemned “the ongoing 73 years of settler-colonial violence against Palestine and the Palestinian people” and “the exploitation, theft and colonization of land and labor everywhere, including in Palestine. To this, we say no more.”

According to the Department of Asian-American Studies, then, since its very founding in 1948, Israel has been engaged in “settler-colonial violence against Palestine and the Palestinian people.” But there were no “settlers” in 1948, or 1958, or 1968. There was “violence” in 1948, but it was the violence started by five Arab armies that attacked the Jewish state on May 15, 1948, ignoring Israel’s offer of peace, as they tried to snuff out the young life of the nascent state of Israel. Israel was fighting for its survival, as it would have to again do so in the wars of 1967 and 1973. Those people denounced as “settler-colonials” in 1948 consisted of the following: Jews whose families had been living uninterruptedly in the Land of Israel for centuries; Zionist pioneers who had, beginning in about 1900, been making aliyah, buying land from Arab and Turkish landowners and settling on it; Jews who had fled Arab lands where they had lived for centuries, with many more of them –some 850,000 in all – fleeing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with most of them choosing to settle in Israel; Jews who had managed to escape from Europe just before World War II; Jews who had survived the Nazis and arrived in Israel from DP camps after the war. These were the people, so many of them survivors of terrible ordeals in Europe and in Arab lands, who are now being denounced by this all-knowing “Department of Asian-American Studies” in Illinois as “settler-colonials,” for managing to find refuge in what would become, in 1948, the tiny Jewish state, and then for helping to rebuild that ancient Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel.

Another point to consider: the Asian-American Studies Department statement includes this: “the exploitation, theft, and colonization of land and labor everywhere, including in Palestine.” So, we are told, this “exploitation, theft, and colonization” by Jews goes on everywhere, including Palestine. Isn’t this a statement that would not be out of place in Mein Kampf?

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies signed a statement, “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective,” along with some 100 other gender-studies departments. With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the “solidarity statement” pretentiously announced that “as gender-studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline” [sic] and that “‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”…

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies asserts that “Palestine is a Feminist Issue.” And so it is, but not in the way the good professors in the department seem to think. To repeat what I wrote yesterday on the subject: It is the Palestinians who, as Muslims, allow husbands to “beat” their wives should they be even suspected of “disobedience,” it is the Palestinians who engage in “honor killings” of girls and women by their husbands, fathers, brothers, who may then be let off with a short prison sentence, or too often, receive no punishment at all. It Is the Palestinians who enforce dress codes on “their women,” who value the testimony of females as half that of males; who have girls and women inherit half what a male inherits. Israel, by contrast, guarantees the legal and social equality of men and women, while the Palestinians violate that equality at every turn, yet here is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies standing foursquare with those who mistreat women, while it inveighs against those who defend their rights.

Three points suggest themselves:

First, let every man and woman speak for himself or herself. Don’t force people into letting their Department speak for them. Not even professors should be made to suffer that.

Second, academics, like cobblers, should stick to their last.

Third, “whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak.”

Come to think of it, the third point is really just the second one, expressed less succinctly. But it bears repetition.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

UK: Labour MP claims Muslims are ‘suffering racial hatred’ after Liverpool jihad suicide bombing

Austria: Muslima had hundreds of images of ‘executions of unbelievers,’ wanted to sacrifice her life for ISIS

Nigeria: Muslims have murdered over 137,000 people in Benue state

France: Muslim prisoner screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ stabs two guards

Austria: Public broadcaster deletes report on persecution of Christians and Jews in Europe, without explanation

UN envoy: Taliban ‘unable to stem’ Islamic State growth as it spreads to ‘nearly all’ Afghan provinces

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

North Carolina: Anti-Israel ‘Progressive’ Muslim Congressional Candidate Hopes to Become New ‘Squad’ Member

/in , , , , , /by

In 2015, the semi-demented Craig Hicks shot three of his neighbors because he believed they were using parking spaces to which they were not entitled. All three were Muslims. But he had a history of berating non-Muslims, too, over both parking spaces and making noise. His wife of seven years testified that  he had never spoken ill of Muslims, never denounced them, never expressed hostility to the ideology of Islam, on social media or anywhere else. In fact, he was anti-Christian, and on his Facebook page wrote: “Knowing several dozen Muslims…I’d prefer them to most Christians.” The police said there was no evidence of a “hate crime.” The prosecutor could come up with no evidence of a “hate crime.” But none of that mattered, or matters, to North Carolina Congressional candidate Nida Allam.

Allam has been  milking this non-existent hate crime for all it’s worth. Her website Nida For Congress includes this: “After three of her dear friends were murdered in 2015 — a case that drew national attention and triggered calls for stronger hate crime legislation — Nida Allam took to politics.”

She was spurred to run for office  because of the “hate crime” against “three of her dear friends.” Allam is not in the race to further her own wellbeing. Not at all. Personal aggrandizement, power and money and fame — these hold no attractions for the self-effacing Nida Allam. She has girded her loins and entered the political arena in answer to a higher call.  She wants to fight against the “hate crimes” that she insists took her friends’ lives.

She has a video at her Nida For Congress website, about her decision to run. Here’s a transcript of part of it:

I was 21 years old when three of my best friends were killed.

Deah, Yusor, and Razan, brutally murdered in a hate crime that shook our community to the core. My lie was shattered but I knew I couldn’t let their legacy die. I looked for ways to fight against the  hate that took my friends  to make sure that no one would have to experience the pain that we [Muslims] endured , to make sure that we [Muslims] could live with dignity and without fear.

I never set out to make history, but sometimes life has different plans [inshallah fatalism]..  It wasn’t just racism and hate that we faced….my service was born out of tragedy…I’m ready to take my passion and my experience [one year as County Commissioner] to the halls of Congress. I’ve been told that I don’t belong, that I ought to wait my turn, but North Carolina can’t wait….I’m Nida Allam, and I’m running for Congress because Congress can’t wait.

Goodness me. So Congress “can’t wait” for the appearance of Nida Allam, who is just like Mighty Mouse, “Here I come,  to save the day/That means that Mighty Mouse is on the way.” She does have a whole list of what she intends to accomplish. Most impressive. Nida Allam has a jobs program because  “everyone deserves a good paying job.” She wants to fight climate change, because “Black, brown, and working class communities are on the front lines of this crisis.” She has a health care platform: “Everyone deserves comprehensive high-quality healthcare coverage that includes primary care, vision, hearing, dental, mental health care, reproductive health care, and more.” Sounds good to me. She has a housing plan: “Housing is a human right, and all of our neighbors deserve a safe and stable place to live.” “Education? “Every child deserves a quality public school education.” And so on and so mindlessly forth. Foreign policy? “We need to end our ‘so-called war on terror.’”

She never mentions Israel in her “Nida Allam For Congress” website. A curious but understandable admission – Nida may be a fool, but she’s “no fool,” given that this past May, amid escalating violence between Israel and Hamas, Allam participated in a pro-Palestinian rally where protestors chanted slogans such as “Israel is an apartheid state” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the latter of which is correctly understood to be a call to eliminate Israel. In a live video she posted to her Facebook page on May 22, Allam appears to have been chanting that line along with her fellow protestors.

A week earlier, Allam attended a May 15 demonstration in downtown Raleigh marking the annual date of the ‘Nakba’ when Palestinians mark the war of 1948.

Following the May 15 rally, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation of Raleigh-Cary released a statement identifying alleged instances of “antisemitic rhetoric” used by some demonstrators, including “posters combining Israeli and Nazi imagery.” One poster, the statement said, featured then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Benjamin “wearing a Hitler moustache,” while another declared, “Israel, Hitler would be proud of you.”

For her part, Allam denounced what she described as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and murder of children” in comments to a local newspaper reporter at the event.

Near the beginning of the May conflict, Allam released a statement of her own calling for a wholesale cessation of U.S. military aid to Israel, which is guaranteed in annual installments of $3.8 billion through a memorandum of understanding between the two countries. “We must end this negligent spending that is being used to oppress the Palestinian people,” Allam wrote, echoing the sentiments of a handful of far-left lawmakers in the House who have argued in favor of conditioning or eliminating aid to the Jewish state.

“I condemn all violence in this conflict and urge the United States to acknowledge our complacency in the continuing Israel-Palestine conflict,” Allam argued at the time.

In June 2018, after reports that the U.S. had quietly frozen aid to the Palestinian Authority, Allam weighed in with an incendiary Twitter comment. “This is the United States of Israel.”

Peter Riezes has reported on Nida Allam’s candidacy here:

Nida Allam, a 27-year-old progressive activist and Durham, North Carolina County Commissioner, announced last week that she will run for the Congressional seat of retiring Rep. David Price (D-NC).

I first researched Allam during her 2019 campaign for County Commissioner, due to her anti-Israel positions. What I found was a history of abhorrent statements that extended far beyond Israel.

In 2018, Allam tweeted, “This is the United States of Israel,” which is consistent with centuries-old antisemitic propaganda that Jews seek to dominate the world.

In 2013, Allam tweeted, “F*** the police,” and she has made many offensive and hateful posts over the years.

I spoke with award-winning Durham columnist and Black minister, Carl W. Kenney II, who told me that Allam’s use of the N-word in a 2014 tweet is “appalling.”

When asked if it matters that Allam’s tweet is from 2014, Kenney responded:

I think it speaks to character issues. I think it speaks to a lack of sensitivity. We have a person who has a desire to run for US Congress at 27…What has she done in building relationships with the Black community to help soothe the pain connected to making that type of statement? … I’m not comfortable that she’s learned a lesson.

When asked about Allam’s “F*** the police” tweet, Kenney told me that while he understands the anger, “In Durham, we’re not one to say ‘f*** the police.’ We want to say we want to work with the police.”

Allam was at the time pressuring  the Durham police to end their training arrangement with the Israeli police, falsely claiming that such training “militarized” the Durham Police Force.

“I met with Kenney via Zoom and asked if it is acceptable that I — someone who is not Black — cite Allam’s N-word tweet in this column as a warning to the public. Kenney responded, “You have an obligation to do that. … For people to fully understand what we are talking about, they need to have it in its original form.”

Here’s Allam’s unseemly tweet: “Kid in front of me is in a group text called “United N*gga Network.’ Where do I apply?”

In 2019, Allam tweeted a picture of herself standing with a Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) sign. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes JVP as “a radical anti-Israel activist group that advocates for a complete economic, cultural and academic boycott of the state of Israel.”…

Allam has repeatedly promoted her close ties with noted antisemite Linda Sarsour, calling Sarsour “my shero, role-model, mentor, and so much more.”

Sarsour has been widely criticized for advocating for the destruction of Israel via the BDS movement and other means, saying “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” and advising Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

Earlier this year, Black constituents and politicians strongly criticized Allam and two other Durham commissioners for what was viewed by many as racially divisive policies.

“There is a sense in the Black community that she [Allam] is among the politicians here who doesn’t really talk to Black people” Kenny [sic] told me. “They have an idea of what is best for Black people without actually engaging in the conversation. That’s a problem.”

On his widely read blog, Kenney warns: “If Allam has her way, the race for Congress will not be determined by local Black voters. It will be won by the support of the national media and progressive politicians desirous of an addition to The Squad — joining Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).”…

Just hours after Allam announced her run for Congress, Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Let’s go Nida!”; Keith Ellison tweeted, “Great Candidate”; and Linda Sarsour retweeted Allam’s campaign announcement….

Nida Allam’s campaign received $115,000 in donations in just the first day it opened. Muslims from all over the country sent money, eager to add one more anti-Israel voice to Congress,  provide  another potential collaborator of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, another member of the Squad. No doubt CAIR is out fundraising for her, raising money among Muslims across the country who are relentlessly focused on increasing Muslim power in Washington. This would-be squadette needs to be stopped in her tracks, or headed off at the pass, preferably by an African-American candidate who will make good use of Allam’s “United N*gga Network” tweet,  and of her palpable want of interest, according to the columnist and black minister Carl Kenney II, in African-Americans.

According to her website, the essence of Nida Allam is that she is “working for a brighter future.” What a fantastic idea. Really, who could disagree?

COLUMN BY

 HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Biden’s handlers remove Nigeria from list of countries blacklisted for ‘engaging in violation of religious freedom’

‘State of Palestine’ builds 100 embassies globally, funds jihad terror prisoners while begging the world for cash

Italy: Muslim migrant mother and brother beat 14-year-old girl for refusing to wear the niqab

UK: Liverpool ‘Christian’ jihad suicide bomber was at mosque ‘all day every day’ in weeks leading up to attack

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Squad: Foiled For Now, But Determined to Carry On

/in , , , /by

The Squad is the name given to four far-left members of Congress, distinguished particularly by their anti-Israel views and votes. Toward the end of September, three of the four squadrettes – Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alanna Pressley – helped to block a budget bill because it contained an aid item they opposed: $1 billion for Israel to replenish its store of Iron Dome missiles, which had been depleted during the 11-day war with Hamas this past May. Their efforts ultimately did not succeed, because two days after they held up the budget bill until the Iron Dome funding was stripped from it, a stand-alone bill providing that Iron Dome funding was passed, overwhelmingly, by a vote of 420 to 9.

A report on the Squad’s efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to block funding for Israel’s missile defense system, is here: “The Squad keeps the dream of dead Jews alive,” by Clifford D. May, Israel Hayom, September 30, 2021:

In case you missed it: Last Wednesday [Sept. 22] members of the “Squad,” far-left House Democrats including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandra [sic] Ocasio-Cortez, blocked a bill to keep the federal government operating until it was stripped of funds to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome.

Actually it was Ayanna Pressley, the fourth member of the Squad, who voted “No,” while Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez voted “Present,” then dissolved in tears, apparently overcome by having to vote, or so some claim, against her beliefs so as to not alienate Jewish voters in New York should she, as expected, run for the Senate.

To be clear: The Iron Dome is not a weapon. It is a shield. It intercepts and destroys short-range missiles before they can reach their intended victims.

Developed through a blossoming partnership that produces next-generation military technology for Israeli and US warfighters, this miracle of engineering is now used to protect American troops as well.

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepts incoming rockets. The missiles do not kill people; they prevent people – the civilians who are targeted by Hamas — from being killed. That is their sole function. The missiles Israel needs to replenish those spent in the May war, the missiles that the Squad and its willing collaborators — Jamal Bowman (D-NY), Pramila Jayarpal (D-WA), Cori Bush (D-MO), André Carson (D-IN), Marie Newman (D-IL), Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Chuy Garcia (D-IL), and Thomas Massie (R-KY) (Massie is an odd man out in this group, for he is not anti-Israel but was concerned about the expense) — all voted against, are purely defensive.

The Iron Dome also defends Israelis who are not Jews. Say a missile strikes an Israeli hospital. Those inside will likely include Israeli Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze and other minorities. They may be doctors, nurses, or patients, because Israel has no laws separating by race, ethnicity, or religion.

In other words, Israel is not an apartheid state, although that’s the slander you now incessantly hear from the Squad and others intent on demonizing, delegitimizing and, ultimately, destroying Israel.

Clifford May points out that both the medical personnel, and the patients, in an Israeli hospital, include not just Jews, but also Muslims, Christians, and Druze. There is no apartheid in the medical system.

What he might have added, had he had more space, was that there is no apartheid anywhere in Israel. In this so-called “apartheid state,” Arabs sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, go abroad as ambassadors for their country. The chairman of the largest bank in Israel, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs study together in universities and technical institutes. Jews and Arabs work together In factories and offices. Jews and Arabs receive medical care in the same hospitals, where they are treated by both Jewish and Arab medical personnel. Jews and Arabs play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. Jews and Arabs own businesses – from high-tech start-ups to restaurants – together. The only difference in treatment is that Jews must, while Arabs may, join the IDF.

The Squad needs to be read the riot act – and the paragraph just above – so as to shame it into silence, if such is possible with such shameless liars, on the subject of Israel’s so-called “apartheid.”

The Iron Dome saves the lives of Gazans, too, because, without this missile defense system, Israelis would not sit quietly as Hamas, which rules Gaza, rained death on them. They’d counterattack hard and fast, which would make it difficult to minimize civilian casualties to the extraordinary extent Israelis have managed in past conflicts.

The Iron Dome defense system keeps Israeli casualties low. If the Squad were to have had its way, and the $1 billion funding to replenish Israel’s stock of interceptors had not passed, the result would not only have been more Israeli civilians dead, but more Palestinians in Gaza would be dead as well, for Israel would have to launch more deadly attacks, with less warning time, to try to destroy as many of the rockets and rocket launchers as possible. Since both the 15,000 rockets Hamas possesses, and its rocket launchers, are deliberately hidden inside or beside civilian buildings, including schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, Israel would have no choice but to hit these buildings where weapons are hidden.

Clifford May further notes:

And since Hamas routinely employs Palestinians as human shields – an egregious violation of American and international law but beneficial for its public relations efforts – Gaza would soon resemble Syria, Yemen and Libya (countries from which, incidentally, millennia-old Jewish communities have been “cleansed”).

Returning to the apartheid slander: It’s a twist on the “Zionism is racism” resolution first promulgated by Israel-haters at the United Nations General Assembly in 1975. Repealed overwhelmingly in 1991, it was revived at a UN conference in Durban in 2001.

Zionism implies nothing more than the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in part of their ancient homeland. And, as anyone who has walked down a street in Jerusalem knows, Israelis come in all colors, including black Jews from Africa and brown Jews from India and Pakistan.

Last week, the United Nations sponsored another Durban conference. Three dozen nations boycotted rather than participate in one more festival of Israel-bashing and anti-Semitism. Many of the nations that did attend are egregious abusers of fundamental human rights.

38 nations boycotted the Durban IV horror, more than twice the number of countries – 14 – that boycotted Durban III in 2009. These were Albania, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, UK, US and Uruguay. The European Union also did not participate or speak at the commemoration.

Many of the boycotters were among the most important states: the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden. One wonders whether, with so many states having boycotted Durban IV, will there be a Durban V?

The UN General Assembly was in session last week, too, and among those speaking was the newly appointed foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hossein Amir Abdollahian. He utilized both new and old slanders, saying he was “honored to announce that my nation’s willpower is dedicated to the total elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, including apartheid and Zionism.” In other words, Tehran’s goal is the “elimination” of Israel. Its nuclear weapons development program is the means envisioned to realize that goal.

Like Tehran, Hamas is not coy about its genocidal goals. “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors,” the Hamas Charter proclaims. “Muslims will fight the Jews,” and even those Jews who “hide behind rocks and trees” will not escape, because the rocks and trees “will cry: Muslim: There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

May might have noted that the prediction quoted by Hamas, about Jews in the end times vainly trying to avoid being killed by hiding behind rocks and trees that then give them away, is one of the best-known hadith, the fons et origo of the anti-Jewish genocidal impulse that is to be found in the immutable texts of Islam, and it cannot be removed, or changed. That hadith will last as long as Islam itself.

Claims that Hamas has moderated over recent years are untrue. “We support the eradication of Israel through armed jihad and struggle,” Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said in May. “This is our doctrine.”

Here’s the rest of the story that unfolded last week: On Thursday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer brought Iron Dome up as a standalone bill. There were 290 [sic for 420] votes in favor and nine opposed – eight from members of the Squad plus one Republican (who says he opposes all foreign aid). Just before the vote closed, Ocasio-Cortez changed from “nay” to “present” – and then broke into tears.

One plausible explanation: She plans to run for the Senate and calculates that many New York voters may prefer not to be represented by an ideologue eager to help terrorists murder Jews and kill off the Jewish state.

Perhaps she’ll counter that she favors a two-state solution. Fine, but it’s impossible to imagine Hamas or the Palestinian Authority (which rules the West Bank) accepting such a compromise until and unless they conclude that the dream of exterminating Israel is unattainable. People such as Abdollahian and Ocasio-Cortez keep that dream alive.

By the way, The New York Times asserted that she’d been diverted from her “principles” by “influential lobbyists and rabbis.” Those darn lobbyists and rabbis!

Yes, who were all those sinister “rabbis,” no doubt black-clothed haredim, whom the New York Times claims were threatening poor helpless Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, emailing or telephoning threats, or perhaps even visiting her in the Rayburn House Office Building to make those threats in person, that she’d better vote for the replenishing of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile missiles – “or else.” Most likely their numbers and power to intimidate have been exaggerated, or even made up out of whole cloth. But it’s the kind of story that the New York Times, that has so often been caught spreading misinformation about Israel, or attacking Jewish organizations that support Israel, of course would have no compunction about publishing.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Jihad bomber responsible for Kabul massacre was arrested in India five years ago for plotting jihad attack on Hindus

UK: Islamic charity website praises Taliban and encourages Muslims to fund jihadis

France: Muslim who quoted Qur’an while raping his victim takes two prison guards hostage

Fatah top dog: ‘The battle will only be over when the occupation is removed from Palestine in its entirety’

Hamas-sponsored conference plans for time after ‘liberation of Palestine,’ discusses which Jews to kill and not kill

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Questions for the New York Times After Its Latest Blood Libel of Israel

/in , , , , , /by

The New York Times recently carried on its front page photographs of 67 children, Arab and Jewish, who died during the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, over the caption “They Were Just Children.” Under each child’s photo, the Times had provided the name of the party responsible for the child’s death; for 64 of the photos, “Israel” was declared responsible. More on this atrocious story is here: “‘The New York Times’ Repackages a Classic Blood Libel,” by James Sinkinson, JNS.org, June 16, 2021:

Though most New York Times readers would not likely have realized it, the dramatic, front-page, full-color photo collage of children killed in the recent Hamas-Israel war was a crudely repackaged version of a classic blood libel against the Jewish people.

On May 28, after Israel ceased its defensive operations to stop Hamas rocket fire and ensure security for Israel’s citizens, The New York Time plastered on its front page a collage of 67 faces of children killed in the conflict, under the title, “They Were Only [sic] Children.”

A caption under each photo in the associated article described how each child died. The captions under 64 of the children perversely named Israel as the cause of death. The truth, of course, is quite the contrary.

Gaza’s terrorist-designated Hamas dictatorship, which started the fighting unprovoked by attacking Israeli citizens with thousands of rockets, determined the pace and intensity of the war, as well as the targets of Israeli retaliation.

While the Times insinuated that Israel chose to kill these children—and that Israel’s actions were unjustified at best and malicious at worst—in fact, every one of those 67 children died at Hamas’s hands.

Hamas was responsible for the deaths of Palestinian children whom the terror group deliberately put in harm’s way by placing its rockets, and launching them, from inside or near civilian structures – kindergartens, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and other places where children would naturally be found. Hamas wanted Palestinian children to die; they would then serve usefully for propaganda purposes – as they did when the photographs of dead Arab children appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Israel, of course, tries as hard as it can to avoid civilian casualties, including children, by telephoning, leafletting, emailing warnings about an impending attack on a target, practicing its “knock-on-the-roof” technique, all in order to get everyone in those buildings to flee. Israel has no desire to kill children or other civilians.

Ever since the Middle Ages, Jews and Jewish communities around the world have been regularly accused of killing innocent non-Jewish children, in bloodlust or in the service of fantastical religious services. Over hundreds of years, such false accusations of murder have come to be known as “blood libel.”…

Despite the Times’ almost daily criticism of the Jewish state—and its decades-long tradition of siding with Israel’s enemies—the front-page photo collage reinvigorated an antisemitic canard, and clearly crossed a line….

There is a straight line from the medieval blood libel of Jews killing Christian children to use their blood in making Passover wafers, and the New York Times blaming “Jews” (Zionists) for the presumably deliberate killing of more than 60 Palestinian children.

Fair-minded people need to ask why, of all the bloody conflicts raging around the world, only the operation involving self-defense for the national homeland of the Jewish people was singled out for this graphically disturbing treatment.

Hundreds of thousands of people die in violent conflict and war around the world every year — 19,444 died in Afghanistan and 19,044 in Yemen in 2020, to say nothing of tens of thousands more in Syria, Somalia and Iraq. Not one of these conflicts was deserving of a front-page photo collage in the Times.

There were many more children who were killed in the continuing wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and, Ethiopia than in the recent Hamas-Israel war. Why was it that the Times has never seen fit to print a similar front-page collage of the dead children in any of those conflicts? Were those children less important than the Palestinian Arab children? Or were the Palestinian Arab children worthy of heightened attention only because Israel could be, and was, blamed by the Times for their deaths?

Moreover, the Times collage project deceptively hid the context of the children’s deaths. It did not mention the [real] reason these children died.

According to HonestReporting, the context was buried: “Just minutes after the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, a 5-year-old boy named Baraa al-Gharabli was killed in Jabaliya, Gaza,” the opening sentence of “They Were Only Children” dramatically asserts. Only 20 paragraphs later do readers find out that al-Gharabli’s tragic death “may have been” caused by a Hamas rocket that fell short.

Israel Defense Forces’ radar images show that some 15 percent of all rockets launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fell inside Gaza, unquestionably killing and injuring many Palestinians. Initial research indicates that failed Palestinian rocket launches killed at least nine of the children pictured in the Times piece. Still, the Times absolves Hamas of the responsibility for their deaths.

The IDF had made public radar images that showed nearly 680 Hamas rockets that had been launched against Israel, but fell instead inside Gaza, where they injured and killed Palestinians, including children. It appears that at least nine of the children who died in Gaza had been hit by Hamas’ own rockets. There is no mention of this under their photos, which attributes their deaths to Israel alone. Nor did the Times mention in the body of its article that accompanied the photos that 680 Hamas rockets fell short in Gaza itself, injuring and killing children and other civilians. Why not? Who at the Times decided that information should be left out?

Furthermore, in an embarrassment to those who put the collage together, some of the photos were of children alive and well, while others were of those who Hamas claimed as members, even if they were only 17 years old. One of them, Khaled Qanou, was a member of the Mujahideen Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement. This vital information was not mentioned anywhere in the Times’ disingenuous diatribe.

Of the 67 Palestinian children who were reported as killed by Israel, we know of at least nine who die from Hamas rockets, not because Hamas admitted it, but because Israeli photos show where a Hamas rocket fell short in Gaza exactly where those children were then reported to have died. Other Palestinian “children” turn out to have been in their late teens, and members of terrorist groups, including the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement, and Hamas itself. But that information was kept from its readers by the New York Times; it would only muddy the tear-jerking message that “They Were Only Children.”

Finally, the images provide no clarification as to the remarkably low ratio of civilian deaths in Israel’s wars with Hamas. Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, notes that a United Nations study showed “that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza was by far the lowest in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare.”

Kemp states that this ratio was less than 1:1 and compared it favorably to the estimated ratios of NATO operations in Afghanistan (3:1), western campaigns in Iraq and Kosovo (believed to be 4:1), and the conflicts in Chechnya and Serbia (much higher than 4:1).

Kemp argues that the low ratio was achieved through unprecedented measures taken by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties, including warnings to the population via telephone calls, radio broadcasts and leaflets, as well as granting pilots the discretion to abort a strike if they perceived too great a risk of civilian casualties.

And as we know, Israel invented the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, the practice of dropping non-explosive or low-yield devices on the roofs of targeted civilian homes as a prior warning of imminent bombing attacks to give the inhabitants time to flee the attack. The practice was first employed by the Israelis in the 2008-2009 Gaza war, and along with telephoning, radio broadcasts, and leafletting, was used again in this latest war with Hamas. We have also learned of Israeli pilots aborting a mission when they detected the presence of children at a targeted site. Here is one example.

The astonishingly low ratio – 1:3 — of civilian-to-fighter casualties in Gaza is based on figures from the IDF, which believes it killed 225 Hamas fighters, with about 75 civilians killed. That is an amazing figure; in modern warfare the ratio of civilians-to-fighters killed is ordinarily at least 3:1. But because of the enormous efforts Israel makes to warn civilians away from its targets, sometimes giving them as much as two hours warning to flee, civilian casualties were kept very low, despite Hamas’ deliberate efforts to increase them. That two-hours warning was what Israel provided to the residents of the media tower, the Al-Jalaa Building, that received so much attention because the AP offices were located there, along with the actual target of the IAF, Hamas weapons development and intelligence facilities.

He [Colonel Richard Kemp] also states that the civilian casualties that did occur could be seen in light of Hamas’s tactical use of Gazan civilians “as human shields, to hide behind, to stand between Israeli forces and their own fighters,” and strategic exploitation of their deaths in the media….

Questions for the Grey Lady:

Why have you never published a front-page collage, or even one on an inside page, of children killed in any of two dozen recent conflicts, such continuing wars as those in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Ethiopia?

Why, in your coverage of the children who died in the latest Gaza war, did you make no mention of Hamas’ deliberate use of human shields, including children, by hiding its rockets in, and launching them from, civilian buildings such as kindergartens, schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings?

Why, in your coverage of the children who died in the Gaza war, did you make no mention of the fact that some were known to have been killed by the 680 Hamas rockets aimed at Israel but fell short, and struck people inside Gaza?

Why, in your coverage of the children killed in Gaza, did you not subsequently let your readers know that several of those “children” whose photographs appeared were in their late teens, and were members of Hamas and the Palestinian Muhajideen Movement?

Why did The New York Times publish in its “They Were Only Children” collage a 2015 stock photo of a young girl, claiming Israeli forces killed her during the May 2021 war with Hamas? Why did it never apologize for that error?

Why did you not make any mention in the text that accompanies the photos of 67 dead children that Israeli pilots aborted missions when they detected children too close to the target?

Why do you nowhere mention, in the text accompanying the collage of photos of children killed in the war, Israel’s various methods to minimize civilian casualties? These include warning the inhabitants of impending targets through phone calls, leafletting, emails, and the “knock-on-the-roof technique,” giving them time – sometimes as much as two hours — to flee. Wasn’t all that worth mentioning?

Why do you trust the figures released by Hamas of “67 children” killed when, from the three previous Hamas-Israel wars, the numbers put out by Hamas proved, upon further investigation, to have been grossly inflated? Given that history, shouldn’t we be skeptical of Hamas this time?

Do we have any reason, on the other hand, to think that the figures about casualties provided by the IDF are to be trusted? Doesn’t the IDF have a long track record of putting out reliable figures?

That’s enough questions for now. I’m sure your continued skewed coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict will prompt still others.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:’

‘Spencer performs a super detective service for the West in this book, Did Muhammad Exist?’

UK: Muslim who called for ‘jihad’ to ‘wipe out Zionist entity’ supports Muslim group 2 prime ministers tried to ban

India: Muslim kidnaps Hindu girl, 15, forces her to convert, threatens to kill her whole family if she goes to cops

American U’s School of International Studies accused of ‘Islamophobia’ for saying Islam compatible with feminism

Canada: MP takes stand against ‘Islamophobia’ and hatred of ‘LGBTQ2+ individuals, families and allies’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Chutzpah: Palestinians Prepare List of Demands For Biden Administration

/in , , /by

The Palestinian Arabs sense an opening for them in Biden’s Washington, where they rightly assume they will be personae gratae again. They have already been preparing their laundry list of demands for the Biden Administration, which is discussed here: “PA wants Biden to reverse ‘anti-Palestinian’ decisions,” by Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2020:

The Palestinians will demand that the new administration under US President-elect Joe Biden cancel “anti-Palestinian” decisions taken by the administration of President Donald Trump, Palestinian officials said on Sunday.

The officials told The Jerusalem Post that the Palestinian Authority has prepared a list of demands that will be presented to Biden after he is sworn in on January 20.

The list includes a request to reopen the PLO diplomatic mission in Washington, rescinding Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, resuming financial aid to the PA and the UN Relief and Work Agency and reopening the US consulate in east Jerusalem.

In addition, the officials said, the Palestinians will also demand the Biden administration cancel the recent decision that allows US citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their place of birth, as well as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement allowing for settlement products to be labeled as “Made in Israel.”

“We have already contacted Biden’s people to inform them of our demands,” a Palestinian official told the Post. “We had a positive dialogue with senior officials who are close to Biden.”

Since that contact between the Palestinians with Biden’s staff, the two most pro-Israel of Biden’s advisers, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, have been appointed to be, respectively, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. It may not be quite as smooth sailing for the PA as it thought just a few days ago.

Last week, PA Foreign Minister Riad Malki said the Palestinians want to conduct dialogue with the new US administration in order to cancel decisions taken by the Trump administration.

Malki said the Palestinians have suffered tremendously as a result of Trump’s decisions directed against them, including the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the transfer of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the closure of the PLO mission in the US and the suspension of US financial aid to the Palestinians.

Malki and other Palestinian officials said they also expected the Biden administration to distance itself from Trump’s plan for Middle East peace, also known as the “Deal of the Century.” The Palestinian leadership has strongly condemned the plan, unveiled in January 2020, as a “conspiracy aiming to liquidate the Palestinian issue and national rights.”

Another Palestinian official told the Post that while he was optimistic the Biden administration would cancel some of the decisions taken by the Trump administration, the Palestinians do not believe it would be easy to return the US Embassy to Tel Aviv.

No, it won’t be easy to move the Embassy back to Tel Aviv. It will be impossible. There is not a chance in hell that the American Embassy will be moved out of Jerusalem. Biden has already declared that he would not do it, though he also added that he “would not have made the move himself,” a curious remark given that he was one of the most enthusiastic backers of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which passed in the Senate by 93 to 5.

“We know that the Biden administration would not be able to accept all our demands, such as the removal of the embassy from Jerusalem, but we are very optimistic regarding the other demands,” the official explained. “If [Biden] renounces the ‘Deal of the Century’ and resumes financial aid to the Palestinians, this will be a good step in the right direction. It will be a big victory for the Palestinian people.”

The suspension of financial aid to the Palestinians was partly in response to the PA’s refusal to end its Pay-For-Slay program, which incentivizes terrorism by providing generous monthly stipends to imprisoned terrorists, and to the families of terrorists who had been killed. The PA has been recently been making noises about modifying the plan, by providing stipends based not, as now, on the length of a sentence, which provide more money the longer the sentence (so those who commit the worst attacks get more money), but instead on the “financial need” of a terrorist’s family. Qadri Abu Bakr, the PLO’s Director for Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, in English told the New York Times that the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) policy on terrorists’ families’ salaries will change. But in the Arabic version of those remarks, Qadri Abu Bakr said the exact opposite, assuring his listeners that the calculation of stipends to terrorists and their families would not change in any way. Two versions, directly contradicting each other. Why not? Qadri Abu Bakr knows: “War is deceit,” said Muhammad.

It is thus doubtful that the PA could bring itself to change its Pay-For-Slay policy, which reflects the Palestinians’ visceral support for terrorism. But even if the PA did change the criteria according to which the stipends are calculated, this would still leave in place a program that subsidizes, and therefore incentivizes, terrorism. This will make it very difficult for the Americans to turn on the faucet of aid again.

The PA’s complacent assumption that the Americans will renew financial aid to the Palestinians needs to be challenged and undermined. Even without the Pay-For-Slay program, why should the Americans turn on that tap for the PA, rather than have the PA go hat in hand to their fellow Arabs in the oil states, or Iran, or Turkey, and ask them for aid? Who decided that the United States owes the Palestinians a permanent living? And why should American taxpayers be shelling out billions, over the years, to UNRWA, which includes on its ever-expanding rolls of those who receive its largesse not just the real Palestinian refugees, those who left in 1947-1949, of whom there may now be 30,000 still alive – but also all of their descendants, now amounting to more than five million people? Who decided that among the many tens of millions of refugees who have been created by conflicts – wars, civil wars, persecutions — all over the world since the late 1940s, only one group, the Palestinians, should be allowed to pass on the refugee status to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on, world without end?

This ever-lengthening list of “Palestinian refugees” has been on the international – almost entirely Western – dole for decades. Don’t we need to ask a few questions at this point? For example, why are we Americans expected to give hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the Palestinians instead of, say, to the inoffensive and much poorer people in Bolivia or the Congo or Nepal? What exactly have the Palestinians done for us? Haven’t they used terror as a weapon for a half-century? Didn’t we see the Palestinians hand out candies and celebrate when they heard the glad news on 9/11/2001? Haven’t Palestinian terrorists killed American citizens? Isn’t Hamas a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, that seeks a worldwide caliphate? And what about the links between the Palestinians and our mortal enemy, Iran?

According to the official, the Palestinians are also expecting the Biden administration to return to the long-standing US policy toward settlements and adhere to UN resolutions on this issue.

In November 2019, Pompeo announced that the US no longer views settlements as “inconsistent with international law,” a move that drew strong condemnation from the Palestinian leadership.

Secretary Pompeo had quite properly declared as a break with previous policy what ought to have been American policy all along. The Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate, and are not “inconsistent with” international law. Their legality stems from the Mandate for Palestine, that included the entire West Bank in the territories assigned to the future Jewish National Home. Previous administrations had relied on the “Hansell Memorandum” of 1978, which took the position that the settlements were “illegal,” but Hansell himself never mentions the Palestine Mandate In his memorandum, as if it were of little moment, when it is, in fact, the essential document for understanding Israel’s claim to the West Bank, and hence, the basis of Israel’s right to build settlements in that territory.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Anticipating Biden Coming in, the Iranian Mullahs Let the Good Times Roll

UK: Muslim jailed for jihad terror offenses asks of people killed by ISIS, ‘Why didn’t they just accept Sharia?’

Australia cancels citizenship of Muslim cleric who plotted jihad massacre at soccer match

France: Muslim stabs man and repeatedly screams ‘Allahu akbar’ while resisting arrest

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Trump Administration’s Geopolitical Hat Trick

/in , , , , /by

Sudan has become the third Arab country to agree to normalize relations with Israel. The Palestinians are most unhappy: “Palestinians condemn ‘shameful’ Israel-Sudan accord,” by Khaled Abu Toameh and Celia Jean, Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2020:

The Palestinian Authority said on Friday that it “condemns and rejects” the normalization of relations between Arab countries and Israel.

A statement by the PA presidency in Ramallah said that normalization with Israel is in violation of the Arab summit resolutions and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative….

Friday’s statement by the PA, however, did not accuse Sudan of betraying the Palestinians or stabbing the Palestinian people in the back, as was the case with the UAE and Bahrain.

Mahmoud Abbas has apparently figured out that the curses and insults that he and his cronies flung at the UAE and Bahrain when they normalized relations with Israel, did the Palestinians no good, but merely inflamed passions against them. With the Sudan, they’re trying a different, more-in-sorrow approach: How can you do this to us? Don’t you feel our pain?

“No one has the right to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian issue,” the statement added. “The path to a just and comprehensive peace should be based on international law and legitimacy so as to end the Israeli occupation of the land of the State of Palestine and achieve independence for the Palestinian people in their state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the 1967 borders. The Palestinian leadership will take the necessary decisions to protect the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

But Sudan did not arrogate to itself the “right to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian issue.” It said nothing at all about the “Palestinians” in its agreement to normalize relations with Israel. It was only addressing, and promoting in two ways, its own national interest. First, to obtain this agreement, the U.S. has removed the Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. That will give it access to foreign investors, and to loans from the World Bank, the IMF, and other institutions. Second, Israel will be eager to prove to the Sudan that it made the right choice, by helping it where it most could use Israeli help: in agriculture. Israel is a world leader in drip irrigation, in wastewater management, and in solar energy, all of which could be of great help to Sudanese farmers.

While not in the official PA statement, Wasel Abu Youssef from the Palestinian Liberation Front, a small faction in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, said that Sudan joining “others who normalized ties with the state of the Israeli occupation represents a new stab in the back of the Palestinian people and a betrayal of the just Palestinian cause.”

“A new stab in the back”? Oh dear. It sounds as if Wasel Abu Youssef of the PLF did not get the memo from Mahmoud Abbas calling for a kinder, gentler approach to Sudan. This kind of charge only infuriated the UAE and Bahrain when it was made about them by the PA; the Sudanese are just as unlikely to be pleased to be described as back-stabbers. The Palestinians really ought to do a better job of coordinating their responses; this mixed-messaging will never do.

Abbas Zaki, a senior official of the ruling Fatah faction, said that Sudan would not gain anything from the normalization accord with Israel….

“Sudan would not gain anything from the normalization accord”? But Sudan has already gained something. It has been removed from the American list of state sponsors of terrorism; that removal will greatly improve Sudan’s ability to attract foreign investment, and will now enable Sudan to receive loans from the IMF, the World Bank, and other financial institutions that were previously impossible to obtain. And then there is the extensive Israeli aid that will be given to Sudanese farmers, just as soon as the agreement goes into effect. Abbas Zaki is whistling in the dark.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that the agreement was “not compatible with Sudan’s record of supporting the Palestinians.”

But that “record of supporting the Palestinians” took place under the long and terrible rule of Omar al-Bashir, the dictator of Sudan from 1989 to 2019. Bashir was an ardent supporter of Hamas, allowing it to operate freely in the country. Bashir also gave refuge to Osama bin Laden, who lived securely in the Sudan for four years. The new regime in Sudan wants to end any hint of the country’s previous connection to terrorists; it wants to reconnect with the West, attract investors, and build its economy, especially agriculture. It has gotten nothing from its “record of supporting the Palestinians” except being placed on the list of state sponsors of terror. Now, by normalizing relations with Israel, it has already been taken off that list, allowing it to attract investors, be again eligible for foreign aid, and be able to obtain loans from major financial institutions such as the IMF. Israel is ready to share with Sudanese farmers the benefits of its expertise and advances in at least three key areas – solar energy, drip irrigation, and wastewater management – where it is a world leader.

PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] spokesman Daoud Shehab accused Sudan of presenting Israel with a “free gift” in order to appease the US.

“This is a black day in the history of Sudan,” Shehab added. “The agreement jeopardizes Sudan’s future and identity and is a betrayal of the Arabs and Muslims.”

The PIJ official expressed confidence that the Sudanese people would not accept this “betrayal.”…

It is Israel that will be giving gifts to the Sudan, in the form of aid to its agricultural sector. As for Shehab’s claim that the normalization agreement “jeopardizes Sudan’s future and identity,” since when did the Palestinians become the judges as to the “Arab” identity of others? Because the Sudanese are black, is there possibly an attempt here to hint at doubt as to their “Arab” identity unless they fall back into line with what the Palestinians demand? And what exactly was the “betrayal” by the Sudan? Did it owe the Palestinians anything? Have the Palestinians ever done anything for the Sudan, other than land the country on the list of state sponsors of terrorism?

There is certainly domestic opposition in the Sudan to this new agreement. But the opponents of normalization surely know that the Sudanese quid for that significant American quo was Sudan’s agreeing to normalize relations with Israel. And if they are willing to “give peace a chance,” they will find the new connection with Israel will pay ample dividends, for the Israelis want to make sure that the “early adopters” of normalization realize economic benefits quickly. In the case of Sudan, as bears repeating, that means Israeli help to Sudanese farmers, mainly by sharing Israeli advances in drip irrigation, in waste water management, and in solar energy.

Commending the agreement from the Arab world was Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who tweeted that he welcomed the joint efforts of all three states involved in the agreement.

He added that he also values “all efforts aimed at achieving regional stability and peace.”…

El-Sisi has for a long time been cooperating with Israel on security matters, especially against Jihadis in the Sinai and, naturally, against the Muslim Brotherhood that is the sworn enemy of his regime. He previously praised both the UAE and Bahrain for their normalization agreements with Israel. It is not surprising, but is still heartening, that the most populous Arab state, and Sudan’s immediate northern neighbor, has come out foursquare for the agreement.

The Palestinian Arabs continue to believe that they should have a veto power over the policy toward Israel of all the other Arabs. They seek to deny the Arab states the possibility of making their own arrangements with Israel, arrangements that further their own national interests. The UAE and Bahrain dismissed the Palestinian objections, and went ahead in normalizing relations with the Jewish state. They have had only curses and insults heaped on them by the Palestinians, which only makes them more determined to promote both economic and people-to-people ties with the Israelis – “a warm peace.” Meanwhile, the entire nation of Israel seems ready to make sure their new Arab interlocutors benefit from such normalization; Israeli businessmen, entrepreneurs, scientists, academics, and tourists have gone to the UAE and Bahrain, while Emiratis and Bahrainis are doing the same in the Jewish state. And now, to complete the Trump Administration’s geopolitical hat trick, Sudan has just become the third Arab state to announce its intention to normalize relations with Israel. Abbas rages in Ramallah, for he can do no other, and the caravan moves on.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

RELATED TWEET:

RELATED VIDEO: FBI warns David Wood of jihadists’ calls to murder him for eating Qur’an pages

RELATED ARTICLES:

North Carolina Leftist who wanted to kill Biden to ‘save Bernie’ had pro-jihad video, praised 9/11

Colorado: Non-Muslims try to destroy Islam by ‘sugarcoating, watering it down, accept LGBT…HIYZ…music is okay’

Muslims from Mozambique screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ cross into Tanzania, behead 20 people

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.