You know the regime in #Iran is utterly weakened & desperate when their propaganda machine produces short films literally portraying an attack on the White House & Congress, and killing Trump & Netanyahu.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2020-01-12 05:56:392020-01-13 07:06:03Iran publishes film portraying jihad attack on the White House and Capitol, killing Trump, Pompeo and Netanyahu
Once upon a time, Jewish progressives embraced their people’s history and were willing to die for its modern political realization. Though they eschewed traditional observance, they typically substituted faith in history for belief in G-d.
Edmund Burke famously stated that “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” and this adage has proven true time and again.
However, what of those who know history but reject its lessons, and instead manufacture alternative traditions based on partisan fantasy or political ideology? Will they merely repeat the mistakes of the past or ensure a future where truth is subjective and morality relative? If the latter, they risk creating a world devoid of ethical integrity and intellectual honesty.
Unfortunately, historical revisionism has become part of the American political process, and those who use it to promote radical narratives are the ones most responsible for today’s irrational hostility towards Israel and the Jewish People.
Progressive extremists are particularly shrill in denouncing Israel for supposed acts of aggression and callousness that in truth are neither outrageous nor extreme, but instead consistent with international law and Jewish historical rights and tradition. They are especially indignant when Jewish history conflicts with the claims of Palestinian-Arabs, whose national narrative is a chimerical study in antisemitic rejectionism with little or no foundation.
This was apparent when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking for President Trump, acknowledged the legality of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. The Union for Reform Judaism (“URJ”) responded with a statement urging the President to recant, declaring: “Any unilateral move…would place serious and critical obstacles to a viable two-state solution, damaging the prospect of renewing the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and causing a long-term threat to Israel’s status as a Jewish and democratic state.” But President Trump’s position reflected sentiments that prevailed before the Obama administration and an understanding that Palestinians oppose a “viable two-state solution” because they deny Israel’s legitimacy. That denial is actually the most “serious and critical” obstacle to peace.
American critics are impertinent when they claim to know what is best for Israel. And the URJ’s statement is emblematic of this conceit in that it (a) seems oblivious to the impact of Palestinian rejectionism and (b) fails to acknowledge that Israeli “settlements” in Judea and Samaria actually conform to international legal norms and standards. This was recognized well before the Obama administration’s eight-year effort to delegitimize the “settlements”. It was Obama’s collusion with the United Nations in 2016 to undermine Israeli sovereignty that constituted a change in US policy, not Trump’s restatement of protocol.
Prior administrations did not resolutely deny the legality of the “settlements” (which were built on ancestral lands where Jews had lived for thousands of years), but believed they could be negotiated based on political considerations. Indeed, Americans commonly recognized Jewish indigeneity throughout the Land of Israel.
Israel’s acquisition of these lands in 1967 was lawful because it was defending itself from an aggressor nation (Jordan). Neither the Law of Belligerent Occupation nor the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibit Israel from maintaining possession of territories seized from an aggressor nation that acquired them in violation of international law. Specifically, Jordan annexed Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem illegally in 1948, before which they had been holdings of a defunct empire. These lands were never independent or part of any autonomous nation-state after Rome conquered the Kingdom of Judah in 136 CE, and certainly not a state of “Palestine” that never existed. Their liberation by Israel if anything reimposed legitimate sovereignty after a two-thousand-year hiatus.
Once upon a time, Jewish progressives embraced their people’s history with religious-like zeal and were willing to die for its modern political realization. Though they eschewed traditional observance after the Enlightenment, they typically substituted faith in history for belief in G-d; and while many of them claimed to profess atheism, they nonetheless continued to express their innate religious sensibilities as historical determinism. They knew where their ancestors came from and believed Jewish national destiny was tied to the ancient homeland.
This ancestral link to Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the rest of ancient Israel was the basis for recognizing the right of Jewish self-determination in the Mandate for Palestine of 1922. While these lands constituted colonial holdings of successive empires after the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth, they never comprised independent sovereign territories between the years 136 and 1948. Furthermore, they were commonly recognized as ancestrally Jewish and for maintaining a Jewish presence for more than 3,000 years – long before the Roman, Arab, and Ottoman conquests.
In recognition of the Jews’ ancient connection to these lands, Israel’s Provisional State Council on September 16, 1948 enacted the “Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance,” which aimed to extend Israeli jurisdiction beyond the 1947 partition lines to areas traditionally acknowledged as part of the Jewish homeland. This ordinance (aka “Ben-Gurion’s Law”) was intended to apply to lands liberated by the Israeli military and was effective retroactively to the date of Israel’s independence on May 15, 1948. The law’s justification was inherent in its recognition that certain lands were innately Jewish (leaving its nonenforcement in 1967 open to critical question).
Unfortunately, the old Israeli left sometimes sacrificed historical virtue for the sake of partisan politics. Though Menachem Begin made a policy of never questioning his political opponents’ patriotism, for example, Labor ideologues were often quick to label him and Herut Party members as Nazis and fascists, thus perverting the context and meaning of those terms for partisan purposes. This was eventually coopted by Israel-haters to misrepresent the past so as to deny Israeli sovereignty and Jewish national claims.
Historical revisionism is now used to empower BDS, justify antisemitism, and delegitimize Israel by falsely depicting it as a colonial creation built on the ruins of a mythical country called Palestine. But historical and archeological analysis corroborates Israel’s Jewish past while offering no support for Palestinian authenticity. Though the Jewish homeland was the target of multiple conquests before 1948, colonialism was enforced by Greeks, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Christian Crusaders, and Ottoman Turks – not Jews. And the history of jihad in the region is one of subjugation, the influence of which continues to inflame anti-Jewish passions today.
Despite the historical record, ambivalence regarding Israeli sovereignty long ago infected the political mainstream without protest from Democratic leadership. In his final television address as Secretary of State, for example, John Kerry inveighed against Israel and pushed the canard that she could not be both Jewish and democratic. He never expressed concern over the religious and ethnic supremacism that permeates the Arab-Muslim Mideast) and his apparent disregard for Jewish ancestral rights was inexcusable.
Similar bias motivated the Obama administration’s collusion with the UN in 2016 to orchestrate a resolution declaring that Israeli “settlements” violated international law (despite much precedent to the contrary) so that the US could withhold its veto and effectively reverse American policy. The Simon Wiesenthal Center recognized this as an attack on Israeli sovereignty and proclaimed it the most antisemitic incident of the year. This assault against Israel on the world stage was nonetheless tolerated by Jewish progressives, and even lauded by some. When Jews fail to condemn such conduct, they enable Jew-hatred masquerading as political dialogue; and denying Israeli sovereignty is indeed a form of antisemitism.
Whereas early Jewish progressives regarded their people’s history with reverence, their political descendants lost all sense of its noble origins and lofty mission. Furthermore, today’s left has altered the past to conform to a worldview that disparages Israel and traditional Judaism.
As Rav Saadia Gaon explained more than a thousand years ago, the Jews are a nation founded on Torah whose national survival requires loyalty to its laws and principles. Without Torah, he said, the Jewish nation would have disappeared like any other ancient people swallowed by the sands of time. Is Israel’s disappearance the goal of those who now seek to deny Jewish history and suppress Judaism’s eternal values?
At the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Florida on November 17, 2019, I unveiled the duplicity and deception at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” and explained, among other things, why Anwar Sadat should not be revered as a man of peace.
Transcript:
Thank you very much. I thought by way of transition I would tell all of you that I wouldn’t be here tonight, today, if it were not for Peter Collier. In the ‘90s, well actually going back further, in the early ‘80s, I worked at Revolution Books, which was the bookstore of the Revolutionary Communist party, and I was very hardcore leftist. And along the course of things, I read Destructive Generation, which had an explosive effect on me, as it had on so many people. Then some years later, I was working as an ad writer, a copywriter and ghostwriter, who read the Qur’an for fun, and after 9/11, was asked to write a book by somebody who knew me and I worked with — to write a book explaining what had happened and why. And I said, “Well, I’m nobody. Why would anybody pay attention to what I think about any of this?,” and the guy said, “Just write it, and if it’s quality work and if it explains the material, then I will get somebody to publish it,” and, of course, the person he got to publish it was Peter Collier.
My first book, Islam Unveiled, came out in 2002 from Encounter Books, and I remember talking to him on the phone after he read the manuscripts and being sort of staggered and amazed when he said that he liked it. And you can hear all these people saying that he completely rewrote — he did rewrite about half of it, but still he liked it. I’m still thrilled. In any case, the other part of that story is that the gentleman who asked me to write the book and encouraged me to do so worked for a different publishing house, a rival publishing house to Encounter, and they were going to publish the book, but then the head of the publishing house, who was a leading conservative publisher, he said in a meeting while I was there that he had visited Gaza and the Palestinians were wonderful people, and he didn’t want to offend them by publishing this book — and that’s a lot of the fix that we’re in, and what I address in this new book, The Palestinian Delusion, which you all got in the bags when you registered.
You may remember Jimmy Carter standing there beaming happily with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister of Israel, at Camp David in the late ‘70s, and there was going to be peace. And you may remember Bill Clinton standing there with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, and they’re shaking hands and Clinton is beaming, and there’s going to be peace. And you may remember George W. Bush standing there with Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon and beaming as they shake hands, and there’s going to be peace. And you may remember Obama standing there with Abbas again and Benjamin Netanyahu, same thing. And the one thing we’ve never had is peace. We’ve had 40 years of peace process and no peace. The reason why is revealed in many of the things that took place in the first and most celebrated aspect of that peace process and that, of course, is the Camp David summit and Anwar Sadat’s overtures to Israel after the 1973 war. This is, of course, very important in world history. If you go to Jerusalem, you can go to the Begin Sadat Center that studies ways to bring about peace and so on, and Sadat is a revered figure around the world, but I would expect that many of you will be surprised to know why exactly it was that he reached out to the Israelis and began the peace process. He is a great saint now. He’s a Gandhi figure and so on, but the real story is a little bit different, as is always the case.
Anwar Sadat, of course, was President of Egypt, and in the Yom Kippur war he was one of the Muslim Arab countries that attacked Israel gratuitously and without cause, and they were, of course, making great inroads, because it was Yom Kippur. They were making great inroads at the beginning, and then the Israelis began to regroup and to beat them back, and then the ceasefire was concluded, and so on. And shortly after this, there was a Politburo meeting, a meeting of the high command of the Soviet Union. Now of course at this time, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was part of the Cold War, with the Israelis on the American side and the Palestinians on the Soviet side, and everything was binary, not like it is now, and you had Gromyko, the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, speaking with Leonid Brezhnev, the Premier of the Soviet Union, about what to do about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and he actually asked them at this Politburo meeting. I’ve got the minutes in the book. “Leonid, what are going to do about the Israelis and the Palestinians?” And Brezhnev says, “We’re going to participate in negotiations. At the appropriate time, we will restore diplomatic relations with Israel.”
And everybody, the whole Politburo was shocked, and Gromyko says, “But the Arabs will get angry.” Well, the sun will come up, but anyway, the Arabs will get angry, and this is what Brezhnev responded, and this is very important. Brezhnev says, “They can go to hell. We have offered them a sensible way for so many years, but no, they wanted to fight. Fine. We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn’t have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery and in air defense and anti-tank weapons, they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed. Once again they screamed for us to come and save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone, Save me. He demanded we send Soviet troops immediately. No, we’re not going to fight for them. The people would not understand that and especially we will not start a world war over them. So, that’s that. We will do what I said.”
You notice that he said Sadat pleaded for help after he had given them all the best weaponry, and they still lost. And so what did Sadat do? He was very astute. He realized okay, the Soviets want me to make peace with Israel, but who really has the leverage over Israel to get them to make concessions? Not the Soviets, but the Unite States. So Sadat took Brezhnev’s advice, but he switched sides, and that was when Sadat, you may recall those of you who are as old as I am, you may recall that in the early ‘70s Sadat broke with the Soviets and approached the United States and made an accord with the United States, and it was considered to be a great Cold War breakthrough. But Sadat himself explained, when he was asked why he was doing this, he said, “What other country can force Israel to withdraw?” That’s what it was all about, and that’s what the peace process was all about.
Sadat, very famously, offered to go to Israel, and of course Israel, being besieged and battered and excoriated in world opinion and everything else for so many decades, they were thrilled, and the Israelis greeted Sadat rapturously when he went to Jerusalem, and he addressed the Knesset and was received as a tremendous hero. But if you actually look at what he said, it’s astonishing. What he was saying essentially in his speech in the Knesset was “Let’s negotiate. You give me everything I want, and our negotiations will be concluded.” Because what he said was, “Let me tell you without the slightest hesitation,” this is Sadat in the Knesset, “that I did not come to you under this dome to make a request that your troops evacuate the occupied territories. Complete withdrawal from the Arab territories occupied in 1967 is a logical and undisputed fact. Nobody should plead for that.” And he talked about permanent peace based on justice, and then he said that moves to ensure our coexistence and peace and security in this part of the world would become meaningless “while you occupy Arab territories by force of arms.”
Now, he’s talking about the 1967 borders, which of course is still a very hot issue, and was demanding that Israel withdraw completely from the so-called occupied territories, but the fact is that, of course, it is a staple of the Muslim Arab rhetoric about Israel that Israel actually is entirely occupying land that belongs rightly to the Muslim Arabs, and thus, none of it has any legitimacy. So, when he’s saying that there can be no peace until all the Arab territories that you occupy by force of arms are cleared out, he’s saying Israel has to stop existing, and then we’ll be friends. And yet nobody really paid attention to this. Nobody pondered the implications at the time, and of course, most famously, Jimmy Carter invited Sadat and Begin to Camp David a few years after that, about a year after this, rather, and there was going to be peace. It was going to be great. But the thing was, Carter was entranced by Sadat. Carter did think that Sadat was some extraordinary, magnanimous Gandhi-like world figure for peace, and so he told him essentially that he would give him anything he wanted. He called him a great and good man, and Carter said to Sadat, “I will represent your interests as if they were my own. You are my brother.”
Now, contrast that to Carter’s national security advisor, you remember Zbigniew Brzezinski. Yeah, you remember him. And he said in his memoirs that Carter’s relationship with Begin was “icy” and even mutual praise was formalistic and devoid of any personal feeling. But meanwhile Carter’s telling Sadat, “I hope I’ll never let you down.” And what’s really ironic about his is that Sadat went back to Mohamed Kamel, his foreign minister, and the rest of his entourage, and he’s telling them all this with great hilarity and talking to them about the person he called “poor naïve Carter.” And it was really sort of ludicrous how he took advantage of Carter at Camp David, and what happened essentially is Begin caught on very quickly. He went back to his own group, and he said the Americans have adopted the Egyptian program. That’s that, and that’s essentially what was forced upon the Israelis at the time. I mean it was really an unfair conflict. It was two against one, and so there wasn’t really any chance.
Begin actually brought along Samuel Katz, who’s the author of a great book called Battleground about the case, essentially the case for Israel, and he had Katz talking to Carter to try to explain to him why Israel had a just case that ought to be respected. And Carter just got more and more impatient until he cut him off entirely. He had no interest in listening to this at all. In any case, what happened was that Sadat is walking, and this is an indication of what his true mindset was, Sadat is walking in the woods in Camp David with Kamel, his foreign minister, and some others, and he’s saying this: “We are dealing with the lowest and meanest of enemies, the Jews. The Jews even tormented their prophet Moses and exasperated their God. I pity poor Carter and his dealings with Begin with his stilted mentality.” And so, then Kamel asks him, “Well, do you think that Carter is going to pressure Begin to give us what we want?,” and Sadat says, “Oh yeah, of course he will.” It was in the bag.
Now, what’s really interesting about this story is that moments after this, or as they’re having this conversation, who walks up to them but Ezer Weizman, the Israeli foreign minister who is also walking in the woods, and he says to Sadat, “Can we talk face to face later on today?,” and Sadat suddenly changes. Seconds ago, he’s talking about “the lowest and meanest of enemies, the Jews,” and now he says, “Oh, of course. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.” He was completely duplicitous. And really, actually it’s been extraordinarily effective. His historical memory is a monument of duplicity. Now, in any case, you know what happened, that the Israelis were made to give up the Sinai, which they had occupied, and make other concessions.
Now, remember that we’re talking about what happened after a defensive war. Why did Israel take the Sinai? Did it have imperialistic design on Egypt? Did it want to colonize the entire Middle East, as a lot of the paranoid Palestinian propaganda says? Obviously not. What you have is the same thing that happened if you look at a map of Germany before World War II and a map of Germany after World War II, and one thing that you’ll notice is that Germany is smaller after World War II. Why is that? Did Poland and the Soviet Union and the rest of them, well, the Soviet Union may have, but Poland was not working from some imperialist project. The entire continent of Europe had been victimized by the Germans, and it was considered to be entirely just that they lose some territory, and that the surrounding nations gain some territory as a matter of protecting their own security. And this is a law of human history, really, that you find multiple examples of throughout history that the victorious nation can expand its territory at the expense of the defeated nation so as to protect itself more effectively from future attacks of the same kind. Only when it comes to Israel was this not allowed.
But Sadat and Carter compelled Begin to give up the Sinai, which had been taken for security purposes, and to make various concessions. One of the extraordinary concessions that Begin made or was forced to make was the recognition of an entity called the Palestinian people. And I’m sure that you all know that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. The Arabs of the region — in the first place the name. “Palestine” was a name given by the Romans to the land of Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 134 of the Common Era. In the year 134, there was a Jewish leader, Bar Kokhba, who led a revolt against the Romans, and they lost. And so the Romans had had enough. This was not the first revolt, and they expelled the Jews from the area, and they renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina,” and they renamed Judea “Palestine.” Where did they get the name Palestine? They went into the Bible, and they saw that the Jews’ enemies were the Philistines, and they named the region accordingly. But at that point, it was just a region’s name. It was like Brooklyn. To say that there’s a Palestinian people that is distinct from the other Arabs of the region is as silly as saying that Brooklynites are ethnically or culturally different and are a separate nation unto themselves. Well, maybe they are.
And when it comes to Palestine, there were always Jews living there, because the Romans had expelled the Jews from the area, but the expulsion decree was not universally enforced, and there was a Jewish presence in Palestine from that moment, 134, up to the present day, uninterrupted. Meanwhile, after the seventh century conquest of the area by the Muslim Arabs, then Arabs moved into the area, and were there intermittently. They were conquered by the Turks, and so on. The people who lived there were Arabs. The Arabs were not differently linguistically, culturally or religiously from Arabs anywhere else in that area. There was no distinct Palestinian people. There never was. And as far as the legal right to the land was concerned, you have various conquests, and the right of conquest is something else that’s always been recognized in human history. So, we can say the land belonged to the Arab Muslim caliphates and that it belonged to the Turkish caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and then what happened? The Ottoman Empire fell at the end of World War I, and the Turks ceded their right to that area to the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. And the League of Nations gave Brittan what is known as the Mandate for Palestine, which was intended to allow for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. That was what it was explicitly for.
So there is nobody else who has any legal claim to that land other than the Jews, other than the State of Israel. And even more than this, you have an unbroken historical record of Jewish presence there. You have the fact that nobody else has any claim to that territory. I’m speaking about the fact that people say nowadays that Israel exists on stolen land. Who was it stolen from? If I pick up a wallet on the street, it belongs to somebody, but nobody owns this wallet. It’s the land that was set aside for the Jewish Mandate for Palestine, and remember, that includes what is known as the West Bank for Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and as a matter of fact it includes Jordan as well, although Jordan was detached from the land dedicated to the Mandate for Palestine by the British early on.
You know the phrase “Perfidious Albion? “Perfidious Albion” is a phrase used for Britain, and I’m sorry if Katie’s here, sorry. But anyway, but there’s no doubt that Albion was perfidious in this case, because, of course, you have the Zionist project beginning in the nineteenth century. In the background of everything that I’m saying, you have the Zionists beginning to say, “This is our land, this is our historic homeland, we need to return to this place so that we have our own nation and are not subject to persecution by everybody else.” And so, Jews from Europe, Jews from all over begin to move into the land of Palestine, and the British are supposed to be behind this. The British are supposed to be saying, “This is what is supposed to happen,” but after it started to happen, the Arabs started to complain, and the Arabs started to complain very simply because of a Qur’an verse. If you open your Qur’an to chapter 2, verse 191, you’ll see it. “Drive them out from where they drove you out.” Now, it is a historical myth in several stages that the Israelis drove anybody out. There was nobody driven out. It was the Jews who were driven out by the Romans in the first place, most of them, although many stayed, as I said.
But anyway, once the Arabs started complaining on this very basic principle, you see, “Drive them out from where they drove you out,” if you think about that for a minute, it means no Jews should be here. This is land that belongs to Muslims because Muslims once ruled it, and if Muslims once ruled it, they have the responsibility before Allah to drive out those who rule it now. So they had to drive out the Jews from the area, and the British, there was a British colonel, Colonel Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor, and he spoke to them. He went to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, some of you may have heard of him — and I’m sorry, Douglas Murray couldn’t make it, so I had to do it. Colonel Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor went to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and the Mufti of Jerusalem is somebody you may be familiar with because he lived in Berlin during World War II, was friends with Himmler and Eichmann and encouraged the final solution, the genocide of the Jews. But this is in 1920. This is before all that, and Colonel Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor told him we’ve got a bit of a sticky wicket here because we encouraged the settlement, but now you are complaining, and we want to make you happy. So, what we need to do is if you commit a few terror attacks, then the British government will see that the Zionist project is not viable and will withdraw.
Yes, the British government encouraged the Arab Muslims of Palestine to commit terror attacks against the Jews, and told them they would be rewarded for doing so. Now, you see, if you think about that, if that is the beginning of all this, then you see why in a microcosm, world opinion is so crazy nowadays, because this is something that the seeds of were planted years ago, that intimidation will work. They were told that if they were bullying and if they were violent, then they would be rewarded, and they have been. Sadat’s overture for peace was just another way to go about the principle, attaining the principle to “drive them out from where they drove you out.” And they have worked on the basis of intimidation ever since. Ever since until one thing happened: Donald Trump was elected president.
Now, you’ll notice intimidation has been the basis of American foreign policy regarding Israel and the Palestinians really ever since the State of Israel was founded. After the State of Israel was founded, with very few exceptions, we have bowed to Arab Muslim intimidation and allowed them to dictate exactly what we would do regarding Israel. Sadat and Carter is one example of that, and pretty much every other peace process initiative, as you’ll see in the book, are more examples of it. And one of the most egregious examples of it came when the U.S. Congress in the ‘90s recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but added a caveat that Jerusalem would not be recognized as Israel’s capital if the president thought it an expedient, for whatever reason, to postpone that recognition. And Bill Clinton postponed it. George W. Bush postponed it. Obama postponed it. On what grounds? Because the Palestinians would riot, because of intimidation. They had been taught from the beginning, they had been told by the British, if you’re violent, if you commit acts of terror, you’ll be rewarded. Trump changed all that. Trump said, “I’m moving the capital. I’m not going to bow to your bullying and intimidation.”
And so finally we have a chance to achieve some sanity in this conflict, but for the rest of the story, for a record of insanity, you have the book all in your bags, and thank you very much for being here this morning.
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch video is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-12-31 06:03:402019-12-31 06:04:43VIDEO: Clearing Away the Delusions about the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
At the recent debate among Democrats running for President, Bernie Sanders was predictably the most anti-Israel of the candidates. He said he would not, hesitate, this “proud Jewish person,” to withhold aid from Israel to force it to do American bidding, which in Sanders’ view includes removing Jewish settlements from the West Bank. After all, he has previously said that “Jewish settlements in occupied territory are illegal.” He called Netanyahu a “racist,” though he provided no examples of such “racism.” Sanders explained, in his contribution to the squaring-the-circle problem, that “the US should craft a foreign policy that is favorable to both Israel and Palestine.” Sorry, can’t be done. “Israel has the right not only to exist, but to exist in peace and security,” said Sanders, who spent time on a kibbutz in Israel as a young man.
It’s nice of big-hearted Bernie Sanders to grant Israel “the right to exist.” He even grants it the right to exist “in peace and security.” But what if Israel cannot exist in “peace and security” unless it holds onto those supposedly “illegal settlements” in the West Bank, which provide it with the necessary strategic depth against invasion from the East? What if every military man who has studied the matter, beginning with the American military men sent by the Joint Chiefs to Israel in 1967, on President Johnson’s orders, and produced a report on the territory which, as a matter of military necessity, Israel would have to retain. They included most of the West Bank, and all of the Jordan Valley and the Judean Hills. We all know that Bernie Sanders spent time on a kibbutz; too bad he didn’t spend time in the IDF. Military matters are not his strong suit.
Given the vast buildup in Arab militaries since 1967, to expect that Israel could once again pull off its victory in the Six-Day War is to ask that country to entrust its security to another such miracle. Israel could not reasonably expect to survive if it were squeezed back into something like the pre-1967 lines – that is, the 1949 Armistice Lines – which Foreign Minister Abba Eban, a famous dove, correctly defined as the “lines of Auschwitz.”
On what evidence does Sanders think that the Muslim Arabs have given up their desire to eliminate Israel? Did Hamas change its charter, or the views expressed every day by its leading members, fighters, clerics? Has Mahmoud Abbas shown a sincere willingness to engage in peace talks with Israel, or has he repeatedly turned down the offer of such talks, as he does even today? Why would Sanders expect him to behave any differently in the future? Abbas is a Slow Jihadist, willing to use the salami-tactics of creating an ever-smaller Israel through “peace agreements,” but his ultimate aim is the same as that of the Fast Jihadists of Hamas: no more Israel.
If Sanders, who refers constantly to his Jewish heritage and the fact that he once spent time on an Israeli kibbutz, a transparent way to defend himself against charges of being anti-Israel, had taken the time to study the history of the Mandate, he might be surprised to learn that the entire West Bank was part of the territory assigned to the future Jewish National Home, and that Israel’s legal claim to that territory never lapsed; when Jordan managed to possess the West Bank from 1949 to 1967, it did so as the military “occupier.” When Israel took control of the West Bank as a result of the Six-Day War, this did not create Israel’s legal claim; that already existed. It merely put Israel in a position to exercise that pre-existing legal claim to the territory.
Sanders not only has little sympathy for, but also no understanding of, the plight of the Israelis who have to secure their tiny state against many would-be aggressors. There is Hamas, sending hundreds of rockets into southern Israel from Gaza, and constantly attempting to breach, with Molotov cocktails, grenades, and incendiary kites, Israel’s security fence. There are Islamic State elements that have regrouped in Sinai; for now their main target is Egypt, but at any time they might attempt to send terrorists into Israel. There is Hezbollah, with its terror tunnels snaking into the Galilee, and its 140,000 rockets stockpiled in southern Lebanon. There is Jordan, where King Abdullah has to keep the lid on his own people, who increasingly demand that the peace treaty with Israel be ended. There is Turkey, where President Erdogan has published a plan for a pan-Islamic military force capable of overwhelming the Israelis and destroying their country.
And most menacing of all is the powerful Islamic Republic of Iran, which never fails to remind Israel, and the world, that it can destroy the Jewish State. To this end, it has already supplied Hezbollah with those 140,000 rockets ready to be loosed upon Israel.
Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg have joined Sanders in leaving the door open to using US aid to Israel as a means to leverage Israel to change its policies on the Palestinians.
But one Democratic candidate does not think aid to Israel should be used as a weapon. Joe Biden, alone among the major candidates, has said he would not use aid as a weapon to force Israel to change its policies. Some have hailed him, not quite accurately I’m afraid, as a “pro-Israel” candidate. The bar for being “pro-Israel” has been set very low this year. He may not call Netanyahu a “racist” as Sanders does, but he has described his behavior as “outrageous.” What does he mean? Is it outrageous for Netanyahu to have the Israeli military prevent Hamas from breaching the security fence on the border with Gaza? Has it been “outrageous” for him to have those soldiers first use tear gas and rubber bullets to stop the participants in the Great March of Return, and if the fence is about to be breached, by those throwing Molotov cocktails and grenades, then to allow those soldiers to use live fire? Was it “outrageous” for Netanyahu to allow the IDF to kill the northern leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Abu Al-Ata, as he was planning a major terrorist operation against Israel? Was it “outrageous,” after PIJ fired 450 rockets into Israel, disrupting life in southern Israel, with everyone having repeatedly to rush to shelters, for Netanyahu to have the IDF retaliate against PIJ offices, launching pads, and weapons storehouses? What should he have done? Was it “outrageous” for Netanyahu to welcome the move of the American Embassy to Jerusalem? Is it perhaps his muscular policy of replying promptly to every Palestinian attack that Biden founds “outrageous,” though he does not explain, because he cannot, what he would have had Netanyahu do instead? It would have been good, in the face of Sanders’ absurd claim that Netanyahu is a “racist,” if Joe Biden had gone on the offensive, and said “Bernie has called Netanyahu a ‘racist.” This is a preposterous charge, and he knows it. I’ve known Bibi for a long time. We have our policy differences, but he hasn’t a racist bone in his body.”
Joe Biden did distinguish himself from Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg during the debate on the subject of aid to Israel. Unlike them, he has repeatedly said he would never use the withholding of aid as a weapon with which to force Israel to do America’s bidding. Biden has, however, repeated the phrase, the formula, the mantra, of what he and many others s call a “two-state solution.” This already assumes what needs to be proved: is there a “solution” to the Arab war on Israel? And if there isn’t, should that be cause for endless doom and gloom, or is there another way to see things?
Let’s state what those who have studied Islam already know: it is impossible for the Muslim Arabs to permanently accept the existence of Israel, whatever its borders. It is unacceptable for Unbelievers to possess land that was once possessed by Muslims; such land must forever belong to Muslims. It is especially maddening when those Unbelievers are the much-despised Jews, who have managed to stave off repeated attempts by Muslims, the “best of peoples,” to snuff out the Jewish state’s young life. And Israel exists, just as maddeningly, smack in the middle of the Arab world, separating North African Arabs from those in the Middle East. Israel is likened by the Arabs, because of its shape, to a “dagger” thrust into their heart; another favorite metaphor is that Israel is a “cancer.” You don’t pull a dagger only part-way out of your body; you deal with cancer by removing every last cell of it.
Of course those who believe in the “two-state solution” assume that there is some giving up of territory by Israel that will sufficiently placate the Arabs so that they will beat their swords into plowshares. The reverse is true: any further withdrawal by Israel, which in returning the entire Sinai to Egypt has already given back 95% of the land it had won by force of arms in the Six-Day War, will merely whet, not sate, Palestinian and other Arab appetites. Were Israel to give up the West Bank, it would again have an eight-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea. It would have the highest length-of-border-to-enclosed-territory ratio of any country on earth – hellishly difficult to police all of that long border. The “Palestinians” see any future agreement with Israel as a way station on the path toward their final goal, which remains, for both the Fast Jihadists of Hamas and the Slow Jihadists of the Palestinian Authority, the end of the Jewish state.
And the “Palestinians” have powerful allies to help them in this task. There is Iran, whose leaders never fail to claim they are quite capable of destroying the Zionists. There is Turkey, which if President Erdogan has his way, would also participate in some kind of pan-Islamic attack on Israel. The “Palestinians” of the “moderate” PA speak among themselves about the destruction of the Zionist state; to the outside world, Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi, and Mahmoud Abbas soothingly refer to the “two-state solution.” They find it goes over quite well.
Let’s replace that word “solution” and speak, more realistically, of how this Arab war on Israel can be “managed.” The answer is that it can be managed in exactly the same way that the United States “managed” the threat from the Soviet Union: deterrence. The U.S. remained sufficiently, and obviously strong, so as to deter Soviet aggression. We – Israel, America, the entire West — cannot change the Qur’an, with its commands to wage violent Jihad against Infidels. But by helping to ensure that Israel remains overwhelmingly stronger than its enemies, America can promote a very long peace.
Three trends should be noted that will only improve Israel’s ability to deter its enemies in the future. First, Israel’s technological superiority over the Arabs will continue to widen, as it has been doing for the past several decades. Second, the most important weapon of the Arabs and Iran remains their revenues from oil. But oil demand is static, and may soon decrease: electric vehicles, and the increasing use of solar and wind power, are steadily reducing oil’s share of the energy market. This means less financial support for the Palestinians, affecting their ability to wage war. Third, demography is not, as everyone seems to assume, on the side of the Arabs. With an average of 3.1 children per woman, Israel has the highest fertility rate in the OECD by a considerable margin and much higher than the OECD average of 1.7. Over the past decade, the annual population growth among Muslims in Israel has fallen significantly, from around 3% to less than 2.2% by 2013, and continues inexorably to decrease, while the overall Jewish growth rate rose from around 1.4% to 1.7% in 2013 and continues, just as inexorably, to increase. If present trends continue, fears about a “Muslim population bomb” in Israel can be laid to rest.
Say it a dozen times a day: there is no “solution” – whether one-state, two-state, or n-state — to the Arab war on Israel. But Israel will be able to manage that conflict, while it goes from strength to strength, technologically, financially, demographically, through deterrence. “Peace Through Strength” — remember? That is good enough. That’s more than good enough. Now let’s try to get that message to Joe Biden.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-12-28 05:44:512019-12-28 05:48:36Joe Biden, the “Two-State Solution,” and Peace Through Strength by Hugh Fitzgerald
The fix is in. What in that review conceivably violates Amazon guidelines? This is clear evidence that Amazon is not a bookstore, but part of the Left-fascist cabal that is working so hard today to crush all dissent from the Leftist agenda.
Strike a blow against the sinister Leftist establishment: if you have read The Palestinian Delusion and like it, please leave a favorable review at Amazon. If you haven’t read it, please buy a copy now. You could even buy it from Amazon, even as it is clearly trying to suppress this book: buying it from elsewhere is not going to dent this elephantine corporation’s earnings, while buying it from Amazon will show that their attempts to deep-six this book aren’t working.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-12-17 04:23:062019-12-17 04:24:15Amazon nixes positive review of 'The Palestinian Delusion', claims it violates its guidelines
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-12-16 04:20:212019-12-16 04:20:21VIDEO: 'The two-state solution is a myth'
Proclaiming Justice to The Nations (PJTN), a Tennessee-based non-profit evangelical Christian organization committed towards standing with Israel and fighting antisemitism, has been removed from the AmazonSmile program, which enables Amazon customers to donate a percentage of their purchase to their favorite charity.
PJTN President Laurie Cardoza-Moore told JNS that “all of a sudden, we began being inundated with e-mails from supporters whose AmazonSmile donations to Proclaiming Justice to the Nations had been repeatedly rejected. They were being instructed to choose another charity, despite wanting to support PJTN.” After reaching out to Amazon for an explanation—assuming it was a technical glitch—the retail giant informed PJTN that customers would no longer be able to donate towards the organization using the AmazonSmile platform, following the listing of PJTN as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The SPLC, whose website says that part of its mission is to monitor domestic hate groups in the United States, has PJTN listed on its “hate map” as being one of 36 Tennessee-based hate groups. SPLC specifically accuses PJTN of being “anti-Muslim.”
Amazon employs 566,000 people worldwide. The company clearly does not lack for personnel to study non-profit groups and to advise Amazon as to which ones qualify for its customers to use the AmazonSmile platform, which allows them to donate part of their purchase to a favorite charity.
But Amazon chose not to do that work itself. Instead, it handed over the decision making as to which groups are to be considered “hate groups” to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a grand total of 254 employees. That means that for every employee of the SPLC, Amazon has more than 2,000 of its own. Is the SPLC so very good at its job that mighty Amazon, with its 566,000 employees, is right to rely on the 254 employees of that outside group? For years, the SPLC presented itself as beyond reproach, an organization of selfless do-gooders at a non-profit. But in recent years, defectors from the group have painted a grim picture of an organization run by scam artists – its head a “flimflam man” — who have arranged colossal salaries for themselves, in some cases have been guilty of sexual harassment of fellow employees, have exhibited racist attitudes, and have been thoroughly unmasked for these and other offenses in numerous damning reports.
Here is some of what Jessica Prol Smith, of the Alliance Defending Freedom, discovered about the SPLC:
For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme. For years, the left-wing interest group has used its “hate group” list to promote the fiction that violent neo-Nazis and Christian nonprofits peacefully promoting orthodox beliefs about marriage and sex are indistinguishable. Sometimes, it has apologized to public figures it has smeared, and it recently paid out millions to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit.
These shameful secrets are no longer hidden in shadows. The New York Times, Politico, NPR and a host of other mainstream publications are reporting on the corruption and widening credibility gap. The SPLC dismissed its co-founder in March, and its president has resigned amidst numerous claims of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism within the organization — a parade of disgraces that vividly force the conclusion: The SPLC is hollow, rotten and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.
Morris Dees, co-founder of SPLC, was dismissed for many reasons. A multimillionaire from his work as a direct-mail marketer before founding SPLC, Dees was reportedly more concerned with fund-raising than with litigating; he had not tried a case in more than a decade, and other than raising money for himself and others, took little part in the SPLC’s day-to-day operations. During his tenure, there were accusations of gender discrimination and racism in hiring and promotions, as well as sexual harassment. The SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, apparently resigned for much the same reasons — charges of race and gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and other, unspecified offenses. Both Cohen and Dees had been receiving very large salaries, way out of whack with non-profits of similar size.
The criticism comes from many corners. There’s the Current Affairs editor who seems sympathetic to the center’s progressive mission but decries its “hate group” list as an “outright fraud” and a “willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC.”
There’s the retired investigative journalist who helped research and write an eight-part series on the center’s “litany of problems and questionable practices” in the mid-1990s. His Washington Post opinion piece reads with a thinly veiled message: We nearly got a Pulitzer Prize for TELLING YOU SO.
But perhaps most damning of all are the indictments leveled by former employee Bob Moser in The New Yorker. He remembers being welcomed to the “Poverty Palace” and recounts the heart-sinking reality of it all — being “pawns” in a “highly profitable scam.”
Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, has long questioned what he calls the center’s “fraudulent” fundraising.
“The chickens have had a very long trip, but they finally came home to roost,” Bright said.
“Morris is a flimflam man and he’s managed to flimflam his way along for many years raising money by telling people about the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups,” he said. “He sort of goes to whatever will sell and has, of course, brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars.”
While the SPLC funded some good work, Bright said, he had long heard complaints about race discrimination and sexual harassment from the center’s former attorneys and interns.
The SPLC has been thoroughly discredited during this last year, yet Bezos has not said a word. Could it be he still doesn’t know about the scandalous goings-on at SPLC, or is that he doesn’t care? Perhaps he’s been busy, swallowing up yet another industry, but he really ought to give Amazon’s reliance on SPLC for deciding which are the “hate groups” to be banned from AmazonSmile more of his attention. And then he might decide to cut the cord.
Given all this, here’s what Jeff Bezos ought to do to spare himself further embarrassment. He ought to read what Tim Moser, the former employee of SPLC, wrote about the organization in The New Yorker. He should read the eight-part series by an investigative journalist on the “problems and questionable practices” at SPLC. He ought to find out what The New York Times, Politico, and NPR have reported about SPLC, which has led many to conclude, with Ms. Smith, that the SPLC “is hollow, rotten, and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.” And he ought to interview Yale Law Professor Stephen Bright, to find out why he calls Morris Dees a “flimflam man.”
What were the charges, not specified at the time, that forced SPLC co-founder Morris Dees to resign in disgrace? What were the charges that led President Richard Cohen to quit the SPLC? What have close observers of the SPLC discovered about how it has been run, to their dismay and horror?
Jeff Bezos should take a day or two out of his busy schedule of insensate empire-building in order to learn more about the SPLC, on which he has chosen to rely for the identification of “hate groups.” He needs to do more than read what Moser, Bright, and a dozen others who have either worked for SPLC or been close observers of the organization, have written. He needs to talk directly with them, so that he will realize the full extent of the SPLC’s transgressions, can ask them probing questions, and learn more about those “flimflam men” at the top, who have lately been exposed as being guilty of gender and race discrimination, among many other sins.
Bezos should also investigate SPLC’s readiness to label as “anti-Muslim hate groups” those who do not preach hate of any sort, but are simply islamocritics. The SPLC long ago consigned Jihad Watch to the outer darkness. When it included Maajid Nawaz, the founder of the Quilliam Foundation, on a 2016 list of “anti-Muslim extremists,” the SPLC was sued by Nawaz, who won a $3.4 million dollar judgment against the group. That has not stopped the SPLC from continuing to describe Jihad Watch, AFDI, and similar websites as being “hate groups.” SPLC describes, with its wonted tone of hysteria, Robert Spencer as that “notorious Muslim-basher and pretend expert on Islam.”
An email request by JNS [Jewish News Service] to SPLC asking for an explanation about their listing of PJTN went unanswered as of press time.
When asked by JNS what would cause the SPLC to label her organization as being anti-Muslim, Cardoza-Moore responded, “Proclaiming Justice to the Nations exists to fight the oldest hate on earth: antisemitism. We were given no explanation as to why we were blacklisted. If our work highlighting antisemites like [Reps.] Ilhan Omar [D-Minn.] and Rashida Tlaib [D-Mich.] got us on the list, we’ll wear it as a badge of honor. Despite the financial penalties that we are facing with AmazonSmile, will not be silenced for fulfilling our biblical responsibility to defend the State of Israel and Jewish people in the face of growing global antisemitism.”
She added that “sadly, the SPLC lost its way long ago, becoming a tool to shame any organization that doesn’t share their extremist agenda.”
Cardoza-Moore said that initially, she thought it was a joke that PJTN had been placed on the SPLC list of hate groups alongside the KKK. However, she said that “I have now learned that this political witch hunt against those who don’t share SPLC’s extremist liberal views has been adopted as a religious doctrine by Amazon. This could dramatically affect our ability to raise funds and function as a nonprofit organization.”
She added that it appears that Amazon “has become the nation’s new moral compass powered by the subversive Southern Poverty Law Center. Charities should not be persecuted in this way; this has to stop.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to JNS via email that PJTN had been dropped, saying in a general statement that according to their policy, “organizations that engage in, support, encourage or promote intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence, money laundering or other illegal activities are not eligible.”
Just as a matter of interest, perhaps Amazon would care to tell us if CAIR is eligible to receive donations through AmazonSmile. If it does, would Bezos be willing to consider the evidence that CAIR just might be an organization that “encourages or promotes intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence”? And while we’re at it, have any of the many pro-BDS groups that many of us believe encourage “intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence” been banned from participating in the AmazonSmile program?
The statement [from Amazon] mentioned that since 2013, Amazon has relied on the SPLC along with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (of the US Department of the Treasury) to make its determination on which organizations are eligible for the AmazonSmile program.
Cardoza-Moore says that as a result of being dropped, she is calling on her donors to bypass Amazon in order to help support Israel and combat antisemitism.
“We have asked our donors to continue supporting PJTN directly instead of through AmazonSmile. Nobody will silence us, even when we stand up against giants like Amazon; we know that we have truth and justice on our side,” she said.
“Our answer to this hateful blacklisting will be to continue building more PJTN chapters across the United States and beyond. We will continue to fight antisemitism and defend the State of Israel, wherever and whenever necessary,” she continued. “We will endeavor to reach more people than ever because our message is needed now, more than ever.”
A statement from PJTN said that in recent months, the organization has led the struggle against the BDS movement in the United States with a wave of state resolutions, and has exposed textbooks used in public schools that it says are indoctrinating children with inaccurate historical information and bias that do not reflect American values.
In 2016, JNS reported that PJTN drafted the state of Tennessee’s anti-BDS resolution, which passed in the General Assembly, making it one of the first states to pass such state-level legislation against BDS.
So PJTN, unbowed, continues to be active in its campaign against the BDS movement. And its donors will now simply find other, more direct ways to support it, now that PJTN has been banned, so absurdly, from the AmazonSmile program. Many people, as they find out more about Amazon, and its continuing reliance on the discredited SPLC for its determination of which groups promote “hatred” and “intolerance,” may want to express their own displeasure with that malevolent and powerful Amazon, and take their custom elsewhere.
Uprisings in Iran have become routine occurrences, albeit without much success. Why? Because Iran is ruled by a totalitarian Islamic ideology like Nazism and communism. In Iran, there is no sovereignty of the people. Instead, there is a perception of the Ummah in Shia theology “rule of Mahdi”, guardianship over the people. In other words, Iran belongs to “Imam Zaman” (the Hidden Imam) and in his absence, a supreme leader is in charge. In this case, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Any revolt against the State is considered a direct attack against the upcoming “Lord of the Age “Mahdi.”
Hence, the moment people start protesting, the regime unleashes its wild dogs (soldiers of Mahdi) on a killing spree. Iranians partook in many protests across the country amidst a failing economic situation, systematic government corruption, and widespread frustration over the lack of political and social freedoms. As always, the regime’s security apparatus reacted to these protests with mass arrests and severe due process abuses. Pundits and experts believe “Khamenei’s tough response could just invite more anger.”
Since the Islamic invasion of 1979, the Mullahs have ruled over the unarmed Iranian people with an iron fist and absolute power while draining the nation’s treasury. As a result, millions of Iranians had no choice but to flee their homes to the four corners of the globe. In these recent protests, Iran’s rulers once again revealed their real identity to the world that they don’t value human life. They are simply vicious killers.
US Sanctions
After the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear deal on May 18, 2018, the US almost immediately imposed several new sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI).
Following up with another sanction on the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his office and those who were closely tied to him with access to major financial resources. In July 2019, the United States placed sanctions on the regime’s Foreign Minister Mohammad, Javad Zarif.
The US also placed sanctions on eight senior commanders of the navy, aerospace and ground forces components of the IRGC. In April of 2019, President Donald Trump declared that the United States designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a foreign “terrorist” organization.
Results
Within a few months, Iran’s crude oil exports were slashed by almost 80%. Despite massive propaganda from President Rouhani’s office claiming these sanctions did not phase them and they had gotten used to them. However, this dosage of reality hit them hard. The regime is out of money and unable to pay the salaries of their military apparatus as well as its terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and other hired thugs. By November 2019, the regime was completely financially broke and needed to come up with a solution to save itself.
Out of desperation, the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei took a gamble and raised the price of gasoline by 50% (some say by 300%) in order to consolidate the budget deficit. And that was precisely what prompted protests in at least five cities almost simultaneously and brought millions of people into the streets. Almost all the slogans were against the Ayatollah Khamenei himself.
Death Toll
On November 15, 2019, over 100 protesters were killed and over a 1000 arrested in just one day. The exact total of casualties since the protests began are unknown, but unofficial reports from inside Iran say around 1000 people died and close to 10,000 were injured or arrested. Out of fear, the regime immediately cut off all communication devices including the Internetto the outside world. They feared of the watchful eyes of the people around the world to witness yet again the Mullahs’ atrocities against the Iranian people who are barely surviving in a country that spends 80% of its oil revenue on terrorism worldwide.
Business as Usual
Without any question, the civilized world is aware that the Islamic Republic is immensely despised by its people, yet, they ignore this and continue doing business as usual. Political analysts and pundits know it is a fact that neither the mullahs nor the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) are going away peacefully. They have no intention of handing over the country to the people anytime soon. Why? Three reasons. First, Iran is a rich country and the Mullahs are naturally greedythieves. They cannot reconcile with themselves for letting it slip away. Second, they know that Shia Islam would most likely cease to exist. Third, they are mortally afraid that if they let Iran become free, the Iranian people would take their revenge without any mercy upon them. After all, for the past forty years they have committed every crime and atrocity known to man against the Iranian people. Something the late Ayatollah Khomeini had warned them about before his death.
Now What?
The regime is aware that they neither can go back nor forward. They are stuck between a rock and hard place. The only reason they are still in power is because there are greedy and money hungry politicians who will do anything for cheap oil and bribery. I remember the Ayatollah Khamenei’s words on his Friday sermons during the Green Revolution in 2009. He directly ordered his Bassij, plain clothes thugs and IRGC forces to shoot and kill indiscriminately anyone who challenged his Ummah (community of Shia Islam).
In another speech, he openly mentioned that he had learned a valuable lesson from the late Shah of Iran. He said, “He would never relinquish power as easily as the Shah did.” In 1978, I was still in Iran and I know the Shah never personally ordered soldiers to kill people at point-blank range. In fact, he never ordered anyone to be killed.
The Shah was a very kind and sensitive man, despite all the allegations the leftist media have conjured up about him. That is precisely why he departed his beloved country rather than stay and face a bloodbath.
Forty Years of Islamic Terror
For the past forty-years, thousands of dissidents, students, intellectuals and journalists have been systematically arrested, imprisoned and tortured for the sole crime of speaking up against the oppressive rule of the mullahs. Many are still languishing in prisons, some have died, and some have simply vanished with no trace. Not only has the regime terrorized its own people, they have also demonstrated a high priority for supporting global terrorism.
Many Iranians are following the events in Iran carefully. Despite an unprecedented internet shutdown by the regime, the Iranian people have succeeded in providing the world with video evidence of the Mullahs’ brutality. “We see you, we hear you, & as Secretary of State Michael Pompeo stated, the U.S. is with you.”
With the recent Iranian uprising across Iran, the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic is now under serious question. The protests that began two weeks ago in Iran were different from most previous protests. It roiled the country since the onset of its 1979 revolution. These protesters have covered more land, overwhelming small and midsize cities across the country. But they also have reportedly drawn more than 16 million participants in over 100 cities than did the 2009 Green Revolution protests in Tehran.
Conclusion
Are we finally witnessing the end of the Islamic Republic? Yes, but not immediately. It is only a matter of time and not a very long one either.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Amil Imanihttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAmil Imani2019-11-29 08:57:512019-12-04 08:17:02Iran on the Brink
Elizabeth Warren reacted to Secretary Pompeo’s statement that in the view of the Administration, Israel’s settlements did not violate international law with characteristic swift certainty:
“Another blatantly ideological attempt by the Trump administration to distract from its failures in the region. Not only do these settlements violate international law — they make peace harder to achieve. As president, I will reverse this policy and pursue a two-state solution,” Warren said.
Was Pompeo’s announcement merely a cynical attempt to “distract” the public “from its failures in the region”? Surely such an announcement was certain to have exactly the opposite effect – it would focus the media’s attention on the Israelis and Palestinians as it had not been so focussed since the Great March of Return began on March 30, 2018. Every major media outlet – CNN, AP, BBC, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post – covered Pompeo’s remarks in detail. Those remarks were hardly designed to “distract” from supposed “failures in the region.” And as for those “failures,” what does Warren have in mind? Was the defeat, by the Americans and the Kurds, of ISIS in Syria a “failure”? Was the collapse of ISIS in Iraq, to which American military assistance contributed, a “failure”? Was the body-blow to Iran’s economy, that the Administration brought about by reimposing sanctions, that in turn led to the streets of Iran now being filled with Iranians shouting against the regime, a “failure”? Was cutting off aid to the massively corrupt UNRWA a “failure”? Was cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority, because of its Pay-for-Slay program, a “failure”?
Warren then blithely noted that the settlements “violate international law.” This was not always her understanding. At a Town Hall in August 2014, Warren called into question the notion that future US aid to Israel should be contingent on the halting of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Clearly she did not then regard the settlements as being “illegal.”
And two years later, in September 2016, ahead of a U.N vote on a resolution condemning Israeli settlements, Warren was one of 88 senators who signed a letter to President Obama sponsored by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, urging him to “veto any one-sided UNSC resolution that may be offered in the coming months”: the resolution was approved by the Security Council 14-1-0, with the United States shamefully abstaining.
Again, Warren was still willing to urge the government to veto a Security Council resolution that treated the West Bank settlements as “illegal.”
What changed her mind? Perhaps, after Bernie Sanders’s claim that he would take some aid money away from Israel and give it to the Palestinians in Gaza, Warren felt she needed to establish her bona-fides among the “progressives” in the Democratic Party, who have become increasingly anti-Israel. And what better way to do it than to instantly attack Pompeo on the “legality” of Israel’s West Bank settlements?
A law professor for many years, Warren is well-versed in reading statutes and codes. As a professor of bankruptcy law, she can comprehend the Bankruptcy Code, so he Mandate for Palestine ought to be child’s play. If she reads that Mandate, she will understand that the League of Nations established, on a sliver of land that had been identified with the Jewish people for two thousand years, and that had formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire, the Mandate for Palestine. That Palestine Mandate was entrusted to Great Britain, whose task it was to prepare that territory for independence as the Jewish National Home. There were other Mandates that were intended to create Arab states – Syria, Lebanon, Iraq – but the Mandate for Palestine was intended solely for the Jews. Warren would then want to know, as the thorough policy wonk she is, precisely what territory was to be included in that Mandate. Upon investigation, she would discover that the Mandate for Palestine applied to all the territory from Dan in the north to Beersheva in the south, and from the river Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the West. In other words, all of what is present day Israel, and the entire West Bank, was included in the Mandate. Israel cannot be called the “occupier” of land that was assigned by the League of Nations to be part of the Jewish National Home, which would then become the State of Israel. When the League of Nations shut down, its successor organization, the United Nations, implicitly recognized in Article 80 of its Charter (the so-called Jewish People’s article) the continuing in force of the Mandate for Palestine. The only thing that prevented the West Bank from becoming, as it legally should have, part of the state of Israel in 1949, was that Jordan managed to hold onto the West Bank, and remained its “occupier” until 1967.
Elizabeth Warren never mentions the Mandate for Palestine, which is the indispensable document in judging the legality of the Israeli settlements. Nor does she mention, in any of her statements online, U.N. Resolution 242 and its significance in giving Israel the right to “secure and recognizable boundaries.” She has a duty to study both the Mandate, and Resolution 242, before making her self-assured and dismissive pronouncements about how those settlements “violate international law.” And she might also explain why those same settlements did not “violate international law” back in 2014, when she opposed making aid to Israel contingent on its halting of settlement building. Did she know something in 2014 about the settlements’ legality that she then forgot, or did she learn something since about their supposed illegality?
Then there is Warren’s remark that the settlements are not only “illegal,” but that they “make peace harder to achieve.” How does she, and the many others who mindlessly repeat this mantra – “settlements make peace harder to achieve” – know this? Because the Arabs – the Palestinians – keep telling them so.
What kind of “peace” is possible between Israel and the Palestinians? Some may insist that by squeezing itself back within the 1949 armistice lines, what Ambassador Abba Eban called “the lines of Auschwitz,” Israel makes peace more likely. But those who recognize that the war being waged, by all possible means, including terrorism, combat (qitaal), economic and diplomatic warfare, and demographic jihad, against Israel has no end, for Muslims, until the complete disappearance of the Jewish state, will not be so quick to put their trust in treaties. That is especially true because the Muslim model for all treaty-making with non-Muslims is the agreement that Muhammad reached with the Meccans at al-Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D., a treaty that was to last for ten years, but which he broke after 18 months, attacking the Meccans as soon as he felt his forces were strong enough to win. Given that Muhammad is the Model of Conduct for all Muslims, Israel cannot rely on a peace treaty with Muslim Arabs to be kept indefinitely.
Instead, there is another and better way to maintain the peace between Israel and its neighbors. That is deterrence: the enemy’s understanding that if Israel is attacked, it will respond, and much more devastatingly. Egypt and Syria now know what they did not know in October 1973, when they launched a surprise attack on Israel. Despite early losses, Israel delivered punishing blows in response. No Arab state since has tried to attack Israel; terror groups are a different matter, for their members are ready to be “martyrs.” For rational actors – fanatic Muslim groups and groupuscules are not among them – deterrence works. It kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union for more than four decades after World War II. Israel must remain overwhelmingly, and obviously, stronger than its enemies for deterrence to be effective.
That is where the West Bank settlements come in. The 400,000 Jews who live in the West Bank, with all of the adults having undergone military training when fulfilling their mandatory service in the IDF, are an indispensable part of that deterrence. Those settlements throughout the West Bank, especially those strategically placed on the Judean hills, and overlooking, the Jordan Valley, are a powerful obstacle to invasion from the east. The settlements significantly improve Israel’s deterrence, and a credible deterrence is the only guarantee that peace between Israel and the Arabs will be kept.
Warren claims the settlements will make peace “harder to achieve.” She has things backwards. The settlements may make a “peace treaty” harder to achieve, but they will make the only peace that really matters, a peace based on deterrence, easier to achieve.
In addition to the Mandate for Palestine (especially the Preamble and Articles 4 and 6), and U.N. Resolution 242, Elizabeth Warren should read about the treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and its continuing significance, in Majid Khadduri’s magisterial War and Peace in the Law of Islam. That’s all the studying she need devote to the matter for now. The exam will be take-home. We’re all hoping that Professor Warren earns an A.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-11-29 07:01:442019-11-29 07:02:55Elizabeth Warren: Those Settlements 'Violate International Law and Make Peace Harder to Achieve' by Hugh Fitzgerald
Not long before tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran reached an unprecedented high point, with the possibility looming of a war that could engulf many other countries besides those two, Israel located a secret Iranian site in Beirut, right near the airport, in the midst of a heavily-populated area (surrounded by thousands of civilians, as a way to discourage Israeli air attacks). The site, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, holds radioactive material and missiles. The Israelis, after all, have been running circles around the Iranians for years. They assassinated, one after the other, four key Iranian nuclear scientists right in the middle of Tehran. They concocted the fiendishly brilliant Stuxnet worm, the first computer program that caused real-world damage, for it sent messages to the computers it infected, the computers that were regulating Iran’s centrifuges, causing those computers to send messages that made the centrifuges speed up and destroy themselves and even damage other centrifuges. At the same time, other messages were sent back that the computer program was working perfectly.
The Israelis have destroyed, in Syria, hundreds of Iranian missiles, and have kept up the bombing of Iranian bases in Syria, and of Iranian soldiers on Syrian bases, preventing any kind of permanent Iranian outpost to be established. Some time ago Israeli agents carried out a night-time raid in a nondescript commercial district in Tehran, lasting six hours and 29 minutes, bringing away 50,000 pages of documents, and countless discs, which constituted the most important part of Iran’s secret nuclear archive, proving to the world that Iran had never abandoned its nuclear project, and had gotten much farther with it than the world previously believed.
In locating the site in Beirut, Israel again did not just itself but the entire Western world a great service. For the missiles whose guidance systems Iran is improving for Hezbollah, and the nuclear material that Iran is storing in Beirut, to be someday used either by its forces or possibly by Hezbollah, are not a threat only to Israel. Iran has designs on Yemen, as its proxy war against Saudi Arabia, that has already lasted several years, demonstrates. Iran would love to project and solidify Shi’a power in Yemen, right on the Arabian Sea, and to be able to threaten Saudi Arabia from the south, made easier by the porous border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Iran has a desire, too, to deal a direct blow to Saudi Arabia itself, as the richest and most powerful Sunni state, whose clerics talk of the Shi’a as if they were Infidels. That could mean supporting the discontented Shi’a in Saudi Arabia, some 15% of the population, almost all of whom are located in the Eastern Province, where the major oilfields are to be found. Iran also wants to take revenge on the United Arab Emirates, for helping to fight the Shi’a Houthis in Yemen and, Iran now suspects, helping Arab separatists in Khuzestan, in southern Iran. Of course, Iran always proclaims as its chief enemy, more so even than Israel, the Great Satan, America. All of these countries have reason to be grateful to Israel for slowing down, for several years, Iran’s nuclear project. Stuxnet alone, a computer worm which destroyed 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz Enrichment Plant, set back Iran’s nuclear project, according to the German scientist Ralph Langer, by as much as two years.
These acts of derring-do did not end there. Israeli agents managed to locate in a dusty part of Tehran the top secret Iranian nuclear archive, to break in, to blowtorch open the many steel doors, to go through the archives and select the huge amounts of material that they then spirited out of Iran to Israel. This archive offered proof to the world that the Iranians had continued to work on their nuclear project after they had supposedly stopped, and that they had gotten much farther along than anyone suspected.
During the last few years, the Iranians have tried to establish their own bases in Syria, and from there hoped both to threaten Israel from closer up than from Iran itself, and to supply Hezbollah with more advanced weapons. But no matter where they put those bases in Syria, and even when the Iranians tried to conceal themselves inside Syrian bases, Israeli planes have always managed to find and to bomb them. And the Israelis have been staggeringly successful at interdicting Iranian weapons shipments meant for Hezbollah.
And now Israel has uncovered, and shown to the world, a secret Iranian facility near the airport in Beirut, which contains fissile material and machines to manufacture precision-guided missiles. At this point, the Iranians may wonder: do we empty the facility of its contents, or will Israel, with its uncanny spying ability, including eye-in-the-sky drones, be able to see everything that comes out of that building and where it is taken? And if, and when, these machines and that material are taken out of the facility, and are in the open, will it not be easier for Israel to bomb both? Perhaps, by making public its knowledge of this facility, the Israelis are hoping to lure the Iranians into doing just that. It is hard for the Iranians, who have so often been outsmarted by the Israelis, to know what to do. What can Israeli spy drones and spy planes and spy satellites and human spies, find out? Do the Iranians try to smuggle the material and machines out, or do they keep everything as it is, but move even more civilians into close proximity to the building, in the hope that this civilian presence will dissuade Israel from attacking it?
As the Iranians have discovered, to their great displeasure, wherever or whomever or whatever they try to hide from Israel, the Israelis always find them out. The Israelis identified, and then assassinated, four of Iran’s top nuclear scientists; they found, and sabotaged, the computers that controlled the centrifuges at Natanz, they found the secret nuclear archives in Tehran and spirited them away, they found and bombed Iranian bases in Syria, and they found, and showed to the world, the once-secret Iranian facility in Beirut. Iran’s rulers are surely in a quandary.
All of this limits Iran’s aggressive plans. Israel has accomplished these feats in order, of course, to protect itself. But the rest of the West, and some Arab states, too, should recognize that they also benefit from these fantastic acts of human and technological derring-do. Some, at least, from agents in Langley to princes in Riyadh, know enough to be grateful. And so should we.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-09-22 07:47:472019-09-22 07:54:13Helping Protect Itself Against Iran, Israel Helps Protect Many Others by Hugh Fitzgerald
Europe has gone down this road before. It didn’t end well. This time, its principal motivator is the continent’s rapidly growing Muslim population, as well as its endless infatuation with an increasingly anti-Semitic Left.
“Europe Poised to Put Warning Labels on Jewish-Made Products,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, August 9, 2019:
The European Union is poised to mandate that Israeli products made in contested territories carry consumer warning labels, a decision that could trigger American anti-boycott laws and open up what legal experts describe as a “Pandora’s box” of litigation, according to multiple sources involved in the legal dispute who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.
The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice recently issued non-binding opinion arguing that EU law requires Israeli-made products to be labeled as coming from “settlements” and “Israeli colonies.”
The decision was seen as a major win for supporters of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which seeks to wage economic warfare on Israel and its citizens. Pro-Israel activists, as well as the Jewish businesses involved in the legal dispute, see the decision as an ominous warning sign that they say is reminiscent of Holocaust-era boycotts of Jewish businesses.
With the EU court’s 15 judge panel now poised to issue its own binding judgment in the case, legal experts are warning that a potential decision mandating such labeling could pave the way for goods from any disputed territory to receive such treatment. The decision also could trigger U.S. anti-boycott laws meant to stop Israeli-made goods from being singled out for unfair treatment on the international market….
The legal dispute first began after France passed a law mandating that products made in the West Bank territory of Israel be labeled as coming from an “Israeli colony,” a label not applied to any other products across the globe.
The term “Israeli colony” is not legally required to be applied under EU law and was seen as overly burdensome by Israeli business leaders.
Following the French decision, the Israeli Psagot winery filed a lawsuit alleging unlawful discrimination against Jewish companies. That lawsuit eventually made its way to Europe’s highest court, the European Court of Justice.
That court now appears poised to affirm the advocate general’s opinion mandating that Israeli goods be labeled in a fashion that opponents say is unfair and anti-Semitic in nature….
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-08-12 04:13:182019-08-12 04:14:16Nazism returns: European Union to put warning labels on Jewish-made products
While the State Department was trying to stop religious hostility, one congresswoman was down the street trying to fuel it. In an eerie backdrop to the Trump administration’s ministerial, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) seemed determined to highlight the threat that exists right here at home — radical Democrats.
Omar, who hasn’t exactly been a friend to Israel, took her contempt to a new level this week when she introduced a new level of anti-Semitism into her congressional agenda. If she learned anything from her February scandal, when she demeaned the Jewish people and drew the ire of her own party, Omar hasn’t shown it. Instead, she’s doubled down on her obvious disdain for Israel with a resolution that would support the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
If you’re unfamiliar, the BDS movement that Omar is promoting is an effort reminiscent of what took place in Nazi Germany leading up to WWII. In 1933, the German government launched Juden boykott, a boycott of Jewish stores and shops designed to not only to hurt the Jewish community economically but to stigmatize and delegitimize the Jewish people. The BDS movement — whether stated or not — has the same effect only it is an international effort targeting the state of Israel.
The BDS movement is being done in the name of the Palestinians, attempting to force Israel to give up their land in the eastern portion of the country, Judea, and Samaria. The sad irony is that while targeting Israel, the movement is hurting many Arabs and Palestinians who are working side by side with Jewish residents in these communities. I’ve been to places like Ariel, which have thriving industrial parks that employ hundreds of Palestinians. The reality is, in those communities, Israel’s thriving economy is fostering a managed and sustainable peace that so many on the outside have promised through third-party intervention.
The criticism has been so overwhelming that CBS News invited the Minnesota congresswoman on its morning show to explain. “Would you like to make it clear that you’re not anti-Semitic?” Gayle King asked. “Oh, certainly not,” Omar said, smiling. “Yes.” “Would you like to make that clear?” King asked again. “Yes,” Omar repeated, a little more frustrated this time. “Oftentimes there are things that you might say, might not hold weight for you, but to someone else, right, the way that we hear and consume information is very different than how the next person might,” she explained.
Of course, to the Jewish people here and abroad, it’s more than what Omar has said (and that’s more than enough). It’s what she’s doing that speaks the loudest. Vice President Mike Pence, like most conservatives and reasonable Democrats, isn’t fooled. He knows this is part of a much deeper hatred, which, if it isn’t stopped now, has the potential to unleash a frightening new chapter in America. “Anti-Semitism is on the rise,” he warned at the ministerial. “In France and Germany, things have gotten so bad that Jewish religious leaders have warned their followers not to wear kippahs in public for fear that they could be violently attacked. And attacks on Jews, even on aged Holocaust survivors, are growing at an alarming rate.”
Then, in a direct nod at Omar, said, “Regrettably, the world’s oldest hatred has even found a voice in the halls of our United States Congress. So let me say it clearly: Anti-Semitism is not just wrong; it’s evil. And anti-Semitism must be confronted and denounced wherever and whenever it arises, and it must be universally condemned.” That’s a scary thought to most Americans, who assumed the U.S.’s new envoy to combat anti-Semitism wouldn’t be needed here at home.
But, as Noam Marans explained at a panel I joined at the ministerial, “Hate is an equal opportunity offender. It sometimes begins with Jews, but it never ends with Jews.” That’s why the U.S. Congress — and Democratic party in particular — needs to stand up and make it clear: this kind of dangerous prejudice won’t be tolerated. Irene Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, who spent eight months in Auschwitz sleeping next to the crematorium, understands all too well where this leads. “Day and night columns of young mothers with children, and elderly men and women, took their last steps as they passed by our barrack. We watched them enter the gate that led to the gas chamber.”
She thought no one could have possibly known such evil existed. “If they knew, surely they would stop it.” It turns out, world leaders knew about Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. “But the killing continued.” Seventy-years later, she said soberly, “Humanity’s vulnerability to the same forces of hate exists today.” And we cannot say we did not know.
Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2019-07-20 05:53:022019-07-20 05:53:02In the Hate of the Moment
But if anyone had questioned her loyalty, he or she would have been denounced as a racist, bigoted “Islamophobe.”
Monica Elfriede Witt (a.k.a. Fatemah Zahra)
“Iran Conducted Cyber Hacks on U.S., Recruited U.S. Air Force Officer to Steal Classified Info,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, February 13, 2019:
WARSAW, Poland—The Trump administration announced a new package of sanctions on Iranian entities tied to the cyber backing of U.S. individuals, a move that comes on the heels of American authorities indicting a U.S. Air Force officer who allegedly tried to pass classified information to Tehran after defecting to the country.
The Department of Justice announced early Wednesday that it had indicted Monica Elfriede Witt, also known as Fatemah Zahra, a former active duty U.S. Air Force Intelligence Specialist and Special Agent, for attempting to pass classified American information to Iran.
Witt had access to secret and top-secret information, according to the indictment, unsealed early Wednesday.
Witt was deployed to several overseas location to conduct “classified missions collecting signals intelligence,” including those of adversaries.
Witt had access to “classified information, including details of ongoing counterintelligence operations, true names of sources, and the identities of U.S. agents involved in the recruitment of those sources,” according to the indictment.
“In or around January 2012 to in or around May 2015, in Iran, and elsewhere outside the jurisdiction of any particular State or district, defendant [Witt] did knowingly and unlawfully combine, confederate, and agree with other persons, both known and unknown to the grand jury, including officers of the IRGC, to knowingly and unlawfully communicate, deliver, and transmit to a foreign government, specifically Iran, and to that foreign government’s representatives, officers, and agents, directly and indirectly, documents and information relating to the national defense of the United States, with the intent and reason to believe that the same would be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of Iran, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 794(a),” the indictment alleges.
The disclosure of this information leak was timed to coincide with an announcement by the Treasury Department that it is sanctioning a handful of Iranian entities for their role in cyber hacks on Americans.
The sanctions hit an Iranian-based entity tied to the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC. This includes “efforts to recruit and collect intelligence from foreign attendees [of various conferences], including U.S. persons, and four associated individuals,” according to the Treasury Department.
Sanctions also were leveled on “a separate Iran-based entity and six associated individuals involved in the targeting of current and former U.S. government and military personnel as part of a malicious cyber campaign to gain access to and implant malware on their computer systems.”…
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/mysterious-3347603_640-e1550225887587.png419638Robert Spencerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRobert Spencer2019-02-15 05:18:272019-03-07 05:17:06Muslim U.S. Air Force Intelligence Specialist tried to pass classified American information to Iran
Once inconceivable, the dismantling of UNRWA; the naturalization of
stateless Palestinian residents in Arab countries; and the emigration of
Palestinians from Judea-Samaria & Gaza are slowly emerging as realistic
outcomes
Once you eliminate the impossible,
whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth – Sherlock Holmes, in “The Sign of the Four”.
Over a quarter-century ago (in 1992) , I warned of the consequences—for both Jew and Arab—if Israel were to evacuate Gaza.
I cautioned: “…the inevitable implications of Israeli withdrawal can be ignored only at great peril to Israelis and Arabs alike”, observing:“…no measure whether the total [Israeli] annexation or total [Israeli] withdrawal can be reconciled with either Israel’s security needs or the welfare of the Arab population there.” Accordingly, I concluded that the only viable and durable policy was the resettlement and rehabilitation of the non-belligerent Gazans elsewhere—and I underscored: “this was not a call for a forcibly imposed racist “transfer” by Israel, but rather…a humane and historically imperative enterprise”.
Confusing economic enhancement with “ethnic cleansing”
Today, after a more than a
decade-and-a-half of bloody confrontations, including three large scale
military engagements—imposed on Israel to protect its civilian population from
predicted assaults—and a fourth appearing increasingly inevitable; with the
Gazans awash in untreated sewage, with their sources of drinking water
polluted, and with perennial power outages, my predictions appear to have turned
out to be lamentably precise.
Perversely, earlier this month I was excoriated for…being proven right—and my fact-based professional assessment as a political scientist that, because of the overtly unremitting enmity of the Gazans towards the Jewish state: “Eventually there will either be Arabs in Gaza or Jews in the Negev. In the long run, there will not be both”, was denounced as a call for ethnic cleansing.
Of course, my detractors
conveniently ignore that, time and time again, I have called for providing
generous relocation grants to help the hapless non-belligerent Gazans find more
prosperous and secure lives for themselves elsewhere, in third party countries,
outside the “circle of violence”; and to extricate themselves from the
stranglehold of the cruel, corrupt cliques who have led them astray from
debacle to disaster for decades.
Confusing an unequivocal call for
economic enhancement with one for “ethnic cleansing”, they apparently believe—in
their “infinite benevolence and wisdom”—that compelling the Gazans to languish
in their current conditions is somehow more humane.
But, more on these wildly unfounded recriminations
against me perhaps in a future column.
A tripartite plan
Several years after my 1992 article, I extended the idea of incentivized emigration to the Arab population in Judea-Samaria (a.k.a. the “West Bank”) and in 2004 I formulated a tripartite plan (The Humanitarian Paradigm) for the comprehensive resolution—or rather the dissolution of the “Palestinian problem”, which include the following components:
The first was the dismantling of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), an anomalous UN entity, charged with dealing exclusively with the Palestinian-Arab diaspora (a.k.a. Palestinian “refugees”), displaced by the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel. As I pointed out back then, because of its anomalous definition of who is considered a “refugee” (which extends to the descendants of those originally displaced), and its anomalous mandate (which precludes resettling them anywhere but in the country from which they were displaced), UNRWA is an organization which (a) perpetuates (rather than resolves) the predicament of the stateless Palestinian “refugees”; (b) perpetuates (rather than dissipates) the Palestinian-Arab narrative of “return” to pre-1948 Israel. Accordingly, the continued existence of UNRWA is an insurmountable obstacle to any resolution of the “Palestinian problem”—and hence its dismantling—or at least, radical restructuring—is an imperative precondition for progress toward any such resolution.
The second component was the launch of an international campaign to induce the Arab countries to desist from what is essentially a policy of ethnic discrimination against the Palestinian diaspora, resident in them for decades, and to grant its members citizenship—rather than keeping them in a perpetual state of stateless “refugees”, as a political weapon with which to bludgeon Israel. To date, any such move is prohibited by the mandate of the Arab League.
A tripartite plan (cont.)
The reasoning behind this prohibition was made clear in a 2004 LA Times interview with Hisham Youssef, then-spokesman for the 22-nation Arab League, who admitted that Palestinians live “in very bad conditions,” but maintained that the official policy on denying Palestinians citizenship in the counties of decades-long residence is meant “to preserve their Palestinian identity.” According to Youssef: “If every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won’t be any reason for them to return to Palestine.”
The significance of this is clear.
The nations comprising the Arab
League are prepared to subordinate the improvement of the dire humanitarian
conditions of the Palestinians, resident throughout the Arab world, to the
political goal of preserving the “Right of Return” — i.e. using them as a pawn
to effect the elimination of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews.
It is to the annulment of this
pernicious policy that international pressure must be directed.
The third—and arguably the most controversial—element
was to offer the non-belligerent Arab residents in Judea-Samaria generous relocation
grants to provide them and their families an opportunity to seek a better and
safer future in third-party host-nations, than that which almost inevitably awaits
them—if they stay where they are.
Atomization & de-politicization
To overcome potential resistance to
accepting the relocation/rehabilitation grants, I stipulated two elements
regarding the manner in which the funding activity is to be carried out: (a)
the atomization of implementation of the grant payments; (b) the
de-politicization of the context in which they are made.
(a) Atomization: This implies that
the envisaged compensation will be offered directly to individual family
heads/breadwinners—not through any Arab collective (whether state or sub-state
organization), who may have a vested interest in impeding its payment.
Accordingly, no agreement with any Arab collective is required for the
implementation of payment to the recipients—merely the accumulated consent of
fate-stricken individuals, striving to improve their lot.
(b) De-politicization: The
incentivized emigration initiative is not cast as a political endeavor but
rather a humanitarian one. This reflects a sober recognition that, after
decades of effort, involving the expenditure of huge political capital and
economic resources, there is no political formula for the resolution of the
conflict. Accordingly, efforts should be channeled into dissipating the
humanitarian predicament of the Palestinian-Arabs, which the insoluble
political impasse has precipitated.
These two elements–direct payments to
individuals and the downplaying of the political nature of the relocation/rehabilitation
grants and the emphasis on the humanitarian component are designed to
circumvent—or at least attenuate—any claims that acceptance of the funds would
in some way entail an affront to—real or imagined—national sentiments.
Once inconceivable, now slowly materializing
For many years, advocating these three elements—the dismantling (or
at least the radical restructuring) of UNRWA; the naturalization of the
Palestinian diaspora resident in Arab countries as citizens; and the emigration
of Palestinian-Arabs from Judea-Samaria and Gaza—seemed hopelessly unrealistic.
However today, all three are slowly
but inexorably materializing before our eyes in a manner that would have
appeared inconceivable only a few years ago.
Of course, a major catalyst for this
nascent metamorphosis has been the Trump administration.
The US administration has—despite
hitherto unexplained and inexplicable Israeli reluctance—exposed the fraudulent
fiasco of UNRWA. As its erstwhile biggest benefactor, the US has retracted all
funding from the organization. But more importantly, it has focused a glaring
spotlight on the myth of the “Palestinian refugees” and the spectacularly
inflated number of such alleged “refugees”—which even include those who have
long acquired citizenship of some other country!
This salutary US initiative has the
potential to rescind the recognition of the bulk of the Palestinian diaspora as
“refugees”. Thus, even if they continue to receive international aid to help
ameliorate their humanitarian situation, this will not be as potential
returnees to their alleged homeland in Israel.
Once the Palestinian diaspora is
stripped of its fraudulent refugee status, the door is then open to settling
them in third party countries other than their claimed homeland, and to their naturalization as citizens of
these counties.
Naturalization of Palestinian diaspora in countries of residence
In this regard, the Trump administration has reportedly undertaken an important initiative–see here; here; and here. According to these reports, President Trump has informed several Arab countries that, at the start of 2019, he will disclose a citizenship plan for Palestinian refugees living in those countries.
Significantly, Palestinian sources told the news outlet: “Trump informed several Arab countries that the plan will include Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.” According to these sources: “the big surprise will be that these countries have already agreed to naturalize Palestinian refugees.” Moreover, it was reported that senior US officials are expected to seriously raise an American initiative with several Arab countries—including stipulation of the tools to implement it, the number of refugees, the required expenses, and the logistics demanded from hosting countries for supervising the process of “naturalization of refugees”.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of such an initiative,
which coincides precisely with the second element in the foregoing tripartite
plan. For, it has the potential to remove the ominous overhang of a five
million strong (and counting) Palestinian diaspora that threatens to inundate
the Jewish state and nullify its ability to function as the nation-state of the
Jewish people.
As such, the Israeli government and all pro-Zionist entities should
strive to ensure its implementation.
Emigration: The preferred option of the Palestinians?
As for the third element of the tripartite plan, emigration of the Palestinian population to third-party countries, there is rapidly accumulating evidence that emigration is emerging as an increasingly sought-after option. Indeed, earlier this month, Israeli mainstream media highlighted the desire to leave Gaza in order to seek a better life elsewhere. For example, the popular website, YNetnews, ran a piece entitled, Gaza suffers from brain drain as young professionals look for better life, with the Hebrew version appearing a few days previously, headlined The flight from Gaza: What Hamas is trying to conceal from the media. Likewise, the KAN Channel ran a program reporting very similar realities (January 13).
The
Ynetnews piece describes the fervor to leave: “Leaving
Gaza is expensive, particularly for the residents of the impoverished coastal
enclave…The demand is high, and the waiting list to leave is long…Those wishing
to cut short their wait must pay for a place on a special list, which is run by
a private firm in Gaza…The price for a place on this special list is $1,500—a
fortune for the average resident of Gaza…”
It would appear then, that the only thing preventing a mass exodus from Gaza is…money. Which is precisely what the tripartite plan proposes providing.
Let their people go: A slogan for April’s elections?
There
is, of course, little reason to believe that, if Israel were to leave
Judea-Samaria, what happened in Gaza would not happen there. After all, the preponderance
of professional opinion appears to hold that, if the IDF were to evacuate
Judea-Samaria, it would likely fall to elements very similar to those that
seized power in Gaza—and the area would quickly be transformed into a mega-Gaza-like
entity, on the fringes of Greater Tel Aviv—with all the attendant perils that
would entail.
Sadly however, despite its clear strategic and ethical advantages over other policy proposals, few in the Israeli political system have dared to adopt incentivized emigration as part of their platform. The notable exception is Moshe Feiglin and his Zehut party –and, to certain extent, Bezalel Smotrich, the newly elected head of the National Union faction in the Jewish Home Party, previously headed by Education Minister Naftali Bennett.
It is, however, time for the idea of incentivized emigration to be embraced by the mainstream parties as the only viable policy paradigm that can ensure the continued survival of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. It is time for the mainstream to adopt an election slogan that sounds a clarion call to “Let their people go”.
EDITORS NOTE: This column with images is republished with permission. The featured photo is by Cole Keister on Unsplash.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/cole-keister-1152964-unsplash-e1548412147271.jpg427640Martin Shermanhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMartin Sherman2019-01-25 05:29:192019-01-25 05:29:21INTO THE FRAY: The imperative for incentivized Arab migration & the emerging inevitability of the Humanitarian Paradigm
And there is no doubt about it: New York Times readers and other Leftists are indeed celebrating. They will celebrate anew when Omar introduces anti-Israel legislation in Congress. They will celebrate all the more when she fails to support women’s rights that counter Sharia provisions. They will keep celebrating every measure against free societies and free people that Ilhan Omar will support.
“New York Times Orders Readers to ‘Celebrate’ Election of BDS Supporter,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, January 1, 2019:
One of the worst features of the contemporary New York Times is that it has gone beyond merely reporting the news and ventured, instead, into the more treacherous territory of instructing readers which emotions they should have about the news.
One danger of that is that not all Times readers may share the emotions the Timesnewsroom judges appropriate. And another danger, or perhaps an advantage, is that in ordering up the emotions, the Times exposes biases that it would prefer to have kept hidden.
So it is with the election to Congress of a Democrat from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who has emerged after the election as an open supporter of the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.
A Times article published in print on January 1 titled “Joyful Headlines About Race and Equality … A few stories about race, from the many we published, that are worth celebrating,” by Adeel Hassan, reported, “2018 also held glimmers of hope — if you search hard enough — with stories about racial equality and justice. Here are a few of that we published and that are worth celebrating.” Among these stories that the Timesinsists are “joyful” and “worth celebrating” was, the paper says, that “Ilhan Omar in Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan became the first Muslim women elected to Congress.”
Islam is a religion, not a “race,” so it’s difficult to see why this development fits into the Times -constructed category of “stories about race.” Maybe it’s just something the Times feels like celebrating. The paper, at least in this article, doesn’t even consider the possibility that choosing to boycott the Jewish state might not be an example of “justice” or “hope,” but rather a grave injustice.
It’s the second celebratory Times article in two days about Ilhan Omar. The first one did concede that “Her support for the boycott, divest and sanctions movement to pressure Israel to improve treatment of Palestinians is making Jewish leaders nervous.”
That Times‘ language inaccurately describes the goal of the BDS movement, which is not to “improve treatment of Palestinians,” but rather eradicate Israel and eliminate it as a Jewish state by insisting on a “right of return” to Israel for “7.25 million Palestinian refugees.”
The language in the first Times article appeared to be a bit much even for some staffers at the New York Times itself. An editor and writer on the Times opinion page, Bari Weiss, tweeted of Omar, “The reason Jews are ‘nervous’ about her is because she tweeted: ‘Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.’” A Times columnist, Bret Stephens, retweeted Weiss with the comment, “Anti-Semitism, in other words.”
Lower down, that first Times article reported “Ms. Omar’s careful answer on the 2018 campaign trail to questions about Israel — and her postelection clarification that she does indeed back the boycott, divest and sanctions movement — has left some Jewish leaders feeling betrayed.”
An editor at The Forward, Batya Ungar-Sargon, tweeted, “Yo @nytimes, @IlhanMN is not ‘making Jewish leaders nervous’ bc she supports BDS but bc she made an anti-Semitic comment about Israel and ignored activists and Jewish journalists who tried to ask about it – which your reporter didn’t in this puff piece.” Ungar-Sargon said she’d like to know if the Times journalist asked Omar “the questions we Jewish journos keep trying to ask but getting stonewalled: Why did you lie to constituents? Do you believe Israel has supernatural powers?”…
EDITORS NOTE: This column with images is by Jihad Watch. It is republished with permission.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/new-york-times-building-660-AP-e1387546014301.jpg307640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2019-01-04 04:41:492019-01-04 04:41:51New York Times orders readers to 'celebrate' election of pro-Sharia BDS supporter Rep. Ilhan Omar
