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The Trump Administration’s Geopolitical Hat Trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLUMN BY

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

Trump: ‘Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and Bahrain agree to a Peace Deal’

VIDEO: President Donald J. Trump announces Bahrain, Israel will normalize relations.


“Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain agree to a Peace Deal – the second Arab country to make peace with Israel in 30 days!”

This is extraordinary. Trump is achieving it by refusing to heed the conventional wisdom that has guided U.S. foreign policy into disaster after disaster for decades. I rated him very high in Rating America’s Presidents, and he keeps on vindicating me. But his defiance of the mainstream analysts and demonstration of their failures is one reason why they hate him with such passionate intensity.

“Bahrain agrees to normalize relations with Israel, Trump announces,” Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2020:

Bahrain has joined the United Arab Emirates in striking an agreement to normalize relations with Israel, President Donald Trump said on Friday, a dramatic move aimed at easing tensions in the Middle East.

Trump tweeted out the news after he spoke by phone to both Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House said.

Trump also tweeted: “Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain agree to a Peace Deal – the second Arab country to make peace with Israel in 30 days!”

“This is a historic breakthrough to further peace in the Middle East,” the United States, Bahrain and Israel said in a joint statement.

“Opening direct dialog and ties between these two dynamic societies and advanced economies will continue the positive transformation of the Middle East and increase stability, security, and prosperity in the region,” it said.

Netanyahu says the agreement marks a “new era of peace.”…

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

Harvard Hires PLO Executive to Mentor Students

Clarion discovers over $2.6 million in donations from the Palestinians to Harvard


Harvard University named Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat — who serves as secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — as a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Erekat, a man who called random stabbing attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinian terrorists “self-defense,” will be charged with mentoring students and giving seminars in the school’s “The Future of Diplomacy Project.”

PLO member Erekat is one of four new fellows appointed by the school to the project. Commenting on the appointments, faculty chair Nicholas Burns said that the new fellows “will strengthen our capacity to learn the lessons of effective diplomacy and statecraft.”

In the course of research to our new documentary film Covert Cash (see below), Clarion Project discovered that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which essentially serves as the governmental arm of the PLO, made six donations to Harvard between the years of 2017 and 2019. The donations totaled $2,625,000.

The film asks, among other questions, what type of return on their investments are these foreign governments getting from their donations to American universities?

Since its inception, the PA has pleaded poverty and solicited donations from the world community. As of December 2018, the U.S. government had given the Palestinian Authority $5 billion in taxpayer dollars since 1994 (post the Oslo Accords). The European Union is one of their largest funders of the PA as well. Besides being used to line the pockets of top PA executives, Israel maintains that a good portion of this donated money has been used for terror.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 with the purpose of “liberating Palestine” through armed struggle. Most of the enormous amount of violence perpetrated by the group over the years has been aimed at Israeli civilians.

The PLO was considered by the United States to be a terrorist organization until the Madrid Conference in 1991.

In 1993, the PLO ostensibly recognized the right of Israel to exist, yet continued to perpetrate terror attacks against Israel. It coordinated those attacks during the 2000–2005 Second Intifada and afterwards with the Palestinian Authority, its governmental arm.

Erekat has been involved in every Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiation since 2000 – all failed endeavors (most likely due to the fact that he explicitly stated in a 2014 interview with Al Jazeera, “I will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state”).

Nevertheless, Erekat will now bring his “expertise” – both as a diplomatic and as the author of 14 books on foreign policy, oil, conflict resolution and negotiations – to Harvard, where students at one of the most prestigious foreign policy schools in the country will be educated by him.

More facts about Erekat:

  • In 2015, Erekat compared Israel to ISIS saying, “There is no difference between the terrorism practiced by the group led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Israel’s terrorism”
  • He called Israel’s expansion of settlements “terrorism” at a time when settlements had seen nearly zero physical expansion for 25 years. In negotiations with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Erekat admitted that the settlements took up only 1.1 percent of the areas Palestinians wanted for a state
  • Erekat denies archaeological evidence of the Jewish history in Jerusalem
  • Erekat claimed his family had lived in Israel for 9,000 years, yet evidence shows that the family comes from the Huwait region of Arabia

EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Decline of Christianity Since the Reformation

David Carlin: The decline of Christianity is found not just in those who claim no Christian faith, but also in those who claim to be liberal Christians.


Modern history (by which I mean the history of the western world since about the year 1500) tells many stories.  I suspect that these many stories are subplots in one big story, and for years I’ve been trying to guess what this one big story may be.  My guess (but it’s only a guess) is that the one big story is the story of how the western world has been trying to get rid of Christianity.

The story begins with the Protestant Reformation.  None of the reformers intended to do away with Christianity.  Just the opposite.  Regardless of anybody’s intentions, however, a divided Christianity would be easier to destroy than a united Christianity.

This divided Christianity led in the 16th and 17th centuries to the rise of skepticism, especially in France.  But skepticism, while it continues even to the present day to erode Christianity, is too purely negative a thing to replace the old faith.  And a replacement is needed.  You can’t just get rid of Christianity and leave the world with nothing to believe in.

Skepticism was succeeded by a more positive thing in the 18th century, Deism, which professed to hold on to the good elements of Christianity (afterlife, morality, etc.) while getting rid of its bad elements.  But Deism was too “thin” a thing to replace Christianity.  Besides, it stopped well short of the ultimate aim of anti-Christianity, namely the complete eradication of the old religion.

Deism helped bring about the French Revolution, which showed for the first time that a powerful state could be used as a tremendous anti-Christianity machine.

In the second half of the 19th century, there was a great intellectual movement on behalf of agnosticism.  But agnosticism was simply another name for the old skepticism, still too negative a thing to get the anti-Christianity job done.

In the 20th century, two gigantic anti-Christianity movements took the stage, and each of them came to control an enormously powerful state: Nazism and Communism.  The former intended to get rid of Christianity while thinly disguising its intention; it deceived many Christians who wanted to be deceived.  The latter didn’t stoop to disguise; it was quite frank about its intention.  Both of them did great damage to Christianity, and when they failed (Nazism in 1945, Russian Communism in 1991) they left behind them a Christianity that had been greatly weakened.

In the postwar period (1945-present) the western liberal democracies (U.S.A., U.K., France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain [after Franco], Portugal [after Salazar]) have been subject to a non-statist kind of anti-Christianity.  These countries all experienced, some of them sooner, some of them later, the growth of an anti-Christianity public sentiment.

These countries all experienced the gradual asphyxiation of Christianity by the gradual growth of anti-Christian feelings.  For decades the state played little or no part in this smothering process – though this has changed recently.

This liberal-democratic, anti-Christianity got a tremendous boost beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the coming of the sexual revolution.  This “revolution” was about sex – but it was about much more than sex.  Sexual restraint and even downright chastity had been an essential element of Christianity from its beginning in the first century AD.  Get rid of Christian sex morality, and you’re well on your way to getting rid of Christianity altogether.

Once the average person decides that Christianity has been wrong about fornication, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, etc. for almost 2,000 years, it will be relatively easy for that person to believe that Christianity has also been wrong about many other things – including all the articles of the Nicene Creed.

Many would-be Christians – I have in mind “liberal” Catholics and Protestants – believe it is possible to have a “new and improved” Christianity that embraces and endorses the values of the sexual revolution.  They are mistaken – as certain a priori considerations should have persuaded them decades ago, and as experience has abundantly demonstrated over the last fifty years.

Throughout the western world (the world that used to be called Christendom), including the United States, Christianity is in steep decline today.  Evidence of this decline is found not just in those who claim no Christian faith (the “Nones”).  It is also found in those who claim to be liberal Christians – which means that they have dropped most of Christianity’s orthodox “baggage.”  And it is also found in those who, while claiming to be orthodox, really don’t take their orthodoxy seriously.

Two questions:

  1. Does one have to be an atheist to be anti-Christianity? Strictly speaking, no. For instance, the Deists of the 18th century were anti-Christianity without being atheists.  But if you want to get rid of Christianity, it helps to be an atheist.  A lot, because atheism is the most thoroughgoing kind of anti-Christianity.  If you want to get rid of the old religion, why not go all the way?  Why not destroy the very foundation of Christianity?
  2. Does one have to be a supporter of abortion to be counted among the haters of Christianity? Yes. For the right to abortion – and not just the legal right but the moral right as well – is essential to the sexual revolution.  If we don’t have abortion as a back-up when mistakes are made or accidents happen, how can we have a moral regime of sexual freedom?

Practically speaking, we can’t.  Think about it.  If abortion were to be banned throughout America, the next thing you know we’d have people recommending chastity.  And once people recommend chastity, guess what? – they’ll start recommending Christianity.

Well, we can’t have that, can we?  And therefore we must make sure that abortion is legal and is considered to be morally unobjectionable.  Indeed we must make it a praiseworthy thing – the kind of thing which, like public education and police and fire protection, everybody who needs it should have free of charge.

For what it’s worth, that’s my reading of the last 500 years.

David Carlin

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

We’re All on the Frontlines Now

Robert Royal: The BLM-Antifa “uprising” is following the Marxist playbook. To end it, we need to stop its infiltration into schools and media.


A shrewd woman (to whom I happen to be married) recently read me some passages from an old news story about the re-naming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, given to writers of children’s books: “’This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,’” the Association for Library Service to Children said in a statement after the unanimous vote.”

The town librarian used to be the enforcer of “community standards” by preventing unsuitable material from falling into adolescent – or anyone’s – hands. And even in demanding good behavior, as per “The Music Man”:

For the civilized world accepts as unforgivable sin
Any talking out loud with any librarian
Such as Marian . . . Madam Librarian.

He/she still is an enforcer, but now – despite talk of “inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness” – pushes Heather Has Two Mommies, proudly defends “drag-queen” story-hours that would make any normal child run screaming, and polices the literature of past, present, and future (certain books never get published for fear of running afoul of her/him).

People talk a lot about “cultural Marxism” now. I don’t know exactly what to make of the expression because during the Cold War some of us actually studied Marxism and its rigid tenets, which serious Marxists regarded as “scientific.” Marx himself would have looked askance at much of what falls under that rubric today. He had, for example, a rather low view of the non-white races – on the basis of the settled science of his time. Curiously, though there are statues of Marx all over Europe, none have been torn down recently.

For Marx, “scientific” history also predicted that Communism would emerge in the advanced nations, not in relatively backward places like Russia and China, which did not yet have the proper “objective” conditions. The revolution would occur in advanced capitalist nations that would so impoverish the masses that they would rise up in huge numbers and easily displace the exploiters.

Recent protesters are not a fulfillment of this fantasy. The vast majority of the people protesting (and even rioting) are not destitute or exploited. They live well compared to most human beings throughout history, at least materially. There’s a reason why Europe and America have to restrict the vast numbers of people – usually “people of color” from Africa and Latin America – who would like to enter despite alleged racism and prejudice. And everyone with a modicum of sense knows it.

So I get the anti-capitalism of the Marxists who founded the Black Lives Matter Movement; I don’t much get the “cultural Marxism” of BLM, which attacks “systemic” racism and promotes LGBTQ as if it were a natural part of Marxist thought.

I know something, however, about what serious Marxists have thought about “culture.” The most prominent of those figures, Antonio Gramsci, if he were alive today, might run with the pack against orthodox Marxism. But he’s enlightening nonetheless.

Gramsci knew the crucial importance of what he called una cultura capillare – “a capillary culture” that, like the capillaries in the body, would carry the revolution into every nook and cranny of society. He gauged – correctly – that you couldn’t defeat democratic liberty directly. It was just too powerful and entrenched.

Gramsci argued – shrewdly – that what was needed was something like what the Jesuits of the Catholic Counter-Reformation were able to achieve by developing and deploying an educational system that formed people in all the crucial cultural institutions. If Marian the Librarian (and all the main institutions to which she is attached) is Catholic, there’s no need for a frontal assault. The revolution imposes itself as a natural consequence.

Just think of the mental revolutions it took for a library association devoted to promoting children’s books to use words affirming its “core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.” In normal times, those words point to goods to be celebrated and pursued. These are not normal times.

“Inclusiveness” does not mean adding voices that might want to raise legitimate questions about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s perspectives on minorities. It means using the old Marxist tactic of portraying others as “class enemies” and airbrushing them out of the picture. Including requires excluding.

“Respect,” in similar Marxist fashion, means judging who is worthy of respect on puritanical ideological grounds. So “respect” is to be shown to Native Americans and Blacks, who – to be clear – deserve it merely as our fellow human beings, whatever their individual foibles or the shortcoming of their “cultures.” Laura Ingalls Wilder, however, and the culture of her day, don’t get – don’t warrant – the same “respect,” whatever their shortcomings.

Once this process gets going in the library, school (and school board), university, media, HR department, even some churches, we are well on the way to what Gramsci knew would produce a revolution almost impossible to reverse.

Almost, because there’s nothing that stops us from carrying out a counter-revolution like what the Jesuits of another age were able to carry out.

Politics is important in this counterrevolution, to be sure. We are in an election year and TCT will be discussing some of the crucial questions for Catholics – and others – in coming months. (As a non-profit, we can neither support nor oppose candidates as such.) One thing we will constantly maintain, however, is that any candidate who is to be taken seriously must affirm the rule of law and denounce violence, whoever the perpetrator.

Barack Obama, the most prominent black leader in America at present, could have done all Americans a service in recent days by speaking out against riot and looting – even if he may have wished to support protests. It’s on such fundamental public distinctions that our future depends.

But the politics will fail if that’s all we do – if we neglect the day-to-day “capillary” efforts that we each have to make, in whatever place we find ourselves.

We’re all on the frontlines now.

Robert Royal

Dr. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by Ignatius Press. The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, is now available in paperback from Encounter Books.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Nancy Pelosi Claims Israeli ‘Annexation’ Will Harm American Security Interests

The story of her astonishing claim is at the Jerusalem Post here:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday that she is “concerned” about a possible Israeli move to annex parts of the West Bank.

“Unilateral annexation puts the future at risk and undermines US national security interests,” she said in a webinar hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA). “It undermines our national security interests and decades of bipartisan policy. We always want it to be bipartisan,” she continued.

The extension of Israel’s sovereignty to the “West Bank” – the name Jordan gave in 1950 to those parts of Judea and Samaria it had managed to hold onto during the 1948-49 war – is based on the Palestine Mandate itself. That Mandate assigned to the future Jewish state all of the land from Mt. Hermon in the north, to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the west, to the Mediterranean in the east. At the end of Arab-Israeli hostilities in 1949, the Jordanian army remained in possession of part of Judea and Samaria; Jordan renamed that territory the “West Bank” in order to efface the Jewish connection to the land, much as the Romans nearly 2000 years before had replaced the name “Judea” with “Palestine.” When Israel took possession of the “West Bank” after the Six-Day War, this did not create its legal, historic, and moral claim to land where Jews had lived for 3,500 years, but allowed the Jewish state to finally enforce its preexisting claim.

A second, and independent source for the Jewish claim to extend its sovereignty to a considerable part of the “West Bank” is U.N. Resolution 242.

The chief drafter of Resolution 242 was Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot), the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations from 1964-1970. At the time of the Resolution’s discussion and subsequent unanimous passage, and on many occasions since, Lord Caradon always insisted that the phrase “from the territories” quite deliberately did not mean “all the territories,” but merely some of the territories:

Much play has been made of the fact that we didn’t say “the” territories or “all the” territories. But that was deliberate. I myself knew very well the 1967 boundaries and if we had put in the “the” or “all the” that could only have meant that we wished to see the 1967 boundaries perpetuated in the form of a permanent frontier. This I was certainly not prepared to recommend.

On another occasion, to an interviewer from the Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring-Summer 1976), he again insisted on the deliberateness of the wording. He was asked:

The basis for any settlement will be United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from “the occupied territories”?

Nota bene: “from territories occupied” is not the same thing as “from occupied territories” – the first is neutral, the second a loaded description. Lord Caradon answered:

“I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.

“Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong.”

Note how Lord Caradon says that “you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” with that “merely” applying to Jordan, but not to Israel, because of the Mandate’s explicit provisions allocating the territory known now as the “West Bank” to the Jewish state. Note, too, the firmness of his dismissal of the 1967 lines as nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,” that is, nothing more than armistice lines and not internationally recognized borders.

Does Speaker Pelosi understand the legal, historic, and moral claims of Israel to Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the “West Bank)”? Does she understand the intent of the Mandate for Palestine, in recognizing those claims, and does she have a firm understanding of the territory that was included by the League of Nations in that Mandate? Does she comprehend, as well, the meaning of U.N. Resolution 242, which allows Israel to make territorial adjustments to ensure its own security? Is she aware that an American military mission, sent to Israel by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the orders of President Johnson, to study what territories, at a minimum, Israel would have to retain after the Six-Day War, reported back that Israel would need to keep the Jordan Valley and parts of the West Bank in order to slow down, or prevent, a possible invasion force from the east that could cut Israel in two at its narrowest point; within the 1949 armistice lines, Israel was only nine miles wide from Qalqilya to the sea.

Would comprehending the Mandate for Palestine (especially the Preamble, and Articles 4 and 6), and U.N. Resolution 242, make a difference to Nancy Pelosi? Would she be less quick to lecture Israel on not annexing territory in the West Bank, if she knew Israel had a perfect right to that territory – the Jordan Valley and the settlements – according to both the Mandate, and U.N. Resolution 242?

Pelosi’s bizarre claim is that any Israel “annexation” of territory would “harm America’s national security interests.” She has it exactly backwards. Any annexation by Israel of territory to which it is entitled, and which will increase the Jewish state’s ability to protect itself, will contribute to American national security. Deprived of control of the Jordan Valley, forced to surrender some of its settlements, Israel would be much more vulnerable to attack. And though Israel has never asked for a single American soldier to help defend it, unlike several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, if it is squeezed back into something like the 1949 armistice lines – i.e., the pre-1967 lines which Abba Eban famously described as “the lines of Auschwitz” — that could make more likely the need, in some future war, for Israel to request American help. That’s not something either Israel, or America, wants. And if Israel were to be squeezed back into something like the 1949 armistice lines, and as a consequence was in danger, in case of war, of being cut in two by an invader from the East, does anyone doubt that if the Israelis ever felt their national survival was at stake, they would use some of their nuclear weapons as a last resort. Does Pelosi want to make such a possibility more likely?

Nancy Pelosi claims that Israel’s annexation of land in the West Bank will harm America’s national security interests; she has things backwards. The better able Israel is to defend itself, the less likely that it will ever have to ask for American aid. And what about the Arab states? Would they be angry with the United States if Israel held onto most or even all of the West Bank? We know that while the member states of the Arab League, for public consumption, have deplored Israeli “annexation,” behind the scenes several of these same states have expressed their support, more muted in some cases than in others, for the Trump Deal of the Century which allows for that Israeli annexation. The ambassadors of three Arab states — Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE – in a sign of support even attended the White House ceremony in which the Trump Plan was rolled out. Though Jordan has denounced any “annexation,” privately Jordanian officials have said they do not want the Palestinians to control the West Bank, for they fear a possible alliance of Palestinians on both sides of the Jordan against the Hashemite monarchy. Two other important Arab states, Egypt and, especially, Saudi Arabia, have lost interest in the “Palestinians” – Crown Prince Muhammad angrily told Mahmoud Abbas to “take whatever deal” he can that the Americans offer – and are more interested in Israeli help, including the sharing of its intelligence with them, in combating Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. When the Israelis were about to annex the Golan Heights, it was predicted that all hell would break loose in the Arab countries. Nothing happened. When Trump decided to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, we were again warned that Arabs and Muslims would be inflamed. Again nothing of the sort occurred.

Now we are being assured that if Israel annexes the Jordan Valley and the settlements, the Arabs will this time really rise up. Why should we believe it? Even in the West Bank, where Mahmoud Abbas insists he has now torn up all agreements with Israel, on the ground there is still security cooperation between the P.A. and Israel. On May 20 it was reported that an unnamed senior Palestinian official sent messages to the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service saying that some coordination would continue and that the Palestinian security organizations will continue to do their best to foil terror attacks against Israel. Even if cooperation really is ended, the official vowed that terror groups will not be permitted to act freely in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority. So there is a lot less to Abbas’s threats to “end all cooperation with Israel” than meets the eye. Abbas knows how valuable is the intelligence the P.A. receives from Israel on its deadly rivals Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their operatives in the West Bank. Will he really want to do without Israeli assistance that on several occasions has even helped to foil plots to murder him and his cronies?

What should Nancy Pelosi in decency do? She should study the Palestine Mandate and its maps. She should remember that even though the League of Nations dissolved in 1946, its successor organization, the United Nations, included in its Charter Article 80 (called the “Jewish people’s article”), which recognized the continuing validity of the Mandate for Palestine. And finally, she should study the text of U.N. Resolution 242, and the authoritative explanation of that text by its main drafter, Lord Caradon. Only when she has thoroughly digested the meaning of both the U.N. Resolution 242 and of the Mandate for Palestine, will she have earned the right to comment on what Israel “should” or “must” do.

She might then say, for example, that “I am well aware that Israel has a right to keep the entire West Bank if it so wishes. I do not challenge that right. But I challenge its wisdom. Wouldn’t it be better to keep the territories Israel currently controls, without a formal annexation that will merely serve to roil the Arab world?” I still think she’d be wrong, but at least she would no longer be outrageously, offensively, intolerably wrong.

The Speaker told participants that Democrats are taking “a great pride” in former president Barack Obama’s memorandum of understanding, which provides Israel with $38 billion worth of security assistance over a decade. “That’s our commitment. And we continue to have that,” she said. “It was signed in 2016 to help Israel defend itself in a variety of ways. And we stand committed to that, but we’re very concerned about what we see happening in terms of annexation.”

“I’m not a big fan of the Palestinian leadership in terms of their capability to be good negotiating partners,” she added. “I wish they could be better. But I think that everybody can be doing better in terms of that.” She also sent a barb to the Trump administration’s peace plan, saying that it has “nothing in common with the word peace or plan.”

Pelosi is “not a big fan of the Palestinian negotiating partners in terms of their capability to be good negotiating partners”? That’s a historic understatement. Mahmoud Abbas for the last twelve years refused outright to engage in any negotiations with Israel. He’s not been a “negotiating partner” at all. And in 2008, when he negotiated for the first and last time with the Israelis, he refused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of 94% of the West Bank, together with Israeli territory equivalent to 5.8% of the West Bank, and on top of that, Olmert also offered to relinquish Israeli control of the Old City to an international body. Abbas refused, and walked out. Pelosi should have told the truth: the Palestinians have shown themselves completely unwilling to seriously engage in negotiations with the Israelis.

Pelosi’s brusque dismissal of Trump’s peace plan — it has, she said, “nothing in common with the word peace or plan” – is intolerable. It is the first American effort that, had it been accepted, would have led to the creation of a Palestinian state, one which would include 97% of all the Palestinians living in the West Bank. For the first time in their history, the Palestinians would have a state. What’s more, according to the Trump Plan, the Palestinians would be given two large swathes of territory in Israel’s Negev, along the border with Egypt, to compensate for territory taken by Israel – as is its right under the Mandate – in the West Bank. Further, Gaza would be directly linked to the West Bank part of “Palestine” by traffic corridors. An enormous effort went into the Administration’s constructing a viable Arab state, consisting of contiguous territories in the West Bank where 97% of the Palestinians now live, and from which they would not have to move. Speaker Pelosi should look at all the work that went into carving out this state before so airily dismissing it.

Finally, in what is surely the most generous offer of aid in history, the Trump Administration promised that international donors would provide the state of Palestine with $50 billion dollars in aid; by comparison, the Marshall Plan allotted a total of $60 billion (in 2020 dollars) not for just one but for sixteen countries. Why does Nancy Pelosi say this carefully worked-out effort was not a “plan”? Has she looked at the maps, and seen with what care the Trump Administration managed to ensure that 97% of the Palestinians now in the West Bank would be included, in contiguous territories forming the state of Palestine, while 97% of the Israelis in the West Bank would be included, without having to move, in the state of Israel. It was a real feat of boundary-drawing. And why does Pelosi say the Trump Plan has nothing to do with “peace” when that is its main goal, to keep the peace between Palestinians and Israelis, by means of both the statehood and the prosperity– that $50 billion in aid — promised to the Palestinians, and through the demilitarization that would be required of the future state of “Palestine”?

American national security interests will not be harmed but enhanced if Israel and the Palestinians make peace, based on the Trump Plan, and if the Palestinians achieve a level of prosperity in their own state that they would not wish to endanger through war, while Israel’s deterrent power is increased by its permanent control, through annexation, of West Bank territories, and especially of the Jordan Valley, that can help prevent or slow down an invasion from the East. There may be a brief display of displeasure from the Arab street, if the Trump Plan is accepted, but in the corridors of power in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman, there will be quiet satisfaction that the Trump Plan has put paid to Palestinian irredentism, given the Palestinians a state of their own, and imposed demilitarization on that state. Israel, more secure than ever, can continue to help them deal with their real worries – the Muslim Brotherhood, the assorted terror groups including Hezbollah (Iran’s proxy), and Hamas (which is merely a branch of the Brotherhood), and above all, Iran.

It is difficult for many Democrats to admit that something good might actually come out of the White House, where they long ago consigned its occupant to the outer darkness. And who has the time to read all that stuff – the Mandate for Palestine, U.N. Resolution 242, Article 80 of the U.N. Charter – or learn about the history of the non-existent negotiations between Mahmoud Abbas and several different Israeli leaders? Who has the time to find out what the Arab leaders really want, which is not always what they say they want? It’s a lot to ask. But try, Speaker Pelosi. Just try.

COLUMN BY

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

Illinois: Muslim who slashed tires at churches and said ‘I don’t like Christians’ now tries to burn occupied church

“In November 2019, prosecutors said that El Hannouny slashed the tires of 19 cars in the parking lots of the First Baptist and Sts. Helen and Constantine churches. Upon his arrest, he told authorities that he damaged the cars because, “I don’t like Christians,” according to police. Hate crime charges were added in January, and he was released on a $10,000 I-bond with electronic monitoring.”

We see how well that worked. Officials did not and would never dare to address the root causes of El-Hannouny’s hatred, and so he was free to act upon it again. When arrested this time, he didn’t show any sign of remorse: “While El Hannouny was being processed, police said he started spitting at officers, reports said. El Hannouny also wrote a religious slur on the wall of his cell.” Yet he will soon be free again, and will almost certainly target yet another church.

“Man Accused of Trying To Burn Down Occupied Church,” by Lorraine Swanson, Patch, April 16, 2020 (thanks to the Geller Report):

PALOS HILLS, IL — A Palos Hills man already facing hate crime and criminal damage charges is now accused of trying to set fire to an occupied church, reports said. Osama E. El Hannouny, 25, appeared Wednesday before a Cook County judge on charges of arson, hate crimes, criminal damage to property, battery to a police officer and violation of bail bond.

In November 2019, prosecutors said that El Hannouny slashed the tires of 19 cars in the parking lots of the First Baptist and Sts. Helen and Constantine churches. Upon his arrest, he told authorities that he damaged the cars because, “I don’t like Christians,” according to police. Hate crime charges were added in January, and he was released on a $10,000 I-bond with electronic monitoring.

On April 14, police said El Hannouny used leaves to set fire to Sacred Heart Church, 8245 W. 111th St. According to the police report, El Hannouny was caught on video looking through the doors of the church building and noticing that it was occupied. Police said he made numerous trips to pile leaves near the gas main and air conditioning unit. El Hannouny allegedly set the leaves on fire, but firefighters quickly extinguished the flames.

While El Hannouny was being processed, police said he started spitting at officers, reports said. El Hannouny also wrote a religious slur on the wall of his cell, according to the report. El Hannouny allegedly scratched, bit and spit at police when they tried to stop him….

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

Notre Dame prof hails Islamic law, asks international law judges to consider “referring to parts of Sharia”

“Notre Dame’s Emilia Justyna Powell, an associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law, an expert in both international law and the Islamic legal tradition, traveled to many Muslim-majority nations to research how the two systems work together in practice.”

Now Powell is on a mission to teach Westerners that Sharia is similar to international law and in some ways superior. For this dubious endeavor she is lavishly featured in the Notre Dame University newspaper. Powell’s canvassing for Sharia has led her to ask “some international court judges” if they “would ever consider referring to parts of the Sharia.”

Powell’s interest in researching Islamic law further is driven, in part, by the bias she sees toward Western law to the point of absolute exclusion of any facets of Islamic law in international law. In fact, some international court judges she interviewed were irritated when she asked if they would ever consider referring to parts of Sharia. “Out of all the religions of the world, we’ve contributed to a large-scale misunderstanding of their legal tradition,” Powell said. “Islamic law and international law share many more similarities than they are given credit for.”

Powell’s skewed view of the Sharia is deceptive, propagandistic and dangerous. There is no comparison between international law (which is democracy-based) and Sharia (which is authoritarian and discriminatory). The violence, human rights abuses and murders committed throughout history in the name of Islam are not an aberration. They are reflections of normative Islam, fully backed by Islamic jurisprudence, which teaches the murder of apostates and gays, the conquest and subjugation of infidels, and the inferiority of women, including the head coverings (Quran 24:31, Quran 33:59) about which Powell fallaciously rambles.  The arrogance displayed by Powell is also an affront to Muslim dissidents who face (and experience) imprisonment (and worse) for opposing the human rights abuses sanctioned by Islamic law. Powell’s potential influence on the young minds who must listen to her propaganda in the classroom is concerning. And she is not unique; in fact, in many colleges and universities today, she is the norm.

“Islamic law and international law share many similarities, Notre Dame Professor says,” by Colleen Sharkey, Notre Dame News, April 8, 2020:

The very term Sharia conjures negative images in the minds of many Westerners, in part due to its association with extremist groups. However, an in-depth look at Islamic law, as practiced in the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, reveals that it is interpreted in different ways depending on the country, its culture and the very people conducting the interpretation.

Notre Dame’s Emilia Justyna Powell, an associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law, an expert in both international law and the Islamic legal tradition, traveled to many Muslim-majority nations to research how the two systems work together in practice. Her findings were published earlier this year in the volume Islamic Law and International Law: Peaceful Resolution of Disputes.

Powell uses the differences in how women dress in various Muslim-majority countries as an analogy for the various interpretations of Sharia.

“A perfect visualization is women’s head coverings. The Taliban encourages women to cover top to bottom, not even showing the eyes. In Saudi Arabia, sometimes eyes are visible but not much else,” she said. “I was recently in Bahrain where I witnessed a new trend: Women are unzipping their abayas and you can see Western-influenced clothing underneath like jeans, ruffles and lace. Many women don’t wear the hijab scarf there and some only wear it halfway on. But who’s to say which is correct? Bahrain is no less Islamic than Saudi Arabia, for example, just different. People in all Muslim-majority countries interpret and, thus, practice the Muslim faith differently.”

International law itself is based on a broad set of norms agreed upon by people from many different nations and cultures. It is also heavily based on Western law which, itself, has deep roots in Christianity — a religion that originated at a time when Roman law was already well established. “Islam, on the other hand, had no a priori legal system to work with other than unwritten tribal customs,” Powell writes. And, while international law has moved to a more secular model, Islamic law remains based in the writings of the Quran and the sunna as well as ijma (judicial consensus) and qiyas (analogical reasoning).

“However, disconcerting the dissonance between the Islamic legal tradition and international law may appear, there are more similarities between these two legal systems than the policy world and the scholarship take into account,” she writes.

By its broad nature, international law allows for interpretation based on norms in individual countries. And many Muslim-majority states have their own declaration of human rights, she notes.

“Sometimes international law promotes the peaceful resolution of disputes, but does not give specific rules or cite specific laws for how to do so. Countries can mediate, peacefully, via negotiation in compliance with international law. Sometimes Muslim-majority countries will also sign international treaties but place restrictions on them — what are technically called ‘reservations.’”

For example, some Muslim-majority countries use reservations to remove “freedom of religion” clauses, because their religion is inextricably part of their culture, with the assumption (often part of the country’s own understanding of human rights) that many of their citizens are all Muslim. In this way, Powell says, they are complying with some international norms but allowing for their identity to remain intact.

Powell also examines how Muslim-majority nations in different geographical areas use Sharia and work within the international law framework. In general, Powell finds that if an ILS (Islamic Law State) country has a secular court system and their constitution mentions peaceful resolutions of disputes, they possess a more favorable attitude toward international courts.

“The Islamic milieu is not a monolith. In each of the ILS, secular law and Islamic law coalesce to create a unique legal framework. Every one of the ILS is different in how it negotiates the relationship between these two legal forces — the religious and the secular — along with their respective differences in socio-demographic and political characteristics. Historically, every one of the ILS has worked out its own unique answers to the question of the balance of Islamic law and secular law,” she writes.

The examples Powell gathered through interviews shed light on the cultural and religious lenses through which many Muslims view courts….

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

VIDEO: Coronavirus and Anti-Semitism

While the world is dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic, some see it as an opportunity to attack Israel with lies and anti-Semitic slurs.

Watch BDS activists and white supremacists share shockingly similar conspiracy theories about the global crisis, including that Israel and Jews are behind or are exploiting the virus. Meanwhile, Israel is working hand-in-hand with Palestinians to combat the virus!

WATCH AND SHARE!

Have you seen any other examples of this? Share your answers in a comment on Twitter

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First Thoughts On the Trump Plan and How Mahmoud Abbas Will Save the Day by Hugh Fitzgerald

“The Deal of the Century” turned out to be remarkably generous to the “Palestinians,” giving them far more than they had any right to expect. It promises them a state – the state of Palestine. It doubles the size of the territory under Palestinian control. The Palestinians will under the plan possess nearly 80% of the West Bank. They will also have their capital in East Jerusalem. The plan includes Palestinian use and management of facilities in Haifa and Ashdod ports, Palestinian development of a resort area in the north shore of the Dead Sea, and continued Palestinian agricultural activity in the Jordan Valley. Ultimately, the plan envisions “modern and efficient transportation links” through the future Palestinian state, including Gaza. The West Bank and Gaza will be linked through a tunnel.

Under the Trump plan, the Palestinians will be obligated to disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad, must stop their Pay-For-Slay plan, must stop inciting terrorism, must end the rampant corruption in the PA, must respect human rights, and must guarantee a free press and religious freedom. We shall see if the PA is able to meet these conditions precedent to achieving a state. The PA’s record to date is not encouraging.

The plan also requires Israel to observe a four-year moratorium on any new settlements in the West Bank while negotiations with the Palestinians are going on, but says nothing about whether the moratorium would continue if, after four years, negotiations are still continuing. It makes provision for $50 billion in aid to be given to the Palestinians, as had previously been announced at the “Peace Through Prosperity” workshop in Manama last June. That is a huge sum, but who would pay it? One hopes that it will not be the Western Infidels paying for the Palestinians. The $50 billion ought by rights to come from fellow Muslim Arabs, those who live in the oil-rich states of the Gulf – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar.

The most important concession of all, according to Trump’s peace initiative, would be the recognition of a new state, the State of Palestine. This State of Palestine would have to agree to be disarmed, but how that disarmament would be enforced, and exactly what arms it would include, remains unclear.

Israel also gets certain concessions. Existing Israeli settlements (that is, towns and cities) in the West Bank would be recognized as sovereign Israeli territory. The Palestinians would have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinian refugees, or “refugees” (the quotation marks indicate that these are the descendants of refugees, not true refugees themselves) would be integrated into the countries where they now live. There would be no right of return.

Netanyahu and Gantz have both declared themselves pleased with Trump’s peace plan. But can they truly be pleased with the recognition of a State of Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem? Perhaps they are pleased because the plan is better than any of the previous plans presented by Trump’s predecessors, and because they know that Abbas will never accept it, so they needn’t worry. They can afford to be pleased. There is no other state in the world that has been successfully disarmed. How likely is it that a State of Palestine, full of Jihadis, could be permanently disarmed, and not become a source of terrorism against Israelis, whether living in the West Bank or elsewhere in Israel?

The plan is generally good, but I confess that I expected even better. I did not think this administration would recognize a State of Palestine with its capital in East Jerusalem. I envisioned instead an arrangement whereby the local Arabs (to be carefully referred to as “Palestinian Arabs”) in the West Bank would be given as much autonomy as was consonant with Israeli security, but not a state. The safer the Israelis, the greater the degree of local autonomy. I see that I was wrong.

However, there is one thing about this plan that makes it most welcome. And that is the assurance that neither Mahmoud Abbas, nor any of his successors in the Palestinian Authority, nor anyone in Hamas, will be willing to negotiate over this plan in good faith. The Palestinians rejected Trump’s plan before they knew what was in it; they reject it again now that they know what is in it. Much of the world will be able to see that even when the Palestinians are offered a state of their own, even when they are promised that that state’s capital will be in East Jerusalem, even when they are further promised $50 billion in aid, far more than any of the more than 100 developing countries have ever received In aid, that is not enough to satisfy them. They are the spoiled brats of the international community.

Other Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman, will urge the Palestinians to take the deal — “You get a state, you have your capital in Jerusalem, the Israelis have to stop building settlements, you’ll have 80% of the West Bank” – “or else.” “Or else” would mean only this: “We are tired of your whining, tired of the whole Palestinian problem; tired of your refusal to accept $50 billion in aid. We have so many bigger problems to think about, starting but not ending with Iran. Get with the program. Or count us out.” The refusal of the Palestinians to take the deal will only widen the gap between them and the other Arabs.

In agreeing to the Trump plan, Israel will have committed itself to not building new settlements in the West Bank for four years, while negotiations are going on. It’s a big concession. But if there are no negotiations, because the Palestinians continue to refuse enter into them, then the Trump administration has made clear that Israel is no longer required to refrain from settlement building. The Trump administration has noted that, in that case, it will support Israel should it decide to unilaterally incorporate other areas of the West Bank, beyond what it will already have annexed. And the offer of a State of Palestine will not be revived. And very few, at that point, will care.

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Los Angeles: Anti-Semitic hate crimes 14 times more frequent than anti-Muslim hate crimes

No hate crimes are ever justified. The “Islamophobia” industry, however, wildly exaggerates the threat to Muslims and falsely portrays them as subject to widespread discrimination and harassment in the US, in its indefatigable pursuit of protected victim status.

“Anti-Semitic hate crimes in LA increased by 60 percent,” JNS, January 24, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

(January 24, 2020 / JNS) Reported anti-Semitic hate crimes in Los Angeles increased by a little more than 60 percent between 2018 and 2019—the highest total for hate crimes on the basis of religion, according to data released on Wednesday by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Of the reported 81 total hate crimes that targeted religious groups in 2019, 69 of them were anti-Jewish, compared to 43 of the 52 total hate crimes in that category the previous year as anti-Semitic—or a 60.5 percent increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes.

There are more than 500,000 Jews in Los Angeles, according to Brandeis’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute.

There were five reported hate crimes that targeted Muslims in 2019, compared to just two the previous year, followed by four hate crimes targeting other religions not listed….

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

Iran publishes film portraying jihad attack on the White House and Capitol, killing Trump, Pompeo and Netanyahu

Iran didn’t indulge these fantasies when Obama was President, right? Wrong.

Iran: Muslim cleric vows to “raise flag of Islam on White House” February 28, 2015

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

History revised is history denied

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?

RELATED ARTICLE: Guardian Angels Patrolling Jewish Neighborhoods In NYC For First Time Since 1991

EDITORS NOTE: This Israel International News column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Clearing Away the Delusions about the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

Order The Palestinian Delusion HERE.


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.

NY: “Highly credible law-enforcement source” says man who stabbed Jews celebrating Chanukah is convert to Islam

If this turns out to be accurate, will investigators try to determine if his reading of the Islamic scriptures led him to carry out this attack? The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the well-being of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41); they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under Islamic hegemony (9:29).

Or will this possibility be ignored, as investigating it would be “Islamophobic”?

And So It Begins: Family of Suspect Says He Is “Mentally Ill” — Latest Updates On Monsey Attack [Updated 6:35PM],” Yeshiva World, December 29, 2019 (thanks to the Geller Report):

REACAP [sic]: A knife-wielding man stormed into the Monsey home of the Kossoner Rebbe (Rabbi Rottenberg) and stabbed five people as they celebrated Chanukah, an ambush the governor said Sunday was an act of domestic terrorism fueled by intolerance and a “cancer” of growing hatred in America.

Police tracked a fleeing suspect to Manhattan and made an arrest within hours of the attack Saturday night in Monsey. Grafton E. Thomas had blood all over his clothing and smelled of bleach when officers stopped him, prosecutors said.

Thomas, 37, was arraigned Sunday and pleaded not guilty to five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary. Bail was set at $5 million and he remains jailed.

UPDATE 6:35PM: The suspect sccused [sic] of going on a stabbing rampage in Monsey is “not a terrorist” – he’s just “mentally ill”. This is according to family which spoke to  the NY Post.

Grafton Thimas [sic]- is “not a violent person,” according to his pastor of 10 years, Reverend Wendy Paige of the Hudson Highlands Cooperative Parish.

“Grafton is not a terrorist, he is a man who has mental illness in America and the systems that be have not served him well,” Paige said.

“I have been his pastor for a long time and I have seen him, he is not a violent person, he is a confused person.”

–@YWN via NY PostNY Post

UPDATE 3:45PM: Authorities are investigating whether Grafton Thomas, the man charged in a machete attack in Monsey last night, is tied to the recent brutal assault and stabbing in Monsey that has been unsolved. In that stabbing, a 29-year-old Mordechai Schlesinger was stabbed as he walked to Shul early one morning….

UPDATE 1:30PM: A highly credible law-enforcement source tells YWN that the Monsey stabbing attack suspect ,Thomas E. Grafton, is a RECENT MUSLIM CONVERT….

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