Educating Biden?

Victor Sharpe

Vice President Joseph Biden was apoplectic in Jerusalem. Was it because of another Palestinian suicide atrocity against Israeli civilians, or that Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, had yet again announced that he would never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state? No, it was because those wicked Israelis announced preliminary tenders for planning and zoning permission to the Jerusalem Municipality for the construction of apartments in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo (Solomon’s Heights).
Building houses for young Jewish couples and families? Terrible! Shocking! How can such aggression be allowed to continue? Biden’s angst exposed the Kafkaesque and groveling acceptance by the Obama administration of Arab and Muslim demands that Jews not be permitted to live in the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem or, for that matter, anywhere in land once conquered by Muslim armies in the name of Allah – and for the Palestinian Arabs that ultimately includes every square inch of Israel.
No matter that Jewish patrimony precedes Islam itself and Muslim occupation by millennia. The Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, demand that the world, and the United States in particular, ignore history. For them, as always, myths matter more than facts.
Obama’s Vice President, Joseph Biden, came to sweet talk Israeli leaders into thinking that President Obama would not countenance Iranian nuclear threats against the Jewish state. But the Biden visit to Israel, far from meeting its avowed goal of smoothing over the differences between the Obama administration and the Jewish state, left Jerusalem and Israelis more distrustful than ever of Obama’s intentions.
Of course, the same Obama administration has done little or nothing to stop the relentless drive by the mad mullahs of Iran to build nuclear bombs or the missiles to deliver them. Nor, in all reality, does this administration ever intend to use truly effective means to stop Ahmadinejad in his quest to unleash nuclear hell upon everyone in order to usher in the perceived Islamic messiah, the twelfth imam.
So now Israel, for daring to add one brick upon another, is excoriated in the national, international and state run medias as endangering the so-called “peace process.”
There was no mention by Biden of the ceaseless Arab aggression against the very existence of Israel or of the terror and destruction Israel has been forced to endure from the Palestinian Arabs. Instead, Biden tells Abbas, while embracing this unrepentant Holocaust denier, that these same Palestinian Arabs, despite all their violence “deserve a state.” Nor did he mention that it would be carved out of tiny Israel and created in the very biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland: Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). No mention either that Jews would be forbidden to reside in the new Arab state. Apartheid-Arab style.
Of course, Biden, clueless as ever, expressed displeasure at the decision by Israel to build houses in the East Jerusalem suburb, while failing to disclose that the land, as with other suburbs in "disputed" parts of East Jerusalem, was originally home to many Jews who were driven out in 1948 by the British-officered Jordanian Arab Legion.
This territory was finally liberated by Israel from its Jordanian Arab occupiers during the defensive June, 1967 Six Day War Israel was forced to fight, 19 years after the Jordanians had illegally annexed it.
In those 19 years from 1948, during which the Jordanians occupied the region, they never remotely considered it as anything but Jordanian. Certainly they never thought it belonged to another Arab people who later called themselves Palestinians. As it was, Jordan's illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, as well as of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), was recognized by only two countries: Britain and Pakistan.
But nevertheless, the Obama White House and the relentlessly anti-Israel State Department decided that they will echo the demands of the Palestinian Authority and call for Israel to stop building homes – not only in Judea and Samaria, but even within the very suburbs of Israel's capital city, Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to the Obama enforced freeze on home building for a 10 month period throughout biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria – but not in Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Arab settlement building has continued unchecked and at a feverish pace without a murmur from President Obama. Double standards? To quote Sarah Palin: You betcha! It matters not to Obama or Biden that Jerusalem – east, west, north and south – has been described as the eternal city of the eternal people.
Rabbi J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who spoke in 1918 at the thanksgiving service for the British liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks, referred to the nearly 4,000 years of history that bound the Jews to every part of their spiritual and physical capital city and of their fate in defending it against its many would-be conquerors. He said:
“Like the Jew, this Holy City of Israel is deathless; fire and sword and all the engines of destruction have been hurled against it in vain. The Babylonians burnt it and deported its population; the Romans slew a million of its inhabitants, razed it to the ground, passed the ploughshare over it and strewed its furors with salt; Hadrian banished its very name from the lips of men, changed it to Aelia Capitolina and forbade any Jew from entering it on pain of death. Persians and Arabs, Barbarians and Crusaders and Turks took it and re-took it, ravaged it and burnt it; and yet, marvelous to relate, it ever rises from its ashes to renewed life and glory.”
Rabbi Hertz was talking on the very day on which, 2,080 years earlier, Judah Maccabee, the legendary Jewish hero, led his warriors against the Greek-Syrians to liberate the Holy City from its heathen occupiers, whereupon he entered the Temple and re-dedicated it to the glory of the One and Only God. Rabbi Hertz ended his speech by proclaiming the prophetic teaching of the Maccabean Festival, which we know as Hanukkah, in Zechariah, 4:6:
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
Now the Palestinian Arab mufti in Jerusalem denies that there ever were Jewish Temples in the Holy City or that Judah, Israel and Judea ever existed or that Jews even lived throughout the Land for millennia. In doing so, he also denies Christianity’s early history and theology. But, sadly, such fantasies are all too common for most members of the “religion of peace.” Even Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who is rapidly Islamizing once secular Turkey, has denied that the Tomb of the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in Hebron and the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem, are Jewish. Erdogan parrots the Islamic myths by calling them Muslim.
Now there is a government and a Prime Minister in Israel under assault by President Obama, who demands that Israel abandon parts of eternal Jerusalem and give it away to those who hate the Jewish people and who have set their face against accepting any Jewish independence or sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
It is instructive to dwell on what has been said by both Jews and non-Jews in the past about Jerusalem, for Jerusalem and Zion are interchangeable. Perhaps, Vice President Biden will come to understand that one can go back for such affirmation through the mists of time to the towering words in Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2:
“For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem.”
These are just two of the 821 times that Jerusalem and Zion appear in the Jewish Bible: Jerusalem 667 times, and Zion 154 times. The words also appear in the Christian bible, though fewer times. They do not appear at all in Islam’s Koran.
According to the much-loved correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the late Moshe Kohn:
“Jewish sources speak of the seventy names by which Jerusalem is referred to in the classical Jewish sources. These include Ariel/lion of God (Isaiah 29:1); Kirya Neemana/Faithful City (Isaiah 1:25); Ir Ha'emet/City of Truth (Zechariah 8:3); Klilat Yofi/Paragon of Beauty (Lamentations 2:15); Yefay Nof/ Beautiful Panorama (Psalms 48:3); and the ancient commentary of Rabbi Akiva in Sanhedrin 58a on 1 Chronicles 29:11 Hanetza/Eternity.

But what of now? The modern State of Israel endures a world willing, even anxious, to divide Jerusalem again – even as it still celebrates the reunification of Berlin – and force it to give away ancestral and biblical Jewish lands to an enemy led by a Holocaust-denier, Mahmoud Abbas, whose own Fatah organization, alongside Hamas, continues to gleefully take credit for murdering Jews.
Israeli leaders may yet, foolishly and tragically, permit Jerusalem to again be divided with barbed wire and pill boxes marking a new and hateful border, just as it was before 1967 when Jordanian Arab snipers made life a living hell for the Jewish residents, with ancient synagogues destroyed and Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives desecrated and used as latrines for the Arab Legion.
If Barack Hussein Obama has his way, and his Vice President continues to do his bidding, the ancestral Jewish homeland in Judea and Samaria will also be lost – not by the ravages of an enemy host, but, to its eternal shame, by an Israeli government acquiescing in its own national suicide; its borders reduced to a mere nine miles wide at its most populous region from the Mediterranean Sea to the foothills of the Judean mountain range – a border, which the late Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the "Auschwitz borders."
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.