Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Chanukah menorah upsets Palestinian Arabs


Elder of Ziyon

From the PA's WAFA news agency (Arabic):

Settlers have just erected a huge brass candlestick on the outskirts of the city of Nablus in the West Bank. Witnesses said that the menorah was set by a crane near the Za'tara triangle a few kilometers south of Nablus, and pointed out that this area is at the center of a number of extremist Jewish settlements.

The menorah is often used in Jewish religious rituals, and the settlers seek to impose their ideology onto the West Bank through actions such as these.

(h/t Dovid Haivri, director of the Shomron Liaison Office, who will happily accept donations to allow more public Chanukah displays to be set up in Judea and Samaria.)


Comment:
Don't you just laugh at this report. It is from an Arabic news site,slanted of course against Israel. It is written for the local Arab population but it is absurd. This is but one more example of it is ok for Islam to display its prayers, symbols and behaviors but not ok for Jews or Christians to do the same. They "get offended"-right, they do not get offended, they do get that the West is ignorant and will believe how put upon the poor Islamists Arabs are. More incitement gobbled up by the media. G-d forbid you say anything against Islam. BTW this tactic has been used for years-they know their beliefs cannot with stand scrutiny so they use threats and real violence against those who dare demonstrate the political system called Islam.

CAIR Rep's Right Idea, Wrong Message


IPT News
November 30, 2010
http://www.investigativeproject.org/2357/cair-rep-right-idea-wrong-message

There's a "pattern" we should be aware of, CAIR-Chicago's Ahmed Rehab told America during a recent appearance on Fox News. It has been Muslims who have helped "foil" recent terror plots and report extremists, he said. In many cases, that's true. Rehab and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), however, can't take credit for helping encourage this pattern of behavior.

A new IPT memo shows that though Rehab has been vocal about his commitment to fighting extremism, he has:

* Refused to wholly condemn Hamas.
* Minimized extremist pockets in U.S. society.
* Accused the government of fabricating its own terrorists.
* Alleged that terrorism prosecutions are not based on evidence, but attempts to silence Muslims and activists for Palestine.

During a 2006 episode of BBC's "Hard Talk" Rehab was asked by the BBC's Stephen Sackur if he could give a "straight forward" condemnation of Hamas. "Do I condemn the hospitals run by Hamas, or the schools that help children learn, in Hamas?" Rehab answered. "No, I don't condemn that. But I do condemn the blowing up of Tel Aviv pizzerias or cafes."

Hamas isn't the only radical group for which Rehab has offered no condemnation or a qualified one. The radical groups Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) and Revolution Muslim (RM) have both encouraged their followers to kill individuals with whom they disagree. Rehab has minimized their significance.

Just this year, RM has issued death threats against British parliamentarians and the creators of the television cartoon "South Park." Similarly, HuT leaders have encouraged Australian Muslims to kill anyone who might stand in the way of establishing an Islamic super-state. As the IPT recently reported, ideological groups like RM are shifting to a more operational role in terrorism.

After the "South Park" threat, Rehab did say that RM should be "seriously investigated," but he also implied the group might be a set-up. Rehab wrote that "whether true Muslims or agent provocateurs," the guys behind RM, "are five community outcasts."

"Most suspect the group is fraudulent," he added. Rehab hinted at a conspiracy by mentioning that the group's "mysterious leader" converted to Islam after living in Israel. CAIR's national spokesman Ibrahim Hooper amplified Rehab's argument when he claimed that, "most Muslims suspect they [RM] were set up only to make Muslims look bad."

When HuT held a Chicago conference in the summer of 2009, Rehab said he felt no need to condemn them, but that he just shouldn't support them. "I cannot claim that there is any danger to the group. As far as I'm concerned, they're a non-violent group. That's the litmus test of whether we should issue something," Rehab said.

During a series of federal terrorism prosecutions, Rehab has repeatedly criticized the government's case, often claiming entrapment or fear mongering.

He said the government radicalized "The Bronx Four," four men who have now all been convicted on seven counts related to a plot to attack a New York synagogue and the New York Air National Guard Base. "[I]t turns out that the radicalization 'tipping factor,' if you will, was none other than a paid government agent-provocateur," Rehab claimed in a piece published by the Huffington Post shortly after the men were arrested.

He backed the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and its five former officials who were found guilty of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. Rehab called the government's case against HLF "particularly worrisome because of its dubious legal arguments."

According to Rehab, the government's evidence "ranged from the mention of the word 'Hamas' by the defendants to textbook guilt by association." He even went so far as to call the HLF trial "a case against the Muslim community" during a 2007 town hall meeting in Texas.

The presiding judge saw things differently. Evidence proved that "the purpose of creating the Holy Land Foundation was as a fundraising arm for Hamas," U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis said as he sentenced the defendants to lengthy prison terms.

Evidence in the HLF trial placed two of CAIR's founding officials, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, at a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of a U.S. Hamas support network. Yet, Rehab has asserted that neither Awad nor Ahmad have ever been "tied to Hamas."

The FBI, however, cited prosecution documents from the HLF trial when it cut off contact with CAIR, concluding the organization is not an appropriate outreach partner and indicating that would continue "until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS." In addition, Solis rejected CAIR's attempt to be removed from list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case, finding "ample evidence to establish" an association between CAIR and Hamas.

Among the exhibits were transcripts from the Philadelphia meeting showing that CAIR's Ahmad called the gathering to order, saying it was a meeting of the Palestine Committee. Over the course of a weekend, committee members discussed ways to "derail" the U.S.-brokered Oslo accords, which tried to lay the foundation for a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Additionally, a Palestine Committee phone list submitted in the trial lists both Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad a.k.a. Omar Yehya. Ahmad also appears in the address book of Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook on two different pages.

Rehab has also criticized another Hamas-related prosecution involving a member of the terrorist group named Muhammad Salah. Rehab argued that Salah was "only guilty of being a bold Palestinian activist." The Muslim community, Rehab told the Chicago Tribune, saw Salah as being "caught in a political drama at a time when it's difficult to be a Palestinian or a Muslim."

Salah was named a Specially Designated Terrorist (SDT) in 1995 by the U.S. Previously, Salah pleaded guilty in an Israeli military court to participating in Hamas affairs. In 2007, Salah was found guilty of providing misleading statements to a U.S. court through his lawyers, specifically that he "never provided or delivered funds for the purpose of supporting Hamas."

"What Comes First"

Arlene Kushner

Yesterday was kaf-tet b'november -- the 29th of November. I was so busy writing about WikiLeaks that I let it pass without notice and now want to return to the significance of this date in 1947: This was the day on which the UN General Assembly voted for the partition of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

Please, view this beautiful video that gives a glimpse into the dramatic history of this day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrIjzUK0FKg (With appreciation to Chana G. for sharing it.)

Perhaps you will weep, as I did, on viewing this -- weep from deep inside your soul, with an understanding of how this all matters.
I cannot let this pass without noting that the resolution was not binding in international law, because it came from the General Assembly (only Security Council votes carry the weight of international law). In fact, it subverted the earlier Mandate for Palestine, passed in 1922 by the League of Nations, which was binding in international law, and conferred upon Britain responsibility for establishing a Jewish homeland in all of Palestine. (The United Nations, in its founding charter, later assumed legal responsibility for commitments of the League of Nations.)

Because the Arabs -- offended by a Jewish presence in the Middle East -- rioted and brought pressure to bear, the Brits reneged on their responsibility under the Mandate, threw up their hands in defeat, and turned the matter over to the UN. And then, in spite of the fact that all of Palestine had been promised to the Jews, we rejoiced to receive part. While the Arabs -- who could have had their state back then! -- rejected the partition because they wanted all of Palestine and would agree to leave nothing for the Jews. As soon as Israel was declared a state the following April (the 5th of Iyyar on the Hebrew calendar), the Arab League attacked.

Not that much has changed since then. The Palestinian Arabs, for all their pretense at "peace," still intend to have the whole thing and not share what had been Palestine between the river and the sea with Jews. Make no mistake about this.

~~~~~~~~~~

And the United Nations? Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1947 vote to partition Palestine. But since 1977, it is also, according to a resolution of the General Assembly, "the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People." No other people in the world is so recognized by the UN: not the Kurds, who are truly a people, or the people of Tibet, occupied by Chinese, or... you name it, no one else. For the UN, you see, the "Palestinian people" are uniquely special. In 2005, the General Assembly passed another resolution requesting "the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People...to organize an annual exhibit on Palestinian rights or a cultural event in cooperation with the Permanent Observer mission of Palestine to the UN."

Dearly, my friends, do I wish the democracies of the world would pick up and walk out of the UN and take their annual dues with them. This international organization has become a travesty of all that is fair and decent.

~~~~~~~~~~

Before leaving the subject of the UN, I want to share one more video -- this from Anne Bayefsky's "Eye on the UN."

As Bayefsky explains:

"The Obama administration joined the UN Human Rights Council in one of its first foreign policy moves. As justification for what it labeled "principled engagement and strategic multilateralism," top administration officials pointed to the Council's new Universal Periodic Review (UPR) system. They called the UPR a "good mechanism" (Brimmer, Assistant Secretary of State) and an "important change (Koh, State Department Legal Advisor).

"On Friday, November 5, 2010, senior American representatives went to Geneva to participate in the first UPR-review by the Council of the human rights record of the United States."

Be forewarned: when you see this it may make you sick to your stomach. Sick, because of the obscenity of UN behavior, but also because of the groveling of the representatives of the US. What has America become?

Please view this to the end, to see the American response to a human rights critique of the US by the likes of Cuba, Egypt, Qatar, Iran, China, and North Korea. (Sound crazy? I kid you not.)

Share this broadly so American citizens can be informed of what is happening. Not many will know about this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuB9UeQJVwM

~~~~~~~~~~

WikiLeaks. The reports -- drawn as they are from 250,000 documents -- will go on and on. I'm sure I'll come back to this many times. Here, as we're on the subject of how Obama handles matters, I want to cite from the analysis by Herb Keinon -- which reflects upon issues I addressed yesterday -- in today's JPost. "Burying the linkage between the peace process and Iran":

"Since the earliest days of Barack Obama’s presidency, there have been...major conceptual differences between how Israel and how the US administration view the Middle East.

"...While the US maintains that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum is the key to unlocking peace in the Middle East and getting other countries in the region on board to help stop the Iranian threat, Israel’s position is to first deal with Iran...

'Israel’s logic is that Hamas and Hezbollah – Iran’s two proxies – will be much less able to gum up the works whenever diplomatic progress looms if Iran is defanged.

"And along comes the cache of WikiLeaks documents and reveals that Obama’s linkage of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran is nothing short of fiction – a fiction he and his key aides have been spinning since the beginning of his tenure. (Emphasis added)

"At his very first White House meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in May 2009, that famous meeting in which Obama called for a complete halt to all settlement construction, Obama was asked what he thought about Israel’s position that only if the Iranian threat were solved could there be real progress on the Palestinian track.

“'Well, let me say this,' Obama said. 'There’s no doubt that it is difficult for any Israeli government to negotiate in a situation in which they feel under immediate threat. That’s not conducive to negotiations. And as I’ve said before, I recognize Israel’s legitimate concerns about the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon when they have a president who has in the past said that Israel should not exist. That would give any leader of any country pause.

“'Having said that,' the president went on, 'if there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians – between the Palestinians and the Israelis – then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.'

"And that position, that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue – that stopping settlement construction – would somehow magically mollify the Arab world and get it to put its shoulder to the wheel regarding Iran has been a constant thread throughout the Obama regime. Here it was popularly dubbed 'Yitzhar for Bushehr.'

"What the WikiLeaks cache revealed, however, was that this argument was a fabrication. There was no need to crack the Palestinian-Israeli nut before getting the 'moderate' Arab nations in the region...on board regarding Iran, because those nations were already fully camped out on board the deck of the ship, just waiting for action against Iran.

"The following quotes from Arab leaders culled from the WikiLeaks trove do not exactly portray a picture of leaders who need any further enticements before 'getting on board...'

"• King Hamad of Bahrain was quoted in 2009 as saying, 'That program [the Iranian nuclear program] must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.'

"• Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed in 2009 urged the US, according to another cable, not to appease Teheran and said, 'Ahmadinejad is Hitler.'

"• Maj-Gen. Muhammad al-Assar, assistant to the Egyptian defense minister, was quoted in a cable in 2010 as saying that 'Egypt views Iran as a threat to the region.'

"Obama was obviously well aware of the views of these leaders, most of whom he personally met, yet he continued to propagate what he must have known to be a falsehood – that these countries would only sign on to sanctions and otherwise support efforts to neutralize Iran if there were progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track." (Emphasis added)
http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/OpinionAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=197286

Keinon says Obama muddled matters by linking the two issues and asks why he felt compelled to do so. I asked a different question yesterday: why Obama turned a deaf ear to Muslim pleas for action on Iran. The question Keinon poses seems to be easier to answer. By conflating the two issues, he hoped to put the screws to Israel and secure that much-coveted "peace agreement."

~~~~~~~~~~

Majid Shahriari, a top nuclear scientist in Iran, who was working on a major project, was killed yesterday when bombs attached to his car went off.

The Iranians, as might be expected, are blaming the Zionists. The Israeli government has nothing to say.

All I can say is, gee, the Iranians seem to be having a hard time lately.

~~~~~~~~~~

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.


see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info

Borders and Security First

November 30, 2010 by Rabbi Michael (Micky) Boyden

J Street is asking its supporters to sign yet another petition, this time urging President Obama “to take the next step toward realizing the goal (of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) by focusing on ‘Borders and Security First’.”

Unlike J Street, which operates out of Washington DC, I live with my family just four miles from the Palestinian town of Qualqilia, and, so, it goes without saying that I have as much of a vested interest as anyone in hoping that the vision of a two state solution can be realised. That having been said, J Street’s petition is simplistic, reflects muddled thinking and seems more intent upon supporting President Obama than in addressing the real issues.

It calls upon the President “to take the next step toward realizing the goal” of a two-state solution. However, having already failed to persuade Saudi Arabia to take any confidence building measures and having been unsuccessful in persuading the Palestinians to enter into direct negotiations with Israel, it is not clear how the U.S. Administration is in any position to take a “next step”.

Indeed, all that has happened is that, as a result of having demanded a moratorium on construction, President Obama has simply played into the hands of the Palestinians and provided them with yet a further reason for staying away from the negotiating table.

However, the problems with the J Street petition go deeper than that. How can one talk of borders and security with the Palestinians when there are clearly two separate and conflicting political entities on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip? The petition chooses to ignore the facts on the ground and reflects a fantasy world of wishful thinking. Is there really any likelihood that Mahmoud Abbas would do a deal with Israel while leaving the one and a half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip out in the cold? Given Hamas’ charter calling for the destruction of Israel, this is clearly a non-starter.

When the petition talks about “Palestinians”, does it really mean just the Palestinian Authority? If so, why doesn’t it say so? Incidentally, it is that same Palestinian Authority that claimed earlier this month that the Western Wall was, in fact, part of the Al-Aksa Mosque and that “no Muslim or Arab or Palestinian had the right to give up one stone” of the “Al Buraq Wall”.

And if that were not sufficient cause for concern, then one might also wish to consider the Israel Project poll published earlier this month, which showed that only 23 per cent of Palestinians believe that “Israel has a permanent right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.” As opposed to that finding, some 60 per cent favoured the continuation of the armed struggle and expressed the view that “the real goal should be to start with two states but then move it to all being one Palestinian state.”

As opposed to that view, one might want to take into account today’s WikiLeaks’ exposure that “Netanyahu expressed support for the concept of land swaps, and emphasized that he did not want to govern the West Bank and Gaza but rather to stop attacks from being launched from there.”

The J Street petition affirms that its supporters have been inspired by President Obama’s commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the question is not whether J Street has been inspired but rather whether the Palestinians share the same aspirations. And that is an entirely different matter.

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Zionist?

Alana Goodman - 11.30.2010

We know that the Obama administration has been far from friendly to Israel — but is this sentiment now influencing policy at the IRS?

The Jewish group Z Street, which claims that its request for tax-exempt status was delayed by the IRS because of its support Israel, has been engulfed in a legal battle with the government agency for months. The case heated up last week after the organization introduced a letter that appeared to show an IRS agent giving unusual scrutiny to another Jewish group that had also applied for 501(c)3 status. Among the questions asked by the agent: “Does your organization support the existence of the land of Israel?” Z Street said that this is further evidence that the IRS has started targeting pro-Israel groups. Ben Smith at Politico has the details of the letter:

A Pennsylvania Jewish group that has claimed the Internal Revenue Service is targeting pro-Israel groups introduced in federal court today a letter from an IRS agent to another, unnamed organization that tax experts said was likely outside the usual or appropriate scope of an IRS inquiry.

“Does your organization support the existence of the land of Israel?” IRS agent Tracy Dornette wrote the organization, according to this week’s court filing, as part of its consideration of the organizations application for tax exempt status. “Describe your organization’s religious belief system toward the land of Israel.”

But are these inquiries simply inappropriate, or are they evidence of an official campaign against Zionist organizations? A couple of tax attorneys consulted by Smith said they found the questions to be out of line:

“The claims go far beyond what should be the IRS’s role,” said Paul Caron a University of Cincinnati law professor and the author of TaxProf Blog.

Ellen Aprill, a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles said the second question was “appropriate” in the context of an application seeking a tax exemption on religious grounds.

“The first one is not the way I would want any of my agents to do it,” she said.

Some have wondered why Z Street is waging a public fight against the IRS instead of handling the tax issue privately. But Z Street founder Lori Lowenthal Marcus told me that her main worry here isn’t her own group’s tax-exempt status — it’s whether the government is holding pro-Israel groups to an unfair standard.

“My concern is that people are sort of veering off into tax world instead of Constitutional law,” said Lowenthal Marcus, a former constitutional lawyer, who added that she believes the actions of the IRS could constitute a First Amendment violation.

But apart from Z Street and the unnamed Jewish group mentioned in the letter, other organizations have yet to step up with claims that they were treated unfairly by the IRS.

Lowenthal Marcus said this doesn’t surprise her and noted that taking on the IRS can be an intimidating task. “Who’s going to challenge them?” she asked.

The current evidence is hardly enough to prove that there has been an official change in IRS policy toward pro-Israel groups, but the letter produced by Z Street shows that the case definitely deserves further inquiry. There is precedent for the IRS denying tax-exempt status to groups that clash with the government’s official policy — the Bob Jones University case is the most prominent example. But while the Obama administration has certainly taken an unfriendly stance toward Israel, this position could hardly be characterized as “official” government policy.

Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media also argues that this issue warrants a public investigation and suggests that this might be the task for a Republican-chaired House Oversight Committee: “What must now be publicly investigated — more work, perhaps, for Rep. Darrell Issa, likely the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — is, as Z Street put it, whether or not the IRS is ‘improperly considering the political viewpoint of applicants’ and engaging in ‘clear viewpoint discrimination.’”

Amnesty doesn't think the intifada ever happened

Elder of Ziyon

Reading the latest Amnesty UK report slamming Israel on not doing enough for Gaza is an unreal experience. Sprinkled throughout the report are comparisons and statistics that simply ignore the second intifada and Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, all for the singular purpose of making Israel look as bad as possible.

Here are some examples:

Gaza’s economic output per capita is today 40% lower than it was in 1994, at the start of the Oslo peace process. Why are they comparing Gaza's economy today with its 1994 economy? The implication is that Israel's commitment to Oslo is a sham, as the economy of Gaza has gone down - due to Israeli actions - since that agreement was signed.

However, the economy in the territories was doign extraordinarily well in the years 1994-1999. Real GDP growth in 1997 was 12.2%, in 1998 it was 11.8% and in 1999 it was 8.9%. And then in 2000, with the intifada, it plummeted: -5.4% in 2000, -15.4% in 2001 and -9.4% in 2002. I don't have the Gaza figures separately, but the closing of the Erez industrial zone and the border closure because of the constant terror attacks threw tens of thousands of Gazans out of work. The withdrawal from Gaza cost many more jobs as well. The reason that Gaza's economy is in shambles is because of a policy of terror that was created by the Palestinian Arabs, not because of Israel's reaction to save its citizen's lives. But to Amnesty, the intifada never happened, and Israel is still "occupying" a territory in which is has no people.

Overall ban on exit and entry still in place. No expansion of the few exceptional categories of Palestinians allowed to travel through Israeli controlled crossings. Number of exits below 1% of 2000 levels.

Again, Amnesty ignored the terror spree and rockets from Gaza as a reason why Israel doesn't want Gazans to have the free access to Israel that they had before 2000.

But beyond that, even though the paper is entitled "Dashed Hopes - Continuation of the Gaza Blockade," it doesn't mention Egypt's role in the blockade - or Egypt's opening of the Rafah border. In this case, Amnesty says that the number of exits through Israeli crossings is down - but they ignore Egypt's crossings which has increased Gazans' mobility. Why do they only speak about Israeli crossings in this statistic, and why do they ignore Egypt's role in blockading Gaza? The only possible answer is because the report is not meant to help Gazans but to castigate Israel.

Even in cases where the real statistics can make Israel look bad, Amnesty specifically bends the numbers to make Israel look worse:

In fact, the UN reports that Gaza requires 670,000 truckloads of construction material, while only an average of 715 of these truckloads have been received per month since the ‘easing’ was announced.


Even if we accept that the UN statistic is accurate, Amnesty is comparing the numbers of the total amount needed with what Israel allowed in an average month. Amnesty could have said that Israel allowed 3600 truckloads of construction material since the easing - but that makes Israel sound better than saying "715 truckloads per month."

Amnesty also says that "Access to around 35% of Gaza’s farmland...remains restricted by the Israeli ‘buffer zone’," a nebulous claim that seems to confuse "arable land" with "farmland."

Amnesty's recommendations also ignore the human rights of Israelis to live in safety:

The international community must do its part to ensure that its repeated
appeals to end the blockade are finally heeded.

1) Launch a new, concerted diplomatic initiative for an immediate,unconditional and complete lifting of the blockade, including:
• allowing movement of people including humanitarian staff into and out of Gaza;
• allowing exports from Gaza;
• allowing entry of construction materials including those for the private sector;
• allowing entry of raw materials;
• expanding operations of the crossings;
• lifting restrictions on fuel imports;
• ensuring access to Gaza’s agricultural land and fishing grounds and the protection of civilians in these areas.

And, if Amnesty's recommendations were to be implemented, unrestricted imports of weapons and long-range missiles would be allowed into Gaza as well.

Not to mention that the only way to have unrestricted movement of goods to and from Gaza would mean no crossings at all - simply tear down the fence and let terrorists have all the access they want to export their human bombs to Israel.

The entire report does not use the word "intifada" or "terror" or "rockets" once. The context of Israel's relationship with Gaza in light of the actions of Hamas and its allies is almost completely missing. And, as we have seen, Amnesty's recommendations would directly translate into a new reign of terror for residents of southern Israel - and beyond.

Apparently, Amnesty and the other "human rights" organizations that prepared this biased report are not the least bit interested in the human rights of Israelis.

Won't You Please Hug a Terrorist ?


Daniel Greenfield

The working theory among the think-tanks, academic campuses, newsrooms and diplomatic offices is that terrorists are just like us. Except depressed and insecure about it. Filled with self-loathing and in desperate need of anger management classes. If only some kind soul could plop them down on an analyst's couch and stuff them chock full of Prozac or Paxil, hug them without letting go, while reading passages from Jonathan Livingston Seagull-- then they'd be just as right as rain. And twice as wet. The news media has already activated its brilliant powers of long distance psychoanalysis on the Oregon Christmas Tree Bomber, and diagnosed him as suffering from his parent's divorce and vicious Oregonian college bullies. Sure Mohamed O. Mohamud might say he's a Muslim terrorist who wants to kill Americans-- but the good people at NBC know better. He's not a terrorist. He's just misunderstood. Deep down inside him, there's gushing oil wells of untapped good.

Mohamed O. Mohamud joins Fort Hood terrorist Major Nidal Hassan (who came down not with Muslim Murder Madness, but a virulent airborne form of PTSD) and Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad (suffering from uncontrollable Foreclosure Fever) on the analyst's couch. Another misunderstood victim of poorly articulated rage that led him to snap and try to kill a whole bunch of people, who coincidentally happened not to be Muslim.

For a depressing stretch of the 20th century, sociologists insisted there was no such thing as a criminal, only a set of responses to social inequities. Robbers, rapists and murderers were just lashing out because of social discrimination in an unfair class system. They weren't depraved, they were deprived. The solution was not to put a beat cop on every street. What was the use. You couldn't fight 'crime' anyway. No more than you can fight 'terrorism'. All you could do was expand welfare programs, pour money into the inner cities and turn a blind eye to crime. Then the improvements in social conditions would end crime naturally.

At some point after the millionth mugging victim and Dukakis getting taken down by Willie Horton, the Democratic party finally realized that no amount of Donahue and Oprah was going to counter the popular demand to get tough on crime. But what didn't work for crime, is now being put to work for terrorism.

Terrorists are never terrorists. And never Muslim. Even when they're both. They might dress up like Osama bin Laden, quote from the Koran and curse the Great Satan-- but the blowdried anchors in their dollhouse news sets will still blame the whole thing on teenage bullying or PTSD in the water. And who are you really going to believe, the terrorists who happily explain their motives, or a newscaster with two advanced degrees in reading things off a teleprompter?

And so it turns out that the terrorists are human beings just like us who never got enough love. Who are too insecure not to be terrorists. Our job is to make them feel more comfortable and give them a confidence boost. Pat them on the back and tell them how wonderful Islam is and how superior Muslim culture is to our rotten degraded lifestyle. "No need to feel bad, Ahmed. I only wish I could murder my own sister every time I catch her talking to a man." "Leila, I would give up my career and the freedom to travel without a male guardian's permission in a split second just to be able to wear a bag on my head all day."

Because what terrorists need most is appeasement. Appeasement is apparently Muslim Prozac. Give them enough of it, and they'll no longer want to behead us or blow us up. Or so the politically correct theory goes. And there you have our international affairs in a nutshell.

This February, Senator John Kerry met with the Emir of Qatar, whose family is intimately tied up with Al Qaeda. And whose government is directing millions of dollars a year to Al Qaeda. Naturally the Senator from Massachusetts didn't waste his host's time on anything as picayune as a request to please stop funding the terrorists who are murdering Americans. We are talking about the nation's premier windsurfing cheese-eating boarding-school attending diplomatic Frankensenator here after all. Instead he wanted the good Emir's help on resolving that whole Middle East peace thing between Israel and the Muslim terrorists.

And the Emir, in between mailing off the latest check to "Sheikh Usama, Forbidden Cave of Mystery, Afghanistan, 90210", was more than happy to oblige.

Painstakingly the Emir explained that Hamas was actually ready to make peace with Israel. But it couldn't come out and say so. Then it would lose popular support and be overthrown. Israel would just have to go ahead and appease Hamas anyway-- and Hamas would pretend not to notice, but really it would notice, and stop the violence. The Emir of Qatar was actually saying that Hamas is more moderate than the average Palestinian Arab Muslim-- a scary, but not particularly surprising revelation.

If Senator Kerry had managed to hang on to more than one single unbotoxed brain cell in that frightening skull of his, he might have asked what the point of a secret peace agreement is-- when the people on whose behalf you're signing it, can't be told about it. But as a good democrat, he was probably already on the same page as a petty tyrant like the Emir in believing that the ignorant rabble have no business knowing what their enlightened leaders are up to anyway.

Pushing his luck further, Senator Kerry asked the Emir what could be done about the extremists. The Emir told him that if Israel gives the strategic high ground of the Golan Heights to Syria, then Syria will help Hamas leaders "make tough choices". Trying to control the hysterical laughter bubbling up in his throat, the Emir told Kerry that, the "return of the Golan is important not just to Syria but also to Hizballah and Iran". Which it of course is. Not because any of them give a damn about the skiing possibilities of the Golan, but because it's a fantastic position for bombing Israel.

Yet Kerry swallowed all of this. Probably nodded knowingly. Didn't blink when the Emir suggested that Ahmadinejad would suddenly change his tune on Israel if only Syria got the Golan Heights. And went off back to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he chairs with his information safely tucked away in the recesses of his equine cranium.

The depressing pattern in all this lunacy is that we've decided that the only way to deal with terrorists is to give them things. Give them some land and money, and they'll be your pet terrorists. Then you can take them out for walks, and hug them and kiss them, and give them long baths. But not only do the terrorists need material things, they also need constant reassurance. You can't just negotiate with the terrorists. You've also got to negotiate with the enablers. And the enablers need land and money too. If you want to talk to Hamas, you've got to give Syria the Golan Heights. And then Hezbollah and Iran will want things too.

Negotiating with terrorists is now like signing a crazy reclusive artist to a record label. You have to woo his handlers and stroke his ego. Reassure him that everyone likes him. And that he won't have to "sell out" by promising not to kill people anymore. All he'll have to do is wink and nod, and that'll be as good as a signature.

We've gone beyond appeasement and into pure toadying. Because the poor terrorists with their bruised egos have been hurt too many times. They don't show up at negotiations anymore. You have to pamper them first to even get them to show up. Abbas needs a Settlement Freeze forever, or he won't even deign to arrive and accept the next batch of Israeli concessions. Hamas can't even show up to negotiate, but if Israel throws its most vital high ground to its buddy, the genocidal optometrist in Syria, then maybe Hamas will put a halt to the violence. For a week or two.

Locally and globally, we're deep in the appeasement business. So deep that we've put aside even the appearance of dignity. We're no longer ashamed of flattering and pandering to the murderers of our own people. We're proud of it. Our political and cultural leaders treat such behavior as a mark of sophistication. Only ignorant bible and gun clinging savages want to kill terrorists. The enlightened among us get down on their knees and search for the nearest available Mecca bound posterior.

Bombing terrorists is old and outdated. Love-bombing terrorists is the new hotness. Especially Muslim terrorists on American soil. They're all walking wounded. Victims of divorce, vicious Oregonian bullying, home foreclosures and airborne PTSD. Discriminated against in airports. Hounded by FBI agents for doing such simple things as trying to maim and murder thousands at a Christmas tree lightning ceremony or outside a showing of the Lion King. Persecuted just for being who they are. It's enough to make even the coldest Amnesty International member with a heart of taffy, weep.

So we've got to make them feel better by constantly praising Islam, letting them build an obscene Victory Mosque near Ground Zero, and jailing anyone who criticizes Islam. Then maybe they'll stop being so insecure and they won't feel that they need to kill us in order to feel good about themselves. Those poor miserable terrorist bastards. Sobbing into their keffiyahs, stuffing the hole in their heart with falafel and C4. Trying to compensate for their unhappy childhood by acting out and killing a few thousand people here and there. How can we not, like President William Jefferson Clinton, feel their pain?

And the answer is so very simple. No one's ever really shown them some love or told them they care. Maybe when we've given up all our freedoms and surrendered all the way. Then they'll finally realize that we mean it after all. That we really truly and completely like them. All the way. When we've appeased them so much, given them so much that we have nothing left to give, then we will finally have atoned for our selfishness, our miserable globalism, our wicked imperialism and consumerism and nationalism, and all our filthy isms. And it's so easy. All we have to do is hug a terrorist. And not mind the bulky dynamite strapped to his chest.

Another Mysteriously Motivated Attack


Mona Charen

A couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the annual hajj, in which 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims fulfill their obligation to travel to Mecca, prominent Muslim clerics from Asia, Africa, and Europe, along with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq denounced violence in the name of Islam and issued a manifesto, signed by all, declaring that "murder of innocents is never justified and violates the teachings of Islam." f you haven't heard about this, it's because it never happened. I conjured it to clarify the nature of the problem. Well-intentioned non-Muslims never tire of asserting that Islam is a religion of peace. Muslims themselves are a lot less forthright. (The Council on American-Islamic Relations has issued formal denunciations of terrorism, but coming from an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing case, such pious declarations are worthless.)

Still, before considering the response to the latest outrage perpetrated by a jihadi convinced that mass murdering Americans gathered to light the Portland, Ore., Christmas tree would land him in Paradise, it's important to pause and notice that while Muslim leaders leave a lot to be desired, average Muslims are heroes in this story.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the FBI was alerted to 19-year-old Somali-born Mohamed Osman Mohamud's increasing radicalization by someone who knew him well. Other sources suggest that Mohamud had quarreled with his family and felt "betrayed" that they did not support his violent ambitions. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that one or both parents (both of whom, by the way, are described as loving America) alerted the FBI.

Further, the elaborate sting orchestrated by the FBI had to involve agents posing as Islamic radicals. I'm guessing here, but it seems unlikely that the agents were non-Muslims. There are probably too many subtle things a non-Muslim would get wrong. So kudos to whoever tipped the FBI to the danger, and to the (presumably) Muslim agents who saw the thing to fruition and arrest.

On the other hand, those Americans who think that respecting the majority of non-violent Muslims requires a mealy-mouthed denial of reality are doing no one any favors.

Some criminal lit a fire at a Corvallis, Ore., mosque a day or so after Mohamud's arrest. This elicited a scolding declaration from the U.S. Attorney, Dwight Holton. Did he denounce the resort to violence by anyone? No. He intoned, "The fact is that violent extremists come from all religions and no religion at all. For one person to blame a group, if that's what happened here, is uniquely anti-American and will be pursued with the full force of the Justice Department."

Of course whole groups should not be blamed for the actions of individuals. Yes, the Justice Department should pursue the arsonist. And, yes, violent extremists can be motivated by all sorts of things. But it is fatuous to pretend that Islam is no more likely than Buddhism, Christianity or Judaism to produce mass killers. When a Christian says "Praise God," people nod politely or in agreement. When a Muslim shouts "Allahu Akbar," everybody ducks.

If a Christian or a Jew suddenly becomes more devout, there is very little chance that he or she will become violent. Quite the contrary. By contrast, religious zeal among Muslims is often expressed with bombs and the blood of innocents. Thousands of imams worldwide preach violent jihad, Islamic schools instill contempt for other faiths, and terrorists actively recruit killers willing to commit massacres for Allah.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder cannot bring himself to say, under questioning before Congress, that terrorists might be motivated by "radical Islam." The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security banned the words "jihad" and "mujahadeen" from official statements about terrorism. And the president removed the term "Islamic extremism" from the National Security Strategy.

Why is it so hard to tell the truth? The truth is that while the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding, there is a powerful strain within the religion that encourages murder and mayhem. Muslims, sooner or later, must deal with this, along with the rest of the world. But to suggest that acknowledging Muslim extremism amounts to bigotry, as this administration seems to, is both dishonest and cowardly.
Mona Charen
Mona Charen
Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist, political analyst and author of Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help .

The Moral Argument Against BDS

Naftali Balanson

New Israel Fund (NIF) Director of Communications Naomi Paiss “Don’t Divest; Invest” makes an important statement by rejecting the global boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and its accompanying “apartheid” rhetoric. Paiss reaffirms the notion that BDS is totally incongruous with Jewish values, and demonstrates that progressives within the community cannot tolerate its “inflammatory and counter-productive” agenda. Her piece is a sharp blow to the very legitimacy of BDS campaigns, particularly those conducted by Jewish groups (see “Peace Process or Land Grab?” by Rebecca Vilkomerson). However, although her argument is compelling, Paiss significantly understates the case against BDS. Yes, attempts to isolate Israel “penalize the innocent along with the guilty, push moderates towards right-wing nationalism, and spur rejection of progressive and humanist values.” But, more importantly, BDS is the antithesis of universal human rights values, rooted in immoral double standards that single out and condemn Israel as a pariah state. The BDS movement also rejects the very existence of Israel as a Jewish entity. Inasmuch as BDS activists seek to eliminate Jewish self-determination, the movement (as a movement, not necessarily every individual linked to it) is anti-Semitic.

The core goals of the BDS agenda expose the true nature of the movement. One of them is the “rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes,” falsely portrayed as a “precept of international law.” There is no such legal obligation, nor is the right of return a peaceful goal. Rather, it is an attempt to reverse partition, refight 1948 – at least demographically – and overturn the right to Jewish sovereignty.

It is, therefore, no surprise that proponents of BDS resort to racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric. A particularly offensive and common theme – exemplified by the hate speech of PACBI’s Omar Barghouti, Electonic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, and others – is identifying Israel with Nazi Germany and the IDF with Nazi soldiers. The Palestinian Christian non-governmental organization (NGO) known as Sabeel claims that “Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him,” persecuted by an “Israeli government crucifixion system.” These pronouncements revive classic anti-Semitic theological themes.

BDS methods are also emblematic of the anti-Semitic goals. BDS targets Israel, its businesses, academics, cultural activities, and even companies that do business with it – not the settlements. This is an extension of the Arab boycott and refusal to recognize Israel. Changes to specific policies or actions of the Israeli government will not end the attacks, and they will continue until the maximalist demands are met – the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.

Yet, these realities are nowhere to be found in Paiss’ discussion, which identifies “tactical” and strategic problems with BDS: it “embodies the message that Israel cannot and will not change itself…it is inflammatory and counter-productive.” But even if BDS messaging were improved and there was no backlash among “besieged” Israelis, BDS would still be immoral and inherently wrong.

Given NIF’s lack of a moral argument against BDS, it is not surprising to learn that NIF is misguided when it comes to funding groups that are active in the global BDS movement. For example, the Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) has received significant grants from NIF since 2006. CWP runs a project – “Who Profits?” – which lists Israeli and international companies that are located in or directly profit from investments in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The project was“initiated in response to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel”and is used by BDS activists to identify corporations to target with anti-Israel divestment. Who Profits? receives tax-deductible donations through NIF’s offices in the US, UK, and Switzerland.

Contrary to the façade of targeted boycotts against “products and services that come from the settlements” that Paiss endorses in her article, CWP attacks the institutions of Israeli business because “it’s impossible to separate the occupation economy… from the normative economy of Israel.” In other words, when we say “occupation,” we mean all of Israel. (This follows directly from Palestinian rhetoric that labels Tel Aviv and Haifa “settlements” and views all of Israel as built on stolen land.) Whereas Paiss praises the Israeli artists who refuse to perform in Ariel, the logic of BDS dictates boycotting all Israeli artists, even the boycotters. In the words of the umbrella Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, “Israelis who oppose the occupation…must be willing to accept that there is a price to pay to end the colonial oppression being perpetrated in their names. …The price that some conscientious Israelis may pay as an unavoidable byproduct of the boycott is quite modest when compared to the price Palestinians have to pay for the lack of boycotts or any similarly effective pressures on Israel.”

Who Profits, in fact, has become a major resource for the BDS movement, providing names of corporations that CWP alleges have connections to the settlements. An October report, for instance, named “almost all of the Israeli commercial banks” and accused them of “having a central role in the perpetuation of the current unlawful and unjust conditions.” For Who Profit’s primary audience, BDS activists, this publication is another target list, likely to be used by CWP and its cohorts to lobby European financial bodies in favor of removing Israeli banks from their portfolios.

Another recipient of major NIF funding, Adalah (over $1.1 million since 2006), plays a different, but equally damaging role in the global de-legitimization campaign. Officials from this NGO co-authored “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?,” a study that accuses Israel of placing Palestinians in “reserves and ghettoes” and criminalizes Israeli self-defense measures as “inhumane act[s] of apartheid…perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another.” As noted by Paiss, the BDS movement is premised upon the “historically inaccurate and inflammatory” comparison to apartheid South Africa. Yet Adalah continues to benefit from NIF’s support.

Adalah also promotes BDS by spearheading efforts “to portray Israel as an inherent undemocratic state and use that as part of campaigning internationally.” Indeed, in October 2009, an Adalah representative told the UN Human Rights Council that “the Israeli legal and judicial systems have consistently failed in providing any legal remedies for the Palestinian people.” Considering that Adalah has petitioned Israeli courts on Palestinian rights issues dozens of times, including numerous victories in the Supreme Court, the crude statement made in the UN is particularly disingenuous.

The Need for Coherent Funding Guidelines NIF has set itself a noble, yet difficult mission: to support and improve Israel, enable and engender healthy criticism, but repudiate those that want to isolate and delegitimize Israel. However, as noted, these important goals are not always reflected in NIF’s funding decisions.

This contradiction reinforces the need to establish firm funding guidelines that reflect ethical norms, best practices, and the organization’s vision. As noted by Washington political strategist Steve Rabinowitz, “Non-profits need guidelines, because who has the time to think about this in the heat of the moment?”

For the mainstream Jewish community, BDS crosses a “red line” of acceptable activities. For instance, in February 2010 the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco announced a policyto refuse funding to groups that “advocate for, or endorse, undermining the legitimacy of Israel as a secure independent, democratic Jewish state, including through participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in whole or in part.”

Similarly, in an endeavor with national implications, the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) in partnership with the Jewish Council of Public Affairs (JCPA) has launched the Israel Action Network to fight de-legitimization and BDS. There is a broad consensus that BDS must be confronted and defeated, not defended and funded.

However, when NIF announced its “funding guidelines” in September 2010, the question of BDS was glaringly absent. Naomi Paiss’ op-ed, described by Zeek as the “first public response from the New Israel Fund on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS),” is a step toward moral clarity. Perhaps she is announcing a policy whereby boycotts of “products and services made in the settlements” and “opposing government expenditures there” are acceptable, if not advised, for its grantees. But, support for the wider BDS movement against Israel, as epitomized by CWP’s activities, is out-of-bounds.

Even before Paiss’ article, NIF had taken principled stands against BDS, including public opposition to the UC Berkeley divestment proposal – which, ironically, was backed by CWP. NIF must now acknowledge the immorality of the BDS movement and its incongruity with human rights values, and end all support for its grantees – such as CWP and Adalah – that engage in BDS and pursue anti-Israel de-legitimization campaigns.

Naftali Balanson is managing editor of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institution that promotes accountability and transparency among non-governmental organizations that claim to protect human rights in the Middle East.

WikiLeaks: Netanyahu – Yes to Land Swaps, No to Arab Immigration

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to give up Israeli land to the PA in return for major Jewish population centers in Judea and Samaria but drew the “red line” at the so-called “right of return,” according to diplomatic messages exposed by WikiLeaks.

Like most of the WikiLeaks revelations, the significance of the Prime Minister’s positions is that they now are direct quotes from Netanyahu rather than assumptions from “anonymous sources.” The idea of a land swap has been trumpeted by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) and accepted by U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell. Under the proposal, Israel would hand over to the Arabs some land from within Israel's 1949 borders in return for a Palestinian Authority state's recognition that areas such as Gush Etzion and Maaleh Adumim would be under Israeli sovereignty.

However, an Israeli official told reporters that in the Feb. 26, 2009 cable, dated two weeks after the Prime Minister was elected, "Netanyahu [only] expressed support for the concept of land swaps, and emphasized that he did not want to govern the West Bank and Gaza but rather to stop attacks from being launched from there." He added that Prime Minister Netanyahu himself “never raised the issue of land swaps and the telegram does not quote him as saying so.”

The issue of immigration of foreign Arabs is called by the Arab world the “right of return,” a term similar to that used in Israel for the right of Jews around the world to immigrate and become citizens of Israel.

No serious Israeli leader has accepted the concept, which would in effect reduce Jews to a minority in the country as a result of the immigration of approximately five million Arabs now living in foreign countries. The Arab world says they should be eligible to live in Israel because they, their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents lived in the country before fleeing in 1948.

Arab armies had encouraged them to leave during the War for Independence, promising them they would return quickly after an expected annihilation of the small and fledgling Israeli army.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, according to a leaked cable, said he “would never allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to Israel. Israel, after all, was not asking for the right of Jews to return to Baghdad or Cairo. Israel will only have a peace partner when the Palestinians drop the right of return.”

He added that accepting Arab immigration and dividing the capital in Jerusalem “would only whet the appetite of radical Islam. The 1967 borders were not the solution since Israel was the only force blocking radical Islam's agenda of overrunning Jordan and Saudi Arabia."

Misdiagnosing Barack Obama - to our own great peril

The naive, the misinformed, the wishful thinkers and the useful idiots of the world believe Barack Obama is simply inexperienced, himself naive, misguided, surrounded by malcontents and destroyers (who, he himself, appointed), or a humanist, an idealist - whatever rationale remotely available to explain his bizarre behavior.

Dinesh D’Souza, President of King’s College, New York City, paints a far different picture in his astute, well documented article from Forbes Magazine, September 27, 2010.

It is excerpted below but should be read in its entirety. The article is titled, Obama’s Problem with Business, but, in all deference to D’Souza, should more accurately be titled, Obama’s Problem with Us.

Jerome S. Kaufman

Obama’s Problem with Business.
By Dinesh D’Souza

Barack Obama is the most anti-business president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the U.S. government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's bizarre actions mystify critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." What does this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero

....What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anti-colonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

Obama Sr. writes, I know a great deal about anti-colonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anti-colonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century.

Anti-colonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anti-colonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder.

Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neo-colonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anti-colonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

He wants neo-colonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to de-colonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anti-colonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anti-colonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

....In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except Obama. He is the last anti-colonial. Emerging economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, it has to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Dinesh D'Souza is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).

The lunatic who thinks he's Barack Obama

Spengler

Napoleon was a lunatic who thought he was Napoleon, and the joke applies to the 44th United States president with a vengeance. What doesn't the president know, and when didn't he know it? American foreign policy turned delusional when Barack Obama took office, and the latest batch of leaks suggest that the main source of the delusion is sitting in the Oval Office.
rom the first batch of headlines there is little in WikiLeaks' 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that a curious surfer would not have known from the Internet. We are shocked - shocked - to discover that the Arab Gulf states favor an invasion of Iran; that members of the Saudi royal family fund terrorism; that Pakistan might sell nuclear material to malefactors; that Saudi Arabia will try to acquire nuclear weapons if Iran does; that Israel has been itching for an air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities; that the Russian government makes use of the Russian mob; that Turkish

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tilts towards radical Islam; or that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi mixes politics and business.

American career diplomats have been telling their masters in the Obama administration that every theater of American policy is in full-blown rout, forwarding to Washington the growing alarm of foreign leaders.
In April 2008, for example, Saudi Arabia's envoy to the US Adel al-Jubeir told General David Petraeus that King Abdullah wanted the US "to cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake" and "recalled the king's frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program".

Afghani President Hamid Karzai warned the US that Pakistan was forcing Taliban militants to keep fighting rather than accept his peace offers. Pakistani government officials, other cables warn, might sell nuclear material to terrorists.

The initial reports suggest that the US State Department has massive evidence that Obama's approach - "engaging" Iran and coddling Pakistan - has failed catastrophically. The crisis in diplomatic relations heralded by the press headlines is not so much a diplomatic problem - America's friends and allies in Western and Central Asia have been shouting themselves hoarse for two years - but a crisis of American credibility.

Not one Muslim government official so much as mentioned the issues that have occupied the bulk of Washington's attention during the past year, for example, Israeli settlements. The Saudis, to be sure, would prefer the elimination of all Israeli settlements; for that matter, they would prefer the eventual elimination of the state of Israel. In one conversation with a senior White House official, Saudi King Abdullah stated categorically that Iran, not Palestine, was his main concern; while a solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict would be a great achievement, Iran would find other ways to cause trouble.

"Iran's goal is to cause problems," Abdullah added. "There is no doubt something unstable about them." There never has been a shred of evidence that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement would help America contain Iran's nuclear threat. The deafening silence over this issue in the diplomatic cables is the strongest refutation of this premise to date.

How do we explain the gaping chasm between Obama's public stance and the facts reported by the diplomatic corps? The cables do not betray American secrets so much as American obliviousness. The simplest and most probable explanation is that the president is a man obsessed by his own vision of a multipolar world, in which America will shrink its standing to that of one power among many, and thus remove the provocation on which Obama blames the misbehavior of the Iranians, Pakistanis, the pro-terrorist wing of the Saudi royal family, and other enemies of the United States.

Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. With a Muslim father and stepfather, and an anthropologist mother whose life's work defended Muslim traditional society against globalization, Obama harbors an overpowering sympathy for the Muslim world.
He is not a Muslim, although as a young child he was educated as a Muslim in Indonesian schools. His vision of outreach to the Muslim world, the most visible and impassioned feature of his foreign policy, draws on deep wells of emotion. I first made this argument in this space on February 26, 2008 (Obama's women reveal his secret, Asia Times Online), seven months before he was elected president.

Think of Obama as the anti-Truman.
As David Brog recounts in his 2006 book Standing with Israel (which I reviewed on this site on June 20, 2006 (You don't need to be apocalyptic, but it helps ), president Harry S Truman overruled the unanimous opposition of his cabinet and made America the first country to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948.

His secretary of state, war-time chief of staff George Marshall, had threatened in vain to resign and campaign against Truman in the next presidential election over the issue. Personal religious motivations, not strategy, guided Truman's decision. He was a Bible-reading Christian Zionist who supported Israel as a matter of principle. Obama has the same sort of loyalty to the Muslim world that Truman had toward the Jewish people. He cannot bring himself to be the American president who ruins a Muslim land.

It is wishful thinking that the Iranian problem can be managed without bringing ruin to the Persian pocket empire. In many respects, Iran resembles the Soviet Union just before the collapse of communism. It turned out that there were no communists in Russia outside the upper echelons of the party. There are very few Muslims in Iran outside of the predatory mullahcracy. According to Zohreh Soleimani of the BBC, Iran has the lowest mosque attendance of any Muslim country; only 2% of adults attend Friday services, a gauge of disaffection comparable to church attendance in Western Europe. Iran's fertility rate of about 1.6 children per women, coincidentally, is about the same as Western Europe's. Iran has a huge contingent of young people, but they have ceased to have children. They have faith neither in the national religion nor in the future of their nation.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, meanwhile, reports that fully 5% of Iran's adult non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opium. Alcoholism also is epidemic, despite the Islamic prohibition on alcoholic beverage, which must be smuggled into the country.

The US won the Cold War by ruining Russia. Russia may never recover. In 1992, three years after the Berlin Wall came down, thousands of pensioners gathered daily near Red Square in the winter cold to barter old clothing or trinkets for food, and the tourist hotels swarmed with prostitutes. The collapse of communism did not usher in a golden age of Russian democracy, and the new government into the most rapacious plague of locusts ever to descend upon a vulnerable economy.

Break the Iranian mullahcracy, and Iran most likely will fall into demoralization and ruin. Punish Pakistan for its machinations with the Taliban, and the country likely will descend into civil war. Iran's nuclear ambitions and Pakistan's dalliance with terrorism both stem from the sad fact that they are failed states to begin with. Push them into a corner, and the failure will become manifest.

In fairness to Obama, he simply carried forward the George W Bush administration's benign neglect of Iran's nuclear ambitions. Bush confirms in his just-published memoirs what was evident at the time: he followed the advice Defense Secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to avoid open conflict with Iran. If provoked, Iran was capable of producing a large number of American casualties in Iraq in the advent of the 2008 elections.

The difference between early 2008 and early 2010, to be sure, is that Iran has had two years to enrich uranium, consolidate its grip on Syria, insert itself into Afghanistan, stockpile missiles with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and build up its terror capabilities around the world. The window is closing in which Iran may be contained. Covert operations and cyber-sabotage might have bought some time, but benign neglect of Iran has reach its best-used-by-date.

The cables, in sum, reveal an American administration that refuses to look at the facts on the ground, even when friendly governments rub the noses of American diplomats into them. Obama is beyond reality; he has become the lunatic who thinks that he is Barack Obama.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman senior editor at First Things (www.firstthings.com).

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.

Fatah/PLO Ideology: The Obstacle to Peace

Yisrael Ne'eman

Once we all get past the latest Wikileaks scandal and find out what the Americans really think of us Israel will once again face the continuing demand for a settlement freeze in Judea and Samaria (West Bank). Whether this comes to resolution or not is often thought to be the determining factor concerning the resumption of peace talks between the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian Authority. While these are preliminaries, much greater issues remain to be resolved whether they be borders, security, Jerusalem or the Palestinian demand for refugee return. But before diving into such weighty issues there is a fundamental misunderstanding many outsiders have as concerns not only Israel, but the Jewish People - emanating from the Palestinian side.The crucial question facing Israeli policy makers when attempting to arrive at conflict resolution with the Palestinians is "What does the other side truly want in a Permanent Status Agreement?" Supposedly the Abbas/Fayyad government wants a two-state solution. However what is the quality of that solution in principle? As we know the Netanyahu government has demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the national home or nation state of the Jewish People, something which even the pro-West secular Fatah led PA government in Ramallah has refused to accept. But why should the supposedly pro-Western American sponsored West Bank Palestinian State to be reject the agreed upon national basis of the two- state solution as presented by the UN Partition Plan in 1947, exactly 63 years ago?







Firstly the UN Resolution 181 was roundly rejected by all the Arab states and the Palestinians at the time. Secondly and more important it does not fit into the secular Palestinian Arab world view and understanding of eternal total Arab dominance of the Middle East. The concept of the totality of the Arab domain is contained in Fatah's Palestine National Charter (PNC)– that same document that PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat (died 2004) promised to amend in 1998 at the urging of then US Pres. Bill Clinton. It was part of the 1998 Wye Accords signed by Netanyahu during his first term (1996 – 1999). Arafat was to ensure that all references or euphemisms implying Israel's destruction were to be removed. This was never done and a year and a half later Arafat responded with the 2000 – 2004 Low Intensity Conflict/Terror Offensive designed to draw in other Arab combatants. The LIC/TO violent option failed as did Arafat's scheme for a wider conflict.







Today and yesteryear's failings are in particular (but not only) rooted in the offending clauses of the PNC – Articles 19, 20 and 21 quoted below with commentary:

Article 19: The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, particularly the right to self-determination.

* This is the Palestinian Arab "secularization" of the absolutist concept of the holy "waqf" or endowed lands as understood in Islam and in particular the policy pursued by Hamas (the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood). The Palestinian People have a "natural right" to their homeland regardless as to whether the same land has proven claims by another people, in this case the Jews who pre-date the Muslim Arab invasion of 638 CE. The UN decided to split Palestine, recognizing both national claims as legitimate. Fatah uses the "waqf" definition in the guise of secular nationalism while determining that Israel (Jewish nationalism) is "inconsistent with the principles" of the UN Charter when confronting the national "right to self-determination". If this was truly the case, then why would the UN violate its own Charter, not only voting for the two-state solution but granting Israel membership a year later? The Palestinians attribute to themselves primordial God (Allah) given intrinsic rights overriding UN Resolution 181, the international recognition of Jewish nationalism and the Jews unbreakable connection to their Biblical homeland.

Article 20: The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

* Any international determination, whether the Balfour Declaration (Britain) or the Palestine Mandate (the League of Nations), both of which only spoke of a Jewish National Home and not even a state are "null and void". Furthermore the Palestinian Arabs take upon themselves the right and the obligation to eradicate Jewish history and religious memory, one which determines the Land of Israel (or "Palestine" of much later years) as the homeland of the Jewish People. Secular Palestinian Arabs made themselves the absolute judge of the Jewish past and belief system, deeming it null and void thereby relegating Jewish memory to either the trash heap of history (as done by such Christian historians/antisemites of the Arnold Toynbee type) or better yet these same Fatah intellectuals are dictating the Jewish past to a vacuum of emptiness, this fate being akin to a collective religious and cultural death.

The Jewish People may retain physical existence, but it is devoid of Jewish content. What is allowed to remain appears to be a certain general ethical monotheism obliterated of all memory. Fatah employs its own secular interpretation of the Islamic Hamas dhimmi oppressed second class status upon the Jewish People world wide. As pointed out by Bat Ye'or in her book Dhimmitude, eradication of both Jewish and Christian memory by Islam over the centuries guaranteed Muslim sovereignty and an Islamic unilateral narrative over these two "tolerated" religions. The secular Fatah/PLO includes a minority of Christians who secularize "replacement theology" when addressing the Jews while Muslims enforce a secularized disinheritance of the Jews for rejecting Arab (Muslim) dominance. When taken in a religious sense this is akin to the Jewish rejection of the Prophet Mohammed and his message. To become part of the only legal national entity in his own homeland a Jew must become a Palestinian Arab nationalist. This is parallel to the centuries old Muslim demand for the disinherited Jews - conversion to Islam.

Article 21: The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, or its internationalization.

* The Palestinian Arab People believe in war as the only solution to the conflict against Jewish nationalism (Zionism) since they are 100% in the right, the Jews having no legitimacy as a national entity or a people with a homeland. This revolution is akin to the Islamic understanding of holy war or Jihad – which by definition is all consuming and total in its world scope for Islamic dominance. When applied as a localized Palestinian nationalism the euphemisms of "revolution" through armed violence to obtain "total liberation" add up to a secularization of the Jihadist concept. Furthermore, "all proposals" falling short of secular Jihadist revolutionary liberation are "reject[ed]" including international attempts at peace making. The only solution acceptable to the Palestinian Arab People is a non-compromising total victory over the non-People, the Jews.

Such "secular" Fatah/PLO thinking parallels the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Hamas in its demand for total victory. Specifically the PNC expresses positions as are found in the Hamas Covenant - Articles 11, 13 and 32.

The first step in achieving the two-state solution is a full recognition of the Jewish rights to the Land of Israel. One cannot adhere to the Palestine National Charter and advocate peace with the Jewish nation state simultaneously. Although it appears that Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad would accept peace with the Jewish State it is not clear whether PA President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) holds similar views. Without amending the Charter Palestinians are living a contradiction in regards to engaging in war and peace. To make peace while the PNC remains unchanged theoretically turns peace into a tactic whereby Israel relinquishes land as a first step in an overall war against the Jewish State to obtain a total Palestinian victory – the annihilation of Israel.

So what appears to be the Palestinian game plan from the Fatah perspective? Serious military action is out of the question, certainly for the foreseeable future. Hence action on the civilian front becomes the answer. This secular Fatah/PLO Palestinian perspective will be dealt with in the next article.

U.S. spied on Israel's Washington embassy, claims ex-envoy

Haaretz.com


Wire-tapping began at some point after 1996 and took a number of years for embassy officials to discover, says Itamar Rabinovich.
By Yossi Melman

The United States broke an Israeli code and tapped the secure phone line in the Israeli Embassy in Washington without Jerusalem's knowledge.

That revelation about Israeli-American relations did not come from WikiLeaks, but rather from former ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovich, in a radio interview yesterday. Rabinovich did not say exactly when the code was broken and when Israel found out about it, but it was understood from his remarks that the tap started after his 1993-1996 tenure in the U.S. capital and was discovered only years later.

The former envoy said that every staffer at the Israeli Embassy in Washington is warned about possible leaks of conversations held in the building and on ordinary phone lines, but also on the secure phone line.

After the Americans broke the code, Israel's deepest policy secrets were apparently exposed.

"Every 'juicy' telegram was in danger of being leaked," Rabinovich told Army Radio's Razi Barkai. "We sent very few of them. Sometimes I came to Israel to deliver reports orally. The Americans were certainly tapping the regular phone lines, and it became clear that in later years they were also listening to the secure line."

Wiretapping, code-breaking and intercepting of messages is the province of the National Security Agency. It is no secret that despite intelligence cooperation and an understanding between the two countries that they will not spy on each other, both Israel and the United States have been involved in such actions.

For example, Israel has had involvements with agents like Jonathan Pollard, and stolen sensitive information and technological secrets for its security industries.

No spies caught

As far as is known, American spies have not been caught by Israel's intelligence services, although there have been instances when U.S. intelligence operatives contacted Israeli citizens and explored the possibility of recruiting them.

The Americans have also used their military attaches to gather information.

Israel believes that over the years, U.S. intelligence services have been listening - or at least attempting to listen - to conversations between key people in Israel and staff at its missions around the world.

For that reason, diplomats going abroad are instructed by the Shin Bet security service to treat every conversation as if it is being tapped and to make sure not to reveal secret information.

However, the assumption was still that the secure phone line could not being tapped.

Comment:
Of course now Pollard will be released. Wait, the US will put on trial the man responsible for spying on their ally, Israel? No, wait, rather be hypocrits and dishonest.

Abbas to UN: Continued settlement constitutes a time bomb


JPOST.COM STAFF
11/30/2010

Israeli envoy to UN responds, "it takes two to tango"; Ban Ki-moon calls settlement building "serious blow to credibility of political process."

In a message read at the UN's headquarters in New York Monday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called West Bank settlements a "time bomb," AFP reported.

As the world body commemorated International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, a message from Abbas said that the deterioration in the peace process "requires bringing a decisive and final end to the vicious Israeli settlement campaign." The PA president continued, saying that continued settlement "constitutes a time bomb that could destroy everything we have accomplished on the road to peace, at any moment," AFP reported.

Responding to what he called "destructive rhetoric," Israeli UN envoy Meron Reuben retorted, "It takes two to tango, Israel cannot reach peace on its own," according to AFP.

Reuben added, "We can only achieve peace with the Palestinians through compromise and direct and bilateral negotiations," according to the report. "We can only move forward through bilateral negotiations that address the concerns of both sides," he said.

For his part, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke candidly on the issue, saying that there was "little optimism" on either side, AFP reported. Addressing the issue of settlements, the secretary-general said that continued building constitutes "a serious blow to the credibility of the political process."

Ban Ki-moon, however, did not only direct his statements at Israel. He made it clear that the Palestinians "must continue to roll out the institutions of statehood, combat terrorist attacks and curb incitement," according to the report.

Comment: What do you do when you don't want to talk or really cannot talk to another person? Do you not look for any statement that you think will resonate with the other person to get you "off the hook'? Do you not use a tried and true justification that others have accepted for a long time? Is there not validation of your point if enough important others support your justification statement? All of this to appear on the moral high ground-fact is you are a weak person unable to tell the truth. Sound familiar Mr. Abbas?

John Kerry Was Selling Out Israel During Middle East Trip- (Wikileaks Document Dump)

Yid With Lid

Here's another Wikileaks revelation that isn't surprising. While Israel was trying to conduct "peace talks" with an unwilling Palestinian Authority, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John "Why the Long Face?" Kerry was busily selling out the Jewish State. Instead of letting the sides negotiate their own solution, the Progressive Senator was telling Qatari leaders that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, and that a Palestinian capital should be established in East Jerusalem. He also conceded that the Temple Mount (he called it the Al-Aqsa Mosque) will have to remain under Palestinian control.
Any negotiation has its limits, added Senator Kerry, and we know for the Palestinians that control of Al-Aqsa mosque and the establishment of some kind of capital for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not negotiable. For the Israelis, the Senator continued, Israel's character as a Jewish state is not open for negotiation.

Well heck, we don't need any negotiations now, don't worry about the freeze or the fact that the Palestinians are avoiding peace talks at all costs, the Jewish people have no right to the Holiest Site in Judaism. Senator Kerry says so.

But Kerry wasn't done he also gave away the Golan Heights:

The Chairman added that Netanyahu also needs to compromise and work the return of the Golan Heights into a formula for peace.


Gee, the Senator from Massachusetts has saved everyone so much time, no long negotiating process, just the the word from up high. Senator Kerry explains it all to you.

In a separate meeting the day before with the prime minister, Kerry ignored history by saying that Hamas can become a peacemaker like Arafat:

Senator Kerry, noting that he had seen Yasser Arafat make the transition from PLO fighter to signer of an agreement on the White House lawn, observed that people can come around and change their position.

Huh? What transition? Maybe Senator Kerry missed the Second Intifada run by the terrorist Arafat.
Maybe he also missed Arafat walking out of peace talks where he got almost everything he wanted. Both were in the papers, who knows maybe Teresa wasn't selling enough Ketchup and he had to cancel his newspapers for a while.


Kerry has been a long time supporter of giving the terrorist organization Hamas legitimacy by recognizing and reaching out to them. This past December the crazies from Code Pink led an anti-Israel, pro-Hamas Gaza Freedom March they did so with an official endorsement of their efforts by the former Democratic Party Presidential Candidate.

Massachusetts senior U.S. Senator John Kerry provided a letter on Senate stationery that supported constituents who participated in last December’s anti-Israel, pro-Hamas Gaza Freedom March, led by President Barack Obama's ally

...In the letter, Kerry wrote that his staff met with the Massachusetts delegation before they left, and his staff would be briefed about the trip upon their return.

Code Pink co-founders Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin used Kerry’s letter at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt to pressure the Egyptian government to allow 1300 leftists passage into Gaza from Egypt.
The leftists gathered in Cairo from around the world to mark the one-year anniversary of Israel’s defense against Hamas’ rocket and mortar attacks.

Images of the letters from Kerry and Carson were posted by the publisher of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, on his blog at Posterous.com.

Abunimah wrote that he, Benjamin and Kit Kettridge met for over an hour with “three officials, including Gina Cabrera, head of US citizen services, and Gregory D. LoGerfo, First Secretary in the Office of Economic and Political Affairs. The third official, whose name I did not note, identified himself as a ‘regional security’ official.”

Benjamin and Kettridge also met with “the embassy’s Deputy Director Matthew Tuellar, in command while Ambassador Scobey was on leave,” according to Abunimah.

...The letter was written on letterhead from Kerry’s Boston office. The name and phone number of staffer Christopher Wyman was included as a point of contact.

The text of Kerry’s letter is below

December 23, 2009
To Whom it May Concern:
I am writing to express my strong support for members of the humanitarian delegation from Massachusetts that will be traveling to Israel and the Palestinian Territories from December 27th to January 15th. The humanitarian delegation from Massachusetts is sponsoring this visit and they plan to meet with non-governmental organizations, assess the health care system and observe human rights and trade union conditions among Israelis and Palestinians.

I respectfully request that every courtesy be given the members of the delegation during their visit. My staff has met with members of the group and is impressed with their ability, dedication and commitment to the peace process. We look forward to seeing them again upon their return and hearing about their visit.

For any questions or concerns please feel to contact Christopher Wyman in my Boston office at 617 565-8522
Thank you for cooperation in this very important matter.
Sincerely,
John F. Kerry

Not ONCE does Kerry mention terrorism in his letter! This is the Senator Kerry who believes that Yassir Arafat was a "good guy." This is the Senator Kerry who believes he should do all the negotiating of a Mid-East peace agreement. Clearly Senator Kerry like most of our progressive Democratic legislators have no regard for the safety of the Jewish State.