Obama and the coming disaster

Obama and the coming disaster

 Dov Ivry

Whatever his fate in the election, Obama has earned a unique niche in Jewish history. He is the only president ever to take the side of a Nazi war criminal against the Jews in a dispute.

The question is whether this was done through malice or is he just that dumb?

The comedians made Bush out to be a retard exaggerating every little slip of the tongue or other trivial faux pas. But no president ever made such a fool of himself as Obama did when he began a toast to Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace at the very moment the band began to play the British national anthem. Anyone who has ever attended a baseball game knows that when they play the national anthem you stand silent to attention or at least be quiet. Not Obama. He continued making his rambling toast to the queen and didn’t stop until after he lifted his glass and realized that no one was answering.

If that had been Bush it would have been the signature event of his eight years; replayed and reworked over and over again, the basis for a 1,000 jokes and as many skits. He would never have lived it down. Obama? Not a peep. When Obama was elected our court jesters all seemed to have gone for operations to remove their funny bones or maybe it was their guts.

What this does tell me is that this guy Obama is indeed dumb, abysmally dumb; next to him Bush comes off looking like Einstein revisited. It does let Obama off the hook on a more serious charge of malice.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem was a confident of Hitler, friend of Himmler, adviser to Eichmann. He organized Waffen SS units comprised of Muslim troops in the Balkans and slaughtered Jews and Serbs and Gypsies in the tens of thousands. His troops were responsible for the murder of 90 per cent of Bosnia’s Jews. He was reported to have visited Auschwitz and complained to the Germans that they were going too slow. He pressed Hitler to do unto the Jews in the Arab world what he was doing to the Jews of Europe. When the Third Reich fell he came home as the leader of the local Arabs, the role Arafat would later play, with his stated goal with a little help from his friends, the Arab states, to drive the Jews into the sea. He was wanted for war crimes but slipped the net.

The Mufti owned the Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem although he never lived there. When it came time to tear it down in 2009 to make way for a housing development under the auspices of a Jew, Obama tried to stop it, arguing through the state department that the property had to remain in the hands of the Arabs, meaning the family of the Mufti. Alhough a Nazi war criminal the Mufti is still a hero not only among the region’s Arabs, who hold it to his favor that he killed myriads of Jews, but also Bosnian Muslims. Had Israel given in to Obama Muslims would have celebrated this as a tremendous victory and a restoration of the Mufti to respectability. Never mind that; Israel could not under any circumstances participate in any process leading to the honoring of a Nazi war criminal in its very capital. The tension lasted nearly a year, Obama pressing the case of the Nazi war criminal and the Israeli government determined to resist him at all costs. At one point Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, tried to help out Obama in case he didn’t catch on what was the issue. He circulated a picture of the Mufti meeting with Hitler. Didn’t work; Obama was exactly as he was at the gathering of the queen when they played the national anthem; utterly oblivious. Ovadiah Yosef, the venerable leader of the Shas political party, spoke for everyone when he explained why he thought Obama was relating to Jews with such profound contempt. Yosef said, “He believes we are his slaves.” How could something like this even happen

Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish state for 3,000 years. There was an interregnum when the Jews were absent. During that time conquerors passed through as if in a parade but the city never belonged to any of them for long. In 1948 the United Nations declared Jerusalem to be an “international city” but only Jews and Arabs took to the field to fight over it; not one soldier was seen in the service of “international city.” If you are not prepared to fight for something, you lose your right to make a claim. The Arabs, under the Jordanian king, grabbed the eastern section of the city in the first war. The Israelis drove them out in a second war in 1967 and reunited their capital.

Since then the chances of Israel giving up part of its capital to a foreign power are about the same as the Americans giving up Washington, the British giving up London, or the French giving up Paris. Zero. Unthinkable. Then a weird and unprecedented thing happened. Nations of the world, the motive obviously being to curry favor with the Saudis and other oil-rich Arab states and their limitless business opportunities, declared that the results of the 1967 war don’t court, those of the 1948 war would stand. Did that mean they wanted east Jerusalem returned to Jordan, who had in the first place as much right being there as Borneo? Not exactly. To which foreign power then? You know, to the “Palestinians.” Who? Where did they come from all of a sudden?

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. They announced their intent to launch an armed struggle to liberate “Palestine.” They had a choice. They could lay claim to east Jerusalem and other lands occupied by Jordan as well as Gaza occupied by Egypt. Or they could lay claim to the Jewish state which included west Jerusalem. Let’s see: read the fine print, Article 24, notwithstanding etc etc the PLO has no interest in the “West Bank,” that would include east Jerusalem, or Gaza. You don’t say. The PLO specifically renounced all claims to east Jerusalem and declared a war to wrest control of west Jerusalem (and everything else the Jews possessed). How come then three years later the nations of the world out of the blue were now backing a claim for the Palestinians to territories which they themselves hadn’t made and which they specifically renounced and excluded in their charter? You know, they really didn’t mean to say west Jerusalem, they meant to say east Jerusalem. Give them a break. Of course, the truth is that the PLO charter was a moveable feast from the beginning. They coveted only whatever the Jews possess, as did many powerful Arab countries, who saw the PLO as a useful public relations instrument, a “liberation” movement and all that, very trendy. When the Arab countries got their heads handed to them on a plate in their attempt to go straight at the Jews in order to dispossess them in 1967, this PLO thing took on new importance. The world was comfortable with the gambit, winked, and encouraged them.

Back in the late 80s, long before Oslo had ever been dreamed of, I attended a course for the unemployed. The participants were a cross-section of Israel’s unemployed, including a fair sprinkling of Arabs. Everyone got on well, conversations were always light and bright, until one day during a long break, the topic of achieving peace between Israel and the Arabs in the territories came up. Everyone showed good will and a great amount of flexibility. “We can do this.” “That would work.” “Why not do it that way?” “I’m sure we could agree to that.” After 15 minutes things went so well had we had been delegates at some convention, they could have rolled out a draft peace agreement and we all would have signed. Then someone asked, “What about Jerusalem?” The elephant in the room had been noticed. It took about 30 second flat before sides were drawn and everyone was shouting, screaming, cursing, nearly coming to blows. The “peace talks” had exploded.

They said when Oslo came that Jerusalem was on the table. What this meant was that no matter what progress they might make in subjects of mutual interest such as water management or tourism projects, the grandiosely trumpeted peace talks would go nowhere. I knew that from my experience at the course for the unemployed. Jerusalem, in point of actual fact, is not on anyone’s table and never will be; everyone in the country knows that. The only people who were in denial were the Jews who framed our side of Oslo. I can’t guess who was trying to con whom or who gained most from the con but ever since Oslo opened 20 years ago what we’ve been witnessing is a cross between a game of charades and a danse macabre. At Camp David in 2000 Ehud Barak bent into a pretzel-shape trying to meet all of Arafat’s demands but even Barak wasn’t going to give them east Jerusalem. At the point Hamas said Arafat ordered the extremist Muslim organization to begin a wave of terror that lasted approximately four years and cost the lives of nearly 7,000 people on both sides: the ratio of deaths being 1:5 Jew to Arab, not counting tourists.

How do I know that Israel will never voluntarily give up any part of its capital? Because we are a democracy. If you check the voting results since Jerusalem was reunited, you would not find any Knesset where there would be a majority for handing over part of Jerusalem to a foreign power. You can project Knesset results well into the future as far as the eye can see and you could bet your house that the situation will not change. Even if the prime minister were a Manchurian Candidate put there by the Saudis and went to a negotiation and signed away east Jerusalem, the Knesset would immediately throw the document into the trash can.

You can figure it out for yourself the now and future position of the Knesset on the subject of Jerusalem on the basis of the makeup of the electorate. A third of Israelis are religious. To them Jerusalem is a matter of abiding love. Another 10 per cent are strongly traditional; same as above. Among your large ethnic minorities the Russians and Ethiopians are very patriotic in their majority; you don’t get them voting for capitulation. You are already at 50 per cent and you haven’t even started with secular native-born Israelis who form the bulk of the Jewish population. The three biggest parties are Likud, Kadima (now collapsing) and Labor. If together they are not 100 per cent against capitulation on the question of east Jerusalem they would be in the 90s (on the fringes of diminished Labor there may be a knot of capitulators.) Next up come the hard-line right-wing parties. You are well over 70 per cent and you can stop counting.

The Arabs have this expression picked up by the fawning foreign media (save Fox News) “Arab East Jerusalem” as if it were populated entirely in a pristine state by Arabs living serenely in their antebellum lifestyle hermetically sealed from the noisy and tumultuous Jews over in their frenetically modern west Jerusalem. There ain’t no such animal. East Jerusalem which also spills north and south of west Jerusalem has a population of 450,000 of which approximately half are Jews and half are Arabs.

The population demographic is enough reason why to even speak of handing over part of the capital to a foreign power is absolute madness. The 200,000 plus Jews are citizens of a democracy, enjoying the benefits of a good health delivery system, a well developed court system, social benefits such as child allowance and retirement pensions, and all the trappings of an advanced modern state. Some day with a stroke of the pen we are expected to believe that they are to be cast off to be put under the rule of a backwards, undeveloped, corruption-ridden Third World dictatorship run by anti-Semites who have murdered Jews and engaged in other terrorist acts? I think there would be a civil war before the general populace would let any government abandon 200,000 fellow citizens to this fate; and of course, no government would.

But now there is another serious impediment with giving away east Jerusalem to the Arabs for the capital of their proposed state; what do they call it again, Ruritania? This one was created by Obama himself. Don’t underestimate the power of an idea once cast as pollen to the winds. When Napoleon came to the Promised Land he raised the prospect of the Jews regaining their state. No one had mentioned that for 1,700 years. He made the idea a matter for serious consideration and it would take root, lead to the Zionist movement, and eventually the state.

In seeking to give the Shepherd Hotel to the heirs of Hajj Amim, as the Nazi war criminal was called, Obama created a seed that could lead, if conditions were right, to the return of Nazism as a powerful force in the world. The Fourth Reich. They laughed at Napoleon too in his day; please bear with me.

One of the Mufti’s SS Waffen units was called the Handzar Brigade, active throughout the Balkans. The military historian Shaul Shay described them. “The Handzar soldiers rained terror upon the civilian population everywhere that they were posted and perpetrated many war crimes, mass killings, rapes, the burning of complete towns with their inhabitants, robbery and looting. … The soldiers regarded Hajj Amin as a ‘saint.’”

When Yugoslavia fell apart, a fellow named Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim extremist, became leader of the Bosnian Muslims. Serbs say he had been a member of the Handzar Brigade. Tito, the Yugoslav head, locked him up for three years after the war and another five in the 80s at that time for engaging in Muslim extremist propaganda.

Six months before civil war broke out in 1992 in Bosnia a Muslim magazine Novi Vox reintroduced the Handzar Brigade to the folks. Carl Savich, a Serbo-American historian, wrote that it “published a front-cover illustration showing a Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS officer in the Handzar Division stepping on the decapitated and bloody heads of Serbian leaders, including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. The caption read: ‘The Handzar Division is ready!’ Another headline announced: ‘The Fourth Reich is coming—Welcome!’”

In 1993 Robert Fox, a reporter for The Daily Telegraph, went to Fojnica in Bosnia to investigate the execution-style shooting of two Serbian Roman Catholic priests. That’s when he discovered that the Handzar Brigade or as they were called the Handzar Division had been reconstituted, by other reports by Izetbegovic himself. Wrote Fox, “The Handzar Division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar Brigade, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was … the Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler.” Serbs were made the bad guys in this war (undoubtedly deservedly so) but they claim the Bosnian Muslims were giving as much as they were getting and a number of Muslim military leaders were indeed put on trial for war crimes. Dave Emory, a broadcaster, has spent his life turning over rocks to look for fascists and recording his findings. Emory may be classed as an eccentric, but he does provide information you’d never get anywhere else. Emory examined the new Handzar Division and found it was led and trained by Pakistanis and Afghans, who in all likelihood were affiliated with al-Queda. Albanians from Kosovo filled much of the rank-and-file. Emory said Izetbegovic fixed their main role to serve as a praetorian guard for him in Sarajevo but they moved around to trouble spots and were concentrated in Fojnica where the priests were executed. The deputy defence minister under Izetbegovic, a guy by the name of Cengic, was also a veteran of the original Handzar Brigade.

In 2003 Izetbegovic died. The state department, now under Bush, published a glowing eulogy of America’s friend and ally. At that same moment the Iranian foreign ministry published a glowing eulogy of Iran’s friend and ally.

Here is the cause for concern; the ease at which conflation occurred between the Nazi ideology as interpreted by the Mufti and the Muslim extremists of today including al-Queda. Let’s say that all the half-baked yakkers on the world stage pushing us to hand over east Jerusalem to the Arabs as the capital of Ruritania get their way. The name of the property Obama sought to give to the Mufti’s family is called “The Mufti’s Wineyard.” That would be made into a shrine and very soon it would become one of the major tourist attractions, in terms of visitors, in the world. Every Muslim extremist of every stripe would make pilgrimage there along with, get this, every Nazi, neo-Nazi, and Nazi sympathizer in the world. They share the same common goal, as enunciated by the Mufti, finish the work of Hitler, the second Holocaust. Ruritania would be of course, wink, demilitarized. But once Arab oil money gets mixed into things, everything slides and the world looks the other way. Ruritania would see a chance to recruit a foreign legion out of all these Nazis from Europe and the Americas showing up to show support for their state. The legion would be well funded and equipped, and could be stashed somewhere else in the Arab world. Within a few years you could have a fully trained Nazi army of 200,000 men, mechanized, with Russian tanks and jets, under the control of the Ruritanian high command at least at the outset. They could roll over every country in the Middle East and would pose an existential threat to Israel. With nukes from Pakistan and Iran they could pose an existential threat to civilization. It would take only a few changes of government in South America or eastern Europe and they would soon outgrow the limitations of Ruritania.

Aren’t Original Nazis and Mufti Nazis incompatible? Nazis are Nazis; the Mufti and his circle got along famously in the Third Reich; the pictures and testimony from eyewitnesses prove it. They share a common goal: completing the Holocaust. The Nazi form of government, one strong man at the top, no democracy, has been common in the Muslim world for centuries. For a number of years “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s book, or as it is called in Arabic “My Jihad,” has been a brisk seller in the Arabic-speaking world. Captured Egyptian soldiers were found carrying them in the wars against Israel and in 2005 a spot survey by Agence France-Presse found “Mein Kampf” to be a bestseller in Ramallah. In Arabic “Mein Kampf” is not presented as an historic document but as an inspirational guide to the future. Hitler was the very herald of this future. Writes the translator Luis Al-Haj, “Hitler was a man of ideology who bequeathed an ideological heritage whose decay is inconceivable. … National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star.” Original Nazis have nowhere else to go; if playing second fiddle for a time to the Mufti branch of the movement is the price to pay for getting hold of the weapons needed to resume the struggle, it’s a small price to pay.

Am I exaggerating? Could be. But even Rome was just an acorn at some time. You put this Mufti acorn in east Jerusalem under an independent Ruritania government run by Hamas say and you are well and truly starting down the road to the Fourth Reich. And the man you can thank for it – Obama. If he had kept his mouth shut the Mufti could have been interred once and for all without anyone noticing. As it was, Obama triggered riots and mass demonstrations for weeks on end, young and sympathetic members of the Mufti’s family came out in the spotlight demanding their property back, and now millions around the world know that the old Shepherd Hotel was located on “The Mufti’s Wineyard.” Preventing the Fourth Reich may now be the most salient reason for Israel to stick to its guns on east Jerusalem; it didn’t need another reason but it got one in spades.

Underlying the issue of the disposition of the Mufti’s property, which was really a sideshow, was something even more fundamental. Do Jews have the right to live where they choose, not in some foreign country, but in their own country, and more to the point, in their own capital. The history of Sheikh Jarrah is this. Up to perhaps 150 years there were no homes built outside the old walls of Jerusalem, a very small area. Then development began and the population grew rapidly, with Jews throughout Jerusalem forming the majority. Sheikh Jarrah itself became an exclusive neighborhood for Arab millionaires and they weren’t that many. Next to it was a Jewish neighborhood Shimon HaTzaddik. In 1936 Arabs broke into Shimon HaTzaddik and murdered 500 Jews. This was the scene as reported by a British truck driver Alex Morrison. “They left behind them one of the worst sights I ever saw in my life. … The naked bodies of the women exposed the evidence that the knives had been used in the most ghastly fashion. The bodies of children, apparently set alight with gasoline in a nursery, were still smoldering.”

In 1947 they came back; the residents were armed and drove them off. The British then came and confiscated their arms so many had to leave. The Shepherd Hotel was located on a main artery to Mount Scopus where is located Hadassah Hospital. The weakening of Shimon HaTzaddick left their convoys exposed. On April 16, 1948, a convoy to Mount Scopus was attacked close to the Shepherd Hotel. For six hours, in broad daylight, the convoy came under fire. Dr. Yassky, the director of the Hadassah Hospital, Dr. Moshe Ben-David, the director of the medical school, the linguistics scholar Dr. Benjamin Klar, Abraham Freiman, an expert on Jewish law, doctors, professors, nurses, and patients were
brutally murdered, 79 victims in all. A British regiment remained inside Shepherd Hotel the entire time. When a soldier emerged he stopped the slaughter with one shot. The Jordanian army would then come and drive out the rest of the Jews in Shimon HaTzaddick and the remainder of east Jerusalem.

Whenever Israel announces new building projects in Jerusalem either Obama, Biden, or Hillary, or two or all three (with Axelroad speaking for Obama), pipes up with words like, “insulting,” “an affront,” “very unfortunate.” Israelis see developing Jerusalem as a way to honor the memories of forebears whose lives were cut short in the most horrific manner in reviving our land after a forced absence of 2,000 years. Obama, Biden, and Hillary relate to Jews as if we are cockroaches; step on them, sweep them out the door. They are not fit for human company; whatever they do it’s disgusting; if they squawk, step on them again.

When Israel recaptured the eastern part of the capital naturally the owners of the properties, now occupied by Arab squatters, wanted them back. The process went through the courts as slow as molasses but progress was made. Meanwhile even if Israel did not rush to establish a residential presence in east Jerusalem, the institutional presence was made vast and ubiquitous including the national police headquarters set in Sheikh Jarrah. Throwing out the squatters and building new residential complexes is only the last stage of making east Jerusalem into an integral part of the city as it was before the ethnic cleansing of the death squads and the Jordanian army. The plan to build 1,600 units in Ramot Shlomo was announced on the day Biden arrived for a visit and that set off that particular tantrum.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat explained, “Israeli law does not discriminate between Jews, Muslims, and Christians or between eastern and western Jerusalem.” The Sheikh Jarrah plan was to put up 20 units once the Shepherd Hotel was demolished. The developer was a Jew whose rights were confirmed in the courts. Given the reaction in Washington to this you would have thought he was a Norwegian gunman who had just killed all the staff members at the American embassy. Out of nowhere appeared the American ruler, HRH Obama Ozymandias the Unready, (is that his name?) acting for all the world as if Israel were no more than a colony of America under US military marshal law and demanded that the Israeli government suspend Israeli law as enunciated by Nir Barkat, and stop the project on a dime. The crime of the developer in the eyes of this Obama the Unready’s was capital and unforgivable – he was a Jew.

Obama’s stance triggered large demonstrations. Who were these people and what did they want?

– Arabs. I have no problem with Arabs demonstrating. Welcome to democracy. They knew the families being kicked out and you have to appreciate that they were under the influence of a lot of emotion. Of course they were whipped up by the pie in the sky crowd that wants the Israeli capital to be made into the capital of Ruritania which will happen the day after pigs fly. But that’s okay too. Rioting is something else but once you put enough ringleaders in the slammer, the rest lose their taste for it.

– Israeli citizens. These are the Lunatic Left. They included Peace Now and Zehava Galon of the extremist Meretz Party whose watchword over the years has been “if it’s good for the Jews, we’re against it.” What they sought to accomplish was to cancel the law that protects Jews from housing discrimination, making it possible for someone to refuse to sell property to a Jew merely because he is a Jew. Meretz runs a slate for the Knesset; let’s see them tell the voters straight out, the majority being Jews, that they intend to introduce a law making it legal to discriminate against a Jew in housing. The voters would call that proposal lunatic. That’s why I call them the Lunatic Left.

– American citizens. These included such vainglorious organizations as J Street and the New Israel Fund. These tourists also came out to oppose Israel’s anti-discrimination housing laws, but they are not citizens and they can go back to where they came from and fight for their political agenda there. Let’s see. They can work to get US housing laws changed so that other Americans may discriminate with impunity against Jews. They could form a coalition with other like-minded groups who also want to roll back the civil rights of Jews there, namely the Stormfronters and various neo-Nazi formations. Politics makes strange bedfellows; but if the JStreeters and New Israel Funders insist on climbing into bed with these guys, you can bet sooner or later they are going to be screwed. I can’t think of anyone in Israel who would shed a tear when that happens.

– The Europeans, the EU at al. I call these people the 10 percenters. They always come here clucking and cackling about how some “international law” trumps Israel’s law. There are only two ways to introduce foreign law into a sovereign state; the imperialist way, invade and do it by force; or through negotiations, a state signs and ratifies a treaty. But no country would abolish civil rights for its citizens as the result of a treaty and Israel never did.

The fact is that whatever this phoney “international law” the Europeans cackle and cluck about is, it is governed by the rule determining the efficacy all legislation which states: possession is nine-tenth of the law. The bill of goods they are trying to sell is 10 per cent of something and no one is going to buy your bill of goods if all you can deliver is 10 per cent.

I would say that Europeans are morally bankrupt but that would imply that at some point in the past that they possessed a store of morals. As a matter of fact we know what “international law” they are referring to, the law of the ghetto. Cross-border law in Europe for a thousand years was that Jews did not have the right to live where they wanted. If a Jew asked to build down by the river; he was told that his place was by the town dump. A Jew wanted to live in Moscow; no his place was in the Pale of Settlement. Housing discrimination is the hallmark of anti-Semitism, the hallmark of Europe; I’d think I’d be shocked if EU representatives came here and advocated anything else but housing discrimination against Jews. Nothing has changed in Europe and we have a control group to prove it; the Gypsies, who often got the same back of the hand from European authorities as the Jews and still do. Their housing conditions in several countries (Spain excluded) throughout Europe are appalling. The worst case has been in Kosovo. When the Americans were bombing Belgrade to make the world safe for democracy their allies the Muslim Kosovars were going from village to village burning down the homes of Gypsies or simply throwing them out and moving in themselves with all the possessions. A lot of Gypsies ended up in the capital at wit’s end. The British said we have a place for you where you can put up your tents and build temporary housing. This rises to the level of an atrocity. They took them to a toxic landfill. All of them got sick, several died, women suffered miscarriages. The Gypsies asked NATO, other Europeans, to help them. NATO turned its back on them and they were stuck there on this toxic landfall for several years. The only difference between the Europe of the past and the Europe of today is that we Jews don’t have to live there. Otherwise they’d put us on that toxic landfill.

Article 80 of UN Charter recognizes the right of Jews to settle anywhere in mandated Palestine. That’s the international law on the settlements in Judea and Samaria. As for the accusation that Israel is “occupying” something, Meir Shamgar, future Supreme Court chief justice, ruled that you cannot occupy something that didn’t belong to someone else. He defined the territories as “disputed” and that has been our story ever since and we’re sticking to it. As for who owns the territories it’s quite clear. A place acquires the name of the people who live there, the owners. Judea has been a name of the land for 3,500 years; sometimes all of it, sometimes part. “Jew” is short for Judean. Philistina was an antiquated name the Roman Hadrian plucked out of a geographical scroll when he looked for a new moniker now that he had utterly destroyed the Judeans in the Bar-Kochba Revolt. It was a name without a people because they had died out long before. The current “Palestinians” are Turkish colonists in the main but the age of colonialism is over. They are being invited to talk about their future not by any right, but by charity. The sooner they realize that, the sooner we might get a deal done.

When Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria the UN just shrugged. Britain recognized the annexation de jure immediately and the annexation of Jerusalem de facto. Jordan was operating under the same “international law” as exists today; so how come Israel is supposed to be in contravention and it has only annexed Jerusalem and not the rest, and Jordan wasn’t? Huh? Huh? “International law” cannot be selective; same territory, different master, different reaction. It doesn’t pass the smell test.

The Arabs throw out that Israel is in violation of the “Fourth Geneva Convention.” That was a set-up by the Arabs, a hatchet job; the session in question was boycotted by both the US and Australia because they saw in advance the fix was in. It boils down to this: What the Arabs and all their cackling and clucking claque got on their side as far as “international law” goes is spit; or actually 10 per cent of spit.

The Arabs often ask: Why are the Jews permitted to regain their property from the time of the War of Independence and the Arabs are not. The answer to the first part is this. The Jews who lived in east Jerusalem were driven out by gangs or soldiers but never gave up right of ownership. They were never refugees.

The whole question of refugees falls under Resolution 242 of the United Nation which states that the sides will resolve the refugee problem: both Jewish and Arab refugees. With Oslo the refugee issue was put on the table. That means any claims from Arabs, who are seeking lost property, have to be dealt within the framework of the settlement on the refugee issue. That’s the answer to the second part of this.

Of course as with everything else no progress has been made on the refugee issue and the fault lies entirely with the Arabs. There were 850,000 Jews stripped of everything run out of 10 Arab countries. Arabs who fled the fighting in Israel numbered upwards of 500,000. The Jews lost billions in property; some say $100 billion in today’s money — $21 billion alone in one neighborhood of Cairo. The Arab losses would not come to half of that. Israel, with very little resources, took care of its own. The Arabs, with money to burn from oil, put its refugees on the dole and the let UN take care of them on other people’s money. That’s old news.

The problem is this. Never in history since the dawn of time has a refugee been able to pass his status to the next generation. What normally happens is that a person moves from point A to point B where offspring is born. The offspring belongs to the state at point B; what status they give him has got nothing with the original state at point A. Some countries permit expats to pass on their citizenship to their children; some don’t. But refugees?

What the Palestinians have done is tried, and this is also a con, to pass refugee status down to the third and fourth generations. Now they are claiming some crazy figure of 5 million refugees and want Israel to accept them all under a “law of return.” That foolishness even more than the status of Jerusalem apparently was the straw that broke the back at the Camp David talks.

There are two ways to resolve the refugee problem. If they have 5 million refugees, then our side must have 7 million refugees by their definition – that would be probably include most of the Sephardi and Yemenite Jews in the world save those who were domiciled in Europe or elsewhere when the expulsions occurred. Israel is not going to allow 5 million people to swarm into its land nor would Russia or Argentina or anyone else so there has to be a financial settlement. Since the difference in value in property is $50 billion, according to some estimates, let the Arabs pay up and we’ll call the refugee problem fixed.

The other way to solve this is probably what is going to happen. Even those who were babies among the actual genuine refugees are in their mid 60s today so in another 10 or 20 years there just won’t be any refugees. Time will inter the problem. Or as Clinton once suggested, come up with a fund. If it is limited to actual refugees, it would be a good idea.

But if the Arabs want to be crazy then Israel has the right to charge interest on that $50 billion owned to the 7 million Jewish refugees, because once the Oslo talks started that constituted an admission by the Arabs that as per Resolution 242 there was a Jewish refugee problem and they were obliged to address it. Had they plunked down $50 billion the same day that would have been the end of it. But meanwhile that money is being used to bottle Coca-Cola in Egypt, growing crops, and for investments; it is not standing idle. They have to pay interest. In another few years they will owe us $100 billion and it will grow down through the ages.

Netanyahu is always a half step short of gaining the transcendent popularity that, for instance, the founder of his party Menachem Begin attained. The reason is his insensitivity to the plight of the poor in the land; they are the base of his party, the Likud, the working poor and those in distress. But as far as defending Israel’s honor, there is none better than Netanyahu. He did a great job in standing up to Obama; anything less, permitting any deviation in the Shepherd Hotel plan allowing Obama to accommodate the heirs of a Nazi war criminal was simply not acceptable.

What happens now? This bird Obama may be around for another four more years. Who knows what kind of trouble he’s going to cause us? But it’s the Americans’ call and if that’s who they want to shove down the throat of the world, it is their right.

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