Suppose Islam Had a Holocaust and No One Noticed

Suppose Islam Had a Holocaust and No One Noticed

While Western newspapers were debating whether or not to reprint the Mohammed cartoons, in Nigeria as many as 2,000 people were massacred by the Islamic State in Nigeria, also known as Boko Haram, in what is being called the deadliest attack by the Muslim group to date.
Survivors described the Islamic State setting up efficient killing teams and massacring everyone while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. "For five kilometers (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt," one survivor said.

There’s a word for that. It’s genocide.

The Islamic State in Nigeria had reportedly managed to kill 2,000 people last year. This year they did it in one week. But we don’t pay much attention to what happens in Nigeria unless there’s a hashtag. No one has yet thought up a clever hashtag for the murder of 2,000 people. #Bringbackourdead doesn’t really work.

The Islamic State’s next target is Maiduguri, the largest city in Borno with a population of over a million. Known as the “Home of Peace”, if Maiduguri falls, the death toll will be horrific.

The Catholic Archbishop, Ignatius Kaigama, warned that the killing wouldn’t stop in Nigeria. “It's going to expand. It will get to Europe and elsewhere.”

Of course it already has, but not on the same scale.

“We will conquer Europe one day. It is not a question of (if) we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen,” an Islamic State spokesman had warned. “The Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons.”

“Those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”

Imagine that the burning towns and villages aren’t in Nigeria or Syria. Imagine them in France or Sweden. It’s not that great of a leap from armed cells carrying out attacks to a militia capturing entire towns and villages. They’re different phases in the same conflict.

Al Qaeda in Iraq went from a terror group carrying out suicide bombings to running a state in a decade. So did Hamas in Israel. There are already zones in Europe under the control of unofficial Sharia police. France has fewer Muslims than Nigeria and a more stable government with professional police and military forces. These two factors are the only ones keeping Islamic genocide at bay.

The massacres in France were carried out by the same types of men and movements responsible for the killings in Nigeria and Iraq. They just aren’t organized enough and still lack the numbers to conduct the same large scale genocide that they are already carrying out in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq.

Two Islamic States, one in Nigeria and another in Iraq/Syria, are engaged in genocide. Obama delayed responding to ISIS until it was already engaged in genocide and was moving on Baghdad. His people have done everything possible to avoid responding to the Boko Haram genocide in Nigeria.

The usual excuses are there. The central governments are compromised, incompetent and corrupt. The only possible solution is political. The real issue is poverty. Meanwhile the killing and the denial go on.


The foreign policy infrastructure, the human rights NGOs and the self-important scribblers who presume to tell the world what is important in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post have fought hard to avoid connecting the killings by the Islamic State in Nigeria to the killings by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And they have fought hardest of all to avoid connecting these killings to the thousands murdered in the streets of New York and the latest bodies strewn about Paris. The killings can be connected with three simple words; global Islamic genocide.
The European intellectuals of the last century were too fixated on their vision of a better world to understand what was happening in Germany and Japan. And what had to be done about it. While they dreamed of a world government that would do away with war, the killing had already begun.

The intellectuals of this century are equally unwilling to take their attention away from microfinance, climate change and world government to see the beginnings of a worldwide Holocaust underway.

Genocide isn’t new to Africa or the Middle East so they put it down to local tribal conflicts. Terrorism isn’t new to America or Europe, so they blame political extremism. Like the elephant and the blind men who touched its trunk and thought it was a snake, they respond to the local manifestation of Islamic genocide by seeing a familiar local phenomenon; tribal war, political extremism or minority problems.

And anyone who sees the big picture is instantly denounced as an Islamophobe. But what if the Muslim genocide of Hindus and Buddhists in Asia and the Muslim genocide of Christians and Jews in the Middle East are part of the same phenomenon?

What if the Islamic State killers in Nigeria who shout “Allahu Akbar” during their massacres share a motive with the 9/11 hijackers who were told to “shout 'Allahu Akbar,' because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers”?

What if a common bloody thread of Koran verses runs through the massacres of non-Muslims in the Philippines and Kenya, in Israel and Australia, in France and China, in Thailand and Syria?

What if the acts of terror on the evening news are not random events, workplace violence, mental illness and political extremism, but the beginning of another global Islamic genocide?

The rise of Islam was not based on faith, but on mass murder.

Within a few centuries of the time that Mohammed had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, the massacre of millions of Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists was underway across the Middle East through India and as far as Afghanistan.

The Islamic Holocaust was the greatest act of mass murder in human history. And it is still taking place today over a thousand years later.

The decay of the Roman Empire created an opening for the Islamic conquests. As Western civilization, which plays much the same role as the Roman Empire did in tying parts of the world together, falls, a new wave of Islamic conquest and genocide is underway.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana wrote.

It would be a terrible thing indeed if we were condemned to repeat the mass murder of hundreds of millions and the eradication of entire civilizations under the black flag of the Jihad because we refused to remember the past or acknowledge the present. Because we were too afraid of being called Islamophobic to speak out for the dead around the world.

It would be a terrible thing if the Nigerian village of today were to become a Swedish village tomorrow. It would be an even worse thing if the Muslim conquests of India were to be repeated in Europe.

Genocide is an ugly word.

It’s a word that we have come to associate with villages in Africa or with old concentration camps in Europe. We don’t think of it as something that can happen to us or to our children.

But we should.

The Islamic wars from Nigeria to Israel, from Iraq to Kashmir, are genocidal. Israel may become the first Western country to suffer Islamic genocide, but it will not be the last. 9/11 was the first Islamic mass murder of thousands of Americans, but it will not be the last.

In the face of genocide, our first duty is to warn the world.

The Counterjihad is a war for our survival. It is our resistance to global Islamic genocide.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.co.il/2015/01/suppose-islam-had-holocaust-and-no-one_19.html

They are still coming for the Jews. So why is nobody speaking out?

By Dan Hodges

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

When I turned up for my first day of work in the House of Commons in May 1992, Pastor Martin Niemöller’s haunting words were one of the first things I saw. They were on a poster that hung in the corner of my new office.

They’d been left there by a previous occupant, and no one had thought to remove them. So they sat there, for another year or so, until someone else claimed the desk, and put up their own poster. But for a year, that phrase greeted me every morning: “and there was not one left to speak for me”.

I replayed it in my head again today, when I saw that Theresa May had told a service to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Paris terror attacks: "I never thought I would see the day when members of the Jewish community would say they do not feel safe in this country”. I suspect very few of us will have thought we would have lived to see so black a day. Unless, of course, we are Jewish.

A couple of days after the Charlie Hebdo attack, I did a debate with the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins on the PM programme, about the appropriate UK security response. In the course of conversation Simon came out with an illuminating statement. “Britain is a robust country”, he said. “We’re not vulnerable to these people. Accidents will happen, terrorist incidents will happen. But we mustn’t dance to their tune”.

I think I know what Simon meant. That for all the harm they do, terrorists do not represent an existential threat to our society or way of life. Indeed, this has been a common response amongst the liberal commentariat. Polly Toynbee wrote a similar piece last week: “In everyday life, Britain has become remarkably safe – relatively crime-free, children rarely die, most people live to a ripe old age. Life is so dull we invent fears”. And Simon and Polly are right. You are not all that vulnerable. Many of your fears about becoming a victim of terrorism are invented. So long as you are not Jewish.

Whenever Martin Niemöller’s warning is quoted, it is always used in the past tense. But as the Paris attacks proved, they are still coming for the Jews. In reality, they have never stopped coming for the Jews.

Attend a wedding, or other social function hosted by a prominent member of the Jewish community. You will be met by smart young men with name badges and ear pieces, who will politely ask you your business, and check your bag. Walk past a Jewish school. You will see the high gates and CCTV cameras. Walk past a Jewish school in France, and you will see soldiers with automatic weapons. They are not there to ward off imaginary monsters, but real ones.

Not everyone in the public sphere has been silent to this truth. Since the Paris attacks I have seen several commentators passionately speaking out about the real and present threat to the Jewish community. Emma Barnett, Jonathan Freedland, Danny Finkelstein, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch. But that underlines the problem. It is mainly Jews that have again been left to speak out for the Jews.

The reaction from outside the Jewish community follows the same pattern. Like Simon Jenkins and Polly Toynbee, we try to hide behind a veil of self-centered proportionality. Or, we cry “look over there!” Yes the Jewish community is under threat, but what about the “revenge” attacks being launched against the Muslim community? Or we deploy the “some of my best friends are Jewish” argument. Yes some Jews are being targeted. But look at what’s happening to the Palestinians. Should we really be surprised? Yes, obviously we must condemn the “terrorists”. But don’t we have an obligation to try to understand them as well?

And what lies at the heart of this response? If we’re honest, if we’re really honest, it’s that those of us who are not part of the Jewish community have subconsciously – and shamefully – come to the view that being a target of terrorism is merely one of the occupational hazards of being a Jew.

The words on that poster on my office wall used to inspire me. But in the past week they have come to chill me. Why? Because the full implications of them have finally dawned on me.

We should not speak out because what is happening to others is wrong. We should not speak out because what we are witnessing is unconscionable in its own right. The only reason we should speak out is because if we don’t, then one day they may come for us.

That’s not good enough. It was not good enough then, and it is not good enough now.

We all have to speak out now. The time for qualification is over. We must rage against the fear. Scream ferociously “this will not stand”. That in 2015 we will not sit by whilst out neighbours feel scared to go to their shops, or take their children to school, or go to their place of worship.

We need to say: “They came for the Jews. And I spoke out. Because I am not a Jew”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11354927/They-are-still-coming-for-the-Jews.-So-why-is-nobody-speaking-out.html

Anti-Semitism Is Never Solely About the Jews

Anti-Semitism Is Never Solely About the Jews

Radical Islamists attack Jews as the handiest target in a campaign to destroy the free societies that jihadists abhor.

By RUTH R. WISSE

The security of free and open societies depends increasingly on intelligence services. To find the sources of terror attacks originating in the Middle East, investigators track recruits back to their leaders in mountain or desert lairs. The intelligence agencies have become good at their work—though never good enough—but so far they seem not to have focused on the trail leading to the ideology that set terror in motion.

The Times of Israel offers a promising line of inquiry in its report on events in Paris last week under the headline, “First They Came for the Jews, Then They Came for the Cartoonists.” This echoes the famous words of Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, a victim of the Nazis during World War II who connected the dots between the successive targets of his attackers.

Like those who came for the cartoonists, those who came for the pastors in the 1940s had been after the Jews. The unspecified “they” of back then and now locate in the Jews the handiest target on the way to subjugating the free and open society that is their ultimate foe.

These links through time also exist across contemporary time zones. The terrorist attack on the Har Nof synagogue in Jerusalem in November killed four Jews, just as the attack at the kosher supermarket in Paris killed four more. Since the start of this millennium there have been attacks on Jewish houses of prayer in Düsseldorf, Brussels, Minsk, Mumbai, Istanbul, London and Caracas. There are fewer than 4,000 Jews in Mumbai, about 9,000 in Caracas, more than 170,000 in London, and a half-million in Jerusalem. Disparate local factors cannot account for the single-minded choice of targets.

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If we mistakenly imagine that this is “about” the Jews, however, we fall into the trap that anti-Semitism sets for us by deflecting attention from perpetrators to victims. The trail of terror leads not to the Jews but from those who organize against them. Fingering the Jews—in their homeland or elsewhere—is a pretext. In every case, Jews are convenient targets standing in for the liberalizing aspects of individual freedom, democratic governance and modernity complete with its anxieties. Anti-Jewish politics aims at the tolerant societies in which Jews flourish.

One of those societies is Israel. Adjusting our sights, if we follow the trail of Middle East terror back, past its current practitioners—Islamic State, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and various offshoots and affiliates—we arrive at the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The PLO was founded in 1964—three years before the war launched by the Arab states from which Israel emerged in possession of some disputed territory on the west bank of the Jordan River. Until 1967, the PLO and its offshoots had existed in Jordan but been suppressed; after the war, as the PLO focused its terror exclusively against the Jews, money began to flow to the organization from the Arab states. A pure product of ideological anti-Semitism, the PLO and its terrorism formed but one weapon in the Arab war that was failing to destroy Israel by other means.

Here we reach the heart of the matter. Opposition to Israel was the unifying feature of an otherwise splintered Arab League that found in anti-Zionism the same ideological energy that Europeans had found in anti-Semitism. Other ideologies pit left against right; religious against secular; reactionaries against progressives. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism unite otherwise contentious parties against a common target.

After World War II, Arab leaders in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere welcomed fleeing Nazi officers for their military, technological and political expertise. The radical differences between the two cultures did not preclude collaboration in a unified strategy focused on the same Jewish target.

Those Arab leaders made a poor choice. With their countries almost unscathed by the war, they might have concentrated on regional improvement, following the lead of Jordan’s King Abdullah I, who was prepared to settle for the lion’s share of Mandate Palestine. Instead they found in Israel a scapegoat and, in the Palestinians, a pawn whom they condemned to perpetual refugee status as a pretext for their own perpetual belligerence. No doubt they believed they could control potential domestic unrest by channeling popular anger at a foreign “invader.”

But deflecting dissatisfaction does not arrest it. Ignoring crises does not eliminate them. Appeasing terror does not defeat it. Arab leaders would have done better to resist the temptations of anti-Semitism and follow the Jews’ example. The recovery of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel showed, and continues to show, the possibilities of creative renewal. Who knows what Arab societies could accomplish if they likewise had the confidence to look inward and undertake serious reform?

For their own safety, those already living in free societies have to hunt down the terror cells to destroy them. But beyond them, what needs to be confronted is the ideology that brought terrorism into being. Only the incubators of this fatal hatred can accomplish that. The rest of the world can help by refusing to join the diversion of condemning Israel and by urging Arab and Muslim leaders to make up for seven lost decades of blame.

Ms. Wisse a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007) and “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (Princeton, 2013).

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/ruth-r-wisse-anti-semitism-is-never-solely-about-the-jews-1421366930-lMyQjAxMTE1OTE4OTExMTk5Wj

The delusional thinking of Israel-haters

by Vic Rosenthal

It’s often said that Jew-hatred is irrational, and this is obviously true when you look at the absolutely insane beliefs of Jew-haters. For example, Muslims in Paris suburbs believe that Jews, even “a hybrid race of shape-shifters” were responsible for the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, “to make Muslims look bad.” Right.

But exactly the same kind of delusional thinking characterizes obsessive “critics of Israel.” Several years ago there was a scandal over the master’s thesis of one Tal Nitzan at the Hebrew University, in which she argued that the fact that there are no reported rapes of Palestinian Arab women by Jewish IDF soldiers is ‘evidence’ that Israelis are racist. Nitzan argued that they deliberately do not rape them because their racism makes Arab women undesirable to them! Nitzan’s thinking is clearly irrational, but she received a high grade and a prestigious award for her thesis.

But we all know that academics are often, shall we say, different from the rest of us. So we can chalk this up to academic silliness. Not so for the next example, which appeared in the New York Times. A writer named Sarah Schulman popularized the term ‘pinkwashing’, “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”

Schulman’s argument was that Israel’s LGBT-friendly policies, rather than being evidence for its being an advanced liberal and tolerant democracy, were actually a “public relations tool.” Never mind that Israel is in fact one of the best places in the world (and by far the best in the Middle East) for people with non-traditional gender identities, and that gay Palestinians often flee to Israel to escape persecution. One is not allowed to mention these facts because it will obscure the oppression of Palestinians.

If this isn’t enough, the same argument is recycled for the growing Israeli vegan and animal rights movements by Shawndeez Davari Jadali, who is a research assistant for the “Islamophobia Studies Journal” — yes, there is such a thing — at UC Berkeley of course.

Nitzan, Schulman and Jadali seem to believe that Israel is so evil that it is forbidden to point out any of its good qualities. It is only legitimate to vilify it for its alleged oppression of Palestinian Arabs.

The traditional name for the fallacy in their arguments is petitio principii, or begging the question. It means assuming the thing that you are trying to prove. A sure giveaway is when a supposedly empirical proposition (in this case, ‘Israel is evil’) can’t be falsified by any possible evidence. And that is what is happening here. No matter what evidence is presented that Israel really is an advanced democratic state, it cannot possibly be enough for them.

A related problem in leftist thinking is the idea that a true progressive activist can’t pick and choose his causes. He or she must buy the whole package, from animal rights through anti-racism, LGBT causes, Palestinism, women’s rights, etc. And it’s all one or another form of ‘oppression’, usually by the same white male culprits. Jadali says this explicitly:

Liberationists work to elevate the struggles of oppressed groups, whether animal liberationists or Palestinian liberationists, in the struggle for justice. Therefore, a necessary distinction must be made between uncritical, depoliticized, and ignorant vegans/animal rights activists that are duped by Brand Israel’s vegan-washing, and intersectional activists that understand the interconnectedness of oppression and strategically stand in solidarity with Palestinians in boycotting the occupation.

It never occurs to them that possibly they are wrong about the Arabs, and that the other evidence should give them a clue that they are wrong.

Israel’s army is moral and/or disciplined enough to not rape enemy civilians, the nation is LGBT-friendly, has women in important positions in the army, government and work force, has strong environmental and vegan/animal rights movements, has free and fair elections, and more. This should lead a rational person to consider that perhaps the reports of Nazi-like behavior toward Arabs from the anti-Israel contingent don’t make sense. But they are ideologically insulated against facts that are contrary to their assumptions.

In fact, Israel does its best to behave in a humane and fair way in the face of continuous provocations from the violent extremists that control Palestinian society, and indeed have a dominant influence over almost all of the Arab and Muslim world. Israel behaves this way because it is essentially a tolerant, liberal democracy.

Israel isn’t perfect, but its behavior in conflict situations is probably more in keeping with international law than that of other Western democracies in recent conflicts — and there is absolutely no comparison with the behavior of its opponents, like Hamas, Hizballah, and the PLO.

http://abuyehuda.com/2015/01/the-delusional-thinking-of-israel-haters/

A Clear Answer to an Old Debate: Arafat Colluded with Hamas Against Israel at the Height of the Oslo Years

A Clear Answer to an Old Debate: Arafat Colluded with Hamas Against Israel at the Height of the Oslo Years

By Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi


-Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Zahar claims that after the Camp David summit in 2000, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat gave the go-ahead to the head of the Hamas military wing to carry out terror attacks.

-Hamas received arms from Fatah and the Palestinian Authority for the attacks – further proof of the Authority’s responsibility for the outbreak of the Second Intifada.

-Arafat reached the decision that the negotiations at the Camp David summit in July 2000 were going nowhere. He sent a security representative to Sheikh Salah Shehade, head of the Hamas military wing at the time, with the message: “I have no objection to Hamas taking action.”

On December 15, 2014, the Palestinian News Agency published an interview with Mahmoud Al Zahar, a member of the Hamas Political Bureau and one of the organization’s most prominent leaders. Al Zahar referred in the interview to the events preceding the outbreak of the Second Intifada on September 28, 2000. The excerpt below is taken from this interview.

“Abu Amar [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat] reached the decision that the negotiations at the Camp David summit [in July 2000] were going nowhere. He sent a security representative to Sheikh Salah Shehade [head of the Hamas military wing at the time] with the message: ‘I have no objection to Hamas taking action’ and we knew [what this meant] when we met to go over details.”

“Some of us said: ‘Those people [the PA] want to know who is [behind] Unit No. 103 or the groups [terror factions] that would carry out [terror attacks] under the name of Omar al-Mukhtar, so that they can report on us, because they [the PA] coordinate with Israel on security matters.’”

“Others said: ‘No, let’s take this opportunity to carry out acts [terror attacks] jointly with them [the PA] or take arms from them. Their method is well known and if they had wanted to use us they would have reported on us [to Israel] and they would be partners [with Israel in anti-terror activities].

“We received arms from them [the PA] and carried out the acts [terror attacks]. [In response to the interviewer’s question, not clearly audible, about the source of the weapons]: ‘[We got the weapons] from Fatah here [in the Gaza Strip], from the [then Palestinian] Authority here [in the Gaza Strip]…. We took those weapons from them and carried out the acts [terror attacks]. They told Abu Amar [Yasser Arafat]: Wait a minute, it was not us who brought you to this situation. There was a siege [by the IDF on the Mukataa Compound in Ramallah, which served as the main headquarters for the Palestinian government, including Arafat’s office], and the [West] Bank was re-occupied [in Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002], and wiping him out [blaming Israel for the alleged “assassination” of Arafat].”

[In response to the interviewer’s question about Arafat’s motives in allowing Hamas to carry out terror attacks after the Camp David summit]: “Only Allah, blessed be He, can know those intentions. Was it done to improve the terms of the negotiations or were they meant to show a shift [in Arafat’s policy]? These are things that Allah, blessed be He, will account for [with Arafat].”

Consistent in Relating Arafat’s Involvement
Mahmoud Al Zahar has made similar claims in previous interviews about Arafat’s go-ahead to Hamas for terror attacks after the Camp David summit. Below is an excerpt from a report in Al-Quds newspaper on April 9, 2005:

“Al Zahar said that the Palestinian Authority reached what Hamas had warned against, namely the Israeli Occupation’s denial of agreements signed with the PLO, clarifying that: ‘After the failure of the Camp David negotiations, the PLO began to tell Hamas that this was the opportunity to begin actions [that is, terror attacks against Israel]. Hamas was mistrustful of this approach, but nevertheless carried out attacks under the name of the Omar al-Mukhtar Force.”

Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported on September 29, 2010 that, at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Al Aqsa Intifada, Mahmoud Al Zahar said: “The late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told Hamas to undertake a number of military acts in the heart of Israel, after he felt that negotiations with the occupying regime at the time had failed.”

Al Zahar in the center
Al Zahar in the center
In an interview on the official Hamas website (Palestine-info.info) on October 8, 2010, Mahmoud Al Zahar was asked about his statement that Hamas had been permitted to launch terror attacks prior to the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada. Below is an excerpt from that interview:

[Question] “You have previously said that President Abu Amar [Yasser Arafat] instructed Hamas to carry out terror attacks while he was under siege in Ramallah. Can we expect that Abu Mazen [the current Chairman of the Palestinian Authority] will reach a similar stage in his relationship with the [Hamas] movement?”

[Al Zahar] “Abu Amar did not tell Fatah to hold talks with Hamas in order to carry out attacks because of support for the opposition, but because of his desire to use terror attacks for tactical purposes. I remember attending the People’s Conference with [senior Fatah representatives] Hani al-Hassan, Abu Ali Shahin and Abdullah Elhourani in the el-Sheikh Awad Hall at el-Al Zahar University [in Gaza]. At that time those present raised the necessity for Hamas to launch terror attacks against the Israeli occupation, and it was no secret. Abu Amar wanted it to be a tactical measure designed to exert pressure on Israel through Hamas. Abu Mazen does not have that courage or that attitude and is not capable of gambling with his life to that end. By this I meant to suggest to the public that at certain points in time use was made of the opposition for tactical goals, and it does not arise from an attitude that sought to improve the negotiation terms. For that reason, I have no interest in changing the endeavors whereby reconciliation and opposition were attempted in order to improve the terms of the negotiations. But it is vital that they [reconciliation and opposition] should be based on a strategic overview.”


About Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd.

http://jcpa.org/article/hamas-arafat-intifada/

Israel Agrees: Time to Call Abbas’s Bluff

Israel Agrees: Time to Call Abbas’s Bluff


Jonathan S. Tobin

For the past 20 years, whenever some Americans have raised the question of whether U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority should be cut off, opponents have always trumped such calls by invoking a single point: the Israelis disagree. Even as the PA flouted its commitments under the Oslo Accords and acted in various ways that ought to, under U.S. law, mandate a halt to American aid, Israel’s various governments have always opposed such action. But in the wake of the PA’s failed attempt to get the United Nations Security Council to recognize their independence and decision to head to the International Criminal Court to further harass Israel, Jerusalem is preparing to ask Congress to finally enforce the law and end the flow of U.S. taxpayer dollars to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt Fatah government. Though the Obama administration disagrees, Congress should do just that.

Why were the Israelis so reluctant to turn off the spigot of American cash to the PA up until now? The answer is that for all of its flaws, every Israeli government has always rightly viewed the PA as a necessary evil. Though under both Yasir Arafat and his successor Abbas the Fatah-run Authority has helped foment hatred as well allying itself with terrorists (as it did with its unity pact with Hamas last year), and even financed its own terror groups during the second intifada, it still performed a number of useful tasks. Israel is denounced as an occupier by the world but the PA governs most of the West Bank (not to mention the fact that Hamas-ruled Gaza functions as an independent Palestinian state in all but name). Israel would not wish to have that responsibility thrust upon it. The PA’s massive security forces also provide valuable cooperation for Israel. Moreover, the Israelis also understand that they always need an interlocutor to help keep a lid on the conflict if not to solve it.

It was for those reasons that the Israelis have always sent mixed messages about U.S. aid to the Palestinians. On the one hand, they wanted the Americans to try and hold the Palestinians accountable for their commitments. But whether or not those efforts were successful, they never wanted the plug pulled on the aid for fear of causing the PA to collapse, something that would create a mess that the Israelis would be forced to clean up.

Since all these factors still apply, what could be motivating the Israelis to change their tune?

The key reason is that by blowing up the latest U.S. attempt to negotiate peace with an end run to the UN and its affiliated agencies, the Palestinians have come to believe they can conduct a diplomatic war on Israel with impunity. So long as the PA thinks it can keep receiving the subsidies it gets from the U.S. and the rest of the West without keeping their commitments, there will never be any motivation for them to make peace. Worse than that, if they are not held accountable for a strategy based on perpetual conflict, Abbas and his crew won’t be deterred from further efforts to foment terror against Israelis. Rather than the aid buying a modus vivendi and a low level of violence if not peace, its continuance has had the opposite effect in that the PA thinks it has a blank check to avoid peace and the freedom to carry on the conflict in any manner it chooses.

Throughout the more than 20 years of the PA’s existence, both Israel and the U.S. have treated the PA with kid gloves. Both have at times acquiesced to the whitewashing of PA policies that were not only detrimental to coexistence but also a clear threat to any hope of peace. But the latest Palestinian attempt to isolate Israel has taken this to a new level. If the PA is allowed to not only further isolate Israel internationally but is permitted to use the biased machinery of the ICC to brand it a pariah, it will be setting in motion a series of events that will only lead to more violence.

That is why Israel is withholding the tax revenues it normally passes along to the PA as well as advising Congress to put a halt to its generous aid. In response, Abbas’s aide Saeb Erekat has said the PA may just dissolve itself, ending security cooperation and saddling the Israelis with the unwanted and difficult burden of governing the West Bank. These are serious threats, but Washington should call the PA’s bluff immediately.

The notion that Abbas and his Fatah kleptocracy would simply go home and abandon the huge patronage scheme they have created on the West Bank is absurd. Abbas operates his Ramallah government for the sake of his party and cronies, not for Israel. Power and the ability to skim money from international aid is not a sideline for Fatah; it is their raison d’être. He needs the money he gets from Israel and international donors to keep his organization going. That is why it is reasonable to suppose that if he felt that there was a genuine threat to its existence, he would abandon his UN gambit even if he continued to talk about it for domestic purposes. Moreover, the security cooperation with Israel is as much if not more in Abbas’s interests as it is in that of the Jewish state. He relies on Israel to protect him against threats to his life and his government from Hamas and other terror groups backed by Iran. Without the Israelis, his future isn’t worth a shekel.

Having shown that appeasement of the PA doesn’t work, it’s time for both the U.S. and Israel to put the hammer to Abbas and remind him that the money he gets from American taxpayers comes at a price. While there are many Palestinians who might be willing to send the West Bank up in flames for the purpose of furthering their century-old war on Israel, the corrupt leaders of the PA have other priorities. It’s time for Congress, acting with the support of the Israelis, to remind him of that.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/01/05/israel-agrees-time-to-call-abbass-bluff-us-aid-palestinians/

Behind the Headlines: Palestinian UN Security Council draft resolution

 Behind the Headlines: Palestinian UN Security Council draft resolution

This resolution lacks the components that would advance a future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. An agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will only be achieved through bilateral negotiations.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) draft resolution was submitted by Jordan to the UN Security Council on Monday, 29 December. 

Israel strongly opposes unilateral measures in the Security Council. This resolution is completely one-sided and lacks the components that would advance a future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It will harm chances for peace and undermine hopes for a better future for both Palestinians and Israelis.

An agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will only be achieved through bilateral negotiations and not through one side dictating terms. Israel remains committed to the negotiating process and will reject any attempt to unilaterally impose conditions on it.

The PA resolution can only harm chances for peace as it:

Reduces any incentive for the Palestinians to negotiate and compromise while encouraging Palestinian rejectionism. The resolution is part of the PA's strategy to bypass direct negotiations by forcing its positions on Israel through third-party pressure.
Allows the Palestinians to ignore Israel's legitimate interests, especially in regards to the necessary security arrangements and recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Promotes further Palestinian unilateral actions that violate the agreements signed - with the backing of the international community - between Israel and the PA, as well as all internationally accepted frameworks for peace, including UNSC Resolutions 242, 338 and 1850.
Rewards the PA - at a time of heightened terrorism and official incitement - for choosing Hamas as its partner in government at a time when radical Islamist terrorism is raging throughout the region.

The PA's insistence on presenting the resolution despite the lack of support (and in the middle of Israel's election season) shows that the Palestinians are not engaging in a measure to advance the negotiating process but in a provocation to heighten tensions. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is attempting to dictate terms that will undermine the security of Israel. Israel expects that the international community will unequivocally reject this effort.

http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/Issues/Pages/Palestinian-UN-Security-Council-draft-resolution-30-Dec-2014.aspx