Should American Politicians Support Terrorism?

The political left has long supported Palestine at the expense of Israel. We would do well to remember that there never actually was a Palestine–it was the name given to Israel by the Romans to insult the Jews.

Consider the following quote:

“We considered ourselves Jordanian until the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Then all of the sudden we were Palestinians – they removed the star from the Jordanian flag and all at once we had a Palestinian flag.” ~ Walid Shoebat

Walid Shoebat is also credited with saying:

One day during the 1960’s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was a Palestinian.

Keep that in mind as you read today’s news.

Just the News recently posted an article about the American political left’s embrace of Iran and Palestine. After what happened this past weekend, they might want to reconsider that embrace.

The article notes:

As evidence of civilian atrocities mounted, President Joe Biden emerged in public to unequivocally denounce the Hamas terror attacks as “pure unadulterated evil” but his repudiation cannot hide the long embrace by his party’s liberals of the two main actors behind the staggering violence that rocked the Middle East: the political and military leadership in Palestine and their backers in Iran.

Even as American hostages remained in peril, the beheaded torsos of innocent civilians were collected from Israeli streets and Hamas and Tehran celebrated the bloodletting, many liberals in America were still trying to express empathy for the attackers.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib flew a Palestinian flag outside her official congressional office, while Rep. Ilhan Omar suggested Israel’s counteroffensive might be a “war crime.” Biden’s secretary of state tweeted, then deleted a call for a “ceasefire” just as Israel ramped up its rescue missions. The U.S. Department of State’s Palestinian Affairs Office literally implored Israel to “refrain” from “retaliatory attacks” before reversing course. On the streets of liberal cities and the campuses of left-leaning universities like Harvard, many even suggested Israel deserved blame for Hamas’ attacks.

People who want to commit violence will always find an excuse.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is extremely insightful.

Spreading Lies In The Name Of Human Rights

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial about a recent report by Amnesty International. The more than 200-page report accused Israel of being an apartheid state. When you consider that Arabs in Israel have more freedom than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, this is an amazing accusation.

The editorial notes:

Perhaps you thought Israel had long ago established its right to exist as a Jewish state. Guess again. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want to eliminate Israel as we know it, but who would have thought they’d find allies in Amnesty International?

Perhaps we should have known this given some of Amnesty’s sympathies with the global left. But the nonprofit advocate for political prisoners is going far beyond that with its 211-page report labeling Israel an “apartheid” state that deserves the world’s opprobrium and sanction. The report is embargoed until Tuesday, but we’ve obtained the draft from a source other than Amnesty. It deserves condemnation for its bias and lack of understanding about why Israel survives amid hostile neighbors.

…The Amnesty report is a long indictment of Israel that attempts to show it is an apartheid state in how it treats Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. “Israel has established and maintained an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis—wherever it has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948,” says the report summary.

No one was claiming to be a Palestinian in 1948, but that doesn’t stop Amnesty International from attempting to undermine Israel’s right to exist. As I have reported before, Walid Shoebat once stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.”

The editorial concludes:

The Amnesty report is especially ill-timed in an era when Israel and Arab states are negotiating new deals for commerce and travel since the Abraham Accords. A fair assumption is that Amnesty’s drafters hope to block such progress by inflaming world opinion with the “apartheid” slander. Amnesty also calls on the United Nations to sanction Israel, and the International Criminal Court to investigate and hold Israelis criminally responsible.

We assume the Biden Administration will denounce this calumny and oppose all efforts to use it as a cudgel against America’s best friend in the Middle East.

Don’t count on the Biden administration coming to Israel’s rescue.

The Sorry State Of Freedom On Our College Campuses

A friend sent me a link to a Washington Post article posted on October 9. The headline in the article is, “A second Michigan instructor withheld a recommendation letter from student headed to Israel.”

The disturbing part is the reason given:

The article continues:

Her email echoed the one that arrived last month in the inbox of Abigail Ingber, another junior at the University of Michigan. 

“I am very sorry, but I only scanned your first email a couple weeks ago and missed out on a key detail,” John Cheney-Lippold, a cultural studies professor, wrote to Ingber in early September, upon realizing that the reference was for a program at Tel Aviv University. “As you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine. This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there.”

The concept that Israel includes Palestinian land is simply not true. As Walid Shoebat has stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.” Jordan was established to be the Palestinian state. The Palestinians were kicked out of Jordan after they attempted to overthrow its government. The Arab countries have kept them as refugees for generations in order to gin up anger against Israel with the hopes of driving the Jews into the sea. It is unbelievable that our college professors are encouraging this sort of behavior. It’s a shame our college teachers don’t know history. In actuality, the land occupied by Jordan was initially given to Israel.

The article concludes:

Michael Zakim, a cultural historian at Tel Aviv University, argued that the boycott would end up undermining “the Palestinian struggle” by unwittingly supporting forces “determined to delegitimize the humanism and internationalism that predominates on Israeli university campuses.” He labeled as “inanity” some of the means taken to “discredit Israeli academic culture,” such as the refusal to serve as an external reader on a dissertation.

Feisal G. Mohamed, then of the University of Illinois and now at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, responded, saying the boycott didn’t compel each of the actions decried by Zakim. Still, he reasoned, “any and all available means must be used to end an occupation.”

At Michigan, the board of regents declined last year to form a committee to investigate divesting the university’s endowment from companies doing business with Israel, after the student government passed a resolution supporting such a move.

But refusing to throw its weight behind BDS isn’t enough, Secker (Jake Secker) warned. If the university doesn’t take further action to insulate its students from the political actions of their professors, he said, it could have a crisis on its hands.

“This is an epidemic that’s starting to begin,” he said. “Especially being someone who has an Israeli background, I took it personally. It really disturbed me.”

Any university discriminating against students who want to study in Israel should lose all federal and state funding. BDS is not an acceptable policy, and the government should not be funding it.

A Short History Lesson

The idea that Israel belongs to anyone except the Jews does not hold water historically. The British named the area of Israel Palestine as an insult to the Jewish people who lived there–it had nothing to do with there being a state of Palestine. Such a state never existed.

This is the picture of the land given to Israel in 1920:

The majority of that land that was originally given to Israel was given to Jordan. After the war in 1948, the Armistice Agreements left Jordan in control of the West Bank. In 1950, Jordan annexed the West Bank and gave all residents Jordanian citizenship. Until the 1967 War, the people living in the West Bank were considered Jordanian citizens. As I have noted in previous posts, Walid Shoebat stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.”

So where am I going with this? Pamela Geller posted an article on her website on January 12 about a court case in the Court of Appeal of Versailles France.

The article reports:

…the Court of Appeal of Versailles ruled that West bank settlements and occupation of Judea Samaria by Israel is unequivocally legal under international law, in a suit brought by the Palestinian Authority against Jerusalem’s light rail built by French companies Alstom and Veolia…

Somehow the major media did not report this ruling.

The article includes a detailed analysis of the case and the reasons for the decision. I will try to summarize the highlights here:

In order to rule whether the light rail construction was legal or not, the court had to to seek the texts of international law, to examine international treaties, in order to establish the respective rights of the Palestinians and the Israelis.

And to my knowledge, this is the first time that a non-Israeli court has been led to rule on the status of the West Bank.

…Keep in mind though, that the Court’s findings have no effect in international law. What they do, and it’s of the utmost importance, they are clarify the legal reality.

The Versailles Court of Appeal conclusions are as resounding as the silence in which they were received in the media: Israel has real rights in the territories, its decision to build a light rail in the West Bank or anything else in the area is legal, and the judges have rejected all the arguments presented by the Palestinians.

The article lists the Palestinian arguments:

  • The PLO denounces the deportation of the Palestinian population, and the destruction of properties in violation of international regulations. Relying on the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the UN resolutions, it considers that the State of Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and is pursuing illegal Jewish colonization. Thus, construction of the light rail is itself illegal (1).
  • The PLO adds that the light rail construction has resulted in the destruction of Palestinian buildings and houses, the almost total destruction of Highway 60, which is vital for Palestinians and their goods, and has conducted many illegal dispossessions. Therefore, several clauses from the annexed Regulations to the October 18, 1907 Fourth Hague Convention were violated (2).
  • Finally, the PLO alleges that Israel violates the provisions relating to the « protection of cultural property » provided for in Article 4 of the Hague Convention of 14 May 1954, Article 27 of the Hague Regulations of 1907, Article 5 of the Hague Convention IX of 1907, and Article 53 of Additional Protocol No. 1 to the Geneva Conventions.

The article explains why these are not valid arguments:

The Court explains that the Palestinian Authority misinterprets the texts and they do not apply to the occupation:

  • First of all, all the international instruments put forward by the PLO are acts signed between States, and the obligations or prohibitions contained therein are relevant to States. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor the PLO are States, therefore, none of these legal documents apply.
  • Secondly, said the Court, these texts are binding only on those who signed them, namely the « contracting parties ». But neither the PLO nor the Palestinian Authority have ever signed these texts.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The 1967 lines were not borders–they were lines drawn in an armistice. Remember also what has happened in the Gaza Strip since Israel gave it up–it has become a launching pad for sending rockets into civilian areas, and all of the income-producing greenhouses were destroyed because they had been owned by Jews. That kind of hatred is not anything the world needs to encourage.

It will be interesting to see what the implications of this court case will be. First of all, will any of the major media report it? Second of all, will this impact any decisions made at the United Nations regarding a ‘two-state solution.’ Again, I would like to note that until the people involved in the ‘two-state solution’ are willing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, the ‘two-state solution’ is not a recipe for peace, but only an excuse for more war.

This Should Make Us All Feel Very Secure

Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about the Syrian refugees coming to the United States. The article brings up a rather obvious but somehow unmentioned fact–Homeland Security has no way to vet the refugees because Syria has no police or intelligence databases to check the backgrounds of incoming refugees against criminal and terrorist records. Syria is a failed state at this point. There is not enough order to keep a reliable database.

The article reports:

Senior FBI officials recently testified that they have no idea who these people are, and they can’t find out what type of backgrounds they have — criminal, terrorist or otherwise — because there are no vetting opportunities in those war-torn countries.

Syria and Iraq, along with Somalia and Sudan, are failed states where police records aren’t even kept. Agents can’t vet somebody if they don’t have documentation and don’t even have the criminal databases to screen applicants.

So the truth is, we are not vetting these Muslim refugees at all. And as GOP presidential front-runners duly note, it’s a huge gamble to let people from hostile nations enter the U.S. without any meaningful background check. It’s a safer bet just to limit, if not stop, their immigration.

“If I win, they’re going back,” Donald Trump vowed. “They could be ISIS. This (mass Syrian immigration) could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time.”

Ben Carson, for his part, said that he would bar refugees from Syria because they are “infiltrated” with terrorists seeking to harm America. “To bring into this country groups infiltrated with jihadists makes no sense,” Carson asserted. “Why would you do something like that?”

The Obama regime claims to have no evidence of terrorist or even extremist infiltration. But Sessions made public a list of 72 recent Muslim immigrants arrested just over the past year who were charged with terrorist activity.

This seems to be a rather large gamble for a national security issue. The other untold part of the story is the unwillingness of the stable Muslim countries in the Middle East and elsewhere to take in these refugees. Saudi Arabia offered to build mosques in Germany for the refugees; why didn’t they offer to build them houses in Saudi Arabia?

There is a political element in the Middle East that thrives on using refugees as pawns. The Palestinians were not Palestinians until 1967. They have never been able to settle in the lands they actually came from–they have been kept in refugee camps and blocked from forming a viable non-terrorist state.

The following quote tells it all:

Walid Shoebat Quote

One wonders what purpose the political forces in the Middle East have in releasing all of these Muslims to western countries.

The Vatican Signs A Treaty With Palestine

CBN News is reporting today that the Vatican has signed a treaty with the “State of Palestine.” Just for the record, there is, nor has there ever been, a State of Palestine.

As I have previously posted:

As Walid Shoebat stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.”

The article reports:

Israel‘s Foreign Ministry called the text of the treaty “one-sided” and expressed regret.

“This hasty step damages the prospects for advancing a peace agreement, and harms the international effort to convince the PA (Palestinian Authority) to return to direct negotiations with Israel,” the ministry said in a statement.

“We also regret the one-sided texts in the agreement which ignore the historic rights of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and to the places holy to Judaism in Jerusalem,” it continued.  “Israel cannot accept the unilateral determinations in the agreement which do not take into account Israel’s essential interests and the special historic status of the Jewish people in Jerusalem.”

The article reminds us:

Vatican officials say the document signed Friday reflects the church’s support of a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians

No mention was made about Hamas, the terror group which entered into a unity government with the Palestinian Authority and calls in its charter for Israel’s destruction.

Christians are being martyred in the Middle East as we speak, and the Vatican is making treaties with terrorists. One has to wonder if they have lost their way.

 

A Brief Primer On Israel And Gaza

Israel turned Gaza over to the Palestinians (there has never actually been a Palestinian state) in 2005. Just to refresh your memory, there was no cry for a Palestinian state until after the 1967 war. As Walid Shoebat stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.” That is a part of the history of the Middle East that is often ignored.

So what is this current war about? This is a chart from the IDF blog:

graph

This is a picture of a playground in Sderot, Israel:

This cute little piece of playground equipment is actually a bomb shelter. Children is Sderot have 15 seconds to get to a bomb shelter when the sirens go off. The reason we have not seen massive civilian casualties in Israel caused by the Hamas rocket attacks is that Israel uses the Iron Dome to keep the rockets from hitting the ground and the Israeli population has been spending a lot of time in bomb shelters. (There is also the ‘God thing.’ Israel has a Biblical relationship to God that includes ownership of the land they now possess. The Bible clearly says that the person who blesses Israel will be blessed and the person who curses Israel will be cursed. History bears that out.)

Please remember when you hear the hysterical cries of Palestinian casualties that those casualties are planned by the Palestinian government. When Israel tells people to leave an area they are about to attack, the Palestinian government orders the civilians to stay there–the Palestinian government understands the optics of Palestinian civilian casualties in the propaganda war. Israel is not targeting civilians–the government of Gaza has targeted Israeli civilians for years. Don’t believe the current propaganda.

This May Make The Peace Process Rather Difficult

Yesterday The Times of Israel posted a story quoting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The article states:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said there is “no way” he will recognize Israel as a Jewish state and accept a Palestinian capital in just a portion of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, rebuffing what Palestinians fear will be key elements of a US peace proposal.

…Speaking to youth activists of his Fatah party, he suggested he would stand firm again, particularly over the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“They are pressing and saying, ‘no peace without the Jewish state,’” he said, though not spelling out who is applying the pressure. “There is no way. We will not accept.”

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that if Palestine is demanding to recognized as a state that they should also be willing to recognize Israel as a state. I have seen the maps drawn by various Arab countries that do not include Israel, and it seems to me that if we are ever going to have peace in the Middle East that kind of foolishness has to stop. If the Palestinian government is going to demand recognition as a Palestinian state, they should be willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

In case you are new to reading this blog, I am going to end this article with something I have quoted before. To me, this quote sums up the history of the Palestinians. It is a quote by Walid Shoebat: “Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?” There has never been a Palestinian state (unless you consider Jordan, which is made up of land promised to Israel and then given to the Arabs to form a Palestinian state and then given to the Hashemites when they were driven out of Mecca). The whole argument for a Palestinian state is a rewriting of history. The land has never belonged to the Palestinians–the British called it Palestine as an affront to the Jews.

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Ignoring History When It Interferes With Your Politics

Breitbart.com posted an article today about the UNESCO exhibition that was scheduled to open in Paris on January 20. The exhibition has been cancelled because documents the Jews’ 3,500+ years connection to the Land of Israel, chronicling the timeline from the days of Abraham to the 21st century.

The article reports:

UNESCO cancelled the event, while not disputing the factual basis whatsoever behind the exhibit itself, for fear it may hurt the “peace process.” The event, which had been planned for over two years, was cancelled three days before it was set to open. The successful campaign mounted to cancel the expo can largely be accredited to a last minute protest by the Arab group at UNESCO.

The protest doesn’t change history. The problem with the exhibit is that it reminds people of the history of Israel. The connection between the Jews and Israel goes back thousands of years. The Palestinians did not exist as a people seeking a homeland until after 1967. As Walid Shoebat stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.”

The article at Breitbart.com reminds us:

The UN has maintained its heavy biases against the State of Israel for many years. Some argue that it has become the sole focus of the entire United Nations system: to engage in a delegitimization campaign against the Jewish state. Israel’s envoy to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, once stated that UNESCO has an “obsession” with Israel. In October, UNESCO left a single meeting in Paris declaring it had passed six separate resolutions condemning tiny Israel, but none regarding the rest of the world in its entirety.

According to UN Watch, an incredible 100 percent of UNESCO’s condemnatory resolutions have been in opposition to Israel.

The United Nations may have begun with a beautiful idea–world peace and freedom for all the citizens of the world. Unfortunately, a number of countries that do not support democracy have banned together to form a very influential voting bloc within the organization and have caused the United Nations to stray from its original mission. Rather than condemn terrorist regimes and tyrannies, the organization has focused its condemnation on Israel. It really is time for the United Nations to leave America and go elsewhere. The improvement in the traffic situation in lower Manhattan alone would be astonishing.

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