Tag Archives: Palestinians

Spreading Lies In The Name Of Human Rights

Posted on by

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 Whole Story

Posted on by

Yesterday Caroline Glick posted an article in Newsweek about the current war between Israel and the Palestinians. It’s a rather detailed article, so please follow the link above and read the entire article. I will try to summarize some of the important points.

The article reports:

There are two sources of the violence. The first is Palestinian incitement. The second is the support the Palestinians receive from the Biden administration.

Several weeks before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began four weeks ago, the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) launched a campaign of incitement across its media organs.

Israel, Fatah and the PA claimed, was defiling and threatening the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The Temple Mount is the site where both the Jewish Temples stood. It is the single holiest site in Judaism, and it is also the third-holiest site in Islam.

Fatah’s incitement campaign served two purposes. First, it deflected public attention away from PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to cancel the recent elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and to the PA presidency. Abbas is now in the 16th year of his four-year term—the last PLC elections were held in January 2006. Pressured by the public, Abbas had announced that elections would finally be held beginning this month. But since all the opinion polls since 2006 have shown that Hamas will win any new PA election, Abbas set out to find a way to blame Israel for his refusal to hold elections. He insisted that Israel agree to permit Jerusalem Arabs to vote in Jerusalem itself. Israel refused, maintaining that Jerusalem Arabs could vote in either the PA-controlled areas or online. Abbas then canceled the elections and promptly blamed Israel.

The cancelled elections are actually one of the main roots of the current problem–the attacks on Israel and the Israeli response are a very effective distraction from the fact that Abbas is now in the 16th year of his four-year term.

The article also explains the issue of Sheikh Jarrah:

At the same time, Abbas began stirring up passions by disseminating lies about alleged Israeli encroachments on Al-Aqsa and inciting terrorism. By doing so, Abbas was able to ratchet up his standing with the broader Palestinian public.

Hamas, for its part, wasn’t going to abandon the incitement stage to Fatah. So it joined in the incitement about Al-Aqsa and then opened a new incitement front pertaining to a 50-year property dispute in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in northeastern Jerusalem.

In 1875, the chief rabbis of Jerusalem purchased buildings in the neighborhood and registered their purchase with the Ottoman—and later, British—authorities. In 1948, with the Jordanian conquest of the neighborhood, the buildings were listed under Jordan’s “Register of Enemy Property” and leased to local Arabs. After Israel liberated and unified Jerusalem in 1967, the Jewish landowners registered their buildings again with the Israel Land Authority and began a process that has dragged on ever since of attempting to restore sovereign control over their properties. The Arab tenants, for their part, recognized the Israeli Jewish ownership of the buildings in a 1982 lawsuit. But in the ensuing 39 years, they have appealed every court ruling requiring them to vacate the premises.

In February, the Jerusalem District Court upheld a lower court ruling that required the Arab tenants to vacate the premises and the properties to be transferred to the Jewish owners. The Arabs appealed to the Supreme Court of Israel, which was initially set to hear the appeal last week.

The article concludes:

In a stunning statement Tuesday, as Hamas rained down rockets on Israeli civilian targets and the Israeli military responded with surgical air strikes against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza, State Department Spokesman Ned Price drew a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians. Price said: “Israel has the right to defend itself and respond to rocket attacks. The Palestinian people also have the right to safety and security, just as Israelis do.”

The message Price sent to Hamas, Fatah and the Israeli Arabs assaulting Israeli Jews is that the U.S. is on their side. They can attack Jews and blame Israel and the Jews for their aggression, and the Biden administration will fund them, defend them and even adopt their anti-Semitic narratives. Palestinians are now certain they will be rewarded, not punished, for their aggression.

So long as this remains the Biden administration’s position, we can expect the latest Palestinian war against Israel to continue. Indeed, so long as this remains the administration’s policy, the danger that the Palestinian war will escalate into a regional onslaught against Israel by Iran’s proxies across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen will only increase.

Unfortunately the election of Joe Biden as President did not bring us closer to peace and normalcy as some people had expected. It has brought national and international turmoil.

Some Background On A Story That Is Generally Being Misreported

Posted on by

Right now the media is reporting that the Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah are being evicted. Somehow the media is not explaining the history and background of this eviction.

 

The Kohelet Policy Forum provides the background on the situation:

The current dispute in Sheikh Jarrah involves several properties with tenants whose leases have expired, and in a few cases squatters with no tenancy rights at all,against owner–landlords who have successfully won court orders evicting the squatters and overstaying tenants. The litigation has taken several years, and the owners have won at every step. The squatters and overstaying tenants have appealed against the eviction orders to the Supreme Court. The only decision that stands before the Israeli government is whether to honor the courts’ decisions and enforce the eviction orders if affirmed by the Supreme Court, or whether to defy court orders and deny the property owners their legal rights.

 Fox News did not accurately report on the situation:

…Trey Yingst’s May 8 report, which aired on FOX at about 1:57 PM Eastern time. Yingst claimed that the court decision to evict certain residents of that neighborhood was based on “an obscure Israeli law.” Yingst also quoted the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs claiming that the residents are at risk “if the [Israeli] Supreme Court sets a new standard.” Of course, there is nothing “obscure” about the requirement that tenants pay rent, nor is it a “new standard.”
 
NGO Monitor reports that, “according to a 1989 High Court decision, and re-affirmed repeatedly in subsequent cases, as in the case of any tenant living on someone else’s property, residents … were required to pay rent to the organizations that owned the properties. Their failure to do so, along with instances of illegal building and illegally renting properties to others, resulted in the current legal proceedings against them, culminating in the District Court decision.”
 
And the Kohelet Policy forum explains, “the leasehold and trespass legal issues at stake are similar to those found throughout the world, other than the unusually strong rent control and tenant protections given to the protected tenants (Palestinian Arabs in this dispute).”
 
While Yingst interviewed two residents of the neighborhood on camera, he did not interview anyone who could reliably give an accurate legal perspective.
 
While a decision on the case has now been postponed for up to a month, the violence that it has spurred continues to escalate, so it’s important for journalists and the public to understand the facts. Moreover, as described below, Yingst’s reporting on continuing events also adds new errors.  

Be aware that the media often reports on events in Israel without knowing or including the background information that explains what is happening.

 

When You Give A Mouse A Cookie…

Posted on by

If any of you haven’t read If You Give A Mouse A Cookie I strongly suggest that you find a copy and read it. It is a children’s book, but it contains a powerful message. It also offers tremendous insight into what Congress just did with the coronavirus relief package and omnibus spending bill they just passed. Remember when Congress had to pass a separate spending bill for various areas of the budget and had to negotiate to keep spending under control? I don’t either. The coronavirus relief package is nothing more than a Christmas tree of spending on pet projects, many of which have nothing to do with the impact of the coronavirus.

Breitbart posted an article today about one item in the bill.

The article reports:

The coronavirus relief bill released Monday includes $250 million in investment aid for the Palestinians and for encouraging Israeli-Palestinian dialogue in a provision titled the “Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act of 2020.”

The provision, named for retiring Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), is buried deep within the nearly 6,000-page legislative text.

First al all, the only reason a bill is 6,000 pages long is that the people supporting it don’t want it read carefully.

The article continues:

Citing economic stagnation in the Palestinian Territories, and the potential for economic development to encourage peace, the Lowey Act would spend $50 million per year for the next five years. A version of the act passed the House in July.

The act would create the “People-to-People Partnership for Peace Fund,” run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to “provide funding for projects to help build the foundation for peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians and for a sustainable two-state solution.”

It would also support projects that foster dialogue between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. The fund would have an advisory board of 13 members, plus two members “who are representatives of foreign governments or international organizations for renewable periods of 3 years.”

The act would also create the “Joint Investment for Peace Initiative,” which would provide investment funding for “projects that contribute to the development of the Palestinian private sector economy in the West Bank and Gaza.”

The act prohibits the funding from being used to aid any foreign government, including the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It also prohibits funds from being given to any group deemed to be involved in, or encouraging, terrorist activity.

Congress limited funding to the Palestinian Authority in 2018 under the Taylor Force Act, which prevents U.S. taxpayer dollars from going to the Palestinian government while it continues to pay stipends to terrorists and their families.

Has it occurred to anyone that maybe the Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution–they want a one-state solution without Israel. Sending them money is not going to change that.

 

Misplaced Concern For Human Rights

Posted on by

CBN News is reporting today that the United Nations has released a list of companies that have businesses in areas Israel captured as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The article reports:

The list was designed to punish more than a hundred companies doing business in east Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights. Israel froze ties with the council’s leader, accusing the office of serving the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction) campaign.

Reaction came quickly after the report’s release and US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) accused the council of persecuting Israel while protecting the world’s worst tyrants. He called on the body to “investigate the crimes of its own members instead of obsessing over the Jewish state.”

The UN has a history of actions against Israel. The United Nations Human Rights Council was created in 2006. Since then, it has issued 45 resolutions against Israel, about 45% of all country-specific resolutions issued. The United Nations Human Rights Council includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Venezuela, and Libya. None of these countries are stellar examples of human rights.

The article notes:

After the release of the database Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to boycott those who boycott Israel, calling the Human Rights Council a “biased body that is devoid of influence.” His political rival, Benny Gantz, also condemned the publication, calling it a “dark day” for human rights.

Jason Greenblatt, one of the architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, told CBN News the public should be pro-active against the boycott movement.

“First of all, shame on them. You know, they were working on this, they held it back and now after a peace plan is launched they go ahead and do that, shame on the Human Rights Council. The UN is a terrible place for Israel. I would actually encourage all of your viewers to write letters to [UN Secretary-General António Guterres] and protest that,” said Greenblatt.

…Ironically, any resulting boycotts would likely hurt Palestinians the most. For example, CBN News has reported how international pressure forced the SodaStream company to leave Mishor Adumim and move to Israel costing many of the 500 Palestinian employees their jobs.

“The Palestinians certainly stand to suffer if these types of measures are put in place. It will harm companies that employ Palestinians; it will harm companies that provide goods and services to Palestinians,” NGO Monitor’s Yona Schiffmiller told CBN News.

He also said the majority of the list’s information came from BDS linked groups.

“I think it’s also important to note that the activities these companies are being targeted for are completely legitimate. There is no international standard that bars business activity in occupied territories or in settlements,” Schiffmiller explained.

“Many of the companies that we’re talking about are conducting activities that are outlined in the Oslo Accords. So, these are internationally recognized agreements between Israel and the Palestinians that the UN is now completely disregarding by putting out this list,” he concluded.

The article concludes with actions that anyone can take to fight this:

Just last year, 600 businessmen and women from more than 50 countries will come to Israel to connect with and invest in Israeli business leaders for the second-annual ARISE conference.

“We’re really tackling some of the greatest crises around the world. And so, we’ve invited them to connect with Israeli businesses and meet face to face and create those connections and transactions that will help bring Israeli innovation to the world,” ARISE Founder and President Adv. Calev Myers told CBN News.

Over the last few years, various states in the US have passed laws against boycotting Israel. Schiffmiller said the international community is within its rights to stop supporting a UN body that’s potentially harming these companies.

STOP THE BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL! 
Sign the Petition
Text “STOPBDS” to 41-444
VISIT: CBN.COM/STOPBDS

Please do.

Letting A Lie Stand

Posted on by

John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog today about a lie told by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. She has made a number of anti-Semitic statements during her short term in Congress.

The article reports:

Yesterday Tlaib retweeted the claim that a “herd of violent Israeli settlers” had “kidnapped and murdered” a seven-year-old Palestinian boy. The original tweet was accompanied by a video that showed an Israeli rescue team recovering the body of the boy from a cistern.

The article concludes:

The whole thing was a hoax, made up out of whole cloth. (Not the death of the boy, which was real, but the assertion that he was murdered by Israeli “settlers.”) The tweet by the Palestinian politician, Hanan Ashrawi, has now been deleted, as has Tlaib’s retweet. But Tlaib’s deletion was silent, with no explanation or apology, or any attempt to correct the misinformation that she had spread to tens of thousands on Twitter.

What happened is obvious. Like many people, Tlaib believes anything that tends to confirm her pre-existing bigotry. There is no need to investigate or verify the facts when an opportunity to smear Jews is at hand.

Anyone can make a mistake and believe something that isn’t true. However, Congresswoman Tlaib owed the people who follow her on Twitter and explanation of why her tweet was deleted and a correction to the story. Kidnapping and murder is generally not something that Israelis do to children. Unfortunately the Palestinians who Tlaib supports have a history of killing innocent people–both Israeli and American–citizens of Israel and tourists. The Representative needs to check her facts more carefully.

Some Common Sense From The State Department

Posted on by

Yesterday Paul Mirengoff at Power Line Blog posted an article about a recent statement of policy by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The article reports:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared today that the U.S. does not regard Israeli settlements on the West Bank as illegal. He thus reversed the position taken by former Secretary of State John Kerry in the dying days of the Obama administration.

Pompeo explained that, after carefully studying the issue, he concluded that President Reagan got it right when he found that the settlements are not illegal. Reagan had reversed the position taken by the Carter administration.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Benny Gantz both support this move.

The article also notes:

Caroline Glick views Pompeo’s statement as a diplomatic turning point. She writes:

Pompeo’s statement is first and foremost an extraordinary gesture of support for Israel and the rights of the Jewish people on the part of President Donald Trump and his administration. But from a U.S. perspective, it also represents a key advance in Trump’s realist foreign policy.

Since taking office, Trump has worked consistently to align U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond to the world as it is, rather than to the world as “experts” imagine it to be. In the Middle East, this realignment of U.S. policy has provided the nations of the region – including Israel and the Palestinians – with the first chance of reaching genuine peace they have ever had.

I doubt that the Palestinians have any desire for genuine peace, and therefore doubt that Pompeo’s statement will move the parties closer to such a peace. However, I agree with Glick that Pompeo’s realism (and President Trump’s) about West Bank settlements is a prerequisite for real progress in any meaningful peace process.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that the ‘settlements’ are not really settlements–they are thriving communities that include hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. We have learned from experience that when the so-called Palestinians are given territory they do not built infrastructure–they use whatever financial aid they are given to build terrorist tunnels and buy rockets and ammunition. Until that changes, I see no point in negotiating to give any territory to them.

 

Does This Lady Not Know History?

Posted on by

Elizabeth Warren wants to revive ‘land for peace’ (because it has worked so well in the past). Let’s back up a little and see previous results.

On September 14, 2005, Boston.com reported:

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip — Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses yesterday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps, and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.

American Jewish donors had bought more than 3,000 greenhouses from Israeli settlers in Gaza for $14 million last month and transferred them to the Palestinian Authority. Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who brokered the deal, put up $500,000 of his own money.

Palestinian police watched yesterday as looters carried materials from greenhouses in several settlements, and commanders complained they did not have enough manpower to protect the buildings. In some instances, there was no security and in others, police joined the looters, witnesses said.

”We need at least another 70 soldiers. This is just a joke,” said Taysir Haddad, one of 22 security guards assigned to Neve Dekalim, formerly the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza. ”We’ve tried to stop as many people as we can, but they’re like locusts.”

The failure of the security forces to prevent scavenging and looting in the settlements after Israel’s withdrawal Monday raised new concerns about Gaza’s future.

Israel gave up the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in the name of peace. They left the greenhouses there so that the Palestinians would have a source of income. Evidently the Palestinians would rather destroy their only hope of economic prosperity than accept that gift. Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip has become prime real estate for launching rockets into civilian populations in Israel. That is how successful ‘land for peace’ has been in the past. There is no reason to believe it will be any more successful in the future.

Yesterday The Washington Examiner reported:

Elizabeth Warren issued a warning to Israel if it continues building settlements in the West Bank.

The Massachusetts senator was asked after a town hall in Iowa whether she was open to making U.S. aid conditional on an agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt construction in a territory Israel won in a defensive war in 1967, which is home to about 3 million Palestinians and roughly 400,000 Jews.

“Right now, Netanyahu says that he is going to take Israel in a direction of increasing settlements. That does not move us toward a two-state solution. It is the official policy of the United States of America to support a two-state solution. And if Israel is moving in the opposite direction, everything’s on the table,” she told reporters at Simpson College in Indianola on Sunday.

That is not a recipe for peace, that is a recipe for war and the killing of innocent civilians. Ms. Warren evidently does not know her history.

The House Of Representatives Accomplished Something Good

Posted on by

On Tuesday The Hill posted an article about the vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on the bill titled, “Opposing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel.” A similar bill was introduced in the Senate, but was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations on March 25, 2019. No further action has been taken on the Senate bill.

The final vote was 398 yeas, 17 nays, 5 voting present, and 12 not voting. (The numbers are from the U.S. House of Representatives website.)

The article at The Hill notes:

The resolution’s opponents included progressive freshmen Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who support the BDS movement.

House Democratic leaders brought the resolution to the floor under a fast-track process that required a two-thirds majority for passage and limited debate to 40 minutes. No one spoke in opposition to the resolution during the allotted debate, but the two progressives delivered floor speeches earlier in the day to express why they’d vote against it.

Tlaib, citing her family’s Palestinian roots, said she “can’t stand by and watch this attack on our freedom of speech and the right to boycott the racist policies of the government in the state of Israel.”

Someone should point out to Tlaib that Palestinians have full rights in Israel. They are more free and more prosperous than the Palestinians that live anywhere outside of Israel.

The article continues:

Lawmakers opposed to BDS stressed that the boycott movement against Israel is unlike other boycotts in American history, arguing that it espouses anti-Semitic views and undermines the prospects for peace in the long-running Palestinian conflict

“Here’s the thing about the global BDS movement: I don’t believe it promotes racial justice or social change at all. It promotes a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that seeks to marginalize Israel, that would deny the Jewish people the right of national self-determination,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said during floor debate.

“You want to criticize a government, that’s your right. You want to stop buying products from a certain country, that’s also your right. But participating in an international commercial effort that undermines Israel’s legitimacy and scuttles the chances of a two-state solution isn’t the same as an individual exercising First Amendment rights,” Engel added.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians have illustrated the fact in recent years that they are not interested in becoming a positive member of the global community. In 2005 Israel removed its settlers from the Gaza Strip and turned the land over to the Arabs. Up until that point the Gaza Strip was the home of greenhouses that supplied fruit and vegetables around the world and had a flourishing economy. The first thing the Arabs did was destroy the greenhouses (and thus destroyed the basis for the thriving economy). Since that time the Gaza Strip has been used as a base for firing rockets and building terrorist tunnels into Israel. Money given to the Arabs that was earmarked for humanitarian purposes has been instead used to buy weapons and build tunnels. The Palestinians do not want to exist peacefully in a two-state solution–they want to destroy Israel.

The following is taken from an article I posted in January 2018:

Until the Palestinians stop training their children to kill Jews, there will be no peace in the Middle East. The BDS Movement is simply another way to attack Israel. I am glad most of the House of Representatives understood that.

This Is How We Change Our Schools

Posted on by

The following is a March 19th Press Release from Americans for Peace &Tolerance, a Boston-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting peaceful coexistence in an ethnically diverse America by educating the American public about radical ideologies that undermine the academic integrity at American High Schools and Universities:

NEWTON RESIDENTS SUE CITY’S SCHOOL COMMITTEE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, PRINCIPALS AND TEACHERS FOR DISCRIMINATION AGAINST JEWS AND ISRAELIS
 
Ideological/Political Curriculum Teaches Propaganda Instead of Facts

 
NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS. On March 12, 2019, Newton taxpayers filed a lawsuit in Middlesex Superior Court against the Newton School Committee, Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman, the principals of the Newton high schools, and certain high school history teachers. Plaintiffs are asking for a court order that would compel Newton school officials to stop indoctrinating students with anti-Semitism, bigotry against Israel, and Islamist religious dogma as part of the high school history curriculum. This suit was made necessary because the embattled school administration is shielding its teachers from scrutiny and refusing to supervise what is being taught in its classrooms. The taxpayers claim that Newton Public Schools (NPS) has deliberately failed and refused to comply with the Equal Rights Amendment of the Massachusetts Constitution, with the Massachusetts Student Anti-Discrimination Act, and with civil rights regulations that require schools, through their curricula, to encourage respect for the human and civil rights of all individuals regardless of race, identity, religion, color, sex, and national origin.
 
The extensively documented 469 page legal complaint, available here, details the lengthy history of Newton residents’ efforts to have NPS address and correct the factually flawed teaching. Plaintiffs and their attorney were provided with an enormous volume of factual documentation by Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) Executive Director Ilya Feoktistov, whose investigations over the past several months formed the basis of this action. 
 
“In looking for the sources of the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bigotry in the Newton curriculum, we discovered a few bad apple teachers who view their teaching positions as giving them license to promote their personal political agendas,” said Mr. Feoktistov. “We are also looking closely at a common pattern with these politicized teachers — most, if not all, have taken professional development courses developed with foreign funding by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”
 
“Newton history teachers and school administrators must think either that anti-discrimination laws do not apply to them, or that these laws do not protect their Jewish and Israeli students,” said the President of APT, Charles Jacobs. “There is no academic freedom to brainwash students with fake history and pro-Arab or anti-Semitic propaganda that is, these days, alarmingly too common on the left in America.”
 
Evidence described in the complaint shows how Newton teachers teach that Jews and Christians deliberately forged their holy texts to contradict the Muslim Qur’an; that Zionism has “little connection” to Jewish history in “Palestine;” that the Jews took advantage of the Holocaust to gain sympathy for Zionism at the expense of “Arab plight;” and that the Israelis treat the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews. After being taught all this, students are asked to debate whether there should be a one- or two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. 
 
Karen Hurvitz, attorney for the taxpayers, stated that her clients are not asking for money damages, even though defendants have certainly caused years of incalculable damage by their insistence on teaching impressionable students materials that slander Israel and Jews. “This is the type of teaching that leads to anti-Semitism — and it has. The taxpayers here are merely asking NPS to perform their duties and obey the law, which requires that their curriculum encourage respect for all people. Education should be based on fact, not on stereotypes and propaganda.”

This is how you handle educational indoctrination.

What Has He Done?

Posted on by

The mainstream media delights in talking about Donald Trump. They bash him on a regular basis–they don’t like his tweets, they don’t like what he says at his rallies, they don’t like the judges he appoints, etc. But when was the last time you heard any of the media mention anything that President Trump has accomplished in his almost two years as President? It seems as if that might be a consideration in the mid-term elections.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted a list of President Trump’s accomplishments.

I will attempt to summarize that list here:

The stock market on Wednesday, January 17th, 2018, said it all.  On that day the Dow broke 26,000 points for the first time in its history. As a result the Dow broke the record for the fastest 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 and 7,000 point increases between major milestones in the history of the Dow. All of these increases occurred since Donald Trump was elected President.

…President Trump however reached a GDP of 4.2% in the 2nd quarter of 2018 and 3.5% in the 3rd quarter.  With a GDP in the 4th quarter of around 3%, the GDP for the year will be greater than 3%.  Something the prior President Obama never did and said no longer could be done.

In regards to debt, President Obama increased the amount of US debt astronomically. By the time Obama left office he had doubled the US debt to $20 trillion and incurred as much debt as all previous Presidents combined. President Trump is slowing that trend.

…With his increasing GDP and slowing of debt increases, President Trump has managed to decrease the debt to GDP ratio in the 2 years since the 2016 election.

…President Trump is the ‘Jobs President’.  Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 250,000 new jobs were created in October.  In President Trump’s first two years since elected President, the US has gained over 4.3 million jobs.  (In President Obama’s first two years the US lost over (4.2) million jobs.)  More people are working in the US than ever before and unemployment is at 50 year lows landing at 3.7% last month.

…President Trump vowed to destroy ISIS. Despite President Obama saying that ISIS will be around for a generation, these murderers and terrorists in the Middle East were decimated over the President’s first year in office. Both Syria and Iraq declared victory over ISIS and due to President Trump’s resolve, less than 1,000 ISIS fighters remain.

…The President refused sending Pakistan security assistance in the millions due to the Pakistani’s harboring terrorists. He stopped an Obama last minute $221 million transfer to Palestine and cut aid to Palestinians in half. He showed that the US is unwilling to work with Muslim entities that support radical Islam.

…President Trump signed more than 90 executive actions in his first 100 days alone.  The White House.gov site lists 81 pages of Executive Actions in the two years since the President was elected into office.  The actions include –

* Dismantling Obama’s climate change initiatives.
* Travel bans for individuals from a select number of countries embroiled in terrorist atrocities.
* Enforcing regulatory reform.
* Protecting Law enforcement.
* Mandating for every new regulation to eliminate two.
* Defeating ISIS.
* Rebuilding the military.
* Building a border wall.
* Cutting funding for sanctuary cities.
* Approving Keystone and Dakota pipelines.
* Reducing regulations on manufacturers.
* Placing a hiring freeze on federal employees.
* Exiting the US from the TPP.

There is much more, but you get the picture. Please follow the link to the article to read the entire list. It is amazing that the mainstream  media has reported very little if any of this. If you wish to see these accomplishments continue, vote Republican on Tuesday. If you wish to go back to a low workforce participation rate, more regulations, and higher taxes, then vote Democrat.

The Sorry State Of Freedom On Our College Campuses

Posted on by

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.

Telling Only One Side Of The Story

Posted on by

Yesterday Townhall posted an article about the reporting of the violence on the Israeli border with Gaza. First of all, let’s look at some of the history of Gaza. In 2005, Israel turned over Gaza to Arabs who wanted a Palestinian state. The Arabs immediately destroyed the greenhouses that supported the Gaza economy and began using Gaza as a launching pad for missile attacks against Israel. In June 2007, Hamas took over Gaza. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by America. They have definitely lived up to their name.

The article at The Hill shows some of the headlines from the mainstream media about the violence:

CNN: “37 Palestinians killed in Gaza protests ahead of US embassy opening”

ABC News: “Death toll in massive Palestinian protests climbs to at least 41, bloodiest day in Gaza since 2014 war”

Washington Post: “Israelis kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza protesting U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem”

Los Angeles Times: “At least 37 Palestinians killed by Israeli army at Gaza border”

Let’s add a few facts to this just to make it interesting. News outlets reported that the ‘protestors’ set tires on fire, sending plumes of black smoke into the air, and hurled firebombs and stones toward Israeli troops across the border. Doesn’t sound like a peaceful protest to me. It was also noted that at least three people were killed because they were about the detonate a bomb. This sounds like self defense to me, but it is not being reported that way.

The article concludes:

The media’s biased reporting on Israel is nothing new. It has been a staple of liberal media reporting. Anti-Israel bias is also rampant amongst Democrat politicians. Even some liberals cannot understand it, calling it a double-standard. Howard Kurtz uses some very appropriate terminology when he discusses the media’s double-standard on Trump reporting in his new book Media Madness, calling the media’s biased reporting a “decimation of original reporting.” “The lines between news and opinion were not just blurred, they were all but obliterated,” Kurtz writes. That exact bias is all too familiar in the reporting of Israeli defense against Palestinian violence. Just as mainstream media has been irresponsibly spreading fake news about Trump, so too have they been spreading lies about Israel – vilifying Israel and victimizing Palestinian aggression.

If you would like unbiased insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I suggest you read analysis by self-proclaimed left-wing Arab, Fred Maroun. 

But until the media stops with the fake news, take heed what you read.

Israel is a small postage stamp in a football field of Arab nations. It is truly sad that the Arab nations will not let them live in peace.

 

A Problem With The Two-State Solution

Posted on by

It would be nice if Israel and a new nation (historically it has never been a nation) of Palestine could live side-by-side. However, that is highly unlikely unless things change drastically.

One problem is what the Palestinians are teaching their children. Below is a picture of Palestinian kindergarten children dressed as suicide bombers. They are being taught that it is noble to die in the act of killing Jews. That might be a problem if you want peace.

Another problem is that the families of terrorists are generously paid for the terrorist acts of family members.

CBN has posted the following information along with a petition to Congress to sign the Taylor Force Act.

In 2016, Taylor Force was murdered in a knife attack while on a Vanderbilt University trip to Tel Aviv, Israel. His attacker was a Palestinian man who was paid with U.S. tax dollars by the Palestinian Authority, a known terrorist organization, to murder Taylor. The terrorist was killed by police—but his family was left with a lifelong lucrative financial reward:

  • Pension for life that is triple the average salary in the West Bank
  • Free tuition for life
  • Free health insurance for life
  • Free clothing allowance for life
  • Free monthly stipend—ALL courtesy of U.S. tax dollars.

This practice of financially incentivized murder is known as #PayToSlay. We must stop it.

Each year, the U.S. government gives $300 million in U.S. taxpayer money to the Palestinian Authority for the promotion of peace in the area—but that’s not how the PA uses it:

  • In 2016, the PA paid $135 million to terrorists jailed in Israel
  • And $183 million to family of terrorists and to incentivize future attacks
  • That adds up to more than $300 million to reward and incentivize acts of murder—in one year alone.

This is the information on the Taylor Force Act as posted at Thomas.gov:

Summary: H.R.1164 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)

Introduced in House (02/16/2017)

Taylor Force Act

This bill prohibits certain assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 from being made available for the West Bank and Gaza unless the Department of State certifies that the Palestinian Authority:

  • is taking steps to end acts of violence against U.S. and Israeli citizens perpetrated by individuals under its jurisdictional control, such as the March 2016 attack that killed former Army officer Taylor Force;
  • is publicly condemning such acts of violence and is investigating, or cooperating in investigations of, such acts; and
  • has terminated payments for acts of terrorism against U.S. and Israeli citizens to any individual who has been convicted and imprisoned for such acts, to any individual who died committing such acts, and to family members of such an individual.

This is what has happened in the Senate:

To put it bluntly, unless the American people make noise, this bill will die in committee in the Senate. It is about time that America stopped funding to families of terrorists who kill Israelis.

The State Department Announces

Posted on by

The New York Post is reporting today that the State Department has announced that America with be withdrawing from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) because of UNESCO’s anti-Israel bias. This is long overdue.

In June 2012, I posted an article illustrating how some of UNESCO’s money is spent. The article featured a cartoon teaching Palestinian children that Jews are killing them. That is not a recipe for peace.

The article at the New York Post concludes:

But the Israel-Palestinian issue has been a major point of contention.

Last year, Israel removed its UNESCO ambassador after the agnecy stated that one of Jerusalem’s holy sites is specifically a “Muslim holy site of worship,” according to Reuters.

Senior American officials, including UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, have repeatedly denounced UNESCO, which the US also withdrew from during the Cold War under then-President Reagan.

Washington, which viewed the agency as mismanaged and used for political reasons, rejoined it in 2003.

Until the people who now live in the Gaza Strip do something other than to send rockets into Israel, I see no reason to recognize Palestine as a nation. The world does not need another terrorist state. In recent years we have seen rockets from the Gaza Strip aimed at civilian targets in Israel and tunnels dug to facilitate attacks on Israeli children. Western countries have funded these activities in the name of humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, very little of the humanitarian aid has gone to humans–it has been used to buy weapons and create tunnels to attack Israel. If the United Nations continues to support these activities, we will have no choice but to withdraw from the United Nations completely.

The Taylor Force Act

Posted on by

Taylor Force was an American who was stabbed to death in 2016 while visiting Israel. He was a former U.S. Army officer who was part of a Vanderbilt University tour group visiting the country.

On February 16th of this year, Mr. Lamborn [Congressman Doug Lamborn] (for himself and Mr. Zeldin [Representative Lee Zeldin]) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs (H.R. 1164):

On September 28th of last year, Mr. Graham (for himself, Mr. Coats, Mr. Blunt, Mr. Rubio, Mr. Kirk, Mr. Cotton, Mr. Boozman, Mr. Cruz, and Mr. Scott) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations (S. 3414). The Senate Bill and the House Bill are the same. So what is this about?

CUFI has posted the following:

Since September of 2015, the beginning of the so-called “stabbing intifada,” Palestinian terrorists have murdered more than 50 innocent people and wounded hundreds more.

The media often describes these terrorists as “lone wolves” completely disconnected from Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA). But the fact is that the Palestinian Authority makes generous lifetime payments to every Palestinian imprisoned for killing Israelis. And if the terrorist dies during his attack, his family receives these payments. This financial support for terrorism is actually required under legislation passed by the Palestinian legislature.

The United States provides the PA with approximately $300 million in aid each year. The PA makes approximately $300 million in payments to terrorists and their families every year. There is no way around this troubling reality: our taxpayer dollars are being used to fund terrorism. This must end!

Sen. Lindsey Graham re-introduced a critical piece of legislation — The Taylor Force Act. Representatives Lamborn and Zeldin introduced similar legislation in the House of Representatives. This bill requires that we cut all U.S. aid to the PA until it stops funding terrorism.

This bill is named after Taylor Force, a West Point graduate who survived tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan only to be murdered in Israel by a Palestinian terrorist.

In April 2013, FrontPage Magazine posted the following:

The Tel Aviv-based Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, representing 24 Americans living in Israel, filed a civil action lawsuit against the State Department last November claiming that the U.S. government is funding Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.

The plaintiffs, some of whom have been victims of Palestinian terrorism, “are fearful that the money that is going to the Palestinian Authority eventually winds up in the hands of the terrorist organizations that can be facilitated to carry out attacks against them,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center and one of the lawyers on the case, told The Daily Caller. “So they find themselves in a very weird situation where their tax money is going actually to attacks against them,” she added.

The Obama administration, not surprisingly, has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.  It argued that the plaintiffs do not have legal standing to bring the suit – i.e., they did not suffer direct personal injury traceable to the actions alleged to be illegal. The Obama administration also argued that the courts have no business getting involved in foreign policy decisions that are inherently “political questions.” These are nothing more than pretextual arguments to prevent discovery of the truth whether the Obama administration is violating express congressional conditions on the granting of aid to the Palestinian Authority and for the West Bank and Gaza.

American foreign aid has been funding terrorism for a while. It will be interesting to watch the fate of the House and Senate bills that are trying to end this practice.

A Really Disgraceful Legacy

Posted on by

There are no words to describe fully what the Obama Administration did at the United Nations this week.

Tablet Magazine posted the following statement by the Prime Minister’s Office in Israel:

“Israel rejects this shameful anti-Israel resolution at the UN and will not abide by its terms. At a time when the Security Council does nothing to stop the slaughter of half a million people in Syria, it disgracefully gangs up on the one true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, and calls the Western Wall “occupied territory.” The Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes. Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.”

The article further reports:

The resolution was authored by Egypt, which shelved the draft after the Netanyahu government reached out to the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump, which then pressured Cairo to drop the resolution. Venezuela, Malaysia, Senegal, and New Zealand say that if Egypt doesn’t push forward, they will. The resolution will permanently enshrine as a matter of international law that the Western Wall is “occupied Palestinian territory,” and that Jews building homes in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is illegal. One prominent member of the pro-Israel community in Washington called the resolution “a nuclear bomb.”

The Obama Administration is already briefing friendly press organizations that they’re showing no animus toward the Jewish state in refusing to veto the resolution. Rather, it’s “tough love”: for an Israel that seems not to have the will or vision to take chances for peace.

That’s not how Israel sees it. As a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem told Tablet: “President Obama and Secretary Kerry are behind this shameful move against Israel at the UN. The US administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts and effectively make the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory. President Obama could declare his willingness to veto this resolution in an instant but instead is pushing it. This is an abandonment of Israel which breaks decades of US policy of protecting Israel at the UN and undermines the prospects of working with the next administration of advancing peace.”

What really concerns me about this resolution is the idea that building homes in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is illegal. This resolution will not bring peace–it will encourage more violence on the part of those who want to see Israel destroyed. For evidence of the success of ‘land for peace’ all you have to do is look at the Gaza Strip, now a launching pad for launching rockets at civilians in Israel.

Article 1 of the United Nations Charter states:

Article 1

The Purposes of the United Nations are:

  1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
  2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
  3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
  4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

In my opinion they have not lived up to their charter and need to be disbanded. Where is the outcry about the killing of Christians in the Middle East and Africa? Where is the outcry against the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia? Where is the outcry against the killing of homosexuals in Iran? It is truly time for the United Nations to go away.

Meanwhile, I hope the Trump Administration will either undo what has just been done or else simply defund the United Nations.

The President-Elect Is Already Making A Difference

Posted on by

One of the main differences between President Obama and President-elect Trump is their attitude toward Israel. President Obama supported a two-state peace solution involving the United Nations; Donald Trump seems to be moving in a different direction

Yahoo News is reporting today that the UN Security postponed a vote on a draft resolution demanding that Israel halt its settlement activities as President-elect Donald Trump weighed in and said the United States should veto the measure.

I would like to say a few things about the two-state peace solution. Israel dragged its citizens out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and gave the land to the Palestinians (there actually are no Palestinians–that term was invented after the six day 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.”). At the time it was turned over, the Gaza Strip had greenhouses and infrastructure that supported its citizens economically. The new residents promptly destroyed those greenhouses–taking away their route to prosperity. They then used money given to them by generous (but mislead) countries to buy rockets to lob into Israel. Why in the world should we create another terrorist state? It is obvious that those claiming to be Palestinians have no intentions of making peace with Israel–the charter of the PLO states that Israel has no right to exist. It is time to ask the other Arabs in the Middle East to set aside some of their large acreage of land for the Palestinians. However, that will never happen because the Palestinians are useful tools in the fight to destroy Israel. President-elect Trump has promised to support Israel. I believe that will be a blessing to Israel and to America. Israel has been our only true friend in the Middle East.

The United Nations is not a friend of Israel. It never has been. That was recently admitted by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (story here). We really need to look at the direction the U.N. has taken in recent years and think about whether or not we choose to be part of it.

The Future Of Israel If Hillary Clinton Wins The American Election

Posted on by

Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East. Turkey was a secular state in the general area, but that is rapidly changing, so Israel stands alone as the only place where Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all free to worship and practice their religion. Isn’t it ironic that the state the Islamic countries want to wipe out is the only state in the area that actually provides freedom for its Muslim population.

So what would the election of Hillary Clinton mean for Israel? Her leaked emails and her choice of associates give us some clues. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted an article yesterday providing some insight into how Mrs. Clinton would treat Israel.

The article reminds us of the beliefs of some of Mrs. Clinton’s associates:

…Sid Blumenthal, one of Hillary’s most trusted advisers, sent Clinton dozens of anti-Israel articles written by Sid’s rabidly anti-Israel son Max. Hillary responded favorably to them.

…[In] September 2010 [Berger] (Sandy Berger) sent Ms. Clinton ideas on how to pressure Israel to make concessions for peace. Mr. Berger acknowledged “how fragile Abbas’ political position [is],” and how “Palestinians are in disarray” and that “[f]ailure is a real possibility.” Mr. Berger was well aware, and informed Ms. Clinton, of the very real possibility that Israel would be placing its national security at grave risk in a deal that would very likely fail and lead to a Hamas takeover. But Mr. Berger felt the risks to Israeli lives were worth it. He advised making Mr. Netanyahu feel “uneasy about incurring our displeasure.”. . .

Astoundingly, Mr. Berger seemed to accuse the Jews in America of racism toward Obama. “At a political level, the past year has clearly demonstrated the degree to which the U.S. has been hamstrung by its low ratings in Israel and among important segments of the domestic Jewish constituency,” he writes. “Domestically, he faces a reservoir of skepticism on this issue which reflects many factors, including inexcusable prejudice.”

From Anne Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s director of policy planning from 2009 to 2011:

…She wrote Ms. Clinton in September 2010, devising a scheme to encourage wealthy philanthropists to pledge millions to the Palestinians (which no doubt would have been embezzled by Abbas and his cronies, as were other funds). Ms. Slaughter writes, “This may be a crazy idea… Suppose we launched a ‘Pledge for Palestine’ campaign… Such a campaign among billionaires/multimillionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state.”

She adds, “There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.”

Here’s how Clinton responded to this call for aiding “Palestine” and “shaming Israelis”: “I am very interested-pls flesh out. Thx.”

Pressuring Israel to give more land to a terrorist entity is not a recipe for peace in the Middle East. When Israel turned over the Gaza Strip in August 2004, the new residents immediately destroyed all of the greenhouses and infrastructure that could have provided a source of income for the area. Since that time the Gaza Strip has become a base for rocket attacks and terrorist tunnels to be used against Israel. It is also worth remembering that the Arabs in the Middle East have consistently refused to sign anything saying that Israel has the right to exist. Again, Israel is not the problem.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would probably destroy our long-standing alliance with Israel.