Archive for June, 2012

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The Palestinian movement and Jew hatred

Sunday, June 17th, 2012

We keep hearing how there is a big difference between Jew hatred and anti-Zionism. Those who are promoting boycotts of Israeli goods, academics, athletes, etc. until Israel provides ‘justice’ to Palestinian Arabs — which is defined in terms that would preclude the existence of the Jewish state — vehemently insist that they have no problem with Jews per se.

Often they themselves are Jews. “How can we be Jew-haters,” they ask?

This position is belied by their double standards and by the pathological obsessiveness of their focus on Israel. But they nevertheless maintain that the logical distinction between hating Jews and ‘opposing’ (in fact, hating) Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs means that social sanctions against antisemitism (and in some countries, legal ones) do not apply to them.

But if we look at the Palestinian movement that they are supporting, it is joined at the hip with ideas and people that represent classical racist Jew hatred of the most murderous kind.

We can quickly dispose of Hamas, whose charter — which has not changed since its inception — contains anti-Jewish material taken directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But did you know that the Palestinian Authority (PA) published a textbook for children in 2004 that asserts that the forged Protocols are historically true?

The PA media and religious appointees also continue to describe Jews as descendants of apes and pigs. Does this count as ‘criticism of Israeli policies’?

We know that the first ‘Palestinian’ leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, fomented pogroms against Jews in Palestine in the 1920’s and in Iraq in 1941. Then he went to Germany and helped Hitler raise a Bosnian Muslim SS division to fight in Eastern Europe. After the war he helped clandestine networks resettle wanted Nazi war criminals in Arab countries (Egypt and Syria), where some served as military or political advisers. Both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas praised him as a Palestinian hero.

It’s well-known that Mahmoud Abbas wrote a ‘doctoral’ dissertation (see also here) in which he claimed that there were fewer than 900,000 Jewish Holocaust victims, that the Nazis did not murder Jews in gas chambers, and that Zionists encouraged Hitler to murder Jews in order to gain the world’s sympathy!

It’s also documented that Abbas, working under the direction of Arafat, provided funds to terrorist Abu Daoud to carry out the massacre of Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics 40 years ago this September.

Now it turns out that he and Arafat had help from neo-Nazis. Here is another link in the chain between Palestinian Arab terrorism and Nazi evil:

Berlin – Newly released files from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency reveal that neo-Nazis plotted with the Palestinian group Black September in the 1972 Munich Olympic terror attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes, according to a Der Spiegel magazine story on Sunday.

According to the online Spiegel report, police in the city of Dortmund sent a notice to the German domestic intelligence agency, Verfassungsschutz (BfV), in which “Saad Walli, an ‘Arab looking man’ met conspiratorially with the German neo-Nazi Willi Pohl.” The meeting took place roughly seven weeks before the 1972 terror attack in Munich.

Saad Walli was the cover name for Abu Daoud, who is widely believed to be the ringleader of the 1972 terror attack in Germany. Pohl bragged to his employer about his contact with the extremist PLO wing…

Pohl, the neo-Nazi, is now a crime fiction author and said, “I chauffeured Abu Daoud throughout the entire Federal Republic where he met in different cities with Palestinians.” Pohl helped Daoud obtain false passports and other documents, according to the report.

The Palestinian movement, both the Islamic and nationalist branches, has always worked hand-in-glove with its natural allies, the Nazis and neo-Nazis. It emphasizes anti-Jewish doctrines in Islam, and promulgates the long-discredited myths of European antisemitism.

If you support the Palestinian movement and its goals of replacing Israel with an Arab state — even if you hide behind the fantasy of a ‘democratic state of all its citizens’ — you need to understand exactly who you are supporting and what you have  signed up for.

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Posted in Antisemitism | 5 Comments »

UN: Church of the Nativity not ‘Palestinian’

Friday, June 15th, 2012
The interior of the Church of the Nativity after Palestinian siege ended

The interior of the Church of the Nativity after Palestinian siege ended

News item:

The secretariat of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has come out against a bid by the Palestinian Authority to use an emergency procedure to register Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity under the country of “Palestine” as a World Heritage site.

“At the UN, where the General Assembly each year adopts more resolutions criticizing Israel than on the rest of the world combined, this is a spectacle as rare as Halley’s Comet,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said…

“This is the first time in recent memory that a draft resolution circulated by the United Nations – let alone by UNESCO, which recently elected Assad’s Syria to its human rights committee – openly rejected a Palestinian claim or position,” Neuer said. His Geneva-based nonprofit group monitors UN activity.

Actually, this is not in the least surprising.

The Christian world understands quite well what would be likely to happen to its holy places under Muslim rule. While it is unlikely that the PA would immediately flatten the church and build a mosque on the site — although one wonders how long it would take Hamas to do so — even the relatively moderate Jordanians severely limited access by Christians between 1948 and 1967, and of course totally excluded Christians who were Israeli nationals. Israel, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to protect and provide access to Christian (and Muslim) sites.

In Egypt, Muslim extremists have attacked and destroyed churches and murdered Christians, who are 12% of the population. If the Muslim Brotherhood should take power, Christians may officially be declared dhimmis and forced to pay a special tax:

When asked what he thought about many Christian Copts coming out to vote for his secular opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, [Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed] Morsi reportedly said, “They need to know that conquest is coming, and Egypt will be Islamic, and that they must pay jizya or emigrate.”

I’m certain that the 2002 invasion of the Church of the Nativity hasn’t been forgotten. I’ll quote at length from an account by David Raab (see link for sources):

…”More than 100 Palestinian gunmen…[including] soldiers and policemen, entered the Church of the Nativity on Tuesday, as Israeli troops swept into Bethlehem in an attempt to quell violence by Palestinian suicide bombers and militias.”34 The actual number of terrorists was between 150 and 180, among them prominent members of the Fatah Tanzim. As the New York Times put it, “Palestinian gunmen have frequently used the area around the church as a refuge, with the expectation that Israel would try to avoid fighting near the shrine” [emphasis added].35

And in fact this was the case. The commander of the Israeli forces in the area asserted that the IDF would not break into the church itself and would not harm this site holy to Christianity. Israel also deployed more mature and more reserved reserve-duty soldiers in this sensitive situation that militarily called for more agile, standing-army soldiers.36

On the other hand, the Palestinians did not treat it the same way. Not only did they take their weapons with them into the Church of the Nativity and fire, on occasion, from the church, but also reportedly booby-trapped the entrance to the church.37

On April 7, “one of the few priests evacuated from the church told Israeli television yesterday that gunmen had shot their way in, and that the priests, monks and nuns were essentially hostages….The priest declined to call the clergy ‘hostages,’ but repeatedly said in fluent English: ‘We have absolutely no choice. They have guns, we do not.'”38

Christians clearly saw the takeover as a violation of the sanctity of the church. In an interview with CWNews, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s Undersecretary of State and the top foreign-policy official, asserted that “The Palestinians have entered into bilateral agreements [with the Holy See] in which they undertake to maintain and respect the status quo regarding the Christian holy places and the rights of Christian communities. To explain the gravity of the current situation, let me begin with the fact that the occupation of the holy places by armed men is a violation of a long tradition of law that dates back to the Ottoman era. Never before have they been occupied – for such a lengthy time – by armed men.”39 On April 14, he reiterated his position in an interview on Vatican Radio.40

On April 24, the Jerusalem Post reported on the damage that the PA forces were causing:

Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them.

They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage….

One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: “They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything….They stole our prayer books and four crosses…they didn’t leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it.”

Israeli officials said the monks said the gunmen had also begun beating and attacking clergymen.41

When the siege finally ended, the PA soldiers left the church in terrible condition:

The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity seized church stockpiles of food and “ate like greedy monsters” until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry. They also guzzled beer, wine, and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests’ quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. The indulgence lasted for about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests who were trapped inside for the entire ordeal….

The Orthodox priests and a number of civilians have said the gunmen created a regime of fear.

Even in the Roman Catholic areas of the complex there was evidence of disregard for religious norms. Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed. “Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold,” said a Franciscan, the Rev. Nicholas Marquez from Mexico.42

Please explain again why Christians might be nervous about the church being in ‘Palestine’!

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Propagandist Phil Reeves changes name, becomes respectable

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
Phil -- er, Philip -- Reeves in his new job as a respectable journalist

Phil — er, Philip — Reeves in his new job as a respectable journalist

by Vic Rosenthal

Remember the “Jenin massacre?”

In April 2002, IDF forces fought with Palestinian guerrillas from the Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad factions for 10 days. After the dust cleared, 23 Israelis were dead along with 52 Palestinians, of whom 5 were judged to be non-combatants.

Immediately thereafter, Palestinian sources claimed that hundreds had died in a monstrous war crime that James Petras, an American academic, compared to the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghettto.

Reports of the devastation multiplied, larded with atrocity stories. A ‘documentary film‘ made by a Palestinian director was full of such charges, including the supposed destruction of a hospital wing by tank shells. Later, it was pointed out that no such wing had ever existed.

Nothing was more gripping than on-the-scene reporting by Phil Reeves of the UK Independent, scant days after the battle ended:

A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.

A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.

In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets.

A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children’s toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.

We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.

Reeves never said that he saw the “hundreds of corpses.” But one has to be a careful reader to notice that. In another article, he simply repeated ugly Palestinian stories:

In the first of this article published yesterday we described how even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14-year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, said Faris’ eight-year-old brother Abdel Rahman. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.

Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son Ziad, a fighter from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. “I heard shooting,” said Ms Zubeidi. “The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, ‘Help.’ We couldn’t do anything for him. He had been shot in the face.” In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Reeves’ ‘reporting’ consisted of a combination of suggestions of terrible hidden crimes, uncritical repetition of Palestinian stories, and an overall tear-jerking emotional tone. He was careful, however, not to explicitly make any false statements that could be checked.

By his series of sensational articles in the Independent, Reeves may have done as much or more than any Western reporter to spread the myth of the ‘Jenin Massacre.’

So where is Phil Reeves now?

Where does he fit, this vicious little whore, this character assassin of the Jewish state, this yellow journalist?

Where else? Reeves — now called ‘Philip’ instead of ‘Phil’, befitting  his new-found respectability as a ‘journalist’, found a spot at that paragon of fairness and professionalism, NPR!

Philip Reeves is an award-winning veteran foreign correspondent who covers Europe out of NPR’s bureau in London…

Reeves joined NPR in 2004, after spending 17 years as a correspondent for the British daily newspaper, The Independent. During the early stages of his career, he worked for BBC radio and television after training on the Bath Chronicle newspaper in western Britain.

If you’re interested, you can find more about NPR here.

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Posted in Media, NPR | 1 Comment »

Obama silent as ErdoÄŸan erases Israel from family of nations

Monday, June 11th, 2012
Soulmates: President Obama giving a hug to Turkish Islamist PM Recep ErdoÄŸan at G-20 meeting last November.

Soulmates: President Obama giving a hug to Turkish Islamist PM Recep ErdoÄŸan at G-20 meeting last November.

Yesterday I wrote that the US had allowed Turkey to veto Israeli participation in a counterterrorism forum. This isn’t the first time. Raphael Ahren writes,

Turkey has since [the Mavi Marmara affair] blocked Israeli participation in several international events. Last week, the World Economic Forum held a “special meeting” on the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia in Istanbul. No Israeli officials were present, possibly because Erdoğan, who partially funded the conference, demanded that they not be invited. Last month, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu vetoed Israel’s participation in a NATO summit of heads of state and government in Chicago. Then, too, an Israeli diplomatic official said: “We didn’t plan on attending the summit anyway.”

Considering that the Mavi Marmara affair was orchestrated by the Turkish regime, following other provocations — a visit by Hamas leader Haniyeh to Turkey in 2006 (and this year), and a theatrical display by ErdoÄŸan in 2009 at the Davos economic forum, this behavior is not surprising. Turkey under ErdoÄŸan’s AKP has made enmity with Israel a fundamental part of its program to become the major power in the Middle East, as US influence there fades.

What is particularly interesting is the way the US, under Obama, seems to be playing along.

After the Mavi Marmara affair, US pressure caused Israel to back off its economic warfare against Hamas, handing Erdoğan a victory (and Israel a defeat).  And compared to his clearly expressed distaste for Israeli PM Netanyahu, Obama sees Erdoğan as a soulmate. Barry Rubin wrote (Mar 26),

President Barack Obama is continuing his love affair with Turkish Islamist leader Recep Erdoğan. As Erdoğan continues to undermine Turkish democracy, throw hundreds of moderates into jail, destroy the nation’s institutions, help Iran, throw hysterical tantrums about how much he hates Israel, promote Islamism in the region, and is fresh from still another meeting with Hamas leaders, Obama continues to use Erdoğan as his guru.

When the two men met at the Seoul, South Korea, Nuclear Security Summit on March 25, Obama practically slobbered over the anti-American ruler, calling Erdoğan his “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.”

One could write a great deal about how ErdoÄŸan is bad for Turkey, bad for the Middle East and bad for the US (Rubin does). But there is another aspect of this that particularly bothers me.

That is the question of how Obama relates to our traditional ally, Israel. By his unforced silence in the face of ErdoÄŸan’s ostracism of Israel from the family of nations — in effect, the virtual erasure of the Jewish state — Obama is sending a message to both Israel’s friends and enemies that he has no problem with it.

Obama’s message is received loud and clear in the capitals of Israel’s enemies, who are emboldened to try to move from virtual erasure of a nation to its physical destruction. And to those who are not enemies, it is a prediction of how Obama will act (or not) when the chips are down.

May I hope that the message is also received by Israel’s friends among American voters?

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Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Hillary Clinton snubs Israel, apologizes for US counterterrorism

Sunday, June 10th, 2012
Secretary of State Clinton apologizes on behalf of US at Global Counterterrorism Forum in Istanbul

Secretary of State Clinton apologizes on behalf of US at Global Counterterrorism Forum in Istanbul

News item:

The United States blocked Israel’s participation in the Global Counterterrorism Forum’s (GCTF) first meeting in Istanbul on Friday, despite Israel’s having one of the most extensive counterterrorism experiences in the world.

Israel was excluded from the meeting due to fierce objections by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Washington-based source told Globes news…

Twenty-nine countries are participating in the GCTF, ten of which are Arab and/or Muslim countries.

The GCTF was created (and is undoubtedly mostly funded by) the US. According to the State Department,

The U.S. proposed the creation of the GCTF to address the evolving terrorist threat in a way that would bring enduring benefits by helping frontline countries and affected regions acquire the means to deal with threats they face. It is based on a recognition that the U.S. alone cannot eliminate every terrorist or terrorist organization. Rather, the international community must come together to assist countries as they work to confront the terrorist threat.

Given that the most ‘frontline’ country facing terrorist threats is Israel, which has been subjected to terrorism on an almost daily basis since its birth, one would expect that Israel would be among the founding members of the GCTF.

Nope. Israel was not included among the membership, and as we see from the above, is not even permitted to attend its meetings as a non-member.

Do we begin to sense the stench of hypocrisy here, as our State Department happily acquiesces in maintaining Israel’s pariah status for the benefit of the ‘enlightened’ members of this forum like Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

The smell gets even stronger as  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, representing the Obama Administration, crawls on her belly to apologize for the behavior of the US:

I am here today also to underscore that the United States will work with all of you to combat terrorists within the framework of the rule of law. Now some believe that when it comes to counterterrorism, the end always justifies the means; that torture, abuse, the suspension of civil liberties – no measure is too extreme in the name of keeping our citizens safe…

I know that the United States has not always had a perfect record, and we can and must do a better job of addressing the mistaken belief that these tactics are ever permissible. That is why President Obama has made our standards very clear. We will always maintain our right to use force against groups such as al-Qaida that have attacked us and still threaten us with imminent attack. And in doing so, we will comply with the applicable law, including the laws of war, and go to extraordinary lengths to ensure precision and avoid the loss of innocent life.

Of course, the Obama Administration has been responsible for many more targeted killings than its predecessor — not that I think that’s a bad thing — but apparently it’s the attitude that’s important.

The real purpose behind the GCTF was made clear at the conference:

“The GCTF sought from the outset to bridge old and deep divides in the international community between Western donor nations and Muslim majority nations. And it has, I think, done that quite effectively,” a top US official said at the press briefing prior to the opening session.

The $90 million so far distributed by the GCTF to ‘frontline’ countries may have helped.

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