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Police and Zaka volunteers remove the body of murdered American tourist Kristine Luken, December 18, 2010

So what’s new?

The trial of three Palestinian Authority (PA) Arabs charged with the sadistic murder of a Christian tourist and the attempted murder of her Israeli friend began Sunday in the Jerusalem District Court…

The attack took place December 18 at Khirbet Hanut in the Mata Forest, near Beit Shmesh, where Kaye Wilson, a dual Israeli-British citizen, and a visiting friend, Kristine Luken, had gone on a hike. Luken did not survive that day.

Wilson told the court Sunday of the horrific ordeal as the accused men sat in the defendants’ bench and looked on. Luken’s brother, Dean Luken, flew in from Texas to attend the hearing.

The attackers approached the women in the forest and tied them up. They later confessed to Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) interrogators that they had come there with the intent of murdering Jews.

“I saw Kristine being murdered in front of my eyes,” said Wilson, describing how one of the killers gingerly removed her Star of David necklace and then stabbed her. She played dead in order to save her life, while Luken was dying. “She screamed. I did not want him to hurt me. I tried not to utter a sound. It was difficult because the pain was great but I tried to play dead. I heard Kristine uttering her last gasps. I was not sure if I was alive,” she told the court. –  IsraelNN

A pity that the trial couldn’t be held in Texas, where the death penalty for murder is regularly carried out. If found guilty in Israeli court, the murderers will likely be sentenced to long, perhaps life, prison terms. Sounds good, except that they are likely to be released in a lopsided ‘prisoner exchange’, an operation to ‘bolster Abbas’ against Hamas, or just in a general amnesty when the state of ‘Palestine’ is declared.

Even one of the convicted killers of five members of the Fogel family, Hakim Awad, the one who did the stabbing, received only five life sentences.

Israel’s jails are full of Arab murderers of Jews. Murder is a political act, just like stealing Jewish cars or farm animals can be. There are literally hundreds of cases like this — innocent people shot, stabbed, burned, stoned or beaten to death (like Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran, 13 and 14 years old, in 2001).

In March 2004, an Arab student named George Khoury was shot dead while walking in Jerusalem. The killers were members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa brigades who were looking for “Jewish settlers” to kill and mistook Khoury for a Jew. Yasser Arafat called the young man’s prominent father and personally apologized. The al-Aqsa Brigades issued a statement saying that they regretted the case of “mistaken identity” and that Khoury was a martyr for the cause. I doubt that there will be an apology to Luken’s family.

It is top priority for the government of the soon-to-be state of ‘Palestine’ to free all Palestinians in Israeli prisons, whom they consider political prisoners or at most prisoners of war:

The PA president said that recognition of statehood with pre-1967 borders is necessary for renewed negotiations with Israel. “We need to have full [UN] membership within [pre-1967] borders in order to go to negotiations on a basis adopted by the world so that we may discuss the permanent issues of Jerusalem, borders, refugees – and our prisoners in Israeli prisons.” — Mahmoud Abbas, September 16, 2011

One of the issues that has prevented a prisoner-exchange deal with Hamas for Gilad Shalit is the Hamas demand for the release of numerous murderers. Although ridiculously unfair “prisoner exchanges” have been the rule for the past few years — including one that released the vicious child murderer Samir Kuntar — apparently the demands this time were over the top, even for an Israeli government under tremendous pressure to get Shalit out of Hamas’ hands regardless of the price.

The judges in the case of Fogel murderer Hakim Awad considered sentencing him to death:

“A case such as this tempts the use of such a punishment,” the judges wrote in their decision. “The imprisoned criminal, whose life would be taken after being sentenced to death, might turn into a martyr, a shaheed in their terms, with all the meanings that are attached to it.” — JTA

I admit that I don’t understand this. There are plenty of Palestinian Arab ‘martyrs’ to serve as inspiration for more. The PA constantly names streets, schools, camps and playgrounds after them to make sure that they do inspire others, especially young people. One more wouldn’t hurt.

Technorati Tags: Israel, murder, Arabs, Kristine Luken, Hakim Awad

Yesterday, Mahmoud Abbas explained what he expects to get from the UN:

“We are going to the United Nations to request our legitimate right, obtaining full membership for Palestine in this organization,” Abbas said in a televised speech, indicating he would seek a vote on the issue in the UN Security Council…

“If we succeed, and this is what we are working towards, then we must know that the day following the recognition of the state, the occupation will not end,” Abbas said.

“But we will have obtained the world’s recognition that our state is occupied and that our land is occupied and not disputed territory, as the Israeli government claims,” he said.

He added that the move is not intended to isolate Israel or delegitimize its legal status. “Israel is there, no one can isolate or take away its legal status, but we need to isolate the policies of Israel. We need to put an end to the occupation and take away the legal status of the occupation.”

The PA president said that recognition of statehood with pre-1967 borders is necessary for renewed negotiations with Israel. “We need to have full [UN] membership within [pre-1967] borders in order to go to negotiations on a basis adopted by the world so that we may discuss the permanent issues of Jerusalem, borders, refugees – and our prisoners in Israeli prisons.”

For once, he’s telling the truth. Although they don’t like to admit it, and no matter how often their friends in the media say “settlements are illegal under international law,” the Palestinians realize that in fact the territories are at most ‘disputed’, and Jewish settlements east of the Green Line legal (see scholar Howard Grief’s arguments for Israel’s legal title to all of the area of the mandate here).

Abbas believes that a Security Council resolution that recognizes a state of ‘Palestine’ in the territories will overcome the precedents set by

the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, the Mandate for Palestine conferred on Britain by the Principal Allied Powers and confirmed by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, and the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920 [Grief]

as well as UNSC resolutions 242 and 338, which state that the disposition of the territories captured in 1967 shall be determined by the agreement of all of the parties (and not imposed by the UN), and of course the Oslo accords which reaffirmed that principle.

All of this, he hopes, will disappear. But statehood will not confer any responsibilities on the Palestinians, such as to feed their own people or resettle any of the Arab refugees (except in Israel).

A PLO official remarked that statehood would not affect the right of refugees to return to their ‘original homes’ in Israel. Indeed, it will not affect the status of any Palestinian ‘refugees’, not even the ones within the PA.  They will remain in refugee camps, supported by the UN (mainly with US money) until they can be mobilized to overrun Israel and turn it into West Palestine!

The arrogance is remarkable, considering that the Palestinians have no economy, have created no real institutions, do not have a unified leadership, and have proudly announced that they plan to create an apartheid state which will engage in ethnic cleansing of its Jewish inhabitants. But none of this seems to matter.

The PA — and this doesn’t include payments to the UN refugee organization, UNRWA — receives half  a billion dollars a year of US taxpayer funds, plus millions more from the EU. US instructors train its army, which is armed with US weapons. Much of the money is paid to PA officials in Gaza, which is under Hamas control. Without this international dole, there would be no PA.

They are asking the UN for statehood while Hamas — an explicitly racist group which espouses genocide against the Jewish population of Israel, which is holding a kidnapped Israeli incommunicado in violation of international law, and which continues to fire rockets at random against a civilian population (a war crime) — is officially part of the PA.

All of this is justified by an invented, inverted historical narrative, and — in the case of Hamas — a radical Islamist ideology.

The only thing preventing the passage of such a resolution is a threatened US veto. Abbas claims that a veto would “destroy the two-state solution.” In Abbas-speak, a “two-state solution” does not mean a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. It means that there will be a Palestinian state where Jews are forbidden to live, and an ‘Israel’ where 4.5 million Arab ‘refugees’ will have the right to join the existing Arab minority to create another Arab state. So according to this definition, he is correct.

Direct negotiations with Israel could have given the Palestinians a state in the territories with generous borders and serious concessions on Jerusalem. But it could not, ever, give them a right of return for refugees because no imaginable Israeli government would commit suicide.

It’s also the case that any bilateral agreement would have to include recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and a statement that the Palestinians have no further claims, territorial or otherwise, against Israel.  These conditions would not be acceptable to the Arabs for obvious reasons. It is not “Israeli intransigence” or construction within settlements that has prevented a bilateral agreement. It is simply that Israel won’t negotiate itself out of existence.

The Obama Administration has promised to veto the Palestinian proposal in the Security Council. Most analysts believe that it will do so. Polls show that most Americans support Israel. It is already becoming a partisan issue, with Republicans increasingly staking out pro-Israel positions. Can you imagine what would happen if Obama became the first president in history to permit an anti-Israel resolution to pass in the Security Council?

But in my opinion, the President and his advisers are a slim reed to lean on. And supposing that there is a veto, what will Israel have to pay to get it?

Technorati Tags: Palestinian Authority, Israel, Abbas, UN, Security Council, Palestinian statehood

Jewish refugees, Czechoslovakia, 1946. Israel made room for them.

The very first thing Israel did as a state was to do its absolute best to bring Jewish refugees everywhere home.

European refugees from the Holocaust, Jews expelled from Arab countries with little more than the clothes on their backs, Jews in danger in Ethiopia — every Jew who needed a home was given one, despite the enormous cost, the lack of food and housing, and the precarious existence of the Jewish state.

Now that the Palestinian Arabs are, or think they are, on the verge of statehood, what do they plan to do for the 4.5 million or so people who claim Palestinian refugee status?

After all, statehood is supposed to provide a solution for the “plight of the Palestinians” and part of their plight has always been said to be the horrible circumstances of the ‘refugees.’ So surely one would expect that a top priority for the new state of ‘Palestine’ would be to help these people: give them citizenship, homes, education, jobs, etc. Get them out of camps and help restore their self-respect.

But in keeping with the Fundamental Axiom of Arab Prioritiesâ„¢ which says that “Hurting Jews is Always More Important than Helping Arabs,” that is not the case.

Thanks to Elder of Ziyon for bringing this to our attention:

BEIRUT: Palestinian refugees will not become citizens of a new Palestinian state, according to Palestine’s ambassador to Lebanon.

From behind a desk topped by a miniature model of Palestine’s hoped-for blue United Nations chair, Ambassador Abdullah Abdullah spoke to The Daily Star Wednesday about Palestine’s upcoming bid for U.N. statehood.

The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But … they are not automatically citizens.”

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would “absolutely not” be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees.

Neither this definitional status nor U.N. statehood, Abdullah says, would affect the eventual return of refugees to Palestine. “How the issue of the right of return will be solved I don’t know, it’s too early [to say], but it is a sacred right that has to be dealt with and solved [with] the acceptance of all.” He says statehood “will never affect the right of return for Palestinian refugees.” –  Daily Star, Lebanon

In other words, the refugees will continue to be stateless, living on the UN (mostly US) dole, in ‘refugee camps’, as they have for the past three generations, until they can finally fulfill their purpose — to overrun the Jewish state.

So not only will ‘Palestine’ be a racist, antisemitic, apartheid state, it will not lift a finger to help its own people. They want a ‘right of return’ to Israel, but they will not get one to Palestine!

Tell me again why the UN will vote for Palestinian statehood, please.

Technorati Tags: Palestine, statehood, refugees, Israel

Maen Areikat tells reporters that Palestine will be free of Jews

The Palestinians are so confident that their program will succeed that they have stopped trying to hide its real nature:

By Oren Dorell, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.

After 44 years of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” PLO Ambassador Maen Areikat says.

“After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.

Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.

In case there is any question about what he means by ‘separation’, here is a snippet from an interview with Areikat last year in Tablet  (big h/t to Challah Hu Akbar):

Q: When you imagine a future Palestinian state, do you imagine it being a place where Jews, if they wish to become Palestinian citizens, could own property, vote in elections, and practice their religion freely?

A: I remember in the mid-’90s, the late [PLO official] Faisal Husseini said repeatedly “OK, if Israelis choose to stay in a future Palestinian state, they are more than welcome to do that. But under one condition: They have to respect and obey Palestinian laws, they cannot be living as Israelis. They have to respect Palestinian laws and abide by them.” When Faisal Husseini died, basically no Palestinian leader has publicly supported the notion that they can stay.

What we are saying is the following: We need to separate. We have to separate. We are in a forced marriage. We need to divorce. After we divorce, and everybody takes a period of time to recoup, rebound, whatever you want to call it, we may consider dating again.

Q: So, you think it would be necessary to first transfer and remove every Jew—

A: Absolutely. No, I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state.

Q: Any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?

A: Absolutely. I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

There is a word for separation on racial/ethnic grounds — apartheid.

One could ask Areikat if his argument doesn’t also imply that Arab citizens of Israel must pick up and leave, or if it doesn’t invalidate the alleged ‘right of return’ for Arab refugees to Israel, but you already know he doesn’t think so.

Mahmoud Abbas also said something similar recently, but he didn’t use the word ‘Jew’. He said that “not one Israeli” would remain in the Palestinian state. No antisemitism here, it was suggested. Well, now there’s no doubt.

So the UN will vote for a declaration of an explicitly antisemitic, apartheid state, in effect validating the third major ethnic cleansing of Jews in the last 100 years — while at the same time they will be holding a conference condemning ‘racism’ (except of course that the conference will ignore racism and condemn the Jewish state).

Areikat was also asked whether homosexuals would be allowed in ‘Palestine’. “Ah, this is an issue that’s beyond my [authority],” he responded. No wonder Hitler is a hero to so many Palestinians.

Technorati Tags: Palestine, Maen Areikat, Jews, PLO

Our local Islamic Center is holding a 9/11 memorial program tomorrow. They’ve invited a woman whose sister-in-law was murdered on 9/11, who will speak about it from an anti-war point of view. They are certainly entitled to do this.

I’m sure she will bring up the subject of dislike and prejudice against American Muslims. She will suggest that there is a massive amount of it since 9/11, but she will actually be wrong. Here is a table of hate crime statistics from the FBI for 2009:

Of the 1,575 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

71.9 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
8.4 percent were victims because of an anti-Islamic bias.
3.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Catholic bias.
2.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Protestant bias.
0.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
8.3 percent were victims because of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
4.3 percent were victims because of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

There are perhaps three times as many Jews as Muslims in the US. But a Jew is almost nine times as likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim (nevertheless the example of a hate crime victim on the FBI site is a Muslim). Keep in mind that the large Muslim organizations like CAIR have been aggressively encouraging Muslims to report ‘Islamophobic’ incidents as hate crimes.

Think about what happened to innocent Jews in Arab countries when those countries lost a war that they started against the new state of Israel. Talk about hate crimes! Comparatively, the US has done remarkably well in its treatment of American Muslims since 9/11.

‘Islamophobia’ is used quite loosely not only to mean prejudice against Muslims, but any criticism of Islam. For example, I recall a meeting with several Muslims when the name of Daniel Pipes came up. “Oh, he’s Islamophobic,” the Muslims agreed.

Pipes actually is neither prejudiced against Muslims nor anti-Islam: his position is that the religious texts can be — and are, by some — interpreted in an aggressive, expansionist or violent way, and that there is presently a struggle in the community of Muslims between traditional Muslims and the radicals. But because this implies that Islam is not perfect in all respects, he is considered ‘Islamophobic’.

In the UN, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) has been working with some success to criminalize ‘defamation of religion’, an effort which some see as legitimizing anti-blasphemy laws in Islamic countries. Lately, the effort appears to be receiving some support from the Obama Administration. Of course, the Western position until now has always been that individuals have rights which must be protected, not religions:

The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to “implement” a U.N. resolution against religious “stereotyping,” specifically as applied to Islam. To be sure, it argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms. Many of them police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws and the OIC has long worked to see such codes applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.

Last March, U.S. diplomats maneuvered the adoption of Resolution 16/18 within the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC). Non-binding, this resolution, inter alia, expresses concern about religious “stereotyping” and “negative profiling” but does not limit free speech. It was intended to — and did — replace the OIC’s decidedly dangerous resolution against “defamation of religions,” which protected religious institutions instead of individual freedoms.

But thanks to a puzzling U.S. diplomatic initiative that was unveiled in July, Resolution 16/18 is poised to become a springboard for a greatly reinvigorated international effort to criminalize speech against Islam, the very thing it was designed to quash.

Liberal Jewish leaders in the US also seem to be worried about the threat of Islamophobia:

“Ten years after 9/11, it has somehow become respectable to verbally attack Muslims and Islam in America,” Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism, said Thursday at the Washington event organized by Shoulder to Shoulder, a group founded a year ago during a period of intensified anti-Muslim rhetoric.

“There are very real consequences when entire populations are represented in the public imagination by their worst elements, when the sins of the few are applied to the group as a whole. I have watched in astonishment as prominent politicians, including candidates for president of the United States, have found it politically opportune to peddle divisive anti-Muslim bigotry.” — JTA

I am not sure which candidate(s) Rabbi Yoffie is talking about, or what “bigotry” they are peddling. But I think we are moving dangerously close to stifling free speech when we create a psychological no-go zone around critical discussion of Islam. After all, the 9/11 attacks were committed against us by Muslims in the name of Islam. As I wrote yesterday, it isn’t enough to just blame “al-Qaeda.”

The word ‘Islamophobia’ is a bad choice to describe anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic prejudice, because etymologically it should mean “fear of Islam” (a better word would be ‘misislamy’ or something similar, but it’s almost unpronounceable). It seems, though, that while Muslims are strongly opposed to criticism of Islam, the radical ones at least are quite happy to promote fear of Muslims. There is a reason that random attacks against civilians, like 9/11 or Hamas’ missile attacks on Israel, are called ‘terrorism’. They are intended to demoralize a population by creating fear.

Fear of terrorism is a very real thing. But especially in the culture of the West in the last 50 years or so, fear of being called a ‘bigot’ is also real. And just as we need to defend our people and civilization, we need to defend our ability to speak freely and openly about forces that threaten them.

Technorati Tags: Islamophobia