Archive for the ‘My favorite posts’ Category

The Protocols of the Elders of Durban

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

There is an international conspiracy that reaches throughout the world, a conspiracy that is supported by you and me, citizens of the developed nations of world.

This conspiracy involves the UN and the very well-funded network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) associated with the UN. We can call it the “Durban conspiracy”, after the UN-sponsored Durban Conference on Racism of 2001, where NGOs ambushed Israel (and ignored actual racist regimes), passing resolution after resolution accusing her of racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, state terrorism, colonialism, denial of self-determination, apartheid, crimes against humanity, etc.

It was at Durban that the strategy of delegitimizing and discrediting Israel in order to isolate and weaken her was fully articulated. The ultimate goal is to destroy. There’s no other way to understand it.

Now, having long since taken control of the UN, the tentacles of the conspiracy are infiltrating that other bastion of progressive modern civilization, the European Union (EU):

The United Nations has scheduled an “International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace”, to be held in the European Parliament in Brussels, August 30-31. This misleading [title] not withstanding, this annual conference is held under the auspices of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the International Coordinating Network for Palestine – frameworks that promote the conflict through NGOs involved in implementing the Durban agenda of demonization. This year, for the first time, the exercise is gaining the legitimacy of sponsorship by the European Parliament, further highlighting the role that the Europe Union plays in supporting the radical NGO campaign. — NGO Monitor

If you still think that there is some possibility that this conference may actually be about peace rather than support for anti-Israel activities, note that topics include

“The situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and civil society response”, “Action by civil society organizations working in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”, workshops on “Fortieth anniversary of occupation: building on action taken by civil society…”, and “Strengthening campaigns to end occupation, including grassroots campaigns against the wall, rallying around Bil’in”

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know that our UN contains a “Division for Palestinian rights“? Here are a few of the things it does:

  • Organizing the annual commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People;
  • Preparing studies and publications relating to the question of Palestine and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and promoting their widest possible dissemination, including in cooperation with the Department of Public Information;
  • Maintaining liaison with NGOs which are active on the issue;
  • Maintaining and developing the Web-based United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL).

UN postage stamp from UNISPALUNISPAL is impressive, by the way, containing audio, multimedia, photographs, etc. There are no pictures of Qassam rockets, but here’s a nice one of a postage stamp.

And I haven’t mentioned the “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” who is required by his mandate to only see the Palestinian side of any story, or indeed the United Nations Human Rights Council:

By the beginning of 2007, the Council had passed eight resolutions condemning Israel, and none condemning any other country. More resolutions targeting Israel have been proposed for upcoming sessions. Israel, the United States and some human rights groups raised concerns about this revival of a practice of the UN’s discredited former Commission on Human Rights. — Wikipedia

These are some of the official UN agencies that exist only to target Israel. There are also more than a hundred NGOs listed by NGO watch, funded by governments, the UN, the EU, etc. that take the side of the Palestinians. Many of these are hard-core anti-Zionist organizations that exist only to support the anti-Israel cause. These were the perpetrators of the Durban conference.

So the next time someone tells you that there is a well-funded international conspiracy working behind the scenes to control the policies of nations, the contents of media, and even the minds of ordinary people, you will know exactly what he or she is talking about.

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The ADL and the Armenian Genocide

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

Recently I wrote about attending a lecture by a Holocaust denier at a local church. It was upsetting to listen to the speaker’s repeated statements that yes, a lot of Jews died, it was war after all, but there was no concerted effort on the part of Hitler and the Nazis to wipe out the Jewish people.

The speaker had an answer for everything, and it’s impossible to respond to every ‘fact’ that someone can invent. It takes painstaking research, and by that time they have invented another ‘fact’. So even though historical facts — this happened or it didn’t — are absolutely true or false, there is no absolute proof in history the way there is in mathematics.

But after a while the weight of the evidence, the preponderance of the research, becomes so overwhelming that we can say that we know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that such-and-such did occur. At this point, ‘revisionist’ history stops being constructive, and we need to look for motives behind it other than a disinterested search for truth. This is the way it is with the Holocaust.

And this is the way it is for the Armenian Genocide.

Which brings me to Watertown Massachusetts, where local Armenians are asking the city to remove itself from an ADL program (“No Place for Hate”) because the ADL does not take a position on the Armenian Genocide and lobbied against a congressional resolution calling on the US to recognize it:

[ADL director Abraham] Foxman said he is surprised that he has become a target of Armenians. The ADL, a group founded in 1913 to fight anti-Semitism, has no official position on the Armenian genocide, he said.

“I’m not going to be the arbiter of someone else’s history,” he said in the interview, adding that he does not believe that Congress should either. When asked specifically if what happened to Armenians under the Ottoman Empire was genocide, he replied, “I don’t know.” The ADL only takes positions, he said, on current events, not on something that happened in the past.

Many groups oppose the resolution, including of course the Turkish Republic — although the resolution makes it quite clear that the guilty party was the Ottoman Empire. However, general international recognition of the genocide might make it possible for Armenians to claim compensation from Turkey. Turkey has applied pressure in many directions, including that of the US State Department which is concerned about Turkey’s relations with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and the State of Israel which sees Turkey as its only Muslim ‘ally’ (although in my view it’s a pretty poor ally).

It’s also possible that the ADL was influenced by an implied threat to the Turkish Jewish community.

Nevertheless, Foxman’s position is not supportable:

“You would never ever say that about the genocide in Darfur; you would never ever say that about the Holocaust,” said [Sharistan] Melkonian. “You need to stop genocide anywhere you can, and the only way to stop genocide in the future is to acknowledge that it happened.” — Boston Globe

It is contradictory for the ADL to oppose Holocaust denial vigorously, as it should, while refusing to take a position on another historically documented genocide.

And it doesn’t set a good precedent, either, in a practical sense. Today, pseudo-historical revisionism is being used by Israel’s enemies to claim that Jews dispossessed Palestinian Arabs unfairly from their lands, that Israel engineered the war in 1967 for expansionist motives, etc.

The ADL is wrong about this issue and should change its position.

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Camel dung and Arab media

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

One of the most effective propaganda techniques around is to keep repeating the most extreme exaggerations and outrageous falsehoods imaginable about your enemy; the reader applies a reasonable discount and assumes that maybe 25% of what you say is true. Of course, the real percentage is close to zero.

This works especially well if your enemy is more or less truthful. Then the reader is inclined to split the difference, and believes 50% of your rubbish.

Ami Isseroff has written a colorful description of much of the Arab media, with examples:

I am tired of being inundated with the flood of intellectual effluvia that spews forth from the sewers of official Arab world publications. These concoctions often have what can be politely described as “authentic Middle Eastern flavor.” Middle Eastern food is famously redolent of savory flavors and exquisite odors: mint and sesame, hel and kusbarah, garlic and onion, the smoke of open fires, and occasionally, though less discussed in polite company, camel and donkey excrement and similar odors…

The flavor and aroma of Middle Eastern journalism, too often tends in the direction of the camel dung, bad sanitation, rotten eggs and spoiled meat of racism and xenophobia, rather than the kusbarah and hel and fresh ground Turkish coffee of original and imaginative thought.

Read the article and note the examples. We can laugh at the crazy rantings that pass for ‘news’ and ‘analysis’ in the Arab world, but the fact is that it is highly effective, especially with people who read only Arabic (or who are illiterate and learn their facts from TV and radio). In that case, the believability factor is not 25% or 50% but approaches 100%.

It can be argued that this phenomenon — much more than differences in the concrete interests of the parties — is a major motivator of terrorism, and perhaps even the single most important factor preventing real peace settlements between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab nations.

If you want to know who desires peace and who doesn’t, just ask “who sponsors the incitement”?

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Saudi Arabia: bad for the US, bad for Israel

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

It’s time for some clarity regarding the relationship of the Bush administration to Saudi Arabia — in terms of the national interest of the US as well as the consequences for Israel.

Dry Bones: Computer problems

A complete discussion of Saudi influence in the US is beyond the scope of a blog post, but it’s well known that it is enormous — both in the private and government spheres.

Jimmy Carter’s Saudi funding — both for the Carter Center and for, shall we say, more personal needs, is well known. It’s also common knowledge that Saudi money has built and supported mosques throughout the nation, mosques where political as well as religious doctrine is propagated.

The House of Saud has developed a technique of gaining influence over the US government that Daniel Pipes calls “preemptive bribing“:

A hint of the problem comes from none other than Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Washington Post reports that he boasted of his success at cultivating powerful Americans: “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”

The extent of this practice is remarkable:

[Former CIA case officer Robert] Baer notes that every Washington think tank has taken Saudi money, as have numerous lobbyists, PR firms, lawyers, and every presidential library of the last thirty years. Nor is this all.

Despite CIA censorship, [Baer’s book] Sleeping With The Devil reveals that there is hardly a living former CIA director, assistant secretary of state for the Near East, White House staffer, or member of Congress who hasn’t ended up on the Saudi payroll in one way of another. “At the corporate level, almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has served on the board of at least one company that did a deal with Saudi Arabia.” — Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Nor are the media free of Saudi influence. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns large stakes in Time Warner and even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The Bush family and administration is especially close to the Saudis. Adviser James Baker’s law firm represents the Saudi government and he was senior counsel to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with large investments in Saudi Arabia. Former President George H. W. Bush was a Carlyle Group Adviser and is a large shareholder. Indeed, representatives of the Bin Laden family were in Washington for Carlyle’s annual meeting on 9/11 (and were allowed to leave the country shortly thereafter, as Michael Moore gleefully pointed out in “Fahrenheit 911”).

The Saudi kingdom’s support for radical Sunni Islamism should be worrisome to the US, which is one of its prime targets. And Saudi Arabia’s influence on US policy, such as the decision to invade Iraq (for which some blame Israel!), is a highly dangerous aspect of the relationship.

The President’s new Israel/Palestine policy, as enunciated in his speech yesterday, also shows traces of the Saudi hand, probably by way of James Baker. There’s no doubt that the President’s adoption of the highly unbalanced Arab (Saudi) Initiative represents that Saudi point of view, as does the build-up of a powerful Fatah army as a counterforce to the Iranian/Syrian supported Hamas.

As I wrote Monday, the development of a massive Fatah army in the West Bank is terribly dangerous for Israel, and will not result in the elimination of Hamas or its conversion into a moderate force, as the plan’s proponents seem to suggest.

If the US wants a two-state solution which includes a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel, a huge military buildup of forces opposed to the existence of Israel is not the way to achieve it.

But one can see the Saudi vision of ‘peace’ in this proposal: the Israeli state forced back to 1967 borders, forced to take in Palestinian ‘refugees’, and forced to accept a powerful enemy, armed and financed by the US and perhaps the Saudis, sitting in the West Bank a few miles from her population centers.

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Israel must not abdicate responsibility for her security

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

More and more prisoners and fugitives connected to Fatah are to be released or pardoned. Israel has given the Palestinians a list of 256 prisoners that will be freed shortly as a goodwill gesture to the Abbas/Fayyed government in the West bank.

In addition, Israel agreed to pardon 178 fugitives, including the al-Aqsa brigades commander in Jenin, Zakaria Zubeidi, if they agreed to “lay down their arms” and not engage in terrorism against Israel again. These former terrorists are now being absorbed into the Palestinian Authority’s ‘security’ services, where of course they will be issued new weapons.

But even that is apparently not enough. Today, YNet reports that

Israeli and Palestinian security officials met Monday to discuss expanding the list of 178 wanted Fatah members set to receive amnesty from Israel.

The officials discussed the possibility of adding 206 members of the organization’s armed wing – the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – to the list. However, the list presented by the Palestinians to Israel includes the names of 28 operatives to whom Israel refuses to grant amnesty.

Ynet has learned that Israel may agree to allow these members to move to other cities in the West Bank, or move abroad for several years, an option the Palestinians have so far rejected.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades is a murderous terrorist organization that targets Israelis, civilians and soldiers, both inside and outside the Green Line. It has probably killed more Israelis than any other terrorist group, including Hamas.

What can possibly explain the mad rush to make dangerous concessions of this type? What is Israel getting in return from the Palestinians?

My opinion is that pressure is coming from the US. This is the implementation of the policy enunciated by President Bush in his speech yesterday, in which he mentioned the Palestinian security services no less than three times.

The plan seems to be that a Fatah army will be built to confront Hamas, in the West Bank and possibly in Gaza. Made up of former terrorists (after all, they are the ones capable of fighting), possibly including Palestinian Badr Brigade members from Jordan, and armed and trained by the US, they will be the tool by which Hamas is to be opposed.

I can’t think of a stupider plan, from Israel’s point of view. Take a bunch of violently anti-Israel terrorists located a few miles from Israel’s population centers, arm them, train them, even invite more of the same from other countries, and pay them to fight another terrorist group!

Suppose they succeed in destroying Hamas? Then what? Do they suddenly become peace-loving vegetarians who devote their energies to gardening?

Or suppose they decide that their common interest with Hamas — killing Jews — permits a temporary alliance to further their goal?

Or suppose that, after the arming and training and “bolstering”, Saudi Arabia comes along and manages to negotiate a unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas? Then Israel is facing hostile non-state armies on three sides.

I know that President Bush strongly supports Israel, but I think he has been sold a bill of goods by the Saudi-influenced Baker faction. This plan simply creates a monster that will sooner or later turn on Israel.

Israel must, somehow, get free of US domination and make her own security decisions. One lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people can’t leave its security in the hands of others, no matter how well-meaning they may seem.

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