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Mustafa Barghouti (r) smiles as irrepressable Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh tells a joke at a press conference in Gaza, March 2007.

Mustafa Barghouti (not to be confused with convicted multiple murderer and possible next Palestinian President Marwan Barghouti), a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, lives on another planet.

In an op-ed written for the NY Times, Barghouti talks about freedom and non-violence like a 1960’s civil rights activist instead of a representative of a people which practically invented terrorism as its political strategy.

Through decades of occupation and dispossession, 90 percent of the Palestinian struggle has been nonviolent, with the vast majority of Palestinians supporting this method of struggle. Today, growing numbers of Palestinians are participating in organized nonviolent resistance.

Apparently on Planet Palestine, Hamas — whose charter calls for the murder of Jews and whose leader called for the ‘liberation’ of “all Palestine” just this Monday –  did not win a majority in the last Palestinian election. On Planet Palestine, it’s not the case that in 2007, 70% of Palestinian Muslims viewed suicide bombing as sometimes or often justified (Pew survey, 7/24/07) or that 77% of Palestinians say that “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists” (Pew survey, 6/27/07). Planet Palestine is different from Earth.

On Earth there’s been violent terrorism against Jews by Palestinian Arabs since the early 20th century — long before the ‘occupation’ of Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and even before there was a Jewish state. I would like to know — Barghouti must have explained it to the Times’ fact-checkers — exactly what he defines as the ‘struggle’ which has been 90% nonviolent. Where is the ‘vast majority’ he mentions?

In the face of European and American inaction, it is crucial that we continue to revive our culture of collective activism by vigorously and nonviolently resisting Israel’s domination over us.

Translation: because Europe and the US cannot force Israel to make even more suicidal concessions than the near-surrender offered by Ehud Olmert in 2008 and Barak/Clinton in 2000 — concessions, like the ‘right of return’ that would be the end of Israel — then the Palestinians will continue to ‘resist’.

These are actions that every man, woman and child can take. The nonviolent movement is being built in the villages of Jayyous, Bilin and Naalin where Israel’s segregation wall threatens to erase productive village life.

Good one, bringing in the word ‘segregation’ along with ‘freedom’ and ‘nonviolence’. But what happens in Bil’in and Na’alin is not like what happened at lunch-counters and bus stations in the Alabama of the 1960’s. What happens there is that Palestinian ‘activists’, using extreme left-wing Israelis and foreigners as shields, try to physically destroy the barrier which was built in order to ‘segregate’ murderous terrorists on the other side of it from Israel, while Israeli police and soldiers try to stop them without killing them. This ‘nonviolent’ activity usually includes stones and firebombs.

Interestingly, Barghouti seems to have gotten the idea for his bad analogy from our President, of all people!

President Obama, perhaps unwittingly, encouraged this effort when he called for Palestinian nonviolence in his Cairo speech. “Palestinians,” he said, “must abandon violence. … For centuries, black people in America suffered…the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”

The problem is that Palestinian goals — goals that are set forth in the founding documents of the main Palestinian political organizations, Fatah and Hamas, are somewhat different from those of black people in America. They are to destroy a state, to liquidate its people, to kill them and take their property and occupy their homes. Barghouti lies,

The demise of the two-state solution will only lead to a new struggle for equal rights, within one state. Israel, which tragically favors supremacy rather than integration with its Palestinian neighbors, will have brought the new struggle on itself by relentlessly pushing the settlement enterprise. No one can say it was not warned.

This is a lie because the inability to obtain a two-state solution has nothing to do with settlements. Israel has shown over and over that it is prepared to uproot its people in the name of peace. Olmert offered the Palestinians 97% of Judea and Samaria plus land swaps, the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and sovereignty over the Temple Mount… and they refused to take it.

Barghouti says that the struggle is about ‘equal rights’. So ask him if he agrees to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Ask him why the Palestinian Authority did not accept Olmert’s offer, or Barak and Clinton’s before that. What else did they want?

It is not a given that the demise of the two-state solution will be a disaster for the Jews. It could turn out to be a disaster for the Arabs, the second nakba that they fear so much.  Barghouti writes that “there comes a time when people cannot take injustice any more…” This applies to the Jews as well as the Palestinian Arabs.

Technorati Tags: Moustafa Barghouti, Israel, Palestinians

We haven’t issued a Reality Inversion Alert in some time, so I’ll repeat the definition:

Reality inversion alerts will be issued by FresnoZionism.org whenever Israel’s enemies or their lackeys are caught using their favorite propaganda technique, which is to turn the truth upside down by falsely accusing Israel of doing exactly what they themselves do or try to do.

So, for example, when lackey of apartheid Saudi Arabia Jimmy Carter accuses Israel of being an “apartheid state”, or when the genocidal Hamas movement accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians, reality inversion is taking place.

Today we have two Reality Inversions to report.

First, Saudi Arabia and Syria, two serial reality inverters if there ever were such, issued a joint communiqué last week after the visit of Saudi King Abdullah to Syria. In part,

The communiqué urged joint Arab and Islamic action to stop the continuous Israeli aggression on the Palestinians. The two sides stressed the need to lift the Israeli siege on Al-Aqsa Mosque and confront the measures taken by Israel to Judaize Jerusalem, it added.

So now it’s an ‘Israeli siege’ on the Temple Mount?

The reality is the opposite: the recent attempt to spark violence there are a result of a struggle between Hamas and Fatah for influence in an area which they believe will soon be wrested from Israeli hands by the US. By spreading rumors of an intended ‘takeover’ of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by radical Jewish ‘settlers’, and calling for Arabs to ‘defend’ it, Sheik Raed Salah of the the Islamic Movement is trying to get recruits and money for his organization, which serves as a surrogate for Hamas in Jerusalem.

Nothing helps the Palestinian cause more than violent confrontations, so that Israel’s responses to keep order and protect her citizens can be played as ‘aggression’. Salah and Hamas would love to see a ‘third intifada’, and lacking a Sharon visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext, they are doing their best to create one.

And second, Israel is finally calling out J Street, whose declaration that they are “pro-Israel” is itself a Reality Inversion:

WASHINGTON – The Israeli Embassy informed J Street of its concern that the new lobbying group advocates policies that could “impair Israel’s interests,” an embassy spokesman has told The Jerusalem Post…

J Street has taken several positions at odds with the Israeli government in recent months, including arguing against the immediate imposition of additional sanctions on Iran even as Israel pushes for greater action, and backing US President Barack Obama’s call for a complete settlement freeze in the face of Israeli opposition.

And that isn’t the half of it. J Street, the left-wing Jewish lobbying group which claims that it more accurately represents the position of American Jews than AIPAC (and ‘proves’ it with misleading polls),

…called for an immediate cease-fire on the first day of the Gaza war, believes that negotiations with Iran should be carried out without threat of sanctions, opposed — lobbied against — a congressional initiative asking the President to encourage Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel, called for a complete freeze on construction inside settlements, approved of President Obama’s granting the Medal of Freedom to  Mary Robinson (who as UN Commissioner for Human Rights presided over the 2001 Durban conference), favored an American performance of the antisemitic play Seven Jewish Children, calls for negotiations with Hamas, and is funded not only by the dollars of liberal Jews, but those of known supporters of Arab and Iranian causes…  — FresnoZionism, “The fresh, young, ignorant faces of J Street“

Freedom of speech demands that there be room for yet another anti-Israel lobby, to join the multitude of Saudi- and Iranian-funded ones, and I suppose even one composed of Jews, albeit ignorant ones. But respect for language, logic and decency demands that they don’t invert reality and lie about their goals.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Reality Inversion, Temple Mount, Al-Aqsa, Raed Salah, J Street

106 British Jews will not be celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary. In a letter to the Guardian, they explain that they

…cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.

It’s interesting that this statement could easily apply, mutatis mutandum, to the state of ‘Palestine’ that they wish to see established. But with respect to Israel their facts, both historical and present, are wrong — there was no plan for “the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state” — and what is happening in Gaza today is just the opposite of “collective punishment”, it is the schoolyard trick of hitting someone and then falling down and claiming that he hit you.

So as a result I am declaring a reality inversion alert on these Jews who care so much about human rights that they reject those of the Jewish people.

But here is the most telling part of their letter:

As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.

Do they just mean that the Palestinians make as a big a deal of the events of 1948 as the Jews do of the Holocaust? If they mean this, then I agree with them and it proves that the Palestinians are too self-absorbed to have a grasp of history.

But if it means that the naqba was a tragedy on the same scale as the Holocaust, then even if we accept every exaggeration and outright falsehood that they believe about 1948 — the number of refugees, deliberate expulsion, massacres, etc. — even so, the statement is an abomination, a denigration of the Holocaust in which 6 million were brutally mudered.

So we see that the 106 British Jews have something in common with the Palestinians that they admire: for both groups, the human rights of Jews are as nothing against those of Arabs.

Technorati Tags: British Jews, Palestinians, Israel, Holocaust

Did he do this with a straight face?

The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee [inverted reality when he] filed an official letter of complaint against [Israeli] National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer Friday, citing his threats to obliterate Iran should it attack Israel.

Ben-Eliezer, speaking during the national emergency drill held in Israel during the week, warned Iran any such strike would carry “severe repercussions”; and added that the drill “does not simulate a fictitious situation. I think the future will be much harder that the reality we are familiar with.”

Khazaee filed the letter with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, noting that Ben-Eliezer’s remarks were “another example of the aggressive, terrorist nature of the Zionist regime”; and called on the UN Security Council to take action. — YNet

Coming from the nation whose president has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” (or make it “vanish from the page of time”, depending on the translation you prefer), and who continues to threaten Israel and predict its imminent demise at the hands of his proxies, the complaint is somewhat ironic.

Meanwhile, poor threatened Iran announced that they are running hundreds of new centrifuges to enrich uranium for their ‘peaceful’ atomic program. At the same time, satellite imagery has become available of the site from which Iran recently launched its ‘space program research’ rocket, and there are indications that Iran is working on a much longer-range weapon there:

Geoffrey Forden, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that there was a recently constructed building on the site, about 40 metres in length, which was similar in form and size to the Taepodong long-range missile assembly facility in North Korea.

Avital Johanan, the editor of Jane’s Proliferation, said that the analysis of the Iranian site indicated that Tehran may be about five years away from developing a 6,000km ballistic missile. — TimesOnline

Such a missile could hit targets throughout Europe, not just the Middle East. Surely one would expect the instinct of self-preservation to kick in among the European democracies, and they would put a stop to the Iranian weapons program before it’s too late.

Do the Europeans really want a country ruled by a theocracy, some of whose members may have messianic pretensions and an apocalyptic vision of the near future, to both have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them?

Iranian missile launch site

Technorati Tags: Iran, Israel