RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I told him that peace in the Middle East was in his hands, that he had a unique opportunity to either bring it into being or kill it….” (U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) [1]

Blaming Israel is a common practice in the media and in the West. In a conversation with Professor Graham Allison, at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attributed the escalation in violence in Israel in 2016 to the “massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” He feared that “unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody.” [2]

Kerry’s public rebuke provides the Palestinian Arabs with the justification to pursue their random stabbings, stoning and car-rammings, which they consider to be an inalienable right. The Palestinian Authority is even seeking international recognition for the “right” to kill Israelis. Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, reports that the PA asserts “it has the right to kill Israeli civilians, and they quote UN resolution 3236 of 1974 which ‘recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means.’ The PA interprets ‘all means’ as including violence and killing of civilians.”

Marcus points out the PA deliberately ignores the rest of the resolution that declares “the use of ‘all means’ should be ‘in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations…’ The UN Charter forbids targeting civilians, even in war. [3]

For Kerry, Netanyahu and Israel are the problem. Only pressuring the Israelis will bring about a resolution to the conflict. That the Arabs have never accepted a two-state solution for religious and political reasons has not deterred American administrations from pursuing this fantasy. So long as they deny the independent nation-state status of Israel as a Jewish state, they are the root cause of a dispute that they make inherently impossible to be international in nature, thereby unresolvable under international auspices. Only when the Palestinian Arabs are willing to recognize the right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, can there be any hope of resolving this dispute.”[4]

Today, as the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn has the opportunity either to tackle anti-Semitism or mainstream it into the UK body politic. The evidence that he has any interest in doing the former are not good.

Whenever the specific question of anti-Semitism was raised, Corbyn would say how opposed he was to all forms of racism, “including Islamophobia.” It has apparently proven impossible for Corbyn to realize the specific nature of anti-Semitism; whenever it has come up, he has used the opportunity to talk not about racial hatred against Jews but what he believes to be an epidemic of hatred towards Muslims.

The British Labour party today evidently is riddled with anti-Semitism from top to bottom, and led by people who want to divert attention from the fact or cover it over entirely. Things can only get worse.

How would you push away a problem you did not want to deal with? The best way, as any addict could tell you, is to pretend that you have dealt with it. The drug-addict pretends to have given up drugs. The alcoholic pretends to have cut down on drink. And the British Labour party pretends to have dealt with its anti-Semitism problem.

The UK’s Co-operative Group is closely linked to — and a major funder of — the Co-operative Party, which has an electoral pact with the Labour Party, the UK’s official opposition.

This assumes that those advocating the boycott know exactly where the new borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state will be, despite that they are yet to be determined through negotiation. The enterprises boycotted by the Co-op Group employ many local Arab workers, whose livelihoods are endangered by the boycott.

The Co-op Group continues to refer to Israel’s “illegal settlements” as if these were the only disputed territories in the world. There is no boycott, of course, of major exporting countries with appalling human rights records, such as China (invasion of Tibet), Russia (invasion of the Ukraine) and other countries whose occupation of other areas is not recognized internationally, such as Nagorno-Karabakh or Northern Cyprus.

As usual, of all the countries in the world, Israel is being singled out. For the boycotters of the Co-op Group, Israel is the usual soft target.

The Co-operative Group is the only major British retailer to boycott Israeli goods. It is the fifth-largest retail grocery chain in the UK, with thousands of Co-op minimarkets throughout the United Kingdom. The Co-operative Group (formerly known as the Co-operative Wholesale Society) is closely linked to — and a major funder of — the Co-operative Party, which has an electoral pact with the Labour Party, the UK’s official opposition. The Co-operative Party has, like the Labour Party itself, been infiltrated by a strong anti-Israel faction.

The new law applies only to legitimate asylum seekers, not to the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who have entered Germany illegally by posing as asylum seekers.

Of the more than 1.1 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015, only 476,649 have applied for asylum. Many of the rest have gone underground and are sustaining themselves through petty crime and drug dealing.

Nearly half (49%) of the migrants in Germany whose asylum applications were rejected during the past two years have not left the country, according to leaked government data.

“Regaining control of our borders is an existential issue for our culture and the survival of our society.” — Thilo Sarrazin, renowned German central banker and a former member of the Social Democrats.