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ISRAEL

Our World: The agenda for the Trump-Abbas meeting : Caroline Glick

Israeli society was nearly torn apart in the one year and eight months between Sharon’s surprise announcement and the expulsion of Gaza’s Jews in August 2005.

The day after Israel celebrates its 69th Independence Day, US President Donald Trump will greet PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas at the White House. The date of their meeting, May 3, is notable not least for its timing.

The timing of the meeting presumes a linkage between the establishment of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state. This is not merely obnoxious, it is also blind to reality.

In reality, an independent state of Palestine has existed for the past 12 years in Gaza. Rather than build that up and declare independence, Abbas and his comrades surrendered Gaza to Hamas in 2007.

Hamas, in turn, transformed independent Palestine into a base for jihad.

Abbas’s failure to declare independence in 2005 – and the subsequent failure of his US-trained forces to defend their control over Gaza in June 2007 from Hamas terrorists – is generally overlooked. But it is critical that Trump understand the significance of his behavior before he meets with Abbas.

Since the inception of the peace process between Israel and the PLO in 1993, the professed goal of the PLO has been to establish an independent Palestinian state on any territory over which it was able to take control from Israel. Yet 12 years ago, when Israel withdrew its citizens and military from Gaza, the PLO refused to take responsibility for the area insisting ridiculously that Gaza was still controlled by Israel.

Then 10 years ago, US-trained PLO forces fled to Israel rather than defend their control of Gaza when Hamas took up arms against them.

There are, it seems, two main reasons for Abbas’s behavior. The first is directly related to how he understood Israel’s decision to withdraw.

In December 2003, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon stunned the country when he adopted the platform of the Labor Party – which he had just massively defeated in the general elections – and removed all Israeli communities and military installations from Gaza, including from the border with Egypt, by the end of 2005.

Israeli society was nearly torn apart in the one year and eight months between Sharon’s surprise announcement and the expulsion of Gaza’s Jews in August 2005. The media hemorrhaged with continuous propaganda that demonized the Israeli residents of Gaza and the religious Zionist community in general.

A reminder of that toxic period came earlier this month, when Haaretz published a column by veteran reporter Yossi Klein in which he alleged that religious Zionists posed a graver danger to the State of Israel than Hezbollah.

Abbas and his lieutenants viewed the domestic chaos that engulfed Israel at the time as proof of Israel being on its way off the stage of history.

David Singer: United Nations Must Trash False Information on Arab-Jewish Conflict

The United Nations Study titled “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988” (“Study”) has coughed up yet another piece of false information following that exposed in my last article – which indicates increasingly that the United Nations has been complicit in disseminating false information on the Arab-Jewish conflict for almost the last forty years.

The Study was published in June 1978 by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat (DPRUNS) for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIARPP)

I had only reached the third paragraph of the 275 page Study when the following statement caught my attention:

“The decision on the Mandate [for Palestine] did not take into account the wishes of the people of Palestine”

I could scarcely believe this dishonest statement had actually originated in a United Nations official publication – especially as the evidence contradicting this falsehood was sitting in the United Nations own archives.

That evidence comprises:

1. Meetings of the Palestine Arab Delegation (Delegation) with the recently appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies – Winston Churchill – on 12, 22 and 23 August 1921

2. Letters from 21 February 1922 to 23 June 1922 between the Delegation and the Secretary of State for the Colonies during which the Delegation was housed in the Hotel Cecil in London.

The letters disclose that:

1. The Delegation failed to persuade Britain to abandon the Mandate for Palestine providing for the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

2. The British Government had adopted a fresh definition of policy to finally allay the Delegation’s apprehensions as to the scope and purport of British policy.

The Study’s failure to disclose this evidence is breathtaking.

DPRUNS and CEIARPP clearly sought to hide this evidence to create the false impression that the Palestinian Arabs had been unfairly treated and never been consulted in contrast to the Zionists who had.

Palestinians: This is How We Intimidate Journalists by Bassam Tawil

In the world of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, a journalist’s loyalty to his leaders and their cause supersedes his loyalty to the truth. In a word, it is the truth vs. Abbas’s security forces.

As the international media relies heavily on Palestinian journalists and “media assistants” in covering Palestinian affairs, this intimidation of Palestinian journalists heavily colors the reporting of Western journalists. The stories Palestinian journalists tell their Western colleagues are limited to ones that will not endanger their own lives. This censorship, whether by the Abbas’s security forces or self-imposed, explains why one rarely reads or sees a story in Western mainstream media about negative things happening in the PA-controlled territories.

Even when their Palestinian colleagues are beaten and arrested by Abbas’s security forces, these “journalists” fail to report such incidents. This makes some sense: should they open their mouths with the truth, Abbas and his cohorts might indeed stop inviting them to press conferences and banquets in the fancy restaurants of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho.

Seven Palestinian journalists are the latest victims of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) continued crackdown on the media.

The repressive measures are aimed at silencing critical voices among the journalists and deterring others from reporting stories that reflect negatively on the Palestinian leadership in particular and Palestinians in general.

In the view of President Mahmoud Abbas and his PA, Palestinian journalists exist to write stories slamming Israel or praising PA leaders. Media, for them, is defined as a mouthpiece for Abbas, the PA leadership and the Palestinian cause.

Any journalist who dares to think outside this checkpoint is subject to severe punishment. Under Abbas and the PA, there is no room for an independent media.

The three major Palestinian newspapers — Al-Quds, Al-Ayyam and Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda — are controlled, directly and indirectly, by the PA.

Although Al-Quds, the largest Palestinian daily, is privately owned and published in Jerusalem, it too serves as a mouthpiece for the PA. The newspaper’s publisher and editors know that if they publish any story that is critical of Abbas or the PA leaders, they will face punitive measures, such as banning the distribution of Al-Quds in PA-controlled territories. As such, the editors and journalists have long resorted to self-censorship. This forced silencing explains the absence, for example, of any news items about Palestinian corruption or human rights violations in Al-Quds and the two other newspapers.

Al-Quds suffered heavy financial losses after Hamas banned its distribution in the Gaza Strip several years ago. The newspaper was banned from sale in Gaza because of its affiliation with the Palestinian Authority and criticism of Hamas.

How Long the Palestinian Subsidies for Terror? By P. David Hornik

Judging by the over 12,000 shares (as of this writing) for an article posted by Britain’s Daily Mail on Sunday, many Britons are up in arms. They have good reason to be.

Hannah Bladon, an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham, was living in Jerusalem as an exchange student at the Hebrew University, where she was studying Bible, archaeology, and religion.

On April 14, Hannah—aged 20—was riding on the Jerusalem light rail, and was stabbed to death by a 57-year-old Palestinian man named Jamil Tamimi.

Now in custody, Tamimi, who is described as having mental-health issues, told police that he attacked Hannah in the hope that a soldier would kill him. Based on a psychiatric evaluation, however, an Israeli court has ruled that he’s fit to stand trial.

Tamimi, says the Daily Mail, stands to get a salary of more than £800 (or more than $1000) a month from the Palestinian Authority. What’s irking people is that Britain is currently paying the PA £25,000 annually in foreign aid.

As of last December, the aid money is only supposed to go to education and health. “But,” the Daily Mail notes, “critics point out that when British taxpayers’ cash goes to education and health, it frees up money in other budgets controlled by the PA.”

How likely is Tamimi to get rewarded for his cruel murder?

Itamar Marcus, head of the Israeli watchdog organization Palestinian Media Watch, told the Daily Mail that: “According to PA law, everyone who is imprisoned for ‘resisting the occupation’ receives a PA salary…. In PA practice, 100 per cent of the suicide bombers, stabbers, shooters and car rammers have been included in this category and do receive PA salaries.”

Muslim “Peace Tour” Ends With 4 Stabbed Daniel Greenfield

It’s vitally important for us to understand our cultural differences if we are to have peace. For example, to us, peace means the absence of hostilities. In Islam, peace means submission to Muslims. This latest misunderstanding of cultural differences led to four being stabbed by a Muslim peaceseeker.

The Natural Peace Tours NGO, which arranges for one day entry passes for PA Arabs wishing to tour and become acquainted with Israeli society, confessed they had no idea one of their clients would grab a sharp object and stab four innocent Israeli civilians – one out on the street near Tel Aviv’s Atarim Square and three more inside Leonardo Beach Hotel.

A representative of the NPT management spoke to Army Radio and admitted, “We didn’t take this into consideration.” This, meaning that, as documented on CCTV, the Arab visitor sponsored by NPT grabbed a sharp object, stabbed a pedestrian on the street, then attacked the hotel gallery owner and her spouse, then stabbed a male guest in the lobby and tried to run out—breaking the glass entrance door.

The stabber was finally stopped and neutralized by the gallery owner’s husband, Claudio Wengerowicz, who, unarmed, jumped the attacker near the lobby’s revolving door.

It’s really the sort of thing you ought to take into consideration if you’re going to run tours of Muslims into Israel. Probably the first thing to ask prospective clients is, “Are you planning to stab four people while shouting Allahu Akbar?”

A Palestinian State or an Islamist Tyranny? by Giulio Meotti *****

Abbad Yahiya’s novel takes aim at Palestinian taboos such as fanaticism, Islamic extremism and homosexuality. The novel’s publisher has been arrested and a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Yahiya.

The head of the Union of Palestinian Writers, Murad Sudani, attacked the writer and called for an exemplary punishment. Ghassan Khader, a Facebook user, wrote on his page that Yahiya “should be killed”.

We could go on with this list of Palestinian intellectuals who paid a high price for daring to speak the truth to Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt circle on many issues: coexistence with the Jews, secularism, sexual freedom, freedom of conscience, human rights, or telling the truth about the Holocaust.

A Palestinian state created with the current Palestinian Authority would destroy freedom of conscience for journalists and writers; exile Christians and homosexuals; torture Arab inmates; impose sharia as the only law, and put people to death for “atheism” and “apostasy” (read, conversion to Christianity).

From the United Nations to the European Union and the mainstream press, it seems that the Jews living in Judea and Samaria are the obstacle for the Middle East coexistence. But have these well-known “observers” really observed what is going on in the areas self-governed by the Palestinian Authority, and that two-thirds of the world’s nations want to turn into another Arab-Islamic state?

Recently, one of the brightest Palestinian novelists, Abbad Yahiya, saw his fourth book, Crime in Ramallah, seized by the Palestinian police in the West Bank. The order came from Palestinian Attorney General Ahmed Barak, who ruled that the book “threatens morality”. The novel’s publisher was arrested and a warrant was issued for Yahiya’s arrest.

Palestinians: The Secret West Bank by Bassam Tawil

As Abbas and his advisors prepare for the May 3 meeting with Trump, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah to call on Arab armies to “liberate Palestine, from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.” The Palestinians also called for replacing Israel with an Islamic Caliphate.

It is possible that deep inside, Abbas and many of his top aides identify with the goals of Hizb ut Tahrir, namely the elimination of Israel. Abbas also wishes to use these Islamic extremists to depict himself as the “good guy” versus the “bad guys.” This is a ploy intended to dupe Westerners into giving him more funds “out of fear that the Islamists may take over.”

Abbas’s claim that he seeks a just and comprehensive peace with Israel is refuted by fact after fact on the ground. His sweet-talk about peace and the two-state solution will have far less impact on Palestinians than the voices of Hizb ut Tahrir and its sister groups, which strive to “liberate Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Westerners often refer to Ramallah as a modern and liberal city dominated by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction. The city boasts fancy restaurants and bars where alcohol is served freely to men and women in Western dress, who sit together to eat and to smoke water pipes (nargilas).

But the scenes on the streets of Ramallah, headquarters of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA) last week broadcast a rather different message — one that calls for the elimination of Israel. The message came on the eve of Abbas’s visit to the White House for his first meeting with US President Donald Trump.

According to PA officials, Abbas is scheduled to affirm during the meeting with Trump his commitment to the two-state solution and a “comprehensive and just peace” with Israel.

As Abbas and his advisors prepare for the May 3 meeting with Trump, however, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah to call on Arab armies to “liberate Palestine, from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.” The Palestinians also called for replacing Israel with an Islamic Caliphate.

Israel’s Prime Minister Scraps Meeting With Germany’s Top Diplomat Cancellation was response to foreign minister’s decision to meet a group critical of Israel’s armed forces, Netanyahu’s spokesman says By Andrea Thomas in Berlin and Rory Jones in Tel Aviv

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel scrapped a meeting with Germany’s top diplomat hours before they were to meet on Tuesday, the latest sign of tension between Israel and one of its oldest Western allies.

A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu said the decision came in response to the plan by German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to meet representatives of Breaking the Silence, a nongovernmental organization critical of the conduct of Israeli armed forces in the Palestinian territories.

“Imagine if foreign diplomats visiting the United States or Britain met with NGOs that call American or British soldiers war criminals,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. “Leaders of those countries would surely not accept this.”

Mr. Gabriel, who is vice chancellor in Germany’s government and was on his first official trip to Israel since his appointment as foreign minister this year, said the snub would have no lasting impact on bilateral relations but expressed surprise at the Israeli premier’s decision.

“Imagine we were to invite Mr. Netanyahu to Germany and he wanted to meet with NGOs that also exist here and we were to say, ‘If you do that we will abort the visit.’ People would call us crazy.”

Later in the day, Mr. Gabriel declined to take a telephone call from Mr. Netanyahu, an Israeli official said. In Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry said it couldn’t confirm that account.

Mr. Gabriel was expected to meet later Tuesday with representatives of Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony, often anonymously, from members of the Israeli military on its operations in the territories.

A spokesman for the organization couldn’t be reached for comment.

Postwar Germany has been among Israel’s most steadfast allies for decades. Chancellor Angela Merkel once described protecting the security of Israel as part of Germany’s “raison d’être.”

But the relationship has been put under strain recently, with Berlin becoming more critical of the lack of progress in efforts to reach a negotiated settlement in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Germany sharply criticized Israel’s retroactive legalization of thousands of settler dwellings in the West Bank in February. The Palestinians said all Israeli communities in the territory are illegal under international law.

That same month, Berlin postponed for a year a joint German-Israeli cabinet meeting planned for May in Jerusalem because of what it called “scheduling difficulties” caused by Germany’s presidency of the Group of 20 largest economies. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hamas: The New Charter That Isn’t by Bassam Tawil

It is worthwhile to note that, contrary to what is being published in many media outlets, Hamas is NOT changing its Charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel.

The document goes on to clarify that even if Hamas accepts a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines, “this would not mean recognition of the Zionist entity or giving up any of the Palestinian rights.”

Hamas and the PLO now have crucial common ground: sweet-talk the Western donors while laying stealthy plans to destroy Israel.

Yasser Arafat may have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his PLO officials and he really deserve the prize for the art of deception. For decades now, the PLO has spearheaded one of history’s biggest scams, and now it seems that Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood movement, is about to join the bandwagon.

According to unconfirmed reports in the Arab media, Hamas is about to publish a “political document” in which it “accepts” the “two-state solution.” The purported document is already being hailed by some Western and Israeli analysts and Hamas apologists as a sign of the radical Islamic movement’s march toward moderation and pragmatism.

It is worthwhile to note that, contrary to what is being published in many media outlets, Hamas is NOT changing its Charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel. The new Hamas document is intended for outside consumption and is directed to the ears and eyes of Americans and Europeans only. The original Hamas Charter in Arabic will remain in effect even after the new document is made public and seemingly official. In fact, it does not have to do that. The New Charter, while mouthing all sorts of human rights bromides over which Westerners and the media can be counted upon to swoon, such as:

“Hamas believes that the message of Islam came with morals of justice, truth, dignity and freedom, and is against injustice in all its shapes, and criminalizes the criminals whatever their sex, color, religion or nationality,” and so on. (New Hamas Charter, Article 9).

It is, nevertheless, the same Old Hamas Charter as before. It does not even bother to renounce jihad as an acceptable means of “resistance.” This is Hamas talking in code; pursuing “resistance” against Israel means: We plan to continue launching terror attacks against Israel.

“Hamas confirms that no peace in Palestine should be agreed on, based on injustice to the Palestinians or their land. Any arrangements based on that will not lead to peace, and the resistance and Jihad will remain as a legal right, a project and an honor for all our nations’ people.” (New Hamas Charter, Article 21)

The PLO bluff began with the signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993, and reached its peak three years later, when PLO leaders managed to convince President Bill Clinton and the international community, including many Israelis, that they had changed the PLO Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel. The truth, however, is a far cry from that.

Back in 1996, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council (PNC), held a session in Gaza City where its members decided to “entrust a legal committee with re-formulating the Palestinian Charter.”

No one knows if the committee made any of the proposed changes. It is also unclear whether two-thirds of the PNC members (the required majority) actually voted in favor of changing the PLO Charter.

To this day, some Palestinians maintain that the charter was never officially amended or revoked — and it certainly was not ratified — and that the whole performance was a lie to mislead the international community and Israel into believing that the Palestinians had abandoned their dream of destroying Israel through “armed struggle.”

The PLO Charter question, like the PLO’s pledge to work towards a two-state solution, is murky. What is clear is that many in the international community swallowed the scam and began to believe that Arafat and his cohorts were finally leading their people toward real peace, beginning with recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

A glance at PLO actions over the past two decades will show that this tiger has certainly not changed its stripes. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PLO and its leaders, first Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas, have consistently and stubbornly rejected all Israeli peace offers, some of which were exorbitantly generous.

DAVID COLLIER: THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON…..SOAS SCHOOL OF ANTI-SEMITISM? SEE NOTE PLEASE

SOAS(The School of Oriental and African Studies)is a constituent school of the University of London….where bashing Israel is a major as David Collier has frequently exposed….rsk

03 Nov 2016. I was inside one of the hot spots of radical Islam in London – SOAS. We came to hear Tom Suarez promote his book, ‘State of Terror’. I had not heard of Suarez, and he is a musician, not a historian. The book is published by Karl Sabbagh, who provided one of the speeches at the House of Lords event that saw the Zionists blamed for the holocaust. The only endorsements on the book were from Jenny Tonge and Ilan Pappe. My expectations were low.

My expectations should have been much lower. Suarez is an example of how someone can make a new career out of hating Israel without academic training or even a basic historical knowledge of the conflict. His methodology was clear, ‘I hate Zionists/Jews’, but to write a book, I need to make some citations, and he went off to find some.

Suarez doesn’t come with a backstory or a bio. There is no introduction. From the moment Suarez opened his mouth, until his pillar of sand had been swept aside by several people in the room, Tom Suarez built a narrative that was dripping with hard-core antisemitic undertones.

The basic script was difficult to believe. He has no grounding in history, nor does he seem to have academic research skills. He is clearly not well read, nor does he use diverse source material. What he does is plunder a single archive. Seeking out anything that can seem sinister. This quote, this thought, this demand, then becomes the driving force for the entire Zionist movement.
Creating a Jew hating myth

Suarez needs only a partial record of a conversation. He requires no hard logic. The method of creation is important to understand. Suarez enters a single archive seeking breadcrumbs. It is a Goebbelsesque system of narrative creation that is supported by classic antisemitic tropes of scheming Jews, powerful Jews, bloodthirsty Jews and designed to propagate a myth of a satanic cult of ultimate power that brutally murdered a nation of farmers.

Suarez sidesteps entirely Arab violence. The only ‘terrorism’ of the 1920’s becomes legitimate Jewish land purchase. The only killers, Jewish. Another peculiarity was the insistence in referring only to Christian and Muslim Arabs in the British Mandate of the 1920’s as ‘The Palestinians’. Odd, racist and historically without any merit.

It is however a combination of factors that creates the truly sinister message. The insistence on cleansing the Arabs of violence pushes the outbreak of civil conflict into the late 1930’S. The belief in the global power of the Jewish Zionists. The adherence to the image of the demonic bloodthirsty Jew.

When these three elements are merged, we are left with a rampant demonic force with global control and sinister intent, doing its will between 1937 and 1948. This as six million Jews died. His entire narrative depends on the existence of ‘Elders of Zion’ style control at the very same time as the world shut its doors to Jews and a genocide was committed against them. It is frightening in its sickening inter-dependency.