RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Prime Minister,

It was sickening to see that your government last week voted for the declaration of diplomatic war against Israel embodied in resolution 2334 passed by the UN Security Council.

Bad enough that Britain didn’t use its position as a permanent SC member to vote against this vicious resolution and thereby stop it in its tracks. Worse, far worse was that your government voted for it. In doing so, Britain signed up to propositions that repudiate law, justice and truth.

Now reports have surfaced that, yet more appallingly, Britain was actually instrumental in getting 2334 passed by helping draft the resolution and then stiffening New Zealand’s resolve in proposing it.

I don’t know whether that is correct. I suspect it may well be. I think, nevertheless, that you spoke from the heart the other week when you told the Conservative Friends of Israel of your admiration for Israel as a “remarkable country” and a “beacon of tolerance” and your warm feelings towards the Jewish people.

I also think, however, that you know little about the history of the Jews in the Middle East, the part played in that history by previous British governments or the infernal strategic aims of the people known as the “Palestinians”. I believe, therefore, you might not fully grasp the implications of supporting UNSC resolution 2334.

So let me spell out exactly what your government has done by voting in this way.

It has put itself firmly behind the attempt to exterminate the State of Israel under the cowardly cover of vacuous pieties about supporting two democratic states and opposing terrorism and incitement. It has done this by endorsing the inflammatory falsehoods and legal and historic fictions deployed by those whose purpose is to destroy the State of Israel.

It has shredded the concept of diplomatic integrity by delegitimising Israel’s legal actions in defence of its survival while legitimising the manifestly false claim to the land by those who want Israel gone.

It has put rocket fuel behind the discriminatory and bigoted BDS movement whose aim is to delegitimise Israel and bring about its destruction.

By declaring that Israel’s borders should be established on terms demanded by its mortal enemies, the British government has backed coerced surrender to aggressors bent on Israel’s extermination.

Who is Mohammed Usman Rana? He’s a 31-year-old Norwegian doctor and newspaper columnist who first appeared on my radar in 2007 when, as an undergraduate at the University of Oslo, he took part in a debate about Muslim attitudes toward gay people. Rana, who at the time was head of UiO’s Muslim Student Association, said that he personally opposed executing gays, but refused to criticize countries that punish homosexuality with death. Pressed further on the issue by his opponents, Rana pulled a slick switcheroo, charging that it was not he but they who were displaying intolerance. How dare they sit in judgment of Islamic law?

Did Rana’s failure to condemn the execution of gay people make him an outcast? Of course not – we’re talking about Scandinavia here, after all. Only a few months after the above-mentioned debate, he wrote an op-ed forAftenposten, Norway’s newspaper of record, in which he picked up where he’d left off. Norwegians, he complained in the piece, are “secular extremists” who are insufficiently respectful of orthodox Islam, who hope for an “Islamic reformation” that would in fact mutilate the religion, and who prefer to hear from secular Muslims and ex-Muslims (think Ayaan Hirsi Ali) than from genuine believers such as himself.

Rana’s essay won an award from Aftenposten – a victory that catapulted him into the top ranks of the nation’s commentariat and made him, in the words of author Ole Asbjørn Ness, “Aftenposten’s deadly serious house Islamist.” Who, by the way, chose to give Rana the award? A fellow by the name of Knut Olav Åmås, who at the time was an editor of Aftenposten and who happens to be openly gay. Yes, that’s right: a gay editor gave a major career boost to a writer who refused to criticize the death penalty for gay people. Welcome to Norway.

This year saw another milestone for Rana: his first book. It was published by one of Norway’s oldest and most distinguished houses, Aschehoug, and it was launched at a splashy event hosted by Fritt Ord, a free-speech foundation, where Rana was given an oddly jocund introduction by Fritt Ord’s CEO, none other than the aforementioned Knut Olav Åmås. Also on hand to praise Rana were Trine Skei Grande, head of the Norwegian Liberal Party (who took the opportunity to slam Fox News for its purported Islamophobia), and Hanne Skartveit, political editor of Norway’s largest newspaper, VG. (Interestingly, while Fritt Ord was given a media lashing in 2013 for supporting a book project by Islam critic Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, aka “Fjordman,” nobody publicly criticized Fritt Ord’s support for Rana.)

If any doubts remained about Obama’s malignant narcissism, historical ignorance, and geopolitical cretinism, the lame-duck-in-chief dispelled them with his abstention at the Security Council vote on a resolution slandering Israeli “settlements” as the foremost obstacle to peace. Undoing this despicable abandonment of a crucial ally should shoot to the top of incoming president Donald Trump’s to-do list.

Israeli intelligence has demonstrated that this diplomatic drive-by was orchestrated by Obama himself. “From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of what he rightly called a “shameful betrayal.” On the one hand, such back-door machinations are par for the course in the corrupt U.N. When the Bush administration in 2002 was trying to get a U.N. resolution authorizing the Iraq War, Germany lobbied non-permanent Security Council members Mexico, Chile, Cameroon, and Angola to vote against the resolution, which ultimately failed.

But German Chancellor Gerhard Schröeder had grubby political reasons for his meddling. He was running for reelection on a dismal economic record, and found a useful distraction by tapping into German anti-Americanism and reflexive pacifism. So too with France’s machinations and opposition to the war, which were aimed at ending the sanctions on Iraq so that France could get back to doing profitable business with Saddam Hussein, who in 1983 was buying half of all French arms exports.

These actions are bad enough, and are evidence that the U.N. exists to serve the interests of member countries, usually at the expense of other member countries. But Obama has no such utilitarian motives. He’s done with running for office. His reasons for betraying Israel comprise petty spite at Netanyahu for stoutly and publicly resisting Obama’s policies and actions that endanger his beleaguered country; and obeisance to left-wing historical fantasies about “colonialism,” the “two-state solution,” and Palestinian Arab “national aspirations.” In other words, the clichés one would expect from a badly educated university adjunct professor for whom left-wing bromides function as fashion statements and status assertion.

History, of course, tells a different story. There is no “Palestinian” people or “homeland.” There are Arabs whose historical homeland is the Arabian Peninsula. Any Arab living elsewhere is the descendant of invaders, colonizers, occupiers, and immigrants. There are no “occupied territories” or “borders,” but rather contested territories which are bounded by the 1967 armistice line, and the disposition of which will be decided through a negotiated settlement. The “West Bank” is a euphemism for the historical Jewish districts of Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem is not an Arab city, but for three thousand years has been the capital of the Jewish people, who have inhabited it continuously. The “settlements” are not colonial outposts created at the expense of their rightful owners, but towns and cities in the ancient Jewish homeland, most of them on land purchased from Arab landowners happy to make a profit on such barren tracts.

Nor is Israel an “illegitimate” country. Its existence is the result of international law as created by treaties, conferences, the League of Nations, and the U.N. resolution which established an Arab and a Jewish state, the latter comprising one-quarter of the territory mandated for Israel in the postwar settlement. Israel is as legitimate, and in fact even more legitimate, than the other states created in the region like Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, or the states like Hungary, Austria, the Kingdom of Serbs and Croats, and Czechoslovakia created after the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

UNSC Resolution 2334 stinks to high heaven but don’t count on me to belabor the obvious: the stab-in-the- back American abstention is confirmation of Obama’s real intentions, and the dastardly resolution won’t help the peace process. Pouah! Old news worn to the bone. 2334 is tailored more like an international suicide belt than a whip to beat the Jews.

Let’s look at how the UNSC vote was reported on France’s all-news channel BFM TV. A typical newscast begins with replays of the smashed Berlin Christmas market alternating with scenes in the backward Tunisian town of Oueslatia from which the truck jihadi Anis Amri set out to conquer Europe. Then comes a festive sequence featuring luscious Christmas delicacies displayed in our French markets and footage of shoppers rushing to grab up the last gifts…followed by frightening/reassuring shots of hefty policemen and soldiers guarding our churches. Our churches are targeted, frère, not our synagogues. The newscast closes with the evacuation of miserable refugees and rebels from the snowswept ruins of Aleppo. Underneath all this pertinent news, the scroll mentions in passing a UNSC Resolution “calling on Israel to halt its colonization.”

Stunning juxtaposition: Jihad truck attack, jittery Christmas markets, security details on the threshold of midnight mass, the festering boil of Syria…and the UN sets its sights on…Israel! In the good old days a slap in the face from international opinion would have stimulated an endless stream of insults and accusations against Israel. The Palestinian plight has lost its drawing power: from 23 December to Christmas Day, the perfidious resolution never made it from the scroll to the screen. The Berlin massacre remained front and center.

Apparently it took German police 24 hours to find Amri’s ID stashed in the mastodon killer vehicle. Naïve commentators wondered why these absent-minded guys-e.g. the Kouachi brothers that gunned down the Charlie Hebdo staff two years ago-leave their ID at the scene of the crime. They are still too far from understanding the allahu akhbar resonance of these prideful signatures. Meanwhile Amri was chilling out in Berlin’s “Daesh” mosque across the street from a police station. In the same meanwhile, New Zealand was chumming up with Malaysia, Venezuela, and Senegal, to stick the finger to the whole wide western world in a thinly disguised resolution that delivers you up, chumps, to all the Amris stalking your streets and public squares. You’re in the firing line, boys, and you don’t know what to do about it.

François Hollande’s UN diplomat was supporting the rotten Christmas pudding resolution when the aforementioned Amri slipped out of Germany-so riddled with shoah guilt they couldn’t even close their borders after the Berlin attack-and into France. He passed through Lyon and Chamberry on his way to Torino, Milano, and wherever his heart desired if it hadn’t been for two alert caribinieri who aimed straight from the heart of our endangered liberty.

Where are the smarties that mocked Nicolas Sarkozy for “rubber stamping” George W. Bush, and snapped at the heels of “Bush’s poodle” Tony Blair? They’re ok with pudgy François Hollande yessirring BHO, the same BHO that chickened out on him when Syria’s Assad stepped across the disappearing red line. If you asked the phenomenally unpopular Hollande why France voted for UNSC 2334, he’d probably tell you it’s in the interest of peace. Hmph! Here at home our towns and regions are under constant threat of “two-state” solutions and Paris is in greater danger of division than Jerusalem. France is too busy whoring around at the UN to see the irony. Whatever you say, boys, we won’t make waves. Just put peace in the pudding and we’ll swallow it.

It took Tunisian authorities precious months to admit Anis Amri was a citizen, and accept his deportation. Too late. He had already killed and maimed victims that are hardly mentioned in the media, as if their concrete existence would upstage the mass of refugees whose needs must not be ignored. The outgoing French president never found a way to use existing legislation to deport thousands of dual-citizen jihadis that do not deserve our hospitality. Tunisians don’t want us to send back their rejects. Ordinary citizens are in the streets clamoring “No Jihadis Here.”