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Were the Oslo Peace Accords fatally flawed?

The Oslo Idea traces the roots of the current campaign to delegitimize Israel. The campaign is not linked to Israeli resistance, to the absence of an acceptable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, or to Israel’s reluctance to abandon territory. It results from a change of tactics by the Palestinian leadership. Raphael Israeli argues that these tactics have been used to exhaust, reduce, and replace Israel rather than produce a compromise.

The Oslo Idea deconstructs the immense illusion of the Oslo peace accords, which initiated the so-called “peace process.” He shows how Oslo lured a naive Israeli leadership into a trap. He shows how outside factors, bent on finding and supporting an evasive peace, have helped perpetuate the fiasco Oslo represents. He shows how Oslo’s supporters have advanced the “peace process” by coaxing and threatening Israel behind the scenes, and binding Israel alone with the Oslo commitments and their derivatives. More importantly, the author outlines and analyzes the basic and seemingly unbridgeable points of contention that remain: security, refugees, settlements, water, borders, and the status of Jerusalem itself.

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About the Author
Raphael IsraeliRaphael Israeli is professor of Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University. He has authored over thirty books, including Islamikaze, The Iraq War, Muslim Minorities in Modern States, and Blood Libel and Its Derivatives, as well as over a hundred scholarly articles in the fields of Islamic radicalism, Islamic terrorism, the modern Middle East, and Islam in China and Asia.
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Blood Libel and Its Derivatives: The Scourge of Anti-Semitism by Raphael Israeli (Apr 18, 2012
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The Islamic Challenge in Europe by Raphael Israeli (Jun 16, 2008)

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING Peter Beinart has become the clown prince of the Anti-Israel left. His big blog project, Zion Square, Open Zion or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Zion, grinds along, unattended. Desperate for attention, Beinart scrambles into any issue to pick a fight with the “right-wing” Jews, who have even less […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ THE DEAD BABY MEDIA If the text on that one is too small for you, it’s a CNN piece headlined, “Why the Syrian regime is killing babies.” There’s not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the […]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/06/01/friday-docu-dump-obama-again-suspends-embassy-move-to-jerusalem/
Friday Docu-Dump: Obama Again Suspends Embassy Move to Jerusalem

Just two days after hosting a Jewish American Heritage Reception at the White House, President Obama used executive authority to suspend once again a 1995 bill requiring the government to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

“I hereby determine that it is necessary, in order to protect the national security interests of the United States, to suspend for a period of 6 months the limitations set forth in sections 3(b) and 7(b) of the Act,” Obama said in a short memorandum to the secretary of State today.

Under the act, which was overwhelmingly approved in House and Senate, the Embassy was supposed to be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by May 31, 1999.

Each of Obama’s suspensions, in six-month intervals, have included the same language.

And each misses a sentence that was in President George W. Bush’s suspensions of limitations under the Jerusalem Embassy Act.

“My Administration remains committed to beginning the process of moving our embassy to Jerusalem,” Bush wrote in his presidential determinations on the matter.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/06/under_allah_with_sharia_for_all.html

Last week, a white African-American friend and her husband returned to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) from a European trip and observed an American-Muslim woman from their flight navigating U.S. Immigration and Customs. The couple watched attentively as the covered woman approached the immigration officer, who avoided eye contact, glanced hastily at the woman’s ID, and waved her heedlessly through. When it was their turn to be processed, the officer carefully scrutinized their faces, studied their passport photos, and then repeated the sequence a second time.

While shopping in a Washington, D.C. suburban supermarket, an Iranian-American human rights activist, who fled Iran following the Khomeini-led revolution, spied a woman in a multi-layered hijab shopping with her playful young daughter. In the parking lot, the woman struck her meandering daughter as they passed by the stunned Iranian woman. The activist reprimanded the mother for hitting her daughter and cried out, “And please don’t force her to wear a headscarf when she grows up.” Two hours later, two police officers arrived at the Iranian woman’s home to question her after the irate Muslim mother, who had recorded the activist’s license plate number, summoned them.

Are these incidents indicative of hypersensitivity to potential accusations of Islamophobia, or do they reveal an already entrenched subservience to Muslims — dhimmitude — or both? A closer examination of both leads to the conclusion that perhaps the two concepts are one and the same. Both reflect a fear of Muslims which appears to lead to special treatment. Conceivably, it’s a matter of degree, with dhimmitude being the end result of pervasive concerns about manifesting Islamophobia.

What to Say When You’re Handed the Obama-is-Good-for-Israel Talking Points

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/06/01/obama-is-good-for-israel-talking-points/

Many Americans, and particularly Jews, are starting to receive mailings encouraging them to vote for or donate to the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama by arguing that he is pro-Israel. Several readers have asked me to provide them with responses. Here is a brief answer.

These emails and mailings, though designed to look as if they were written by concerned individuals, clearly draw their texts from talking points posted on the Obama reelection site. The arguments are very thin and selective but are presented as if they represent the totality of Obama policy.

The main arguments are:

1. Obama says he likes Israel.

That’s nice but so what? Of course it is good when he says nice things (by coincidence, no doubt, usually to Jewish audiences) but one can also find a lot of nasty remarks by him, his advisors, and various officials appointed by him. Every president for the last half-century has said similar nice things; not all the presidents put together during this period have said or done so many hostile things. While it is a great exaggeration to say that Obama hates Israel or wants to destroy it, I think it is fair to say that no president (including Jimmy Carter when in office) has been so cold toward Israel and basically failed to understand its nature and interests.

2. Israeli leaders say Obama is great.

Yes, that’s nice but it’s not what they say in private. I can tell you authoritatively that not a single Israeli leader in any party has a high opinion of Obama with regard to Israel and its interests. But it is their job to lavish praise on America’s president. Their task is not to defeat Obama or to critique him but to get along with him as well as possible in order to protect Israel’s long-term alliance with the United States without sacrificing any of Israel’s vital interests. They’ve done it well. The one moment the truth emerged was when Obama betrayed Israel, on the diplomatic level, by announcing, without consultation, a new policy on peace terms while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was flying to Washington. You think Israeli leaders (and this is not ideological, not a matter of left or right) have a high regard for Obama? Read Netanyahu’s speech to the joint session of Congress.

Perhaps the equation can be summarized as follows: Obama just gave Israeli President Shimon Peres a presidential medal of freedom. He also has just helped give Israel a second Muslim Brotherhood-dominated regime next door and insists that this is a good thing.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1985

“I love it when Arabs attack the leftist Jews who think that being their apologists will grant them immunity from being thought of as enemies. The irony here is that it’s not Glick or Beinart who wouldn’t agree to live in Moor’s building; it’s Moor who wouldn’t agree to live in theirs.Indeed, it has always been the Palestinians who refuse to exist in peace with Jews, not the other way around. The solution lies either in their altering their worldview or in our asserting our right to our country. No number of dead Jew-killers returned to their dispatchers on a silver platter is going to change that fact.”

Given the number of times the Israeli government has banged its head against brick walls (and security fences), is it any wonder that it has lost its marbles?

The latest case in point was Thursday morning’s “goodwill gesture” from Israel to the Palestinian Authority and “Hamastan.” This involved exhuming the bodies of 91 terrorists buried in Israel and transferring their remains back to the West Bank and Gaza from whence they hailed. There they were shrouded in Palestinian flags and welcomed home as “martyrs.”

Each of these paragons of Palestinian virtue had slaughtered innocent Israelis in restaurants, buses, hotels and shopping malls. Now that they’re back among the people who laud them for their actions, their families will be able to visit their graves, and school children will be taught lessons on their “heroism.”

The gaga Israeli government said that it hopes “this humanitarian gesture will serve both as a confidence-building measure and help get the peace process back on track.”

Yeah, righ

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=272258

Into The Fray: Peter Beinart has placed himself in precisely the same category as Richard Goldstone. He should be treated in precisely the same manner.

“A Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers “– Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” June 10, 2010
In two recent articles, I made the following statements: “Peter Beinart [has] for all intents and purposes declared political war on Israel.” Indeed he has.And, “There are only two possible explanations for [Beinart’s] actions: He is either sincere or he is not. If he is sincere, he is merely a ‘useful idiot,’ and he should be treated as such. If he is not, then he is engaging in activities that are intentionally detrimental to Israel. He is, therefore, an enemy – and should be treated as such.” Indeed he should.

Beinart has placed himself in precisely the same category as another self-professed “dedicated Zionist” – Richard Goldstone. He should be treated in precisely the same manner – by both the Jewish establishment and Israeli officialdom.Noble or nefarious?

We don’t know what motivates Beinart – whether he is merely silly but sincere, or whether he is actually sly and sinister. We can only infer what drives him from what he does, and what he says – and perhaps more important, from what he doesn’t.But in the final analysis, his intentions are less important than the consequences of his actions, which are deeply detrimental to Israel, the professed object of his devotion and affection.

After all, for the vast majority of those who follow the Middle East conflict, there is little daylight between the charges Beinart hurls at Israel, Israelis, and the Israeli government and those of the Jewish state’s most visceral detractors.If any differences can be detected, they typically relate more to nuance rather than principle.

Even if he does occasionally level some perfunctory reprimand at the Palestinians for their “recalcitrant” (read “brutal”/“ bloody”/“barbarous”) behavior – as if reluctantly discharging some distasteful but obligatory chore –he studiously avoids any policy-relevant conclusions Israel might conceivably be forced to draw from that behavior.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/expedience/

Reading the book about the tortuous path to “The Balfour Declaration” written by Jonathan Schneer, one is struck by the duplicity of the British, who made contradictory promises to the Zionists, the Arabs, the French and even tried to make a separate peace with the Turks. At any rate, PM David Lloyd George, who was always one of my heroes, comes out looking less than a statesman. But, then I re-evaluated the situation and realized that that was expediency. He was prepared to double deal and double-cross as long as it got him what he wanted, namely a way to win WWI war as soon as possible, in order to reduce the terrible toll of lives lost in the trenches. What happened after the war to the Zionists and Arabs was of very secondary importance to him, it was just a question of which gambit in the east would help to win the war on the western front. So he made promises to both the Jews and the Arabs to get their temporary support.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301585/twilight-west-mark-steyn The developed world is all playing the same recessional. The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision […]