RUTHFULLY YOURS

By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish State and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures which did not advance the cause of peace the Pope claims to champion.

The Pope also met with Palestinian “refugees,” as if the 1948 war were the source of conflict between the two peoples, instead of centuries of Muslims having displaced Christians and other non-Muslims from Persia, the Christian Byzantine Empire, all of North Africa, Southern Spain, and most of Eastern Europe.

The Pope called Abbas an “angel of peace”. Really? An angel of peace? According to Shmuely Boteach, “Abbas spent his life murdering Jews,” by financing the Munich terror attack in 1972, by inciting against Jews and by glorifying Palestinian terrorists. The Pope, in short is praising a corrupt supporter of terrorists, a torturer who has abolished any democratic process in the West Bank.

During these four years, Pope Francis has continually put significant barriers in the way of peace between Israelis and Palestinians — a peace based on dialogue, mutual respect and the end of conflict. Instead, this supposed man of peace has strengthened Abbas’s refusal to negotiate with the Jews — the Christians’ “elder brothers”, as Pope John Paul II bravely called them — and to end hostilities with them. If this is his view of Caritas, what a tragic shame.

Mahmoud Abbas’s activities in Rome began on January 14, with the formal opening of the Palestinian Embassy to the Vatican.

The “Palestinian president”, now in the twelfth year of his four year term, then met with Pope Francis for the third time since the start of his papacy four years ago. The high-profile get-together took place in the middle of the Palestinian attempt to bypass the talks with Israel and to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A few weeks ago, the UN Security Council in Res. 2334, condemned Israel for its “settlements”; failed to mention any wrongdoing, such countless Palestinian stabbings and car-rammings of Israeli civilians, and the US Administration, which had planned and orchestrated the UN ambush, refused, for the first time in forty years, to veto the anti-Israel resolution, thereby ensuring it would pass.

This week, on January 15, 2017, the “Palestinian question” dominated the French summit in Paris. By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish State and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures which did not advance the cause of peace that the Pope claims to champion.

When the Pope landed in Israel n 2014, he was photographed praying at Israel’s security barrier, which had been created simply to stop the wave of Palestinian suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. The Pope then stood beneath a graffiti that compares Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis. “Bethlehem looks like the Warsaw Ghetto”, the graffiti said. If it does, it only looks that way because, since the once Christian-majority city Bethlehem was transferred to total Palestinian Authority control in 1995, most of its beleaguered Christians have fled.

Common sense would expect such a front-runner victim at least to have some sense of empathy for terror victims elsewhere. Right? Wrong. Not in Turkey.

Unfortunately, Erdogan’s ideological attachments visibly defeat his fake rhetoric that there are no good terrorists and bad terrorists.

Unsurprisingly, Erdogan who “opposes terror regardless of the terrorist’s identity, rhetoric or [religious] faith … whoever it targets,” has not condemned the latest attack in Jerusalem.

Ten statements in total condemning terror. Not a single word for the young victims of terror in Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a good point when, a day after a terrorist attack in Istanbul killed 38 people on Dec. 10, he said that he condemned all terrorism in Turkey and expected that Turkey did the same when terror targeted Israel. “The fight against terrorism must be mutual,” Netanyahu said. “It must be mutual in condemnation and in countermeasures, and this is what the State of Israel expects from all countries it is in contact with, including Turkey,” Netanyahu said a day before Ankara and Jerusalem formally normalized their frozen diplomatic relations. Netanyahu’s expectation was legitimate but not realistic, especially with Turkey.

A few days later, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman issued an order outlawing the Istanbul-based International Kanadil Institute for Humanitarian Aid, a Turkish aid group, accusing it of funnelling money to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Kanadil foundation is identified with Hamas and with the Muslim Brotherhood and in recent years had been used as a main pipeline for funding projects by Hamas in Jerusalem,” Lieberman’s spokesperson said in a statement. Turkey’s logistical and political support for its ideological next of kin, Hamas, did not come as a surprise, despite normalization with Israel: for Turkey’s rulers, there are terrorists, and terrorists who go with fancy tags.

In a November interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization. He called it instead a “political movement born from [a] national resurrection.” He also said he meets with Hamas “all the time.”

When one talks about Christians in Turkey, one tends to think of them as migrants who moved to the area after Muslims took over or as if Muslims have always been the majority there.

The truth is Bilecik and the rest of Asia Minor, which today has a tiny, dwindling Christian minority, used to be majority-Christian lands, the great Christian-Byzantine Empire.

“The Greek community is dying, and it is not a natural death.” — A Greek an in Istanbul to Helsinki Watch, 1992.

“The Greek community in Istanbul today is dwindling, elderly and frightened,” Helsinki Watch reported. “Their fearfulness is related to an appalling history of pogroms and expulsions that they have suffered at the hands of the Turkish government.” — Helsinki Watch, 1992.

“The conquest of Bilecik is not a random conquest of a territory. The conquest of Bilecik means the establishment of the Ottoman state. And the establishment of the Ottoman state means the beginning of a blessed march. When future generations see this project, they will understand they should be proud of their ancestors and history.” — Selim Yagci, Mayor of Bilecik.

As Turks are taught to take pride in every single thing in their history — including all of the crimes of their ancestors — they still continue committing similar crimes.

Turkish newspapers have recently reported that plans are underway to restore the historic Greek Hagios Georgios Church, referred to as “Aya Yorgi” in Turkish. The church will be converted into a museum and a cultural site.

Osmaneli Mayor Munur Sahin said that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, also visited the region, and said:

“We re-evaluated the situation of the church. This place will never be opened to worship again. It will serve as a museum and a cultural venue. We obtained the necessary permits; we will bring movable cultural artifacts from around Osmaneli and keep them here.”

The restoration project, approved by the Council of Monuments, is set to be finished in two years. The church lies in ruins — largely because the congregants were either murdered or forcibly deported during and after the 1914-1923 Greek genocide.

Diplomats from some 70 countries gathered in Paris over the weekend to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and once more depict Israeli settlements as a grave violation of international law. The conference was a failure, but the conferees could have helped themselves by first checking what French courts have to say about those settlements before scoring Israel again.

In 2013 the French Court of Appeals in Versailles ruled that, contrary to Palestinian arguments, Jewish settlements don’t violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against an occupying power transferring “its civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The law, the court held, bars government efforts to transfer populations. But it doesn’t bar private individuals settling in the disputed territories.

The case arose after Palestinian groups sued the French industrial conglomerate Alstom over its role in the construction of a light-rail line in Jerusalem. The Palestinians lost in the court of first instance, and the Versailles court upheld the lower court’s judgment. The case didn’t go further.

That matters because the Paris conference adopted the premise that settlements are illegal as a matter of settled law and the primary obstacle to peace. The French court makes a nonsense of that judgment simply by looking at what the Geneva Conventions say, rather than basing its judgment on a legally meaningless “international consensus.”

As with so many of the Obama Administration’s Middle East peace efforts, the Paris conference makes untenable territorial demands on Israel and gives Palestinians the hope that they can achieve their aims without making compromises. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the conference as “useless,” while the U.K. refused to accept its closing declaration calling for a final-status agreement that would “fully end the occupation that began in 1967.”

The reality is that Israel will never return to those borders, and no Palestinian state is going to come into existence so long as it is run by kleptocrats in the West Bank and jihadists in Gaza. The next time a similar conference is organized, it would do better to address Palestinian capacity for responsible self-government rather than offer legally dubious claims against Israeli settlements.

A married couple, Peter and Melanie M., were prosecuted and convicted in July 2016 of creating a Facebook group that criticized the government’s migration policy. Also, in July 2016, 60 people suspected of writing “hate speech” online had their homes raided by German police.

None of the above seems to be enough, however, for the president of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, from Angela Merkel’s CDU party, who believes that what Facebook is already doing against “hate speech” is not enough. According to the CDU politician, there is a need for more legislation.

The German government’s view of what constitutes “hate speech” is highly selective and appears limited to protecting the government’s own policies on immigration from legitimate criticism.

When massive antisemitism swept large German cities in the summer of 2014, for example, no such anti-racist zeal was manifest on the part of the German government. On the contrary, there were instances of authorities practically facilitating hate speech. In July 2014, Frankfurt police let mainly Muslim “protesters” use their van’s megaphone to belt out slogans of incitement in Arabic, including the repeated chanting of “Allahu Akbar” and that Jews are “child murderers”.

Firebombing a synagogue, on the other hand, is simply an “act of protest”.

Officials in Germany’s Interior Ministry are urging Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière to establish a “Defense Center against Disinformation” (Ab­wehr­zen­trum ge­gen Des­in­for­ma­ti­on) to combat what they call “political disinformation,” a euphemism for “fake news.”

“The acceptance of a post-truth age would amount to political capitulation,” the officials told Maizière in a memo, which also disclosed that the bureaucrats at the Interior Ministry are eager to see “authentic political communication” remain “defining for the 21st century.”

One wonders whether by “authentic political communication,” the officials of the Interior Ministry are referring to the way German authorities scrambled to cover up the mass sexual attacks on women on New Year’s Eve a year ago in Cologne? At the time, German police first claimed, surreally, on the morning of January 1, 2016, that the situation on New Year’s Eve had been “relaxed.” Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers later dryly admitted, “This initial statement was incorrect.” Alternatively, perhaps they are referring to the decision of Germany’s public broadcaster, ZDF, not to report on the attacks until four days after they had occurred? Even a former government official, Hans-Peter Friedrich, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Interior Minister from 2011 to 2013, accused the media at the time of imposing a “news blackout” and operating a “code of silence” over negative news about immigrants. How is that for “authentic political communication”?

“In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. In many instances they were also subjected to separate and differential forms of mass murder.” — Professor Vahakn Dadrian, in Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case.

These forms of murder included methods such as mass drowning, mass burning, sexual assaults, and mutilations.

“In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers — a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim — raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying ‘Mummy, Mummy.'” — Professor Vahakn Dadrian, in Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case.

“A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Agn (Egin), Harput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician.” — Leslie A Davis, U.S. Consul at Harput.

More than 100 years after the genocide, Turkey still denies it and Turkish history textbooks even blame the genocide on the Armenians themselves.

When experts deny the Armenian genocide and even try to prevent the U.S. government from officially recognizing it, they are killing the victims all over again.

“As long as the genocide remains unrecognized, justice will not be established. The curse of the genocide will not leave this land, and Turkey will never see the light of day. This is not a prediction, but a statement of fact.” — Turkey’s Human Rights Association, 2016.

U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump was recently called on to “guarantee” to Turkey that the Armenian genocide will not be properly acknowledged by the U.S. Congress, in a set of proposals regarding “U.S. Policy on Turkey”.

“The United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass. This has always been critical in the relationship, and most Turks care deeply about the issue,” reads a part of the paper issued by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and authored by former U.S. ambassador to Ankara James F. Jeffrey and Turkish scholar Dr. Soner Cagaptay.

In the meantime, an Armenian protestant church in the Turkish city of Elazig (historic Kharpert/Harput) has been turned into a parking lot, the Dicle News Agency (DIHA) reported.

The walls of the church, which served as a place of worship for the Armenian and Assyrian communities alike, is now loaded with advertising boards, installed by the managers of the parking lot. Before that, the church was used as a flour plant, a marketplace and a livestock market.

The city of Elazig is located in the Armenian highland of eastern Turkey.

Professor Benjamin Lieberman in his book, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe:

“Elazig is a small city in Eastern Turkey of several hundred thousand inhabitants, situated near a series of lakes created by a dam on the Euphrates River. Today its residents are mostly Turks and Kurds, but as late as the spring of 1915 it was also very much an Armenian town. In 1915, Armenians called it Kharpert while Turks referred to it as Harput. It had been an Armenian center for many centuries.”[1]

Inhabitants of the Swedish city of Malmö are living in fear after a 16-year-old Iraqi boy was murdered last week. Ahmed Obaid had been gunned down by an unknown shooter in the Rosengard district on Thursday. The killing is part of a series of violent crimes that has plagued the city located in the south of the Scandinavian country for some time now. Obaid was shot near a bus stop. The teenager had never been involved in crime and was not known to police. His friends say he didn’t fight and had not previously been threatened, writes the dailyExpressen.

The perpetrators are still at large and their identities are still unknown. It does, however, seem yet another hallmark in the disintegration of the Swedish social fabric.

In response to the murder, demonstrators protested in front of city hall yesterday, writes the Swedish Local. Ahmed’s father Najm Obaid, who spoke at the gathering that was also attended by several politicians, said: “we won’t get Ahmed back, but I will be happy if this leads to the violence being stopped.”

Rim Jabboul, an 18-year-old schoolgirl who attended the protest, called the murder“devastating.” She said “it is a real shame that a 16-year-old should have to die like that. He had not lived his life yet. You have to look over your shoulder when you go out at night now. I don’t let my little brother go out at night any more. I hope that the politicians actually view this as a serious problem and start to solve this in Malmö.”

The organisers of the protest presented Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson a set of measures he could implement in order to curb the violent crime wave.

“There’s nothing on it I don’t agree with,” Johansson commented on their proposals. “On the contrary,” he said. “In my opinion, there is no doubt what has to be done. We have to make sure that they can be prosecuted and that they can get long jail sentences.” The Minister furthermore stated that the Swedes “have to get rid of the weapons”, and he is also calling for“tighter punishment so that those who are held for serious gun crime can be arrested immediately and not just be released a few days later.” The government is already working on a draft that, amongst others, plans to quadruple the minimum sentence for the possession ofhand grenades. This type of weapon has recently been used in a Somali gang war that scourged the city of Gothenburg.

Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s Prime Minister, commented as well on the killing in Rosengard, a migrant-dominated precinct notorious for its virtual lawlessness. “On a personal level it’s a tragedy, of course,” he said when he was interviewed on the topic. “Then, on a societal level, it is completely unacceptable that we have this kind of environment where people take it upon themselves to murder.”