RUTHFULLY YOURS

House of Lords has been debating the Middle East, and some of the speeches have been notable for their resounding support for Israel.

Look, for example, at this offering, from Labour life peer Lord Livermore, a former party strategist and quite obviously not a Corbynista:

‘My Lords, I wish to use the short time available to argue for a better understanding of Israel. This task is urgent because we see now a disturbing resurgence of anti-Zionism that is bordering on the antisemitic, particularly, I regret to say, in sections of the left in British politics.

Israel is not of course above criticism. It is right that where necessary we should be critical of Israeli policy, conduct and behaviour. \

But too often this legitimate criticism of specific actions taken by Israel obscures the reality of Israel. When this reality is not heard, it creates a space for those with uglier motivations to build support for grotesque analogies between Israel and apartheid South Africa or even Nazi Germany.

I fear that on the left today what is in jeopardy is support not just for the conduct of Israel but for the concept of Israel. We see senior figures praising as friends those who are committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish homeland.

Indeed, we now have the perverse situation where people who consider themselves to be progressive oppose Israel in the belief that they are standing up for liberal values and human rights, but in doing so side with totalitarian Islamist regimes that abuse human rights and prohibit basic liberties.

I believe that it is the duty of progressives to stop the slide from opposition to specific policies of Israel towards opposition to the very existence of Israel. I want us to make the progressive case for a country where women have the right to vote, dress as they wish and say what they wish in a region where, too often, they are segregated and subjugated; for a country that is committed to the free practice of religion for all in a region where religious minorities are frequently suppressed and persecuted; for a country where gay people are not discriminated against, tortured, detained or executed, as they are almost everywhere else in the region; and for a country with a free press, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary and strong trade unions, all lacking in almost all neighbouring countries.

With more than three million Syrians fleeing war-torn Syria seeking safe havens in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Europe – scarce United Nations resources continue to be used supporting and maintaining about 760,000 Palestinian Arabs currently living in the West Bank and registered as “refugees” with the United Nations Relief And Works Agency (UNRWA).

Their refugee categorization and status was changed on 3 January 2013 when PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas replaced the “Palestinian Authority” with the “State of Palestine” by this decree:

“Official documents, seals, signs and letterheads of the Palestinian National Authority official and national institutions shall be amended by replacing the name ‘Palestinian National Authority’ whenever it appears by the name ‘State of Palestine’ and by adopting the emblem of the State of Palestine.”

John Whitbeck – a legal advisor to the Palestinian team in negotiations with Israel – has written on the significance of this name change:

“In his correspondence, Yasser Arafat used to list all three of his titles under his signature — President of the State of Palestine, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and President of the Palestinian Authority (in that order of precedence). It is both legally and politically noteworthy that, in signing this decree, Mahmoud Abbas has listed only the first two titles. The Trojan horse called the “Palestinian Authority” in accordance with the Oslo interim agreements and the “Palestinian National Authority” by Palestinians has served its purpose by introducing the institutions of the State of Palestine on the soil of Palestine and has now ceased to exist.”

Abbas’s semantic ploy had left Israel without its designated negotiating partner under the Oslo Accords and had effectively ended negotiations for the creation a Palestinian State under the Bush Roadmap.

France is proposing to lead the Middle East Quartet on a new foray into Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. This is understandable as a part of French politics. The Palestinians, however, are setting up to be at least as difficult a client for France as they have ever been for the U.S.

Of the members of the P5+1 negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran last summer, France was least happy with the result and said so publicly. Since President Obama needed all five other nations to sign onto the deal, he bowed to a previously expressed French interest in midwifing a Palestinian state in exchange for French acquiescence on Iran.

Aside from its traditional delusions of influence in the Middle East, France wanted to appease its large, unassimilated, unhappy, and increasingly violent Muslim population, which is predominantly Sunni with no love for Iran – and not much love for the French State. France is also part of the anti-Sunni ISIS coalition, which angers parts of the French Muslim population as well. President François Hollande perhaps thought he could buy time or space by inserting himself in the issue of Palestinian statehood – not resolving the problems that bedevil Israelis and Palestinians, but just producing a Palestinian state.

Hollande & Co. will run afoul of two trends: one French, one Palestinian. First, France’s Muslim population, while increasingly anti-Jewish, is not particularly interested in a Palestinian state. Watching Israel sold down the river by a Western country may have some visceral appeal, but it will not let Hollande off the hook for France’s perceived sins against its Muslim population or the Sunni Muslim cause. Second, France is offering the Palestinian Authority nothing the Palestinians have not previously rejected – and will reject this time as well for the same reasons.

1. Erroneous assumptions produce erroneous policies, as has been the case of all US initiatives towards the Palestinian issue, which has been erroneously perceived – by the US foreign policy establishment – to be the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

2. For example, the first 1948/49 Arab-Israeli War was not launched, by Arab countries, on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. The Arabs launched the war in order to advance their own particular – not Palestinian – interests through the occupation of the strategic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the Palestinians blame Arab leaders for what they term “the 1948 debacle.”

3. Moreover, the 1948/49 War was aimed to prevent the establishment of an “infidel” Jewish entity on a land, which Muslims believe is divinely endowed to the “believers” (Waqf). The Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam, stated: “The establishment of a Jewish state would lead to a war of extermination like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades….”

4. Jordan joined the 1948/49 War, in order to expand its territory to the Mediterranean. Egypt wanted to foil Jordan’s ambitious strategy, and therefore deployed a military force to the Jerusalem region to check the Jordanian advance. Iraq wanted to control the oil pipeline from the Kirkuk oil wells to the Haifa refineries, and Syria aimed at conquering some southern sections of so called “Greater Syria.”

5. At the end of the 1948/9 war, Iraq occupied Samaria (the northern West Bank), but transferred it to Jordan, not to the Palestinians. Jordan occupied Judea (the southern West Bank), and annexed both Judea & Samaria to the Hashemite Kingdom on the East Bank of the Jordan River, prohibiting Palestinian activities and punishing/expelling Palestinian activists. Egypt conquered the Gaza Strip, imposed a nightly curfew, which was terminated when Israel gained control of Gaza in 1967, prohibited Palestinian national activities and expelled Palestinian leaders. Syria occupied and annexed the al-Hama area in the Golan Heights. In 1948, the Arab League formed the “All Palestine Government” as a department within the Arab League headquarters in Cairo, dissolving it in 1959.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wrote in The New York Times to explain why Arabs murder Jews, “Occupation provokes anger and despair which are the major drivers of violence and extremism….”

It’s not Islamic Jihad, or Palestinian Authority/Hamas hate campaigns; it’s the “occupation of Palestinian territory,” “the settlements” – all of them.

It’s a demand that Israel withdraw unilaterally to the 1949 armistice line without any consideration of Israel’s claims or thought about the consequences.
It’s a call for Israel’s demise. In this case, therefore, the messenger is the message.

Instead of regurgitating lies, Ban could have told the truth: Arabs who try to kill Jews are not driven by political or economic concerns, but by hatred. They are willing to give up their lives in the process of murdering Jews because they believe that will bring them honor and public acclaim.

Arabs are not angry because they don’t have a state; they are angry because Jews have one. They do not hate because they lack political rights and economic benefits, but because they believe that Jews are infidels, and that martyrdom and jihad are supreme values.

On May 8, 2001, a Palestinian brutally beat to death two 13-year old
boys exploring a cave – Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran.

On August 9, 2001, a Palestinian walked into a pizzeria in Jerusalem
with a guitar case loaded with explosives and blew himself up, killing
15 people, including 7 children and a pregnant woman. One victim is
still unconscious.

On Octobr 7, 2004 32 people were murdered in two Sinai hotel resort
hotels by Palestinian terrorists who knew that Israelis frequented the
hotels. Among the dead, two brothers – Gilad, aged 11, and little
Lior, aged 3.

On December 5, 2005, Palestinian terrorists attempted to enter a mall
in Netanya but blew up themselves and 5 others at the entrance.

On March 6, 2008, Rosh Chodesh Adar, eight students of the Mercaz
Harav Yeshiva were murdered by terrorists who entered the school and
opened fire.

Ellen McLarney, who teaches Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke, would have you believe that a “pacifist struggle for civil jihad” led by Islamic feminists offers a benign “alternative kind of jihad” to that practiced by Islamist terrorists worldwide.

She peddled her thesis to about twenty listeners (mostly graduate students) in a February 8 George Washington University lecture, reprising discussion of her recent book, Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening. McLarney’s lecture omitted the totalitarian jihadist ideology underlying what she described as a “protracted struggle with non-democratic regimes over matters of human rights.”

McLarney lauded the 1995 book (in Arabic) Women & Political Work: An Islamic Perspective, by Cairo University political science professor Heba Raouf Ezzat. Yet McLarney neglected to mention the book’s publisher, none other than the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia, an entity founded by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB). She noted that Ezzat explicated her concept of feminine “soft force” Islamist subversion, itself derived from the late American political scientist Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power.”

Beginning in the 1970s, McLarney explained nonchalantly, an Egyptian Islamic revival developed via a “passive revolution” to spark an “Islamic civil society that runs parallel to the more secular civil society in Egypt.” As foreshadowed by the 1960s Egyptian writer Nimat Sidqi—who according to McLarney’s slides wrote that “Raising Children is Jihad”—women “have a pivotal role to play in this struggle.” Borrowing from the American feminist slogan “the personal is political,” Ezzat and others developed the “Islamic family as a place for the cultivation of Islamic sensibilities”—the “very seat of politics.”

Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, let loose on Facebook with several unhinged posts about Israel and ISIS.

She is unapologetic about her rampant anti-Semitism, claiming that Israel was responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack as well as for the rise of ISIS.

Campus Reform:
“This ain’t even hard. They unleashed Mossad [Israel’s national intelligence agency] on France and it’s clear why…And I stopped letting folks bully me with that ‘You’re being anti-semetic’ nonsense a long time ago. Just a strategy to shut folks up who criticize Zionism…” Karega wrote along with her post.

Later that day, Karega wrote another post blasting Netanyahu for attending a free speech rally in Paris when French President François Hollande had asked him not to come.

“Netanyahu wanted to bend Hollande and French governmental officials over one more time in public just in case the message wasn’t received via Massod [sic] and the ‘attacks’ they orchestrated in Paris,” she wrote.

In November, Karega posted another theory to her Facebook, claiming Israel’s national intelligence agency was conspiring with ISIS.

Recently, on their opinion pages in a piece titled “Notable & Quotable: The Campus Climate” (February 12, 2016), The Wall Street Journal exposed a curious curriculum program offered by the University of California, Irvine. The overall goal of the curriculum program is to “boost climate change/sustainability education at UCI, especially targeting those students for whom climate and sustainability may not be a focus.”

Turns out such programs are not that unusual on college campuses across the U.S. Whether through standalone seminars, integrations into the general catalog of courses, or more intensely focused for environmental science majors, students are “educated” to be activists for the atmosphere.

Yet the most calamitous climate is the one sustained in the echo chamber of college campuses, resonated by leftist groupthink. Instead of targeting students for indoctrination in foregone conclusions about the Earth and its future climate, educators should be expanding students’ objective knowledge of the complexities of the ecosphere and atmosphere. Maybe then an uncoerced understanding by enough intelligent students will lead to more careful and beneficial use of Earth’s abundant natural resources for the good of people and the planet.

Anthony J. Sadar is author of the new book In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail (Stairway Press, 2016).

http://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-ramps-up-fight-against-tunnelers-with-the-obstacle-1456879133

TEL AVIV—One morning early last month, Ahmed al Zahar picked up a scarf, left his mobile phone in the kitchen and headed out to help build a tunnel underneath the Gaza Strip near the border with Israel.Hours later, he was dead, after an underground passageway he was working on collapsed.A member of the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the secretive militant arm of the Islamist movement Hamas, Mr. Zahar is one of at least 10 operatives who have died since the middle of January trying to create an underground network that could move weapons and supplies in any conflict with Israel, a more technologically advanced foe.

His parents have been told little about where and why their 23-year-old son died on Feb. 2, but they knew he worked for Al-Qassam. And despite his death, they support the digging.

“They are not safe,” Ahmed’s father Haidar al Zahar, 62, said of the tunnels from his home in Gaza City. “[But] tunnels guarantee safety and security for the Gaza Strip.”

Israeli officials and analysts say the digging could push the two sides toward conflict again, although Hamas officials have recently tried to play down the threat the tunnels represent. CONTINUE AT SITE.