RUTHFULLY YOURS

Abbas seems intentionally to ignore that he and his Palestinian Authority are responsible for the violence, as a result of their of their daily incitement against Israel.

A recent poll found that 48% of Palestinians interviewed believe that the real goal of the “intifada” is to “liberate all of Palestine.” In other words, approximately half of Palestinians believe that the “intifada” should lead to the destruction of Israel, which would be replaced with a Palestinian state — one that now would be ruled by Hamas and jihadi organizations such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.

It is notable that only 11% of respondents said the goal of the “intifada” should be to “liberate” only those territories captured by Israel in 1967.

The Palestinians do not, according to the poll, have a problem with “settlements” or “poor living conditions.” They have a problem with Israel’s existence. Palestinians do not see a difference between a West Bank “settlement” and cities inside Israel — or differentiate between Jews living there. They are all depicted as “settlers” and “colonialists.”

This contradicts Abbas’s claim that the Palestinians want a “peaceful and popular” uprising. The Palestinians are not, as their leaders claim, seeking a two-state solution.

As the current Palestinian campaign of terrorism against Israel is about to enter its third month, it is still not clear to many what the Palestinians are trying to achieve. The Palestinians cannot even agree on a name for their campaign. Some are referring to it as an “intifada,” while others are describing it as a “Habba Jamahiriya” [“popular puff,” or “flurry”].

Why use the words “disputed territories” which are part of the historically false narrative? The “West bank” is an integral part of Israel….the remaining area of Palestine after the duplicitous British deeded the rest to the Hashemites who had no historic claims and created Trans-Jordan….later to be known as Jordan…rsk

The daily attacks on Jews in Israel and the disputed territories are continuing. The toll of killings and injury from the three-month Palestinian-Arab terrorism and incitement campaign is mounting. At least 23 victims have lost their lives since the beginning of October in rock, gun, knife and car-ramming attacks.

In Tel Aviv, a Palestinian killed two Jews and wounded others in a knife attack at the entrance to a synagogue. In Gush Etzion in the West Bank, a Palestinian opened fire with a submachine gun on a group of people at a road junction killing 18-year-old American Ezra Schwartz, an Israeli man and a Palestinian passerby and wounding several others.

Near the same intersection 20-year-old Hadar Buchris from Safed was knifed to death. Last Monday, two Palestinian girls ages 14 and 16 stabbed a 70-year-old Palestinian man with a pair of scissors in Jerusalem’s iconic Mahaneh Yehuda market; they mistook him for a Jew.

By any measure, we are losing the war against ISIS and radical Islam. A bigger problem is we do not yet realize we are losing or why. Their legions are growing, their ambitions are apocalyptic, and our resolve is as strong as silly putty.
Without question, our military is superior to any other on earth and we could inflict devastating damage to ISIS if we unleashed our military forces against them. But we are not going to do that—not today, not next month and not after the next atrocity strikes Cleveland, Phoenix or Richmond.

We have a President and his designated replacement-in-waiting who think “climate change” is a greater threat than Islamists with nuclear weapons, and that the way to defeat squads of suicide bombers is to welcome their brothers, sisters and cousins as our neighbors and give them the right to vote.

Spend much time in American colleges and universities and you’ll be become intimately familiar with statements that begin “I support free speech, but . . . ” In other words, schools will proudly proclaim their dedication to free speech and academic freedom often while simultaneously maintaining and enforcing speech codes — policies that unlawfully restrict or prohibit constitutionally protected speech.

To take one example, the University of Michigan — one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities – in one policy condemns “bias-related incidents” such as “making fun” of a “person’s accent” or “insulting . . . someone’s traditional manner of dress or geographic origin.” Yet the university then declares, in an entirely different policy: “Expression of diverse points of view is of the highest importance, not only for those who espouse a cause or position and then defend it, but also for those who hear and pass judgment on that defense. The belief that an opinion is pernicious, false, or in any other way detestable cannot be grounds for its suppression.”

Confused? College students seem to be. Young America’s Foundation — working with the polling company, inc./WomanTrend — surveyed 1,000 college students about their attitudes toward free speech and political correctness. The findings? Students support free speech, until speech gets politically incorrect.

Defying logic, a band of anthropologists voted to boycott archeology. On Friday, Nov. 20, at the business meeting of the American Anthropology Association (AAA), they voted to boycott Israeli universities in line with the BDS movement’s goal of punishing Israel for it’s alleged treatment of Palestinians in the so-called “occupied territories”. The text of the resolution is here. (It is not finalized as the vote will have to go to the 10,000-member association in spring.) Should the resolution pass, the full membership vote, the association will not enter into any formal relationships with any Israeli institutions and would bar Israeli institutions from participating in its publications and events. Israeli institutions, and thereby students (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) would not have access to AnthroSource, the major anthropological database.

I ask not what these anthropologists think they are doing to Israel by weighing in on the complex challenges in the Middle East with a simplistic and biased resolution which demonizes Israel. Nor why an organization representing scholars chooses to ignore the fact that over 11,000 rockets were launched against Israelis after Israel withdrew every living Jew from Gaza. Neither do I ask why academics, who are committed to the understanding of culture and causes, place full blame on Israel and do not factor in evidence of Palestinian government incitement to the murder of Jews. I ask what they are doing to the scholarly pursuits of the archeologists who belong to the AAA.

As most AT readers know, President Obama recently scolded those who don’t want to admit “Syrian refugees” to the United States, saying there should not be a religious test. He had the temerity to suggest it was “un-American,” as if being American means abandoning national security to exchange our lives and future for the lives of some other group of folks, many of who hate us.

In any case, for all of Barry’s faux passion and outrage about religious tests, he had nary a word to say about the religious test that is the core of Islam – the test put forth to non-Muslims before terror strikes, sparing those who can recite passages from the Quran before massacring those who cannot. The dead did not pass the religious test.

Obama does not speak about the religious test put forth to Yazidis and Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East when jihadists show up in their town and at their door and in their homes and demand they convert to Islam. Or die. Because they failed the religious test.

Obama does not speak about the religious test when “Palestinians” take to the streets of Israel and knife, or run over, or shoot Jews because they are Jews, with 23 murdered and 192 wounded in the most recent wave of attacks. It’s a war against Jews because they fail the test.

Or perhaps I should say “wayward wimmin”. After all, they are all feminists.

Then again, what kind of feminism is it which would support BDS against the nation in the Middle East that has done more for gender equality than any other, and which was the first in the region (i.e. from its inception in 1948) to give Arab women the vote?

What psychosis motivates the extreme leftists who’ve hijacked the women’s movement as they have hijacked certain Protestant churches and imposed upon them that warped worldview that imperils Western society and gives aid and comfort to its enemies?

Here’s some of the whacko weirdness:

Not least among those welcoming the respite of Thanksgiving must be the nation’s college and university administrators. After student protests evicted Tim Wolfe as president of the University of Missouri, officials at other institutions of higher learning (if we may still call them that) were harassed by shouting or otherwise threatening students. At Princeton University, students occupied the office of the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, demanding that he throw Woodrow Wilson down the memory hole.

Even at the remove of several weeks, it is remarkable to recall that the disturbance at Yale University was over “offensive” Halloween costumes. But amid the protests, some important principles are now at risk, notably free speech. We asked at the time where the adults were on campus—either school presidents or boards of trustees? The answer, so far, is that most have caved like wet cardboard. The most hopeful adult response has come from 18- to 22-year olds—the students themselves.

Security checks are necessary – all Israelis are used to opening their bags and passing through metal detectors before being allowed to enter a bus or train station, shopping mall or concert hall.

Palestinian terrorists have taken the lives of more than 20 people, ranging in age from 18-year-olds to a man in his seventies, since the latest wave of attacks started on October 1. (Although arguably, this is not a wave but more like a stormy sea: The exact moment when it started is hard to pinpoint.) People have an understandable need to rationalize the attacks. I can tell you what is not the trigger: Checkpoints.

Recently I have heard an increasing number of Palestinians and their supporters claiming that it is the fear and humiliation of military checkpoints that are “fueling the despair” that leads people to decide to kill Israelis, using whatever they can: knives, scissors, guns, axes, or cars driven into a crowd of pedestrians.

The frustration at checkpoints is real. The need for checks even more so.

It is the equivalent of security checks at an airport. Once upon a time, pre-flight security checks were perfunctory. That was before the Palestinian hijackings that began in 1968, targeting Israelis and Jews. Since September 11, 2001, airports everywhere enforce rigorous rules, some obvious, others verging on the ludicrous.

It is becoming increasingly egregious to persist with the shabby charade that any consensual resolution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is possible.

After years of counterproductive concessions and compromise, it is unlikely that the situation is still retrievable by consensual means… remedial measures will require coercive action on a wide scale… Unless the Jews convey the unequivocal message that any…challenge to their sovereignty will be met with overwhelming lethal force, they will increasingly be the victims of such force at the hands of their Arab adversaries – “Into the Fray,” The Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2014

It was with these the words that I concluded my column written almost exactly a year ago. In it, I warned that the country was “on the cusp of carnage” – which was also the title of the column.

No consensual resolution possible

Within days, carnage was upon us, with Jews at morning prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue hacked to death by hate-crazed Arabs brandishing meat-cleavers. Since then, the brutal butchery has continued unabated, indeed, accelerating considerably in recent weeks, with a score of Israelis being slaughtered by Palestinian Arabs.

Alexander Levlovich, Naama Henkin, Eitam Henkin, Aharon Banita-Bennett, Nehemia Lavi, Alon Govberg, Chaim Haviv, Yeshayahu Krishevsky, Richard Lakin, Omri Levy, Avraham Asher Hasno, Benjamin Yakubovich, Ya’akov Litman, Netanel Litman , Reuven Aviram, Aharon Yesayev, Yaakov Don, Ezra Schwartz, Hadar Buchris, and Ziv Mizrahi were stabbed, stoned and shot to death – literally for no other reason than being Jewish.

With each gory week, it is becoming increasingly pointless to pretend some consensual resolution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is possible.