RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17617/israel-strong-horse

Currently — excluding its ventures into South America from where it can more easily threaten North America — Iran, sometimes via proxies such as the Houthis, Hamas or Hezbollah — has successfully inserted itself into Yemen, in a seeming bid to overthrow and supplant Saudi Arabia, as well as in Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

The first time around, during the Obama years, one might understand the fantasy that enriching and empowering Iran might lead it to give up its long-desired nuclear program and expansionist activities, not to mention the extreme abuses of its citizens at home. Now, however, the world has seen that the plan did not work, and that Iran had been cheating all along, anyhow.

What in the world, then, is the US expecting from repeating this disastrous exercise? For both the Israelis and the Gulf’s Arab monarchies, Iran’s Shia regional empire and drive to lead the Muslim world is still justifiably considered an existential threat.

Israel — no longer diplomatically isolated — appears to be assuming a more prominent political and military role in the Middle East. Following Israel’s generous peace terms with its Arab neighbors, states such as Egypt and Jordan decided decades ago to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. More recently, Islamic countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan also decided to normalize ties with Israel. Presently, these strong new ties appear to be leading to cooperation on an ever-deeper strategic level, especially regarding the destabilizing threat to the area posed by an increasingly aggressive and hegemonic Iran.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/united-church-christs-biased-resolution-palestine-joseph-puder/

The United Church of Christ (UCC), in what has become typical among the mainline Protestant churches, issued a resolution (July 18, 2021) stating that Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinian people is a “sin.” The resolution calls on the General Synod to adopt a declaration of requirements for a just peace between Palestine and Israel. The UCC’s most recent resolution was adopted by 83% of its delegates voting on line. The UCC has a membership of 800,000.

The UCC, with its progressive-leftist interpretation of the Bible, its lack of regard for history and Middle East realities, particularly as it applies to Palestinian Islamist terrorism and intimidation, is guilty of the sin of bias. The current UCC resolution, like previous ones, shows a clear anti-Israel bias that is largely influenced by the dhimmified Arab-Palestinian Christians. In order to survive in the increasingly jihadist-Muslim Middle East, including the Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon (all three funded and supported by Iran), and Fatah in the West Bank, Palestinian Christians must show greater anti-Israel vigilance than their fellow Muslims. The above points are evidenced by the massive exodus of Christians from the Middle East to Europe, and the Americas. The Christians are escaping Arab-Palestinian oppression…not Israeli oppression. In fact, this writer interviewed Bethlehem’s Mayor, Elias Freij, in 1991, and asked him where are the Christians of Bethlehem? He replied, “In Santiago de Chile.” Today Bethlehem’s Christian population is around 7%, in the West Bank as a whole, the Christian population is down to about 2%, and in Hamas ruled Gaza, less than 1%.

Using as supportive “evidence” the following groups; Arab-Palestinian dhimmified Kairos declaration, the World Council of Churches, the anti-Semitic and terrorist dominated United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel alone, or bringing forth discredited Israeli NGO’s who are funded by European government agencies with the purpose of weakening Israel, only serves to reinforce the one-sided, biased sources employed by the UCC resolution.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17693/lebanon-normalization-israel

“Normalization” with Israel is not what is plaguing Lebanon. The Lebanese who are dying for lack of medication could not care less about “normalization” with Israel.

“Unfortunately, they sentenced me to 10 years in prison, but they sentenced the Lebanese people to life in poverty and humiliation. The military court in Lebanon did not give me any opportunity to defend myself. The court did not inform my lawyer in Beirut even of the trial date. It did not inform me personally of anything. The least that should have been done was to inform me of the date of the trial so I could defend myself.” — Dr. Jamal Rifi, sentenced to 10 years in prison for treating Israeli Arabs at the request of the Palestinian Authority, arabsaustralia.com, August 24, 2021

The case of Dr. Rifi is yet another example of the blind hatred in Lebanon and other Arab countries towards Israel. These countries are so blinded by their hate for Israel (and Jews) that they are even prepared to punish a physician who helped Palestinians living in Jerusalem. It can be fairly said of these Arabs that they are willing to fight Israel to the last Palestinian.

There is a further ironic twist to this fiasco. While most Arab countries are turning a blind eye to the deepening crisis in Lebanon, there is one country that appears ready to help the Lebanese people: Israel.

One day after the court verdicts were issued against Dr. Rifi and the other two Lebanese, Moshe Arbel, a member of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) called on Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz to provide the Lebanese health system with emergency humanitarian assistance in light of the public health crisis as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the political and economic crisis in Lebanon.

It is no wonder that Lebanon — which is dominated by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist militia — has become a failed state and is on the brink of collapse. A country that prioritizes fighting “normalization” with Israel over rescuing its own people from disaster will never be able to recover from its chronic illness of bigotry and hate.

The financial and economic crisis in Lebanon is dragging the country towards mayhem at a quickening pace, according to various reports. Lebanon is running out of critical medicines and is witnessing fuel shortages. The economic collapse has stripped the national currency of most of its value and left four out of five Lebanese citizens below the poverty line.

The World Bank has described the crisis as among the worst in over a century.

The crisis, however, has not stopped the Lebanese authorities from again displaying their hostility towards Israel. Instead of devoting its energies to solving the economic crisis and end the suffering of its people — not even to distract their people from problems they are clueless how to fix — the failed Lebanese government is busy combating “normalization” with Israel.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-dream-palaces-of-americans

When new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett meets with President Joe Biden and his minders at the White House today, a few things seem like sure bets. First, Bennett and his aides will lay out a scheme for keeping Iran from going nuclear, which the Americans will nod at and ignore. Second, the American side will solemnly raise the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel.

Instead of nodding, smiling, and pretending to share the dream of peaceful democratic Palestinian statehood, Bennett could show true friendship to America by pointing to the example of Afghanistan. It’s clear no one in the American political establishment has yet internalized the lesson.

For twenty years, official Washington, DC dared not describe Afghanistan as it truly is and would be after America’s exit. It would have been gauche to do so— worse, it would have shown that one lacked vision, high ideals. Anyone who didn’t believe there was a democratic polity just waiting to escape its despotic chains and unleash its liberal energies was guilty of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — that is, a racist. In this fun-house-mirror version of Afghanistan, America was building yet another city on a hill, a citadel whose government would promote Western gender theory’s latest findings, which would be enforced by elite special forces units trained by American officers and loyal to the central government in Kabul.

These elements of the Afghani dream-state were part of a bespoke tapestry spun out by and for the policy establishment and Beltway defense contractors, NGO workers, think tank experts, and the rest of the client state. So long as everyone was getting paid, the mirage never hurt anyone — unless your child happened to subscribe to the fiction and put his or her life in danger either in uniform or as an aid worker. But now, the dream palace has burned to the ground, and as the smoke clears no one can mistake the fact that authentic Afghanistan is in the hands of the Taliban.

Bennett knows it would be more polite to nod along meaningfully with his hosts and that he’d insult them by explaining Palestinian statehood is a hallucination on the level of Afghani democracy. Speaking up, however, would nonetheless help safeguard the interests of his own country, while winning the favor of an American public that has seen their elites throw away the lives of thousands of the country’s most high-spirited and honorable young men and women to satisfy their whimsy.

Someone has to say something or else someday soon, the world will wake up to find that the Americans are no longer rich, and no longer capable of writing checks to flatter the vanity of an establishment that can’t distinguish reality from fiction. And maybe Bennett will be the man to shake their senses by simply stating the obvious ­— like the two-decade long effort to stand up democracy in Afghanistan, throwing lives and money at a future Palestinian state is a fools’ errand.

Bennett wouldn’t be the first to make the connection between the Palestinians and Afghanistan. In 2013, former secretary of state John Kerry gave evidence that the US establishment saw the two deadly fantasies as linked. He invited Bennett’s predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu “on a secret visit to Afghanistan to see, in his words, how the US established a local military force that can stand up to terror on its own.” The message, Netanyahu said in a recent Facebook post, was clear: Kerry thought that the model the US employed for Afghanistan would work for the Palestinians, too.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/benny-gantz-is-confused-on-iran-677847

Defense Minister Benny Gantz may very well be correct in his assessment, which he shared with 60 ambassadors in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, that “Iran is only two months away from acquiring the materials necessary for a nuclear weapon.”

But he’s delusional if he thinks that a diplomatic “Plan B” – to replace the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – is going to stop it.

“We do not know if the Iranian regime will be willing to sign an agreement and come back to the negotiate[ing] table,” Gantz said, alluding to the recent rise to power in Tehran of Ebrahim “the butcher” Raisi, ostensibly less likely than his immediate predecessor to cooperate with the West.
It’s a fallacy, of course, since Raisi, like former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, takes his orders from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“At the end of the day, the goal is to reach a ‘longer, stronger and broader’ agreement than the previous one,” Gantz told the group of foreign-service diplomats.

Is it, though?

BY NOW, Gantz ought to be aware that even if the Islamic Republic consents, yet again, to reaching a deal with the P5+1 countries (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany), it will not honor its commitments. It was not merely the content of the JCPOA that gave the mullah-led regime leeway to pursue its nefarious hegemonic aims, after all. 

On the contrary, the powers-that-be in Tehran violated all clauses of the worthless document, which in any event only postponed Iran’s inevitable nuclear capabilities; it didn’t prevent them permanently. Despite multiple attempts by the administration of former US president Barack Obama, abetted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, to obfuscate this fact, it wasn’t exactly a secret.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/08/unrwas-jihad-against-israel-part-three

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has turned “their plight into a political tool” for Israel’s destruction, Center for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) Director David Bedein noted in 2014. His book, Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict—UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, is essential for understanding UNRWA’s cruel exploitation of humanitarianism in order to wage war on Israel.

As previously discussed, over five million Palestinian “refugee” descendants of Arabs who lost their homes in what became Israel during its 1948-1949 War of Independence are the wards of UNRWA. This outsized agency uniquely exists outside of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which cares for all other refugees worldwide. UNRWA has also uniquely emphasized a “right of return” to modern Israel as a permanent solution for Palestinian “refugees.”

They “are the only ones in the world who have sustained their status as refugees across four generations; and their misery has been utilized as a weapon against Israel,” Bedein wrote. Any “right of return” influx would demographically inundate Israel. Thus, “Israel understands that ‘return’ is a code word for destruction, something the Jewish state will never permit,” he added.

Indeed, Bedein quoted Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Muhammad Saleh Ed-Din to this effect. He wrote in 1949 that “in demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the masters of the homeland” and “annihilate the state of Israel.” As Bedein reviewed, the

‘Right of Return’ issue was often mentioned in Arab forums within the wider context of the discussion of Israel’s liquidation. In Israeli eyes, therefore, the continued persistence on the ‘Right of Return’ by any Arab party betrays that party’s desire to wipe Israel off the map.

“Tragically, UNRWA emphasis on ‘right of return’ provides Palestinians with a rationale for their war against Israel,” Bedein observed, and correspondingly UNRWA “camps, quite simply, function in a pro-terrorist environment.” “Terrorist activity in the UNRWA refugee camps has been extensively documented” by monitors such as the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence service, he wrote. Shin Bet has “documented how UNRWA schools are used for storing ammunition, as well as for hiding suspected terrorists,” while UNRWA vehicles and ambulances also transport terrorists and ammunition.

During your first official visit to Washington, DC, you’ll have to choose between two options:

*Blurring your deeply-rooted, assertive Israeli positions on the future of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), which would be welcome by the Biden Administration, yielding to short-term political convenience and popularity inside the beltway;

or

*Tenaciously advocating your deeply-rooted, principle-driven positions, which would underscore a profound disagreement with the Biden Administration and the “elite” US media, while granting you and Israel long-term strategic respect, as demonstrated by some of your predecessors.

For example, the late Prime Minister Shamir honed the second option, bluntly introduced his assertive Israeli positions on Judea and Samaria, rebuffed heavy US pressure – including a mudslinging campaign by President Bush and Secretary of State Baker – suffered a popularity setback, but produced unprecedented expansion of US-Israel strategic cooperation. When it comes to facing the intensified threats of rogue regimes and Islamic terrorism, the US prefers principle-driven, reliable, patriotic, pressure-defying partners, irrespective of disagreements on the Palestinian issue.

Assuming that you shall not budge on the historical and national security centrality of Judea and Samaria, it behooves you to highlight the following matters during your meetings with President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Austin and Congressional leaders (especially the members of the Appropriations Committees):

1. The 1,400-year-old track record of the stormy, unpredictable, violent and anti-“infidel” Middle East, which has yet to experience intra-Arab peaceful-coexistence, along with the 100-year-old Palestinian track record (including the systematic collaboration with anti-US entities, hate-education and anti-Arab and anti-Jewish terrorism) demonstrates that the proposed Palestinian state would be a Mini-Afghanistan or a Mega-Gaza on the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria.

It would dominate 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructures in the 9-15-mile sliver between Judea and Samaria and the Mediterranean, which is shorter than the distance between RFK Stadium and the Kennedy Center.

Thus, a Palestinian state would pose a clear and present existential threat to Israel; and therefore, Israel’s control of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria is a prerequisite for its survival.