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Biden, the Democrats and Israel The American left demands an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, but on whose terms?

By on May 19th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-the-democrats-and-israel-11621376744?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Since Hamas began its rocket offensive last week, the Biden Administration has wisely refused to dictate the Israeli response. But the U.S. narrative war took a notable turn this week as Congressional Democrats demanded a cease-fire. We hope the President bucks his instinct to follow his party and leads it instead.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have launched more than 3,000 rockets into Israel since last week, Jerusalem says, and Israel has been pummeling those groups in the Gaza strip to stop the attacks. Media and progressive activists blamed the Hamas-initiated war on Israel, as they always do, but the White House did not go along.

That position may not be viable for much longer on Capitol Hill. “Now, after more than a week of hostilities, it has become even more apparent that a cease-fire is necessary,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told Politico, “If Israel doesn’t believe a cease-fire is in their interest, that doesn’t mean we have to accept that judgment. We have enormous persuasive power.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reportedly floated an arms-sale delay on Monday, but backed off on Tuesday citing assurances from the White House.

With any luck Israel will soon inflict enough damage on Gaza’s terrorist stockpiles and leadership that it can negotiate a genuine cease-fire. Israel wants a swift end to the conflict, not a repeat of its 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which lasted 50 days and involved a Gaza ground incursion.

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Bookworm Room Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts. (November 11, 2006)

By on May 19th, 2021

https://www.bookwormroom.com/2016/11/06/bureaucrats-job-security-dangerous/

THANKS TO ANDREA WIDBURG OF AMERICAN THINKER…..RSK

EXCERPTS:

Here’s some new information for you to consider when it comes to bureaucrats run amok:  Did you know that it was British bureaucrats, determined to keep their jobs at all costs, who sparked Arab nationalism in Palestine, creating the dangerous Middle East that consumes the world today?

This story comes from Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, published in 1943. The book’s primary purpose is to describe the role Jewish Palestinians played in defeating Rommel – a task Britain could never have accomplished but for these Jewish troops. Before he gets to World War II, though, van Paassen tells how the British Mandate in Palestine came into being and how the Arabs, who had once welcomed the thought of Jews making that wasteland a more inhabitable place, came to be the fanatic Islamic nationalists the world now faces. Because van Paassen was a foreign correspondent in the 20s and 30s, the book has the virtue of being the recollections of a contemporaneous witness, who traveled widely in the Middle East, met many of the power players, and was privy to original documents. (He even interviewed both Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem!)

Because of the myriad details van Paassen provides about the creation of the modern Middle East in the years during and immediately after WWI, it’s quite easy for someone like me to get lost in the weeds. (My first draft of this post hit 5,000 words before I was even a quarter of the way through.) I’ll just touch upon a few highlights here.

Between the Roman conquest in 70 AD and Israel’s re-birth in 1948, the territory known as Palestine (or Syria-Palestine) was never a nation. It was not even an independent substate in the vast Ottoman Empire that eventually controlled it. Instead, it was simply the southern most end of Ottoman controlled Syria. During all those centuries, nobody cared about Palestine because it was a desolate, swampy, disease-filled wasteland. Here’s van Paassen’s description of Syria-Palestine in the years before, during, and immediately after WWI:

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When it comes to Israel, Biden’s actions speak louder than words Andrea Widburg *****

By on May 19th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/when_it_comes_to_israel_bidens_actions_speak_louder_than_words.html

For the first few days after Hamas started raining thousands of rockets on Israel — all of them aimed at civilians — Biden kept silent. Finally, on Wednesday, Biden said “my expectation and hope is that this will be closing down sooner than later but Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory.” Saying this ought to have been a no-brainer, but it was obviously an effort on Biden’s part.

Biden instantly caught flak from the Squad. Even though, thanks to the influx of Ethiopian Jews, there are more Blacks in Israel than there are in Gaza, Ayanna Presley, a racist one-trick pony, promptly analogized herself to the downtrodden Arabs:

“As a black woman in America, I am no stranger to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). “We have been criminalized for the very way we show up in the world … Palestinians are being told the same thing as black folks in America: There is no acceptable form of resistance.”

The other Squad members were not far behind. Ilhan Omar called Benjamin Netanyahu “a far-right ethno-nationalist.” (I had no idea she knew such big words.) Rashida Tlaib reiterated the tired old trope that Israel, the only truly pluralist nation in the entire Muslim Middle East, has an “apartheid government.” And AOC said that Israeli self-defense had to yield to the Arabs’ “right to survive.”

(Again, I will no longer use the word Palestinians. It is a made-up word about a nonexistent Muslim nation. You can go here to learn why I say that.)

All of this makes it sound as if a surprisingly brave and independent Joe Biden has taken a stand against the openly far leftists and his party. However, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Biden’s actions show where his heart lies – and it’s not with Israel.

Even as Hamas is raining rockets on Israeli civilians, Biden announced that he plans to send millions of American taxpayer dollars to the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza:

As the conflict intensifies despite U.S. calls for restraint, the administration notified Congress on Thursday that it will provide $10 million to Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza to support exchange and reconciliation projects with Israelis. The recipients of the aid were not named.

The State Department said Friday that the money is part of more than $100 million that the administration allocated to the Palestinians earlier this year, reversing a near total cutoff in support under former President Donald Trump.

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Senator Warren Outraged By Israeli ‘Evictions’ In Sheikh Jarrah Ignoring legal history.

By on May 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/senator-warren-outraged-israeli-evictions-sheikh-hugh-fitzgerald/

Senator Elizabeth Warren has in the last few years been delivering herself of ever more strident anti-Israel remarks.

In October 2019, she said “everything is on the table” should Israel move away from a two-state solution. By “two-state solution,” she did not mean the one offered by the Trump Administration, but one which would be based on the “1967 lines,” which means the 1949 armistice lines. In May 2020, she signed a letter with 18 Senate Democrats opposing Israel’s possible “annexation” – really, an extension of sovereignty — of territories in the West Bank. On the campaign trail, the senator said she would push Israel to end its “ongoing occupation of Palestinian land” – and denounced the country’s decision to bar Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich, and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from entering the West Bank and East Jerusalem where, of course, they would have participated in an anti-Israel propaganda fest, complete with visits to the demolished houses of terrorists and scenes of Israeli bulldozers creating new apartments in “the settlements,” and whatever else they could find to blacken Israel’s image.

In a speech at J Street recently, Warren said that “if we’re serious about arresting settlement expansion and helping move the parties toward a two-state solution, then it would be irresponsible not to consider all of the tools we have at our disposal. One of those is restricting military aid from being used in the occupied territories. By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course.”

She’s a law professor, well-versed in bankruptcy law, but international law is not her strong suit. She assumes, a bit too self-assuredly, that she doesn’t need to study further any aspect of the Arab-Israeli dispute; she’s a Harvard Law professor; don’t try to tell her there are gaps in her knowledge. Between the two attitudes — Wittgenstein’s “whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak” and the verses aimed at Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, “I am the master of this college/And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” — the complacent Warren displays the second attitude every time.

For It is clear from her constantly referring to “occupied territories” that Warren has no idea that the League of Nations assigned all of the land which we now call the “West Bank” to the Mandate for Palestine, to form part of the future Jewish National Home. She has certainly not read the Palestine Mandate, and especially its Article 6, which calls on the Mandatory (Great Britain) to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land.” She does not realize that the League of Nations’ Mandates became part of international law. She does not know that Article 80 (known as “the Jewish people’s article”) of the U.N. Charter constituted the U.N.’s solemn promise to fulfill the commitments previously made by the League of Nations when it created its system of mandates.

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Is the Biden administration running an anti-Israel con? By Andrea Widburg

By on May 18th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/is_the_biden_administration_running_an_antiisrael_con.html

On Saturday, Israel announced that it had evidence that Hamas military intelligence assets were operating out of a building with civilian media offices – in essence, using the media as a shield. Because Hamas turned the building into a military site, it became a legitimate target under international law. So, AP and Al Jazeera lost their propaganda sites. Israel gave detailed information about notifying Biden in advance of the strike. However, on Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was no such evidence. Does this represent some kind of creepy and dangerous game-playing from the Biden administration?

You can read here about Israel’s initial targeting of the Hamas building, including Israel’s detailed statement about its justification for destroying that building. In the same post, you can see how the Biden administration’s knee-jerk reaction was to castigate Israel for having destroyed the AP and Al Jazeera headquarters.

Various media outlets, however, reported that Biden had so much evidence in front of him that he “gave the OK” to Israel’s assault on the building:

PRESIDENT Joe Biden “gave the OK” for the huge Israeli blitz that levelled an alleged Hamas building in Gaza after Benjamin Netanyahu shared the “smoking gun” evidence.

The evidence is said to have been handed over by the Israeli President during his telephone conversation with Joe Biden on Saturday.

A source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi is reported to have said: “We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building”.

He added Biden had “found the explanation satisfactory”, although did not provide details of the evidence.

The White House “readout” of a Saturday call between Biden and Netanyahu states that Biden “reaffirmed his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza.” It’s not clear whether that call occurred before or after the strike on the Hamas building.

The whole equation changed, though, on Monday, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that can be distilled to his asking, Hamas? What Hamas?

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Violence in Israel Is the Price of Biden’s Weakness By Mike Pence

By on May 18th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/violence-in-israel-is-the-price-of-bidens-weakness/

In the Middle East, he has replaced strength with weakness, moral clarity with confusion, and loyalty with betrayal.

The Trump-Pence administration opened the door to a future of peace in the Middle East founded on our strong and unwavering commitment to the state of Israel. But now Israel is enduring the worst outbreak of violence in at least seven years — a direct result of the weakness shown by the Biden administration from its first day in office.

Many Americans witnessing the recent bloodshed in Israel are perplexed by how quickly violence erupted after years of calm. The answer is that President Biden and congressional Democrats have abandoned unambiguous support for our ally Israel, emboldened our enemies, and turned their back on the policy that yielded historic peace deals in the Middle East.

Under the Trump-Pence administration, we made it crystal clear to the world that America stands with Israel. We withdrew from the dangerous Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama-Biden administration, which put the world’s leading state sponsor of terror on the path to nuclear weapons while sending pallets of cash to the mullahs in Iran. We acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. And President Trump kept the promise made by countless Republican and Democrat politicians by actually following through in moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, the capital of the state of Israel.

Every step of the way, Democrats and self-proclaimed foreign-policy “experts” derided our administration’s approach and issued dire warnings that blood would soon flow in the streets of Israeli cities. As usual, they were wrong.

In fact, last year, our administration brokered the Abraham Accords, a series of historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab-Muslim countries — the most significant breakthrough for peace in decades.These groundbreaking peace accords happened not in spite of America’s support for Israel, but because of it. Other nations knew where America stood with absolute certainty. They knew America would respond forcefully if our citizens or allies were threatened. As a result, they responded rationally by pursuing peace and harmony.

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Associated Press, Hamas Propagandists By David Harsanyi

By on May 18th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/associated-press-hamas-propagandists/

The news agency has a long, shameful record of regurgitating the terror group’s lies.

As more than 1,500 Hamas rockets were flying toward Israeli cities with the express purpose of murdering civilians, CNN could spare only around four minutes — in total — to cover the topic during an entire week of prime time. Typically, it’s only when the Jewish state begins defending itself that the story gets any real traction.

And, needless to say, the focus got intense after Israel destroyed a twelve-story high-rise building in Gaza that housed foreign press outlets, including the Associated Press. Israel claims that al-Jalaa Tower was home to Hamas military-intelligence assets. It called ahead to warn those inside, so, fortunately, no journalist was killed.

AP CEO Gary Pruitt said that his organization “had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” adding, “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

This is nonsense. Pruitt knowingly puts journalists at risk every day he sends them to places such as Gaza, where the ruling regime wages war behind civilians it uses as shields. But how did Pruitt “actively” check? Did he ask Hamas? Did he call the landlord? Did he ring everyone’s bell? And how could we trust that a media outlet that is unable to track down a single Hamas militant shooting Qassam rockets — from dense civilian areas right near its offices — would be able to figure out who was in their building, anyway?

It is, of course, highly probable that Hamas was using journalists as human shields. This is what it does. During the last major outbreak of violence, in 2014, Gaza’s Shifa hospital became “a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders,” who could “be seen in the hallways and offices,” according to the Washington Post — but not the Associated Press, which had around 40 journalists working on the Israeli–Palestinian story, including a number of them filing stories from inside that very hospital.

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What Really Is Behind the Latest Burst of Hamas Terror in Israel Like all wars, the real causes are many and lie below the surface. Dov Fischer

By on May 17th, 2021

https://spectator.org/hamas-terror-israel/

The media of our day always coalesce around a narrative that fits their preconceived worldview. When viewed in a light that “Palestinians” all are “Victims of Color” and that all Israelis are White Supremacists or their next of kin, it is easy to misjudge the Mideast reality underlying present conflict coming from Gaza. That narrative thus preaches that Jews with legally valid property rights in the eastern portion of United Jerusalem are not entitled to advance their legal claims to oust trespassers, Arab or otherwise, from their homes. That same line of reasoning proposes that supposed Israeli belligerence lies beneath the barrage of some 2,000 rockets launched from Gaza and aimed by Hamas at Israel’s civilian population from Ashdod and Ashkelon to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The truth is that a property dispute in the Shimon HaTzaddik/Sheikh Jarrah community of eastern Jerusalem is not the cause of the present war. Jews there owned property since 1875. Their homes and land were stolen from them and their parents and grandparents in 1948, when Jordan’s armies, bent on “ethnic cleansing,” invaded and illegally drove them out. Local Arab squatters moved in, but Jordan refused to recognize the illegal squatters as the land’s new owners. After 1967, when Israel liberated east Jerusalem and reunited the city, the ousted Jewish owners went to court with their documentation to reclaim their seized property. Israel’s courts, which not only are fair but even lean over backwards to favor Arabs in such disputes, repeatedly have held that the Jewish claims are documented and legally valid. As the Jewish landowners were recognized legally, they did not try ousting anyone. Rather, the courts held they could charge rent to the squatters living in their homes, so they did.

Relatively recently, Arab squatters stopped paying rent, so the landlords went to court finally to evict. This happens everywhere in the world when tenants stop paying rent and make clear they will not resume. The verdict on the matter, which has been argued and decided on by Israel’s highest court, was set for announcement on May 10th. That is the whole dispute. This property dispute over Arab Muslims not paying their rent has nothing to do with Hamas launching their current war of more than 2,000 murderous Iranian-supplied rockets aimed indiscriminately at Jewish population centers. The notion that the long-overdue evictions for non-payment of rent caused a war is as absurd as expecting Bulgarian immigrants in California to launch 2,000 rockets aimed at destroying the entire American country in response to local court rulings in Old Town Sacramento backing landlords trying to evict 20 families who won’t pay their rent in a Bulgarian ethnic enclave.

Against that backdrop, Israel is posed with the conundrum of defending itself in a manner that accords with woke expectations of elegance. If rockets are launched against Jewish civilians and other noncombatants from residential apartment buildings, elementary schools, ambulances, and hospitals that Hamas terrorists now control in Gaza, how does one stop the launches — elegantly? Israel cannot just dispatch an Uber or Lyft to the terror launch sites and unplug some wires from wall sockets. They have to extirpate the launchers, the rockets, and the terrorists determined to inflict unspeakable civilian tragedy against millions of Jewish civilians if unstopped.

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Responsibility for the Latest Upsurge in Arab-Israeli Violence Goes to US President Joe Biden by Con Coughlin

By on May 17th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17370/biden-arab-israel-violence

Even Mr Trump’s harshest critics had to concede that, when it came to the Middle East, the Trump era had been a success.

Prior to the latest eruption of hostilities between Israel and Palestinian militants, Mr Biden’s only notable intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian issue had been to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid to the Palestinians, thereby reversing the Trump administration’s decision to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority over its refusal to maintain a dialogue with Washington.

Now, with Palestinian militants once more targeting Israeli civilian areas with rockets and missiles, the folly of Mr Biden’s ill-advised approach to the Middle East has been exposed…. Indeed, the extent of Iran’s military support for Palestinian militants was revealed by an official with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation who boasted last week: “The rockets we use to pound Tel Aviv, our weapons, and our food are provided by Iran.”

Mr Biden’s comment, made following a telephone discussion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, that he expected the violence to end “sooner rather than later” certainly seemed to be more an expression of wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of events unfolding on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Full responsibility for the latest upsurge in Arab-Israeli violence goes to US President Joe Biden as a result of the policies of appeasement and capitulation he has pursued in the Middle East.

When Mr Biden took office in January, the Middle East was enjoying one of its rare moments of optimism, mainly due to the successful approach adopted by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump.

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The Palestinian Propaganda Machine Cranks Into High Gear The facts don’t support the Palestinian narrative, so new “facts” have to be manufactured. Robert Spencer

By on May 17th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/palestinian-propaganda-machine-cranks-high-gear-robert-spencer/

A supporter of the Palestinian jihad against Israel tweeted Thursday: “Israel is now using white phosphorus on the city of Beit Hanoun in Palestine! It can burn human flesh until it reaches to the bones. White phosphorus is prohibited globally and it’s been considered as a war crime!” Included was a gruesome photo of a woman whose hair had been partially burned off and her face severely burned as well. There was just one minor detail that the tweet omitted to mention: the photo was not from Gaza in May 2021, but from Afghanistan in 2009.

If the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were really as brutal and inhumane as the international media and supporters of the Palestinian jihad (not that there is any significant difference between those two groups) claim, it ought to be easy to find evidence of Israeli atrocities. Instead, such enormities are so thin on the ground that they have to be manufactured in order to shore up the Palestinians’ tenuous (at best) claim to victim status.

Nor is this anything new. It has been going on for years. Israelly Cool reported in February 2020 that Palestinian “journalist” Mustafa Batnain tweeted a “heartbreaking photo from Gaza” depicting a baby inside a cardboard box, presumably the little one’s only shelter amid rampaging, savage, brutal IDF forces. Once again, there was a catch: the photo was actually not from Gaza at all, but from Idomeni, Greece. It’s all in a day’s work for the Palestinian factory of Israeli atrocities.

The photo was just the latest of innumerable examples of the deception that is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.

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