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ISRAEL

Palestinians: Glorifying Mass Murderers by Bassam Tawil

The murderous legacy and personality of Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas mass murderer who masterminded a wave of suicide bombings, are being glorified not only by his Hamas supporters, but also by the “moderate” Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Ayyash won his reputation on the murdering and maiming of hundreds of Israelis, most of them innocent civilians. Had he fought for peace and coexistence, Ayyash would have been condemned as a “traitor” and gone down in history as a “defeatist” and “surrenderist.”

“The mosque that produced the mujahed [warrior] Ayyash is continuing to produce heroes.” – Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is in these mosques that Ayyash was taught that Islam permits people like him to build bombs and dispatch suicide bombers to blow up buses. It is also in these mosques where he was taught that devout Muslims are best engaged in spilling Jewish blood.

Children and youths who attend prayers at these mosques are being fed the same hate-speech rhetoric that their hero Ayyash was exposed to in his childhood. Hence it is no surprise that the mosques in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to this day to churn out new terrorists, many of whom aspire to become like Ayyash – mass murderers.

Thus, despite Fatah’s double-talk about a two-state solution and “peace” with Israel, mass murderers still take top billing in its hall of fame. Fatah is also making it known that its former leader, Yasser Arafat, approved of such terrorism against Israel.

The voices of the Palestinians who reject this education for wholesale slaughter are being marginalized by the European leaders doing business with the still-wealthy members of the Arab elite who fund these imams and these mosques.

These European leaders wrongly image that if they get rid of Israel, it will be only Israel. They fail see that Israel is just the first course. They imagine that if they accede to Muslims’ wishes, they will be safe. What they fail to see, as in France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Britain, is that they will be next.

Palestinian youths are being urged to follow in the footsteps of Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas mass murderer who masterminded a wave of suicide bombings that killed and wounded hundreds of Israelis. Ayyash’s expertise in manufacturing explosive devices earned him the nickname “The Engineer” and turned him into a hero in the eyes of many Palestinians. The bomb-maker was killed by Israeli security forces on January 5, 1996, thereby ending one of the bloodiest chapters of Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

Two decades later, this arch-terrorist is still being revered as a hero and martyr. His murderous legacy and personality are being glorified not only by his Hamas supporters, but also by the “moderate” Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

A few years ago, the PA decided to honor Ayyash by naming a street in Ramallah after him. The street sign was posted in Ramallah, the headquarters of the PA where Abbas lives and works, and reads:

“Yahya Ayyash, 1966-1996, born in Nablus, studied electrical engineering in Bir Zeit University. Was a member of the (Hamas military wing) Iz ad-Din al-Qassam, and was linked by Israel to a number of bombings. He was assassinated by Israel in his Beit Lahia (Gaza Strip) home on January 5, 1996.”

This week, Palestinians took to social media to glorify the arch-terrorist further, depicting him as a role model and urging youths to follow in his footsteps.

Weaponized International Law : Peter Berkowitz

If international law is law in the ordinary sense of the term—and not moral posturing, political maneuvering, or personal payback—then it must comprise settled and public requirements, effective and even-handed implementation, and impartial resolution of disputes. The Obama administration’s scandalous decision not to veto U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 last month suggests that international law at the United Nations is not law in the ordinary sense of the term.

Endorsed by the council’s other 14 members, Resolution 2334 condemns Israeli settlement policy as “a flagrant violation under international law” and recognizes all territory east of “the 4 June 1967 lines” (or the Green Line as it is sometimes called) as lawfully belonging to the Palestinians. The sanctimonious but shoddy justifications that leading U.S. officials have offered — in what appears to have been a well-orchestrated public relations campaign — reinforce the conclusion that the United Nations and its Obama-administration enablers were bent on punishing Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the process they have accelerated the delegitimization of international law.

Addressing the Security Council to explain America’s abstention, Ambassador Samantha Power stated, “Our vote today is fully in line with the bipartisan history of how American presidents have approached both the issue—and the role of this body.” That’s false.

While previous administrations have criticized settlements as bad policy, it is the Obama administration that deviates from longstanding American practice by maintaining that every last inch of the West Bank—the territory beyond the Green Line held by Jordan on the eve of the June 1967 Six-Day War—is lawfully Palestinian land. In the very 1982 address on the Middle East that Power cites in defense of Resolution 2334, President Reagan declared, “In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”

Moreover, the peace agreement that President Clinton negotiated at the July 2000 Camp David summit—accepted by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and rejected by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat—as well as the December 2000 Clinton parameters envisaged Israel retaining control of population centers beyond the Green Line. So did President George W. Bush’s 2004 letter of understanding to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which explicitly rejected a return to the 1967 lines.

Power is wrong on legal grounds as well as on security and historical ones. The Green Line is the 1949 armistice line to which Israel and Jordan agreed to end the war begun by five Arab armies invading Israel after it declared independence on the expiration of the British Mandate in May 1948. The armistice lines have no inherent legal significance. Indeed, U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338—the former passed following the 1967 war and the latter enacted after the 1973 Yom Kippur War—both recognized that the 1949 lines were not sacrosanct. Both provided for Israel to relinquish control of some portion, perhaps a large portion, of the land it seized from Jordan (and Syria and Egypt) in 1967 in exchange for security and peace.

RUTHIE BLUM: THE BLAME GAME BLITZ

On Sunday evening, when the details of the allegedly Islamic State-inspired truck-‎ramming attack in Jerusalem that afternoon were beginning to take shape, I received a ‎phone call from a friend in distress.‎

Unlike so many of our peers that day, neither she nor I had been directly affected by the ‎terrorist atrocity, in which an IDF officer and three officers’ course cadets were murdered and another ‎‎15 wounded. And she was not suffering from a common form of anxiety experienced ‎when the loved ones of others are killed or injured.‎

‎”I have had it with leftists,” she said.‎

Since she is not exactly a rabid right-winger herself — and though I was deeply upset by ‎the tragedy I had just spent hours reading and writing about — I laughed. What, I ‎wondered, brought this on?‎

She told me that she first learned of the attack from a mutual friend whom she ‎encountered while out running errands.‎

‎”The blood of the victims wasn’t even dry yet, and the only thing that woman had to say ‎was, ‘It’s so awful; now Bibi will go up in the polls.'”‎

Again I chuckled, this time at my friend’s naive outrage at something I have come to take ‎for granted: Whenever something bad happens, including a rainstorm at an outdoor ‎wedding, blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and bemoan his electoral popularity.‎

But it is not only members of the Israeli Left who respond to every ill that befalls the ‎Jewish state by bashing it and its leaders. My compatriots on the Right have a similar ‎tendency, albeit from the opposite point of view.‎

Sunday’s attack gave expression to the latest example of this phenomenon on both sides ‎of the political spectrum.‎

To understand the way Israelis — as all human beings — automatically translate every ‎event into the language of their ideology, one has to review the facts of the truck-‎ramming, as they have unfolded, based on security camera footage, eyewitness accounts ‎and other evidence collected at the scene.‎

At approximately 1:30 p.m., a large group of cadets on a weekly educational outing that ‎is part of their training to become officers arrived at the Armon Hanatziv promenade and ‎began to disembark from their buses.‎

DANIEL GREENFIELD: KILL THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION

The two-state solution, a perverse euphemism for carving an Islamic terror state out of the land of Israel and the living flesh of her people, is in trouble. The solution, which has solved nothing except the shortage of graves in Israel and Muslim terrorists in the Middle East, is the object of grave concern by the professionally concerned from Foggy Bottom to Fifth Avenue.

Obama set up his betrayal of Israel at the UN to “save” the two-state solution from Trump. The media warns that David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador, is so pro-Israel that he’ll kill the “solution.”

But you can’t kill something that was never alive.

The two-state solution is a zombie. It can’t be dead because it never lived. It was a rotting shambling corpse of a diplomatic process. If you stood downwind of the proceedings, it looked alive.

Up close there was only blood and death.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the two-state solution didn’t solve anything and it wasn’t in the business of creating two states. Not unless you count a Hamas state in Gaza and a Fatah state in the West Bank.

What problem was the two-state solution solving?

It wasn’t the problem of terrorism. Turning over land, weapons and power to a bunch of terrorists made for more terrorism. It’s no coincidence that Islamic terrorism worldwide shot up around the same time.

The consequences of giving terrorists their own country to play with were as predictable as taking a power drill to the bottom of a boat or running a toaster in a bubble bath. The least likely outcome of handing guns to homicidal sociopaths was peace. The most likely was murder. And that was as intended.

The problem that the two-state solution was solving was the existence of Israel; the Jewish Problem.

Spray the two-state solution over an irritating country full of Jews who managed to survive multiple Muslim genocides. Apply and wait for as long as it takes until the Jewish Problem is solved again.

Move the Embassy By Lawrence J. Haas

President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem provides a timely opportunity for the new president to make a sharp break with President Barack Obama’s unwise, unjustified and ultimately ineffective hostility toward America’s closest ally in the turbulent Middle East.

Especially after Obama’s recent decision to abstain from, rather than veto, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlements in absurdly one-sided terms, moving the embassy would send a strong signal to Israel, the region and the world that the United States will once again stand by its allies.

Predictably, critics worry that such a provocative move could have catastrophic effects that include inciting more Palestinian violence, dooming Israeli-Palestinian peace, inflaming the “Arab street” and threatening Israel’s growing private ties to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab nations.

DANIEL GREENFIELD MOMENT: ISRAEL MUST KILL THE TWO STATE SOLUTION

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents the Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the editor of Frontpage’s blog, The Point.

Daniel discussed Israel Must Kill the Two State Solution, explaining that, if it doesn’t, the two-state solution will kill Israel.

Don’t miss it!

The whitewashing of the PLO must end. Caroline Glick

It is not in the least surprising that the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority did not condemn the terrorist attack on Sunday. It is not surprising because the PLO-controlled PA encouraged the attack.

As Khaled Abu Toameh wrote for the Gatestone Institute, in the aftermath of last month’s US-enabled passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which criminalizes Israel, the PA went on the warpath.

Among other things, Muhammad Abu Shtayyeh, who serves as a close adviser to PLO chief and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas called for an intensification of terrorist attacks against Israelis. Shtayyeh said that now is the time to “bolster the popular resistance” against Israel.

As Abu Toameh noted, “‘Popular resistance’ is code for throwing stones and petrol bombs and carrying out stabbing and car-ramming attacks against Israelis.”

Sunday’s terrorist murderer probably was inspired by Islamic State, and its adherents’ recent truck ramming murder sprees in Nice and Berlin, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

But Sunday’s 28-year-old cold blooded killer hailed from Jerusalem, not Nice.

His brain was washed since he was five years old by the PLO-controlled PA’s steady cycle of jihadist incitement.

From the time he was in preschool, the killer was indoctrinated to aspire to commit the mass murder of Jews he carried out on Sunday.

For 23 years, Israel and the US have empowered the PLO.

During this period, the terrorist group never took any concrete steps to promote peace. At no point in the past generation has a PLO leader ever told the Palestinians or supporters abroad that the time has come to bury the hatchet and accept Israel.

Instead, for 23 years, the PLO has openly supported Israel’s annihilation. Often that support has been stated in code words like “popular resistance” which everyone understands means murder.

To make it easy for Americans and Israelis to continue funding, arming, training and of course, recognizing the PLO as a “moderate” organization despite its continued sponsorship of terrorism, PLO members are always happy to talk about a “two-state solution” with Westerners that wish to be lied to.

But they do not hesitate to threaten anyone who rejects their lies about Jews and Israel. For instance, Abbas reacted to US President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to abide by the US law requiring the State Department to move the US embassy to Jerusalem by threatening him.

Trump’s plan will have “serious implications” for the US, Abbas told a group of visiting Israeli leftists.

PLO Executive Committee chairman Saeb Erekat said that if Trump moves the US embassy to Israel’s capital, the PLO will lobby Arab states to expel the US ambassadors from their capitals.

Jebl Mukaber, the Jerusalem neighborhood where Sunday’s terrorist lived, used to be just an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem. It wasn’t particularly friendly.

On Palestinian Statehood The heretical views of Trump’s ambassador to Israel recommend him for the job. Bret Stephens

Diplomats from some 70 countries will assemble in Paris on Sunday for another Mideast conference, intended to preserve the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The timing is not accidental: With five days to go in the Obama administration, there are whispers that the conference may lead to another U.N. Security Council resolution, this time setting out parameters for an eventual Palestinian state.

The question is: For what?

Climate change aside, the cause of Palestinian statehood is the central obsession of contemporary global politics. It’s also its least examined assumption.
Would a Palestinian state serve the cause of Mideast peace? This used to be conventional wisdom, on the theory that a Palestinian state would lead to peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, easing the military burdens on the former and encouraging the latter to address their internal discontents.

Today the proposition is ridiculous. No deal between Jerusalem and Ramallah is going to lift the sights of those now fighting in Syria, Iraq or Yemen. Nor will a deal reconcile Tehran and its terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza to the existence of a Jewish state. As for the rest of the neighborhood, Israel has diplomatic relations with Turkey, Jordan and Egypt, and has reached pragmatic accommodations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

What about the interests of Palestinians? Aren’t they entitled to a state?

Maybe. But are they more entitled to one than the Assamese, Basques, Baloch, Corsicans, Druze, Flemish, Kashmiris, Kurds, Moros, Native Hawaiians, Northern Cypriots, Rohingya, Tibetans, Uyghurs or West Papuans—all of whom have distinct national identities, legitimate historical grievances and plausible claims to statehood?

If so, what gives Palestinians the preferential claim? Have they waited longer than the Kurds? No: Kurdish national claims stretch for centuries, not decades. Have they experienced greater violations to their culture than Tibetans? No: Beijing has conducted a systematic policy of repression for 67 years, whereas Palestinians are nothing if not vocal in mosques, universities and the media. Have they been persecuted more harshly than the Rohingya? Not even close.

Set the comparisons aside. Would a Palestinian state be good for Palestinian people?

That’s a more subjective judgment. But a telling figure came in a June 2015 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, which found that a majority of Arab residents in East Jerusalem would rather live as citizens with equal rights in Israel than in a Palestinian state. No doubt part of this owes to a desire to be connected to Israel’s thriving economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Terrorist Attack Kills Four IDF Soldiers As Palestinians Celebrate How the Obama administration has emboldened the Palestinian death cult. Joseph Klein

A Palestinian terrorist rammed a flatbed truck into a group of Israeli soldiers who had just disembarked from a bus adjacent to a popular promenade in southern Jerusalem on Sunday. They were on a sightseeing tour at the time. The massacre, a copy of the vehicular terrorist attacks in Nice and Berlin last year, resulted in the deaths of four Israelis, including three women, and the wounding of at least fifteen others. The terrorist driver was shot dead before he could inflict even more mayhem. Even so, his attack was one of the deadliest in Israel over the last year.

The terrorist, identified as Fadi al-Qanbar, was believed to have lived in an Arab area of east Jerusalem. He had previously served time in an Israeli jail, but nevertheless reportedly managed to buy the truck he used as a killing machine, which even carried Israeli license plates.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We know the identity of the attacker, and according to all the signs, he is a supporter of Islamic State. We will overcome this terror, just as we overcame other attacks.” Linking this attack to the ones in Nice and Berlin, he added, “We know there is a succession of attacks, and it could well be that there is a connection between those in France and Berlin — and now in Jerusalem.”

As of the writing of this article, ISIS has not claimed responsibility for the attack. Regardless, the Palestinian terrorist could well have been inspired by an Islamic State magazine, which instructed jihadists how to use large trucks to target “large numbers of kuffar” congregating on streets and at public markets. “The target should be on a road that offers the ability to accelerate to a high speed, which allows for inflicting maximum damage on those in the vehicle’s path,” the magazine advised. “It is imperative that one does not exit his vehicle during the attack. Rather he should remain inside, driving over the already harvested kuffar, and continue crushing their remains until it becomes physically impossible to continue by vehicle.” That is precisely what the terrorist driving the truck into the group of Israeli soldiers did. After running some of them over, he put his truck in reverse to crush them even further.

According to a report on Debkafile, some Palestinians standing nearby “clapped and shouted encouragement to the truck driver.”

Hamas spokesman Abdul-Latif Qanou described the latest terrorist slaughter as a “heroic” act which other Palestinians should emulate, although Hamas did not immediately claim responsibility. Palestinian social media were full of congratulations to the terrorist driver for the “feat” he had accomplished. The following is from an official Fatah Twitter account: “perpetrator of the ramming operation in occupied Jerusalem is the martyr Fadi Qunbar.”

A Call on All Christians to Defend Their Birthplace and the Homeland of the Jewish People by Petra Heldt

We need ensure that the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism for more than 3,000 years and the seat of Christianity for 2,000 years, will not be allowed to be Islamic as part of what would soon be an Islamic country, and very likely a terrorist one. In such a state, all polls show that the next vote will be to install Hamas.

Based on the Hamas Charter that denies Israel’s right to exist, the vote could complete eliminating Jewish — and Christian — history and replacing it with Islam.

What drives Western politicians to be servants aiding the destruction of Judeo-Christian culture in the Middle East and Europe? Why does the Paris peace conference prepare for the destruction of the Jewish State while Christians are murdered in Muslim countries in historically unparalleled numbers?

Christians will not be silent when all these places will be voted to go to those who will destroy them — as they destroyed Palmyra, Antioch, Nisibis, Niniveh, and in late 2014, Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery, St. Elijah, leveled by the Islamic State.

The streets of Paris must hear the protests against the attempted rewriting of history at the peace conference and any subsequent Security Council vote. Such protestors are like “a man who would built up the wall and stand in front of God in the gap on behalf of the Land” (Ezekiel 22:30) — so that the only bastion of democracy, the very defender of Christianity, the last keeper of Judeo-Christian heritage in the Middle East and Europe will continue to prosper.

Christians’ collective consciousness must stop the planned peace conference in Paris on January 15-17, and prevent the presumably intended UN Security Council (UNSC) vote on a Palestinian State as a 22nd Muslim state, in the midst of the one Jewish State. We need to ensure that there will be no capitulation to the Islamization of the Middle East and Europe. We need to ensure that the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism for more than 3,000 years and the seat of Christianity for 2,000 years, will not be allowed to be Islamic as part of what would soon be an Islamic state, and very likely a terrorist one. In such a state, all polls show, the next vote will be to install the terrorist group Hamas. That would mean the eventual destruction of all Judeo-Christian heritage, as we have been seeing throughout the Middle East.