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Embracing dangerous delusions instead of our friends

by Mojambo ( 75 Comments › )
Filed under Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinians at May 21st, 2012 - 8:00 am

For years people like Thomas Friedman (and the idiotic, corrupt former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) in order to frighten and/or bully Israel into giving in to the PLO’s demands always claim that unless Israel agrees to the Palestinian version of a “two-state solution”, there will be a “one-state solution” which would merge Israel with the West Bank and Gaza into one bi-national state. Caroline Glick agrees to a one-state solution involving Israel taking over the West Bank and sending the Palestinians there to Jordan.

by Caroline Glick

Two weeks ago, US Congressman Joe Walsh published an op-ed in the The Washington Times in which he called for the US and Israel to abandon the two-state solution.

After running through the record of Palestinian duplicity, failed governance, terrorism and bad faith, he called for Israel to apply its sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. In his words, Israel should “adopt the only solution that will bring true peace to the Middle East: a single Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is the only country in the region dedicated to peace and the only power capable of stable, just and democratic government in the region.”

The evidence that the two-state paradigm has failed is overwhelming. The Palestinians’ decision to reject statehood at Camp David in 2000 and launch a terror war against Israel made clear that they had not abandoned their refusal from 1947 to accept partition of the Land of Israel with the Jews.

So, too, the Palestinians’ election of Hamas in the 2006 elections, and their missile war against Israel from Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, all made clear that they are not interested in a Palestinian state. Rather, their chief desire is Israel’s annihilation.

[……]

Indeed, the fact that there is no Palestinian leader willing to recognize Israel’s right to exist makes clear that if a Palestinian state is established in Judea and Samaria – in addition to the de facto Palestinian state in Gaza – that state will be in state of war with Israel. All territory under its control will be used to attack the rump Jewish state.

Given the abject failure of the two-state paradigm, it is abundantly clear that for all the complications that may be associated with the application of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, it is a better option for Israel than Israeli surrender of the areas.

Walsh’s op-ed is not his first statement of support for Israeli annexation. Last September, ahead of the UN general assembly, Walsh authored Congressional Resolution 394 supporting Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinians asked the UN to recognize a Palestinian state outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel. Forty-four other congressmen co-sponsored the resolution.

And this makes sense.

The Palestinians’ decision to turn the issue of Palestinian statehood over to the UN constituted a substantive breach of the treaties the PLO signed with Israel. Those agreements stipulated that both sides agreed that their conflict would be solved through negotiations and not through unilateral actions. By ending negotiations with Israel and turning the issue of statehood over to the UN, the Palestinians canceled their treaties with Israel. Consequently, Israel is no longer bound by those accords and is free to take its own unilateral actions, including applying its laws to Judea and Samaria as it did in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past.

FOR HIS unstinting support for Israel, Walsh has been subject to an unbridled assault by leftist American Jews. Ron Kampeas from JTA, for instance, attacked Walsh, accusing him of being no different than Israel’s enemies who seek to destroy Israel by ending its ability to define itself as a Jewish state through what they refer to as the “one-state solution.”

[…….]

For its part, the Jewish-run anti-Israel lobby J Street is mobilizing its supporters to bring about Walsh’s defeat in the November elections by soliciting contributions to his Democratic challenger. J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote that “Walsh’s prescription amounts to a call for an end to Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people.”

It is hard to know where to begin a discussion of this assault in which Jewish Americans attacked one of Israel’s strongest supporters simply because he had the temerity to recognize reality and call for the US to support an Israeli victory against our enemies who seek our destruction.

First, it is important to consider the claim that Walsh went against the grain of American ideals by suggesting, “Those Palestinians who wish to may leave their Fatah- and Hamas-created slums and move to the original Palestinian state: Jordan. The British Mandate for Palestine created Jordan as the country for the Palestinians. That is the only justification for its creation. Even now, 75% of its population is of Palestinian descent.”

The fact of the matter is that the two-state paradigm rests on the assumption that the Palestinian state will be ethnically cleansed of Jews before it is established. Whereas Walsh somehow stands in opposition to American ideals for suggesting that the Palestinians may voluntarily immigrate to Jordan, Kampeas, Ben- Ami and their cohorts have no problem with the concept of a Jew-free Palestine and the forcible expulsion of up to 675,000 Jews from their homes in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem simply because they are Jewish.

Aside from their pernicious hypocrisy and moral blindness, what stands out in their assaults on Walsh is that they cannot tell the difference between Israel’s enemies that seek its destruction through the so-called one-state solution, and Israel’s friends, who want it to defeat its enemies and live with security and peace. For the likes of Kampeas and Ben-Ami, there is no difference between Walsh and Israel’s worst enemies.

PART OF this problem is their apparent unquestioning acceptance of the myth of a demographic time bomb. They seem not to have noticed that the Palestinian claim that by 2015 there will be an Arab majority west of the Jordan River is a complete fabrication.

The truth is that if Israel applied its laws to Judea and Samaria tomorrow and all the Palestinians in those areas received Israeli citizenship, Israel would still retain a two-thirds Jewish majority. Moreover, all the demographic trends for Israel, including increasing birthrates and positive immigration rates, are positive. And all the demographic trends for the Palestinians, including decreasing birthrates and negative immigration rates, are negative. According to Israeli demographic researcher Yoram Ettinger, by 2030, Jewish will likely comprise 80% of the population of Israel, Judea and Samaria.

So Ben-Ami’s argument that Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria means the end of Israeli democracy is simply incorrect.

[…….]

The beauty of the two-state fable is that it puts the onus to make peace on Israel’s shoulders.

If it is true that the Palestinians want to make peace, then Israel must make peace. And if all the Palestinians require to make peace is for Israel to quit Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, then that is what Israel must do, together with the 675,000 Jews who live there.

The real tragedy is of course not that the likes of Kampeas and Ben-Ami maintain faith with the fairy tale of Palestinian willingness to live at peace with Israel. The real tragedy is that this myth has been the official policy of the government of Israel for the past 19 years. Since then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin launched the peace process with Yasser Arafat in September 1993, to greater or lesser degrees, every Israeli government has kept faith with the two-state solution lie.

It hasn’t mattered that the Palestinians rejected statehood and peace not once, but twice. It hasn’t mattered that the Palestinians received Gaza lock, stock and barrel with no strings attached and used the territory to launch an illegal missile war against Israeli civilians. The fact that both Arafat and his supposedly moderate successor Mahmoud Abbas rejected partition and maintained their devotion to Israel’s destruction did not stop Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from bowing to US pressure and embracing this fool’s game.

People like Kampeas are the first to bemoan Israel’s sorry state in the realm of public diplomacy. They decry Israel’s hasbara efforts as pathetic and failed. But what they fail to acknowledge is that it is the two-state trap that makes the construction and execution of an effective public diplomacy strategy impossible.

[……]

But you have to be blind to reality to view him as anything other than a friend of Israel.

Happily, not everyone in Israel remains paralyzed. Members of Knesset have launched repeated attempts in recent months to debate legislation calling for Israel to apply its sovereignty over all or parts of Judea and Samaria. Next Wednesday, MK Miri Regev is holding a conference to launch a new Knesset caucus calling for the adoption of this policy.

IN RECENT years, poll after poll has shown that the majority of Israelis do not believe that the two-state paradigm will bring peace or that if a Palestinian state is formed, it will live at peace with Israel.

And yet, because of the choke-hold that Kampeas and Ben-Ami’s Israeli counterparts have held over the national discourse, the Israeli people have been given no other option to consider. Rather, we have been told over and over again that giving our enemies a veto over our rights, land and security is the only alternative.

Walsh and the 44 congressmen who co-sponsored his resolution are Israel’s friends. We should take heart in their willingness to buck consensus and support us. And we should give careful and responsible consideration to their reasonable and supportive policy recommendations.

Read the rest – Let’s embrace our friends

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinians | 75 Comments »

The timeless liberation movement; and the Romney-Netanyahu friendship

by Mojambo ( 90 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Invasion, Islamists, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia at April 9th, 2012 - 8:30 am

Miss Glick makes the point that the destruction of Israel is a key requirement by the Left for the triumph of Socialism just as the jihad against Israel is the spear head in the global movement to create the Caliphate. As we celebrate the week of Passover, let us never forget that the eternal liberation movement is that of the Jews.

by Caroline Glick

Hamas terror boss Fathi Hamad is a notable figure. Hamad is both the director of Hamas’s al-Aksa television station and the terror group’s “minister” of the interior and national security. His double portfolio is a clear expression of the much ignored fact that for terrorists, propaganda is inseparable from violence.

[…….]

On March 23, Hamad was interviewed by Egypt’s Al Hekma television station. The interview was translated by MEMRI.

Hamad made two central points. First, he claimed that the Palestinian war against Israel is the keystone of the global jihad. Second, he said the Palestinians are not a distinct people, but transplanted Egyptians and Saudis.

In his words, “At al-Aksa and on the land of Palestine, all the conspiracies, throughout history, have been shattered – the conspiracies of the Crusaders, and the conspiracies of the Tatars. At al- Aksa and on the land of Palestine, the Battle of Hattin was waged. The [West] does not want this noble history to repeat itself, because the Jews and their allies would be annihilated – the Zionists, the Americans and the imperialists.

[……]

Hamad next explained, “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, [Egyptians] whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians.”

What Hamad’s interview tells us is that today Hamas – the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood – is more interested in unity with Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt than with Fatah. Whereas in the past it joined Fatah in obscuring the direct link between the jihad against the Jews and the jihad against the non-Muslim world, today it seeks to emphasize the connection. To this end, Hamas is willing to abandon the myth of Palestinian nativism and acknowledge that the Palestinians are an artificial people, invented for the purpose of advancing the global jihad in the key battlefield of Israel.

Hamad’s statements underscore a widespread sentiment among Israelis about the revolutions now tearing apart the Arab world. That sentiment is that while the results of these revolutions will be catastrophic in the medium and long term, in the short term they bring respite to Israel. With Arab regimes – new and old – struggling to consolidate power, they have little time or energy to devote to their war against Israel.
[……]

Unfortunately for Israel, while the Arab world is increasingly uninterested in the Palestinian war against Israel, Europe and the American Left are more than happy to pick up the slack.

Consider two recent events. First, two weeks ago the UN Human Rights Council voted to launch a commission whose goal is to criminalize Israel for the existence of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

The council’s decision to form a new kangaroo court to criminalize Israel was not the result of the Arab diplomatic war against Israel. It is the consequence of the European diplomatic war against Israel. It is Europe, not the Arabs that has barred Israel from caucusing with its UN regional group – the Western European and Others Group. By barring Israel from the caucus, the Europeans have denied Israel the ability to make its case to other UN member nations.

For its part, the Obama administration pays lip service to the need to end the Human Rights Council’s obsessive war against Israel. But at the same time, it has effectively joined that war by legitimizing the anti-Israel council both by joining it, and by refusing to use its membership as leverage to coerce the council into abandoning its campaign against Israel.
[…….]

Then there was last Friday’s Global March to Jerusalem, in which a consortium of protesters organized by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and the international Left intended to storm Israel’s borders and fill the state with hostile foreigners.

As Ribhi Halloum, the coordinator of the march said last year, the goal of the GMJ was “to move the right of return possessed by Palestinian refugees from theory to practice.”

In a press conference in Amman days ahead of the operation, Halloum said that organizers expected for two million people to mass at Israel’s borders and attempt to breach them.

In the end, the GMJ failed to mount its planned invasion. The sum total of the day’s events amounted to several violent local demonstrations by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria joined by foreign and Israeli leftists. Israel’s borders were not breached.

The GMJ’s failure to achieve its aims owed to the same pan-Arab distraction that Hamad tried to address in his interview with Egyptian television.

But while the Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese have more urgent business to attend to, the international Left has intensified its own campaign against Israel.

Leading anti-Israel, (and anti-Jewish) leftists including George Galloway, Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire, Noam Chomsky, Jeremiah Wright, Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin served as members of the GMJ’s various organizing committees. These self-proclaimed human rights activists had no problem with the fact that the Iranian regime took a central role in organizing the operation or that the clear goal of the campaign’s Muslim organizers is the destruction of Israel.

To the contrary, this goal is now openly shared by growing numbers of Western leftists. In an op-ed on the Guardian’s online opinion forum, Sarah Colborne, a member of the GMJ’s organizing committees and its national coordinator for the UK as well as the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK wrote, “The struggle for Palestinian rights is at the core of the global movement for social and economic justice.”

Judith Butler, one of Colborne’s American counterparts, has opined that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

So just as Hamas’s Hamad claims that the jihad on Israel is the key campaign of the global jihad, Hamad’s Western partners claim that destroying Israel is the key to the Left’s campaign for socialism.

Disturbingly, the international Left is receiving indirect support for its goal of destroying Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, (and through it, destroying Israel), from the US government. Just days before the GMJ failed to unravel Israel’s physical control over Jerusalem, in a jaw-dropping exchange between State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland and AP reporter Matthew Lee, Nuland refused to say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

The US has always been deeply hostile to Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Beginning in 1950 the State Department directed US diplomats to discourage other governments from establishing their embassies in Jerusalem. But while the US has always undermined its own alliance with Israel by aligning its policy on Jerusalem with Israel’s worst enemies, under President Barack Obama, the US’s willingness to express this hostility has been unprecedented.

This hostility has been demonstrated most famously by Obama’s demand that the government stop respecting Jewish property rights in the city.

It has also been given graphic expression by the administration’s decision to move the Consular Section of the US Consulate in Jerusalem from an Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem to the site that Israel allocated for a new US embassy.

The site is located in the Jewish Arnona neighborhood in western Jerusalem.

Israel allocated the land to a future US Embassy after Congress passed the US Embassy Act in 1995 which obligated the US government to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The site was chosen, among other reasons, because its location in western Jerusalem put it outside the dispute regarding whether or not Israel will retain sovereignty over eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem in a hypothetical peace treaty with the Palestinians. The US government uses the non-resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel as its justification for refusing to accept Jewish property rights in those areas of the city.

The US Consulate in Jerusalem is not subordinate to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. It presents itself as the unofficial US embassy to the non-existent state of Palestine. By utilizing the site in western Jerusalem allocated for a future embassy as an extension office of the consulate, the Obama administration made clear its rejection of Israel’s right to sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. And in light of the US law that recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and orders the government to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem, the Obama administration not only indirectly legitimized the cause of those who seek the destruction of Israel.

It did so in contempt of US law.

In truth, there is nothing new about the West’s rejection of Israel’s right to sovereignty or even to its support and sponsorship for the Arab war for the destruction of Israel. Such animosity predates not only the 1967 Six Day War. It predates the establishment of Israel.

British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, who served as an intelligence officer in wartime and post-World War I Mandatory Palestine, made this point clearly in his memoir Middle East Diary.

Meinertzhagen wrote that the first Arab terror assaults on Jews under the British military government were instigated by the British military. Just before Easter in 1920, British military authorities contacted future Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini and encouraged him to attack the Jews of Jerusalem.

They told him, “He had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine… and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, [the British High Commanders] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish home.”

Today, the Jewish people begin their week-long celebration of Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom. This evening we will read in the Haggada that our fight for freedom is an eternal struggle.

When we assess the global nature of the current assault on Jewish freedom and sovereignty in our country, we see the truth of that message.

While our present circumstances give us much to celebrate, the work of Jewish liberation is far from over.

Read the rest – The eternal liberation movement

It seems that Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu once worked for the same organization.

Editorial

One of the things to think about in respect the current political campaign is the impact that would be felt were the president of America and the prime minister of Israel on the same page. We were put in mind of this by Michael Barbaro’s illuminating dispatch in today’s New York Times, describing the friendship that sprang up in the late 1970s between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mitt Romney. At the time the future prime minister of Israel and the future front runner for the Republican nomination for president were both working for the same company, the Boston Consulting Group, and honing their analytical abilities in the same weekly brainstorming sessions, “absorbing,” Mr. Barbaro reports, “the same profoundly analytical view of the world.”

We will never forget how America’s relationship with Israel descended into acrimony during the latter years of President Clinton’s administration. That was when Secretary Albright was hectoring the new premier in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu, over the so-called peace process. It wasn’t, at least not then, a problem of the Democratic Party. We also watched President Reagan’s near magical relationship with Israel fall off during the accession of George H.W. Bush as the 41st president. That was the period of feuding over loan guarantees that America was giving to enable the Jewish state to build the housing it needed, partly because so many thousands of Jews were fleeing the Soviet Union.

We didn’t see a return to relationship that was both warm and successful until the rise, here, of President Bush’s son, George W. Bush, and, in Israel, of Ariel Sharon. The two had bonded when the former defense minister of Israel gave the future American president a tour of the Samarian hills, from which the logic of Israel’s strategic choices becomes so clear. Under the leadership of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, the acrimony disappeared from the relations between the two governments. No doubt this was helped by the degree to which their common interests became so evident in the war on Islamist terror.

That President Obama permitted that warmth to evaporate is one of the errors of his presidency. We would not say that there has been no working relationship, but the political warmth has gone. Instead we have had a roller-coaster of ups and downs in the two administrations, even while both sides have protested that everything is in fine shape. The tension between the two has loosed a cataract of leaks on what might, or might not, be the plan for Iran. It has returned us to the days when the secretary of state — in this case Mrs. Clinton — exhibits an Albrightian disdain for the way the Israelis are handling what is left of the peace process.

We would not want to suggest that relations between any two countries, leastwise those between Israel and America, are merely a matter of personalities. Relations are ultimately governed by national interest. But neither would we want to suggest that leadership doesn’t matter. We learned this in, among other moments, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Golda Meir’s envoy in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, swung behind President Nixon. This helped sideline the peace plan hatched in the state department and advanced by Secretary of State Rogers. The plan was recognized as short-sighted by Henry Kissinger, who encouraged Mr. Rabin not to blame, indeed to appreciate, President Nixon. Rabin’s sagacity led to the breakthrough understanding that Republicans could be the party more sympathetic to Israel.

* * *

[……]

Read the rest – The Romney-Netanyahu friendship

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Anti-semitism, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Invasion, Islamists, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia | 90 Comments »

The Toulouse killer – a man of the West

by Mojambo ( 51 Comments › )
Filed under France, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Jihad, Palestinians at March 26th, 2012 - 11:30 am

Miss Glick makes the case that Islamic murderers such as Major Nidal Hassan, Youssef Fofana, Naveed Haq and now Mohamed Merah are enabled by boorish Western intellectuals who claim that Islam is a Religion of Peace, refuse to identify the killers as Muslim, and the false narrative that Israel kills Palestinian children (actually Palestinians kill Palestinian and Israeli children).

by Caroline Glick

The massacre of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times – although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case.

On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher.

[…]

But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served.

Indeed, it hasn’t even begun to be addressed. The killer, Mohamed Merah, was not a lone gunman. He wasn’t even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about.

He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims.

An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime?

Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh?

The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Beyond that, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.

And he was surely correct.

Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations.

Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl’s killers took of him before they chopped his head off.

The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camera work. US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009, showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an “SOA,” a soldier of Allah.

Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006, murdering one woman and wounding another five, bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was “a jihadi” and that his victims deserved to die because they were “Israeli collaborators.”

[…]

THIS SITUATION is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West’s responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah’s death can bring no closure to this story.

[…]

Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West’s effective collusion with these killers is Western elites’ justification of their crimes.

After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah’s jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah’s name and his excuse at the same time.

Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel’s “murder” of Palestinian children.

It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn’t murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.

But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn’t know that.

[…]

IN ADDITION to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.

Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.

Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.

[…]

Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah’s death is not a victory of justice.

Read the rest: Mohamed Merah – Man of the West

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in France, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Jihad, Palestinians | 51 Comments »

Fatah-Hamas unity government shows the bankruptcy of the so called “peace process”.

by Mojambo ( 54 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians at February 13th, 2012 - 7:00 pm

By making an alliance with Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas reminds us that the strategic goals of Fatah and Hamas coincide,as well as the bankruptcy of Obama’s appeasement policies. They both wish to obliterate Israel and replace it with an Islamic “Palestine”. Mahhmoud Abbas is as big a liar as Arafat ever was and why are we still channeling money into that rats nest of murder and corruption?

by Caroline Glick

On Monday afternoon, the Palestinians destroyed officially whatever was left of the concept of a peace process with Israel.

When PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas signed a deal with Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashaal in Doha, Qatar, the notion that there is a significant segment of Palestinian society that is not committed to the destruction of Israel was finally and truly sunk.

But before the ink on the agreement had a chance to dry, the peace processors were already spewing bromides whose sole purpose was to deny this inarguable conclusion. Both the Obama administration and the EU claimed that the agreement is an internal Palestinian issue. The EU actually welcomed the deal.

As Foreign Policy Commissioner Catherine Ashton’s spokesman put it, “The EU has consistently called for intra-Palestinian reconciliation behind President Mahmoud Abbas as an important element for the unity of a future Palestinian state and for reaching a two-state solution.”

The Israeli Left was quick to blame the agreement on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

In an apparent bid to inject a bit of reality into the delusional discourse, Netanyahu condemned the pact. As he put it, “If Abbas moves to implement what was signed today in Doha, he will abandon the path of peace and join forces with the enemies of peace.”

[…..]

Netanyahu’s statement was a nice start. But it didn’t go nearly far enough. In speaking as he did, Netanyahu obscured the fact that Abbas already made his choice. He has cast his lot and that of Fatah with Hamas. In so doing Abbas once more exposed the dirty secret that everyone knows but no one likes to discuss: Fatah and Hamas share the same strategic goal of destroying Israel. Fatah is not a moderate force that accepts a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. It is a terrorist organization and a political warfare organization. Fatah’s strategic goal remains what it has been since it was founded in 1959: The obliteration of the Jewish state.

In truth, Monday’s agreement is nothing new. Fatah and Hamas have worked together since at least 1994. In November 1994, Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement in Cairo. The agreement set out each side’s sphere of responsibility. Fatah would negotiate with Israel and Hamas would attack Israel.

That Cairo agreement was but the first in a line of agreements between the two groups. Each new agreement in turn reflected both their shared goal of destroying Israel and their changing tactical preferences.

In 2000, for instance, when Fatah returned to active terrorism against Israel, Fatah and Hamas set up joint terror cells they called the Popular Resistance Committees.

In 2007, they signed their first unity government deal after Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 legislative elections. That deal not only set the terms for cooperation in the PA. It paved the way for Hamas’s inclusion in the PLO. Since the PLO rather than the PA or Fatah is the signatory to the agreements with Israel, the 2007 agreement signaled Fatah’s willingness to abrogate its treaties with Israel.

[…..]

Last May, Abbas signed another unity deal with Hamas. Like the 2007 deal, the pact set the conditions for Hamas’s integration into the PLO and so placed the Palestinians on course for canceling all the agreements that the PLO has signed with Israel since 1993. In the months that passed since, the sides have been diligently working out the means of enacting their unity deal. Those contacts brought about another agreement signed in Cairo in December. That pact laid out the steps for integrating Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the PLO. The first step involved setting up a temporary PLO leadership. This step was implemented last month. The transitional leadership is now organizing new elections to the PLO’s legislative body, which in turn will appoint the executive.

December’s agreement also set out the basis for the interim unity government agreement that was signed on Monday. The sole charge of the transitional PA government is to organize elections for the PA’s legislature and its chairmanship.

SO MONDAY’S agreement doesn’t represent a break with past Fatah behavior, but a continuation of it. The notable aspect of Monday’s agreement is that it shows just how drastically the balance of power has tilted towards Hamas and away from Fatah since 1994.

Since Monday, the usual crowd of peace processors has come up with a number of arguments to deny the significance of the latest Hamas-Fatah rapprochement. One of their favorite claims is that the deal with Fatah is proof that Hamas is becoming more moderate.

For instance, Shlomo Brom, an inveterate peace processor from the Institute of National Security Studies, told JTA, “Hamas is moving away from Syria and Iran, and to a certain degree from Hezbollah, and is repositioning itself in line with the popular movements behind the Arab Spring and the democratization process, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia. A renewed push for reconciliation with Fatah should be seen as part of this reorientation.”

To make this claim, Brom had to ignore the fact that “the popular movements behind the Arab Spring” are jihadist movements from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since December, all of Hamas’s leaders have made public statements underscoring that the movement’s goal remains the destruction of Israel and that its chosen means of attaining that goal is terrorism and war.

Hamas’s leaders have also been clear that they view their current rapprochement with Fatah as a means to overwhelm and defeat Fatah. As the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ senior researcher Jonathan Halevi showed in recent studies of this week’s deal and the December agreement, Hamas’s goal in entering the PLO is to abrogate the PLO’s treaties with Israel. Its goal in joining a unity government with Fatah is to organize elections. Hamas is expected to win both the PA’s presidential and legislative elections in a landslide.

Another argument that the Left is making is that since Monday’s deal made Abbas the PA prime minister as well as its president, the agreement is proof that he is strong and therefore, it’s terrific. As Haaretz editorialized on Wednesday, Netanyahu is irresponsible and destructive because, “Instead of welcoming the bolstered status of a leader who signed the Oslo Accords and reined in terror in the West Bank, Netanyahu opted to present the deal as a capitulation by the PA to a terrorist organization.”

This argument ignores the inconvenient fact that Abbas had no choice other than to take on the title of prime minister because Hamas forced him to fire Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Both the US and the EU view Fayyad as a moderate and the only way to avoid a backlash from firing him was for Abbas to replace Fayyad with himself.

A THIRD argument that has received substantial attention is that the agreement is nothing more than a survival pact between two weakened leaders. Mashaal, it is argued, was weakened by his forced departure from Damascus. He made the deal to strengthen his position vis-à-vis Hamas’s leaders in Gaza.

While it may be true that Mashaal’s stature has taken a hit in comparison to Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, the shift in power between the two arch-terrorists is immaterial.

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Unlike Hamas, Fatah has certainly been weakened by recent events in Egypt. As Mashaal’s Egyptian patrons take power, Abbas’s chief patron Hosni Mubarak is on trial and dying under house arrest.

What is notable about the claims that the agreement is nothing more than a deal between two weak leaders is that they presuppose that it is perfectly understandable that Abbas would turn to Hamas in his moment of weakness in the hopes of strengthening his position.

From Haaretz’s perspective, Abbas is outsmarting Hamas by signing an agreement with Mashaal. According to this line of thinking, Abbas is riding Hamas to increase his power. Since Haaretz is convinced that Abbas is interested in peace, the paper’s editorialists are certain that once he gains strength he will renege on his agreement with Hamas. That is, Haaretz thinks the deal is terrific because Abbas is a liar.

The problem is that it isn’t terrific that Abbas is a liar. Because what that means is that he can’t be trusted to keep his word. Just as Haaretz seems to think he won’t keep his word with Hamas, so, Israel has every reason to believe that he won’t keep its word with it. And indeed, he has a proven track record of lying to Israel. In 1996, he signed an informal “peace deal” with then-deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin. The Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement was the basis of Ehud Barak’s peace offer to Yasser Arafat in 2000. When Arafat rejected Barak’s offer, Abbas denied he had ever signed the agreement with Beilin.

In 2008, Abbas negotiated with Ehud Olmert, giving the premier the impression that he was interested in peace. But after Olmert offered him unprecedented Israeli concessions, not only did Abbas reject the offer, he announced that he does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The most troubling aspect of Abbas’s decision to turn to Hamas in his moment of weakness is what it says about the relative balance of regional forces. Twenty years ago, when Arafat was weakened and isolated due to Israel’s defeat of the Palestinian uprising, and Arafat’s decision to support Saddam Hussein against the US in the Gulf War, the PLO chieftain decided that the only way to rebuild his strength was to gain recognition from the US. And 20 years ago, Arafat knew that the road to Washington went through Jerusalem. So he agreed to enter into peace talks with Israel.

It is a testament to the weakened state of the US in the region that in his hour of distress, Abbas opted to turn to Hamas. Not only does this signify that Washington is no longer considered a serious power broker. It indicates that for weakened leaders, peace with Israel is a far less attractive option than peace with jihadists.

Like Abbas, Arafat was a liar. The consequence of Arafat’s move towards Washington was a two-decade-long phony peace process that left Israel in a strategic position far weaker than that it enjoyed in 1992.

The consequences of Abbas’s move towards Hamas will in all likelihood be far worse.