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Mahmoud Abbas ridiculed for claiming that Jesus was a ‘Palestinian’

by Mojambo ( 130 Comments › )
Filed under Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Supremacism, Israel, Judaism, Palestinians at December 30th, 2013 - 12:00 pm

This is up there with their notion that the Temple was not  located where that hideous Mosque is, and that Noah,  Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus, and Moses were all Muslims.

by Raphael Ahren

Israeli officials reacted with bitter scorn to a Christmas message from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which he called Jesus a Palestinian and suggested Israel was to blame for the exodus of Christians from the Holy Land.

“He should have read the Gospel before uttering such offensive nonsense, but we will forgive him because he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told The Times of Israel on Monday. Abbas’s statement is an “outrageous rewriting of Christian history,” according to Palmor.

 Earlier on Monday, Abbas published a lengthy Christmas greeting, calling Jesus “a Palestinian messenger who would become a guiding light for millions around the world.” Although he expressed his commitment to the peace negotiations with Israel, he expressed harsh criticism of Israeli policies, including an accusation that Jerusalem is responsible for the plight of Christians in the Holy Land.

“We celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem under occupation,” Abbas wrote. “This Christmas Eve, our hearts and prayers will be with the millions who are being denied their right to worship in their homeland.” He called the security barrier an “annexation Wall, which is stealing [Palestinians’] land and dooming their future.”

These rather unfriendly statements are “not exactly in the spirit of Christmas,” Palmor, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said cynically. “Maybe he needs a hug from Santa?”

Abbas also mentioned Palestinians “trapped under siege” in Gaza, and “those who are prevented from worshiping in Bethlehem. Our hearts and prayers are with the people of Al Dbayeh Refugee Camp in Beirut, along with all of our Palestinian refugees — Christians and Muslims uprooted from their hometowns in 1948 and who, since that time, have suffered the vicissitudes of a forced exile.”

Abbas said more Palestinians will celebrate Christmas in Western cities than will do so in the city of Jesus’ birth. “To them we say that Bethlehem is their town and Palestine is their country. We will continue working tirelessly to give them the freedom to decide where to spend Christmas.”

An Israeli government official took offense particularly with the suggestion that Israel has caused Christians to leave the Holy Land. “The exodus of Christians from Bethlehem turned into a flood the moment the PA took control,” the official said.

But at least one Israeli official had some warm words for Abbas’s holiday message: MK Hanna Swaid (Hadash), an Arab Christian from the Galilee town of Eilaboun, backed up the message, if not the facts, of Abbas’s missive.

“What President Mahmoud Abbas said describes the real situation — Palestinians, including Christians, are celebrating Christmas and New Year’s Eve under Israeli occupation. That’s a fact,” he said.

Abbas’s Christmas message seemed to paper over the fact that Christians in the PA are only a fraction of the Muslims living in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Christians are not a minority here: they are an integral part of the Palestinian people,” Abbas wrote in his Christmas message. “Orthodox, Catholics, Armenians, Assyrians, Lutherans, Anglicans, Copts, Melkites, Protestants and others are all part of the rich mosaic of this free, sovereign, democratic and pluralistic Palestine we aspire to have.”

According to the CIA World Factbook, Christians make up 8 percent of the population in the West Bank, and 0.7% of Gaza.

Swaid, 58, acknowledged that in reality Christians are a minority among Palestinians, but noted that he appreciated Abbas’s comments nonetheless. “If the president of a country says so, he thinks and believes that to be the case,” Swaid said, adding that Abbas meant to emphasize that Christians are an “integral part” of Palestinian society.

[…….]

[…….]

Read the rest – Israel to Abbas: No, Jesus was not a Palestinian

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Posted in Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Supremacism, Israel, Judaism, Palestinians | 130 Comments »

Who are these people who still think that Israel is the root of Middle East problems?

by Mojambo ( 155 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Islam, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Sharia (Islamic Law), Syria at September 5th, 2013 - 4:00 pm

One of the more pernicious memes that the diplomatic community has adopted over the years is that Israel-Palestine is the key to Middle East peace and tranquility. The events of the past two years have given lie to that sacred belief. However with people such as our not very intelligent Secretary of State John Kerry wasting their time trying to broker a “peace” between the civilized (Israel) and the uncivilized “Palestine” the end result we see is the gas attacks in Damascus, which have absolutely nothing to do with “Palestine”. I am surprised that the usually reliably Israel hating “The Independent” allowed this column to be published.

by Dominic Lawson

Forget the massacre of thousands in Syria and Egypt, whether by chemical weapons or more conventional methods of mass slaughter. The Middle Eastern issue galvanising some of our musical mega-stars and their followers, even now, is the treatment by Israel of Palestinians. A fortnight ago the violinist Nigel Kennedy told the audience at a Proms concert that Israel should “get rid of apartheid” – his tendentious reference to the treatment of the Arab minority within that country.

Kennedy’s remarks were cheered by many in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, but the BBC cut them from its later television broadcast of the concert, allegedly following a complaint by Lady Deech, a former governor of the corporation. The London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign fizzed into action, declaring that “ suppressing free speech and political dissent is the norm for state broadcasters under dictatorships. It is worrying when we start to see this kind of suppression being practiced by our own state broadcaster.”

This remarkable suggestion that the BBC was acting as state censor on behalf of government (rather than merely demonstrating its own determination not to see its great music festival turned into a platform for contentious political slogans) is an example of how the state of Israel makes so many people lose all sense of perspective.

So it goes with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters who immediately issued a call to arms “to my colleagues in rock’n’roll” over the treatment given to “my brother Nigel Kennedy.” Waters denounced “one Baroness Deech (née Fraenkel), who disputed the fact that Israel is an apartheid state”. What’s with the “née Fraenkel”? Presumably this is the rock star’s way of letting us know that Deech is – aha! – a Jew. Enough said – although Waters did go on to say: “I have many very close Jewish friends”.

Perhaps some of those friends – whether or not they adhere to Jewish dietary laws – might be tiring of his latest porcine stunt, in which Pink Floyd’s pig balloon is imprinted with a Star of David before being “symbolically” shot down. With a delightful irony, this active boycotter of all things Israeli is now himself facing calls to be boycotted, from the admittedly small Jewish population of Dusseldorf, which German city is Waters’ next destination on his current tour.

You might dismiss this as completely irrelevant to the slaughter on the streets of Damascus – and in any rational sense it is – were it not for the fact that the Syrian Free Press, one of Bashar-Al Assad’s propaganda outlets, has been extolling Waters in recent weeks (when not too busy claiming that the murder of hundreds of children by Sarin nerve gas was actually organised by the CIA on behalf of Israel).

Given the longstanding iconography of anti-Semitism within the Middle East, it is perhaps not surprising that when regimes in the region feel threatened by their own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection on Israel or “the Jews”. When the wave of popular uprisings sometimes known as “the Arab Spring” reached Syria, Damascus’s envoy in London went on BBC’s Newsnight to tell a clearly startled Jeremy Paxman that “ the Israelis could be behind it…they could be behind any bad thing in the world.”

Actually, the Israeli government was most discomfited by the uprisings in the region, rather preferring the dictators it knew to the possibility of Islamist regimes in their place. It is Israeli citizens who are now stampeding for gas masks, not those of the US, in preparation for what might follow if President Obama does unleash part of America’s vast arsenal in the direction of sites believed to hold Assad’s chemical weapons.

It is true that Israel in 2007 sent eight fighter jets laden with 17 tons of high explosives to demolish the Dair Alzour site in Syria, which the International Atomic Energy Authority has since concluded was the base of a “gas cooled graphite moderated nuclear reactor not configured to produce electricity…built with the assistance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” […….]

[………..] In many cases, the origins of the problems go back to the death of the prophet Mohamed, and the split between the followers who believed his successor should be appointed under Arab tribal tradition –later known as the Sunni – and those who insisted his successor should be from his family, and nominated Mohamed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali – the group which became known as Shia muslims.

In certain Arab countries, power had been held for generations by the Sunni, even while a majority of the population might have been Shia. This was the case in Iraq, where a sectarian civil war was precipitated by the disastrously misconceived US invasion. The opposite is true of Syria, a majority Sunni country, yet ruled by Alawites, a branch of the Shia.  [………]

This tribal and sectarian dispute, which has the potential to become the Muslim equivalent of the Thirty Years War, has about as much to do with Israel as did the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. And the peoples involved care very little, if at all, about the fate of the Palestinians – certainly much less than do Nigel Kennedy and Roger Waters.

Yet some western governments still fall for the bizarre idea that if the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians were to be sorted, then this would help to solve all the other conflicts in the region. Thus the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared last week, following a meeting with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israeli-Palestinian issue is …perhaps the central issue of the region.”

[……..] But, in the midst of the conflagrations in Egypt and Syria, it does bring to mind the remark of the late French ambassador in London, Daniel Bernard, who in 2001 delivered himself of the view that “all the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”

[……..]

I think I made a similar point on this page over six years ago – but unfortunately this is the last of my columns for The Independent. To those readers who have enjoyed reading them as much as I did writing them, I’m sorry to desert you; to those who did not – you can calm down now.

Read the rest –  So who still thinks Israel is the root of Middle East problems?

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Islam, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, Sharia (Islamic Law), Syria | 155 Comments »

The bewildered presidency

by Mojambo ( 167 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians at August 20th, 2013 - 7:00 am

Obama is starting to see that his vaunted “charm” and”persuasiveness” does not really  work on totalitarians who can see right through him.

by Jonathan S. Tobin

There’s some soul searching going on in the Obama administration as it ponders how they got sidelined in Egypt as the situation there got out of control in a spiral of violence. As the New York Times details in a post-mortem of U.S. policy, the administration went all out to persuade the military that had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood to compromise and allow the Islamists to rejoin the government. Among other efforts to cajole them or to threaten aid cutoffs, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made 17 often-lengthy phone calls to Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi trying to get him to make nice with the Brotherhood. They even sent two Republican senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—to continue the pressure in person in Cairo. And they’re baffled as to why they were ignored as Sisi ordered police and troops to clear out the Brotherhood’s armed camps in Cairo this week.

The easy answer to their questions is that unlike Sisi and the military, President Obama and his foreign policy-team continue to fail to understand that the conflict in Egypt is a zero-sum game. The choice there is between the military and the Brotherhood and the transformation of a key Arab country into an Islamist stronghold. This failure to comprehend the nature of the conflict has led inevitably to paralysis. This spectacle of American impotence is worrisome no matter what you think the U.S. should do about Egypt. But it’s not unrelated to the administration’s other foreign-policy failures that are piling up in the Middle East. Having failed to act decisively to try to avoid a far bigger bloodbath in Syria, and content to waste years on futile diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear threat while devoting disproportionate effort on reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks that have little chance to succeed, it’s obvious that Egypt isn’t the only venue where Obama has demonstrated his cluelessness. [……]

In Egypt, Obama’s main problem is his lack of understanding of the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood poses to both the non-Islamist majority in that country as well as to the region. Having bought into the myth that the Brotherhood’s rise in the aftermath of the fall of the Mubarak regime was an expression of democratic sentiment, it refused to see that if it was allowed to take power it would quickly move to destroy any opposition. The U.S. pressured the military to let Mohamed Morsi take office and then continued to urge them to stand aside as he proceeded to demonstrate that the Brotherhood had little interest in democracy. Even as 14 million people took to the streets to demand that Morsi step down, the president continued to preach restraint and then stood by in puzzlement when the military realized that this was probably their last chance to save their country. Even now, the administration seems stuck in the same mythical “Arab Spring” mindset that is predicated on the idea that a totalitarian movement like the Brotherhood is compatible with liberal democracy. Since they don’t understand what led to the events of the last week, how can we expect the Obama team to put forward a coherent position on what happened and what may unfold in the days to come?

[……..]

Obama came into office thinking that he could charm the Iranians into giving up their nuclear ambitions and that American pressure on Israel could magically create peace with the Palestinians. If problems arose elsewhere in the Middle East, he thought they would be easily resolved with bad guys like Bashar Assad conveniently leaving the stage because President Obama said he “must go.” So as we now peruse the Middle East, we see an Iran that thinks it can go on fooling the West with a diplomatic process intended to stall talks until they can build a nuke while the United States invests precious time and energy on muscling Israel into making concessions to a Palestinian Authority that has no interest in ever signing a peace agreement. And Bashar Assad, with the help of his Iranian and Hezbollah allies, remains in power while winning a civil war that Obama could have spiked two years ago with a timely push.

While critics from both the left and right assail Obama’s indecision that–as I noted on Friday–protects neither American interests nor values in Egypt, this is yet another symptom of an administration that remains besotted with the same preconceptions that it brought to Washington in 2009. While he laments his lack of good choices and the fact that America’s ability to influence events is limited, it is the president’s refusal to face facts about the Brotherhood and some of his other blind spots that is most to blame for the fact that he has left American foreign policy hanging in the wind at a decisive moment in history.

Read the rest – Obama on Egypt; The clueless presidency

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Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians | 167 Comments »

A judenrein “Palestine”; and Turkey is not interested in a diplomatic reconciliation with Israel

by Mojambo ( 79 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Israel, Palestinians, Turkey at August 1st, 2013 - 7:00 am

The same people who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state, have no comments at all regarding the Palestinians  intention to not allow a single Jew to live in any future “Palestine” (and that includes Ha’aretz people). Thankfully I believe there never will be a “Palestine”.

by Herb Keinon

Thankfully the relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian talks has, so far, been fairly void of the overdramatic rhetoric about being on the brink of Abraham’s children sitting in peace and harmony under their respective vines and fig trees.

The closest we came to words about feeling the flutter from the wings of the peace dove was newly minted US special envoy Martin Indyk on Monday, quoting President Barack Obama during his March visit to Israel: “Peace is necessary, peace is just, peace is possible.”

But even that minimalist description was jarred a few hours after the Washington launch of the talks on Monday, and just before Israeli and Palestinian teams sat down for an iftar dinner, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas provided his vision of Israeli- Palestinian peace during a visit to Cairo.

“In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands,” Reuters quoted Abbas as saying in a briefing to mostly Egyptian journalists.

In other words, the state Abbas wants Israel to give him must be judenrein.

The irony of a man whose spokesmen accuse Israel of apartheid saying that his “vision” of his state is one in which no Israeli foot can trod is simply astounding.

[……..]

“The test of whether the Palestinians will live in peace alongside us is whether they will allow some of us to live among them,” a senior Israeli official said some three years ago. His comments came at a time when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was indicating that in any future agreement, not all Jews should have to leave the parts of Judea and Samaria that will come under Palestinian control, and that those who want to live in places that have deep religious and historical significance to the Jewish people should be allowed to do so.

Abbas’s words in Cairo do not exactly enhance a mood of reconciliation. And it is exactly that mood of reconciliation that needs to be pumped up right now, not deflated.

One can debate later whether it will be either wise or safe for a Jewish minority to live in a future Palestinian state, but to completely rule it out off the bat does not bespeak a lot of goodwill.  […….]

In May 1994, just after the signing of the Oslo Accords and just before Israel handed Gaza over to Palestinian administrative control, Yasser Arafat gave a speech in English at a mosque in Johannesburg.

During that speech Arafat called for a jihad over Jerusalem (though he said later he meant a “jihad for peace”) and hinted that the Oslo Accords were a tactical move that could later be discarded.

The Oslo advocates, though horrified by his words, explained that the Palestinian leader did not really mean it, that these words were meant for domestic Islamic consumption only, and that Israel should not overreact and throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Time proved that Arafat meant what he said, and that his head – even in those early, giddy Oslo days – was not exactly in the peace mode.

Efforts to whitewash his words were misguided.

Unlike Arafat, Abbas did not call for a jihad in his briefing to journalists in Cairo, nor did he talk about agreements with Israel as only tactical measures that could be jettisoned when real victory seemed possible.

But still, there is something jarring about his declaration that his vision for a state is not one based on tolerance and mutual respect but rather on the principle that no Israeli will be allowed to tread in “Palestine.” […….]

These words are even more galling considering that in the course of the negotiations Abbas will surely demand that Israel accept tens of thousands of descendants of Palestinian refugees, if not under the rubric of a “right of return” (which Israel will certainly reject), then certainly as a “humanitarian gesture.”

There is a substantial Arab minority in Israel. If there is to be peace, why is it a given that there can be no Jewish minority in “Palestine.”

Read the rest –  ‘Palestine’ without Jews

I guess that  Benjamin Netanyahu apology to Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Obama coaxed out of him is for naught -now there’s a shocker!

by Herb Keinon

Turkey is not interested in a diplomatic reconciliation with Israel, but rather in humiliating it and bringing it to its knees, Israeli officials said on Thursday.

The comments came after Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told the Turkish media that the reason for the deadlock in compensation talks with Israel over the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident was that Jerusalem was not willing to admit that the compensation payment was the result of a wrongful act.

Up until now the assumption was that the two sides were not yet normalizing ties because they could not agree on the size of the compensation package,  [……..]
But Arinc, leading the Turkish team in the three rounds of talks that have already been held, said earlier this week that money was not the issue.

“In our first meeting [the Israelis] showed no opposition to this. But in the second meeting, they intended to give an ex gratia payment [one made without the giver recognizing any liability or legal obligation] as a form of reparation because they fear compensation [as a result of their wrongful act] will set an example for other cases, which is not a concern to us,” the Turkish daily Hurriyet reported him as saying.

On March 22, just as US President Barack Obama was leaving Israel after his visit and at his urging, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and offered an apology for any operational errors that might have led to the death of nine Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara ship trying to break the blockade of Gaza in 2010.

[……]

“There are two problematic areas. The first one is that Israel should accept that it’s paying this money as a result of its wrongful act. Nothing less than this will be accepted. And second, we are waiting for them to realize our third condition of cooperating with Turkey is making life conditions easier for Palestinians. We are not talking about the amount of money as our first two conditions have not been met,” he added.

One Israeli official said that Arinc’s comments reveal that Ankara is not genuinely interested in settling the dispute over the Mavi Marmara with Israel, but rather the aim is to humiliate Jerusalem.

“All of a sudden he says the money is not the issue. Indeed, they want to bring us to our knees and read the text that they dictate to us.”

The official said that the formula for the apology was very carefully crafted, so as not to admit any Israeli legal culpability. Now, he said, this is no longer enough for the Turks. Regarding lifting the blockade on Gaza, Israel has made clear that it has no intention of doing so,  [……..]

One senior Israeli official, when asked several weeks ago about the Turks apparent adding on conditions before returning their ambassador to Israel, replied that “enough is enough,” implying that Israel did what it felt it had to do to try and improve the ties with Turkey, but would go no further.

One Israeli official said on Thursday that while there was US pressure in the past on Israel to make gestures to reconcile with Turkey, there are currently no such demands. Netanyahu did what the Americans expected him to do, the official said, and from their standpoint this whole episode should now be over.

Read the rest –  Israeli official: Turkey wants to humiliate Israel, not reconcile with it

 

 

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Israel, Palestinians, Turkey | 79 Comments »

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