I know I’ve been inactive lately (“lately” being very loosely applied here!), but I came across this and was so inspired and enthusiastic about sharing it that I had to find my way back to my blog if only to share this.

Apparently, the NY Times—in its warped sense of “balance”—figured it would balance its recent track record of 19 anti-Israel op-ed pieces (out of 20 Israel-themed pieces total) with a single op-ed solicited from Netanyahu.

That the NY Times isn’t actually looking for real balance, but simply a token piece, is evident by the fact that they rejected a pro-Israel piece recently submitted by majority leader of the House of Congress, Eric Cantor (R-VA) and the minority whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), in which they jointly oppose the Palestinian Authority’s recent unilateral statehood bid.

Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s senior advisor, had this beautiful response to the NY Times:

Dear Sasha,

I received your email requesting that Prime Minister Netanyahu submit an op-ed to the New York Times. Unfortunately, we must respectfully decline.

On matters relating to Israel, the op-ed page of the “paper of record” has failed to heed the late Senator Moynihan’s admonition that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that no one is entitled to their own facts.

A case in point was your decision last May to publish the following bit of historical revision by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas:

It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.

This paragraph effectively turns on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.

The opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They consistently distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole. Worse, one columnist even stooped to suggesting that the strong expressions of support for Prime Minister Netanyahu during his speech this year to Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” rather than a reflection of the broad support for Israel among the American people.

Yet instead of trying to balance these views with a different opinion, it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel.

Even so, the recent piece on “Pinkwashing,” in which Israel is vilified for having the temerity to champion its record on gay-rights, set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.

Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.”

The only “positive” piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous charge of Apartheid.

Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his position. According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.

Your refusal to publish “positive” pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of supply. It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives jointly submitted an op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama administration for direct negotiations without preconditions. In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut.

So with all due respect to your prestigious paper, you will forgive us for declining your offer. We wouldn’t want to be seen as “Bibiwashing” the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Sincerely,

Ron Dermer
Senior advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu

Omar Al-Ghoul, one of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s advisors, had the audacity to say this publicly regarding the Hamas attack on a school bus that left one young boy brain dead:

The [school] bus wasn’t that badly damaged, but Israel wants to use the attack on the bus as an excuse for its latest war crime against our people

This disgusting, miserable excuse for a human being should have his tongue cut out, the stump cauterized, and then be told: “Aw, c’mon, you didn’t lose that much blood. Don’t use this as an excuse to complain.”

The Palestinians have long been known to say one thing to English-speaking, Western reporters and to say something else entirely to the Arab media, to wit, publicly condemning terrorism in English and through statements to the public while inciting terrorism in Arabic and through actions within the confines of their villages.

It has never been more glaring, though, than in recent weeks, where the juxtaposition of the current  massacre of the Fogel family and the Palestinian officials’ recent public English statements stands out glaringly against the backdrop of their recent actions glorifying and inciting terrorism.

Noah Pollak explained this beautifully on Commentary’s web site two days ago:

Palestinian officials such as Mahmoud Abbas have put on a convincing show of disgust over the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar. Today Abbas said that the attack was a “despicable act” that was “inhuman and immoral.” But are these genuinely felt statements and accurate representations of Palestinian rejection of terrorism, or are they cynical attempts at relieving temporary political and media pressure?

We know that Abbas and the PA are not credible — and that their supporters in various governments and in the Western media are giving them a free pass — because of how they treat terrorism when it is not on the front pages of newspapers. The Israeli government is trying to get that message across by releasing an “incitement index,” a compilation of recent official Palestinian celebrations of terrorism.

From the incitement index, we learn that only a few days ago, one of Mahmoud Abbas’s senior advisers called for the naming of a square in an Arab town in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, a leader of the Coastal Road Massacre in 1978, in which close to 40 Israeli civilians were burned alive in a hijacked bus; a few days before that, the PA’s official newspaper announced that a youth club in Ramallah would hold a soccer tournament in honor of Wafa Idris, a Fatah suicide bomber who used a Palestinian ambulance to enter Israel; and a few days before that, official PA television again celebrated Dalal Mughrabi as part of a “Women as Exemplars” program (over the summer, a number of children’s summer camps were also named after her); and a few days before that, the governor of Jenin awarded $2,000 to the family of a Fatah suicide bomber.

That is all merely in the past two months. The list goes on at nauseating length, documenting the incontrovertible fact that the Palestinian Authority is very much still in the terrorism game — and, it must be added, all while funded by the United States and European governments. The incitement index raises troubling questions: Isn’t it time for Congress to hold hearings on the use of U.S. funds by the Palestinian Authority to promote terrorism?

It is also long past time that U.S. officials asked an even more important question of their Palestinian counterparts: Why do you denounce terrorism that happened a few days ago, but celebrate terrorism that happened a few years ago? Does the passage of time transform murder from a “despicable act,” as Abbas said today, into a cause for celebration? It is clear once again that Mahmoud Abbas and the PA are simply playing their old game — criticizing terrorism in English while glorifying it in Arabic. Israel cannot make peace with people who do that.

 

In light of the recent shark attack in Egypt, which Egypt is bizarrely trying to pin on Israel, Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian journalist, points out the absurdly boundless paranoia that grips the Palestinians and extends to Israel’s other neighbors, like Egypt.

Reading some of these allegations, you can’t help but wonder why the Arabs are still trying to fight the Jews when they apparently believe that they are superhuman and possess such incredible powers!

This piece would be hilarious if these rabid idiots weren’t real people in positions of real power:

It seems that even the animals have now turned against Arabs.

The Western-funded Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have been using animals in its campaign against Israel. About two years ago, Mahmoud Abbas’s official news agency, Wafa, reported that Israel had released poison-resistant rats to drive Arab residents of Jerusalem out of their homes.

The report said that “Rats have become an Israeli weapon to displace and expel Arab residents of the occupied Old City of Jerusalem. Settlers flood the Old City of Jerusalem with rats.”

It is not clear how these rats were taught to stay away from Jews, who also happen to live in the Old City.

Such allegations reflect a sick mindset and are part of a long-standing tradition of blaming Israel and Jews for almost everything that goes wrong in Arab countries and the rest of the world.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to demonize Jews and de-legitimize Israel. This is the kind of incitement that prompts radical Muslims to wear explosive belts and set out on suicide missions against Jews.

To Western audiences, such charges may sound ridiculous and comical. But as far as many Arabs are concerned, the charges, which do not come as a surprise, are not funny.

In fact, the Arab masses have become accustomed to hearing such idiotic allegations from their governments and leaders, especially when they are directed against Israel and Jews. What is worrying that these rumors often find their way to mainstream thinking in the Arab world.

After the rats and wild boars — which the Palestinians also claimed were used by Israel to drive them out of their homes and lands — now the sharks have been recruited to destroy Egypt’s tourism industry.

Egyptian authorities say they do not rule out the possibility that Mossad was behind a recent shark attack that killed a tourist in the Red Sea resort of Sharm a-Sheikh.

According to South Sinai Governor Mohammed Abdel Fadi Shousha, “What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs to confirm.”

This was not the first time that Egyptians have made such stupid and dangerous charges. The Egyptians have already blamed Israel for spreading AIDS and other diseases in the Arab world. Moreover, they had accused Israel of flooding Egyptian markets with chewing gum that arouses women sexually with the intention of corrupting them morally.

The Palestinian Authority has also repeatedly accused Israel of using wild boars to destroy Arab crops in the West Bank and drive farmers out of their lands.

In light of these allegations, it remains to be seen whether Arabs and Muslims will now declare jihad on sharks, rats and pigs.

Emboldened by the world’s liberals’ brainless habit of swallowing whole every cockamamie lie concocted by the Palestinians even as they are often brazenly caught in the act (e.g., staging fake funerals), the Palestinian Authority has really upped the ante now with the mother of all lies: that the Western Wall Was ‘not Jewish’ until the 16th century!

Arutz 7 reports:

The Palestinian Authority’s rewriting of the Bible has reached a new peak – or low – with a “scientific study” claiming that Jews did not begin to claim a connection to the Western Wall (Kotel) until 500 years ago.

The Western Wall, also known in pre-State times as the “Wailing Wall,” is the outer wall of the Second Temple compound, the only remaining structure from the compound,  and has been a symbol of the deepest connection between most of the Jewish world, both religious and secular, and Judaism for two  thousand years following the destruction of the Second Temple on the 9th of the Jewish month of Av  in 70 C.E. From that date until the present, Jews came to mourn at the Wall, including the Spanish Jewish poet and philosopher Yehudah Halevi who is believed to have been killed while praying there in 1141.

However, “Jews did not worship at the Wailing Wall at any time until the Balfour Declaration of 1917,” according to a report on the “study” posted by the PA Undersecretary of the Ministry of Information D. Mutawakkil Taha.

Writing on the official PA website, he added that the report quotes the “Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1917” that “the Western Wall became part of the Jewish religious tradition around the year 1520, as a result of Jewish immigration from Spain, after the Ottoman conquest the year 1517… This was not part of the wall of the so-called Jewish Temple.”

Jews do not claim the Wall is part of the Temple building, but of the compound surrounding it..

The Ministry of Information also stated that a basis for the study’s denial of an ancient Jewish connection to the Western Wall is a Reform Judaism leader’s comment that “there is no sanctity to the Western Wall in Judaism.”

…

The Temple Mount site itself is the holiest site in Judaism, but the Arab world the past several years has conducted a campaign the past several years to deny Biblical accounts of the Jewish First and Second Temples.

The campaign also has included rewriting interpretations of the Bible, claiming that the “Binding of Isaac” actually was the “binding of Ishmael,” the forefather Abraham’s first son by the maidservant of his wife Sarah, who later gave birth to Isaac.

Muslim clerics, despite protests by Israeli archaeologists, also have removedtons of debris from the Temple Mount area as part of an effort to eliminate any discoveries of remnants of the First and Second Temples.

With all the recent chatter about the possibility of the Palestinian Authority declaring a Palestinian state independently of any negotiations with Israel, Dan Izenberg (at times referencing Dore Gold) has written a clear, concise analysis in the Jerusalem Post outlining exactly why the PA cannot do so by current conventions.

He points out that although there is nothing “illegal” about it, most conventional countries today still follow the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, the conditions of which preclude the PA from declaring a state that would be recognizable by conventional countries.

Also, even though most countries today have a bizarre double standard in which they act as though the Palestinians do not have the same moral standards and obligations that other people must follow, Izenberg points out that even still, this is one situation in which they would think twice if only because of the precedents it would set for countries on the “other side” of their double standard, like Chechnya and Tibet.

He writes:

According to the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which is now part of customary law and therefore binding on all countries, a state must possess a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and a capacity to enter into relationships with other states.

Furthermore, the convention states that “the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by other states.”

Thus, there is nothing in international law to prevent the Palestinian Authority from unilaterally declaring itself an independent state.

The question is whether other states will recognize it as such. In theory, states will only recognize a Palestinian state if it fulfills the criteria set down in the Montevideo Convention.

According to Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and current head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, states will, at least in theory, have difficulty recognizing a Palestinian state because it does not meet key criteria of the convention.

For example, the Palestinians themselves are in disagreement over what the territory of Palestine should be.

Palestinian leaders have mentioned many possibilities, including the 1947 partition plan dividing the Land of Israel into a Jewish and an Arab state, the 1949 armistice lines at the end of the War of Independence, and others.

Secondly, the PA does not effectively govern many of the Palestinian parts of the West Bank because according to the Oslo Accords, it shares many responsibilities with Israel. Furthermore, it has no control over Gaza.

Another problem is that according to the Oslo Accords, an international agreement that is still binding, the Palestinian Authority is prohibited from conducting its own foreign policy.

Be that as it may, the more than 200 sovereign states of the world will largely decide whether or not to recognize a Palestinian state on the basis of their individual national interests and ideological outlook.

Israel will not be able to do much, if anything, to prevent other states from recognizing a Palestinian state.

Gold told The Jerusalem Post that the Palestinians have another option, at least in theory. The Security Council is the UN organ that admits states to the organization. The council could pass a resolution declaring that a Palestinian state exists and that member states of the UN should recognize it on a bilateral basis.

The chances of this happening, however, are questionable, since each of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the US, Britain, France, Russia and China, have veto power over all resolutions presented to the body.

Russia and China might be concerned with the precedent the Palestinian move would have for Chechnya or Tibet.

For that reason, neither recognized Kosovo in 2008.

The resolutions of the UN General Assembly, a body that is overwhelmingly friendly to the Palestinian Authority, are nonbinding and have less impact. However, such a move might prepare the groundwork for the presentation of a similar resolution in the Security Council.

According to Gold, the biggest problem facing the PA in unilaterally declaring an independent state is the commitment it made in the 1995 Interim Agreement, Article 31, Paragraph 7, which says, “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.

Hillel Fendel writes on Arutz 7 about the media’s surreptitious attempts to constantly play down the Palestinians’ hard-line positions, and points out the latest “trick”, as attempted by Associated Press’s Amy Tiebel.

Tiebel addresses the stalemate involving the hundreds of thousands of Jews that would potentially live in territories that the Palestinians are trying to control, by saying, “Perhaps there’s another option… Perhaps some Jews can live in a future Palestine, even if only in small numbers, the way Arabs live in Israel.”

This idea, Tiebel says, would “absolve the Palestinians of an uncomfortable charge sometimes leveled at them using a Nazi term—that they want a state that is ‘judenrein,’ or ‘free of Jews.’”

Yup, it sure would. Such a lovely kumbaya idea—if only the Palestinians would ever actually consider mirroring Israel’s open policies, which they clearly are not. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas has said numerous times that he “will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.” And, as Fendel points out, he even said he would not allow Jewish soldiers to be part of an international force stationed in PA-controlled territory either.

So, one can only wonder how Tiebel dreams up her utopian solutions when the facts on the ground clearly lend zero support to those ideas. Plus, it’s hard not to notice how much of an effort she and the Associated Press are making to mask the double-standard that exists—where Israel is expected to accommodate Arab citizens, but the Palestinian leadership apparently goes unquestioned about their clear Judenrein intentions.

Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief of the liberal magazine, The New Republic, has written a piece on his magazine’s site absolutely skewering Obama for his arrogance, his foreign policy naiveté and incompetence, and—specifically—his royal screwup of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation situation.

He writes [emphasis mine]:

…in a way, the person who has most defined the recent history of the conflict is President Obama whose ignorance of the real issues is matched only by his arrogance about the wisdom of his views. I gather that this arrogance extends to other matters. But there is no issue—certainly in foreign policy—about which his passion is stronger, whether his passion was shaped by Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, or not. Alas, passion mixed with only a glimmer of learning is toxic when it is expressed with power and control.

The president’s haughtiness on this congeries of issues seems to know no limits. A New York Times article, “Obama Tries to Calm Tensions In Call for Religious Tolerance,” by Helene Cooper on September 11 indicates that “relations between the United States and the Muslim world (are) perhaps at their most frayed since the invasion of Iraq seven and a half years ago.” Isn’t it ironic, then, that—if the assertion is correct—its essence should have come about nearly half-way into Obama’s term and after he had so indulged Islamic sensibilities in both the religious and political spheres. Still, Ms. Cooper paraphrases the president as criticizing the “continued vilification of Islam in the United States.” Does he really believe that he is without sway on these matters? If he does wouldn’t it be better if he could just keep quiet?

But, of course, he doesn’t think he is without sway. So the president has spoken of his Christian faith on several occasions—in fact, only the day-before-yesterday, answering a woman’s question in an Albuquerque backyard. If he were a Republican liberals would have gotten the willies: what’s all this Christian stuff? Yet a dopey 20% of this slightly dopey nation believes that the president is a Muslim. Oy, vey!

Why? Because he feigned knowledge of Islam that he probably didn’t have.

And he took a clear Palestinian view of their conflict with the Jewish state, Israel.

Indeed, it was only in what I guess was desperation that he for the first time admitted (in his speech at the United Nations) that the land the Romans called Palestine was actually “the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” This admission was very, very late in coming, and it certainly was not something that Khalidi taught his innocent pupil. Perhaps it was a sop to the Israelis to get them to continue the ten-month construction moratorium on the West Bank. This moratorium, which was established at Obama’s insistence, had been in effect for more than nine months without the Palestinians negotiating at all. The Israelis hadn’t even gotten one session when they sat down across a table with the Palestinians. (Not sitting down with the Jews is an old Arab habit, going back to the Paris peace conference which opened on January 19, 1919 and continuing on and on until only recent times. But then you had two presidents who understood the issues: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.)

The currency for verbal intercourse was now that the Israelis stop construction in the territories. But whose idea was this? The fact is that Obama made it the center of his peace strategy from the beginning. This put Israel in a bind. But, worst of all, it put the Palestinians in a much greater bind. They had no room to maneuver. If the president of the United States insists that new building not be done even in settlements that every one knows will remain with Israel how can the Palestinians palaver in any other circumstance? The Palestinians are trapped in Obama’s truculence. The president also urged the Palestinian Authority to consult with the Arab League about its conundrum. This is the most concrete evidence that Obama knows squat about the region. The Arab League always takes a hard-line. And that is what it will do this week. In fact, as Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post report, the League is planning to bring the matter before the Security Council.

George Mitchell has already landed on the troubled turf. And then the desperate Baroness Ashton of Upholland arrived, also expecting to see Netanyahu and Abbas. Before flying she had wasted the time of Hillary Clinton with whom she held a bullshit press conference. Of course, she also demands an extension of the moratorium. I’d like one, too. But I don’t believe it will do anything but prove once more the false peace bona fides of the Palestinians.

Sol Stern wrote a great piece highlighting the hypocrisy of the Palestinians when it comes to hurling accusations of “apartheid”. He casts a spotlight onto a fact of Palestinian society that most of the media choose to conveniently ignore: that the Palestinian refugee camps are clearly an unnecessary societal extreme and mostly only exists today because of the manipulation and oppression of the Palestinian Authority themselves, who are forcing the “refugees” to maintain that status for bargaining purposes, and for purposes of embarrassing—and ultimately “de-Judaizng”—Israel.

Despite potential opportunities for some of those “refugees” to raise themselves out of the refugee camps and to succeed in life, the PA maintains a heavy boot on their necks by denying them basic rights, like the right to vote, the right to build homes (how ironic, given their recent whining about Israeli construction), the right to education, etc. Instead, they are literally forced to live in semi-squalor, receive infinite aid from the United Nations (and, consequently, us in the United States) in the form of food, supplies, education, etc. And, amazingly enough, they are then told (and taught in those same UN-run schools from a young age), that it is Israel who is persecuting them.

Sol Stern argues that it’s time to cast the spotlight on this clear isolation within Palestinian society of these “refugees”. He writes:

…it is not the absence of peace that keeps Palestinians “waiting” in refugee camps. Rather, most Arab leaders since 1948, including the current Palestinian leadership itself, insist that the refugees—originally numbering between 500,000 and 750,000 but now swollen through natural increase to over four million—must remain in those camps until allowed to return en masse to Israel. This insistence in turn makes it impossible to achieve any resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, let alone a “new beginning” in the Middle East.

A few years ago I briefly visited the Balata refugee camp with its 20,000 residents. The camp is inside the West Bank city of Nablus—that is, within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It is where many of the Arabs of Jaffa settled when they fled the armed conflict that flared up immediately after the November 1947 UN partition resolution dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Most of Balata’s current residents are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original refugees. Thus, a new baby born in Balata today is still designated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as a refugee dislocated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and hence entitled to substantial material benefits for life, or at least until the conflict is settled. That infant will grow up and attend a segregated school run by UNRWA. In UN schools and cultural clubs financed by American tax dollars, Balata’s children, like the children in similar camps in Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, are nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors’ homes by the Mediterranean Sea.

While awaiting redemption, Balata’s Palestinian residents are prohibited, by the Palestinian Authority, from building homes outside the camp’s official boundaries. They do not vote on municipal issues and receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. As part of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s “economic renaissance” and state-building project, a brand new Palestinian city named Rawabi is planned for the West Bank near Bethlehem. But there will be no room at the inn for the Balata refugees. Sixty years after the first Arab-Israeli war, Balata might accurately be defined as a UN-administered, quasi-apartheid, welfare ghetto.

…if Olmert’s offer had ever become the basis of serious negotiations, Abbas would have had to admit to the residents of Balata and the other refugee camps on the West Bank that their leaders had lied to them for 60 years and that they were not returning to Jaffa. Among those leaders was Abbas himself, who in his 2005 campaign for the PA presidency declared repeatedly that he would never bargain away the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

Today, two years later, face-to-face meetings, brokered by the Obama administration, are again being held between Abbas and an Israeli prime minister. But just like the Abbas-Olmert meetings, the current talks will go nowhere until Washington recognizes that the official Palestinian stance on the refugees presents a far more serious obstacle to Middle East peace than the issue of construction within Jewish West Bank settlements. The latter is no more than a complication, while Palestinian insistence on the right of return is a deal breaker.

Why not, at long last, break up the awful refugee camps and encourage their residents to integrate themselves into West Bank civil society? The rationale for doing so is not merely political expediency. There is an overwhelming human-rights imperative to deal with the issue now. For the past decade, an array of peace and human-rights groups has been protesting Israel’s “brutal” West Bank occupation and the military checkpoints restricting the movement of innocent Palestinians. Now, many of the checkpoints have been closed, and Palestinians are building their economy and policing their own cities. In these circumstances, where are the human-rights advocates demanding that the Palestinian refugees be freed from their crowded camps, allowed to build their own homes anywhere on the West Bank, and permitted to send their children to regular Palestinian schools?  Why aren’t peace demonstrators marshaling outside the Balata refugee camp with signs saying, “Mr. Abbas, tear down this wall”?

Somehow one doubts that the Palestine Human Rights Campaign or other like-minded groups will undertake such protests. But what does that say about their bona fides as advocates of peace? Does it not powerfully suggest that for them, as for Arab leaders throughout the Middle East, the welfare of suffering Palestinians has been of far lesser import than the demonization, if not the weakening and destruction, of the state of Israel?

In the last 15 years, your tax dollars has pumped $2.4 billion to the Palestinians for programs that supposedly “reduce poverty, improve health and education, create jobs and advance democracy.”  This is all done through a program called “USAID”.

Of course there is the obvious fact that there has been zero improvement in terms of health, education, jobs, and democracy, while the Palestinian Authority took that $2.4 billion dollars and funneled it to weapons, terror training, and—of course—the personal bank accounts of the corrupt PA leaders.

But, besides those lovely expenditures, we can now include hate indoctrination of children in the list of things our tax dollars have been funding. Yup, teaching children about the joys of martyrdom, the virgins waiting for them, and the “evils” of the enemy, Israel.

Arutz Sheva provides this exposé:

The massive USAID program for the Palestinian Authority helps build schools where children learn incitement and that the State of Israel does not exist, investigative journalist David Bedein revealed to Arutz Sheva.

“This is a catastrophe,” he said. “The government of the United States prohibits Palestinian Authority incitement against Israel while it builds the infrastructure for continuing the incitement.”

He said that a USAID official told him that the agency does not examine the PA curriculum and does not check to see if any of the assistance ends up in the hands of terrorists.” Bedein asserted, “They teach children about ‘martyrdom’, praise violent resistance and teach that the entire State of Israel does not exist.”

The USAID program has pumped $2.4 billion into the Palestinian Authority since 1994 for what it says are programs that “reduce poverty, improve health and education, create jobs and advance democracy.” USAID says it plans to invest another $153 million in 2010 for the development of PA infrastructure in Judea and Samaria.

Congressmembers visiting Israel this past summer were surprised to hear from Bedein about continuing incitement in PA textbooks, despite its specific prohibition in the American Roadmap plan.

As far back as six years ago, Bedein reported that the U.S. government funded an Arab lobby group in Jerusalem that “trains media professionals in the art of transforming the image of the Arab-Israeli struggle into an Arab David against an Israeli Goliath.”

During a press conference that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had in London with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he was asked the following question and gave what in my opinion was a strong, intelligent response.

QUESTION: Mr Netanyahu, will you continue while you talk to build homes for Jews in those parts of Jerusalem that Israel captured in 1967?

NETANYAHU: I have made it clear in my conversation with President Obama in Washington and since that Jerusalem is the sovereign capital of Israel.  We accept no limitations on our sovereignty.  This is very clear.  To put a fine point on it, I say Jerusalem is not a settlement.  The settlement issue is outstanding and has to be one of the issues resolved in the negotiations, alongside Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state and effective demilitarization arrangements for any future peace agreement.  But our position is that Jerusalem is the united capital of the Jewish people.  It has only been around for 3,500 years.  We recognise that there are obviously Arab residents in Jerusalem, and they enjoy all the equal rights and all the equal benefits of the Jewish residents.  We do not draw a difference.

(Incidentally, he shortly thereafter gave the following amendment: “I need to amend my response, Jeremy.  We have not been around in Jerusalem for 3,500 years; we have been around there only 3,000 years, so pretty long, I would say.”)

He was also very strong on discussing Israel’s proven commitment to the peace process and the Palestinians lack of any commitment so far, which I think was also a good, necessarily forceful agenda item:

NETANYAHU: …we’re working hard to advance a peace process that will lead to an actual peace result and we hope to move forward in the weeks and months ahead.

We’re not waiting.  We have already moved: my government has removed, to be precise, 147 checkpoints and roadblocks.  The 14 remaining checkpoints, 12 of them are manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to facilitate movement.  I have extended the time of passage on the Allenby Bridge on the Jordan River in order to facilitate movement in and out of the Palestinian territories.  I chair a ministerial committee that seeks to remove and has removed roadblocks to economic activity in the West Bank.  We’ve moved on the ground.

I’ve also moved not merely in deed but in word: I have spoken about the need to achieve this balance of a demilitarized Palestinian state next to a Jewish state and I think that this has resonated far and wide.

It wasn’t easy to do, but this is what we have done in the short period of time, the four months that we’re in office, so we have moved.  We expect similar movement from the Palestinian Authority and certainly based on what we’ve seen in the recent Fatah conference there has not been that movement; that’s an understatement.  But there has to be that movement.  There has to be not merely a partner on the other side, there has to be a courageous partner, because I think we’ve shown a certain amount of fortitude and leadership and that’s what’s required from the Palestinian side.  They have to say unequivocally ‘it’s over.  We are going to make a real peace.  It’ll be a final peace.  It will be a peace that will end all claims to further conflict.  It’ll be a peace that will resolve the Palestinian refugee issue once and for all and just as Jews can come to Israel, Palestinians can come to the Palestinian state.’  But not in Israel, because there has to be a Jewish state and if we’re asked to recognise a Palestinian state as the nation state of the Palestinian people, it is absolutely essential that the Palestinian leadership says to the Palestinian people ‘you will have to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.’  Recognition is the pivot of peace.  The absence of such clear and forthright expressions by the Palestinian leadership of such recognition has been what has been holding peace up and this is what the people of Israel and I think all fair minded people in the world expect.

So, we have moved forward.  We intend to move forward, but we expect the Palestinian partners to be courageous partners for peace that move forward.

The full transcript can be read here.

You almost never hear of Mahmoud Abbas without hearing the adjective “moderate”, and that adjective has also been used to describe his party/organization, Fatah. These are the people with whom the world is expecting peace talks to succeed. These are the people with whom world leaders are pressuring Israel to negotiate peace. So, let’s see more about them. (Thanks to journalist Tom Gross for providing some excellent information on this.)

First, here is a lovely video provided by Palestinian Media Watch, taken at their conference in Bethlehem this month, which was attended by hundreds of Fatah officials from different Arab countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In this video, they are applauding Khaled Abu Asba, a terrorist who took part in a terrorist attack several decades ago in which a commuter bus was hijacked and 37 civilians were killed, including 12 children. Watch as PA Prime Minister Abu Ala welcomes Abu Asba and hails him as a hero:

Also at the conference, were many leaflets passed out among its delegates, one of them headlined, “Until the Zionist Entity is Wiped Out”.

Also, among its resolutions, the Fatah assembly approved a political platform emphasizing the Palestinians’ right “to resist occupation in all forms including armed struggle”, i.e., suicide bombings. A report by Reuters added that President Abbas personally insisted on this.

Another resolution explicitly said Fatah would oppose recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

Yet another resolution adopted was one in which the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state is non-negotiable and that no Palestinian leader is permitted cross that line. Tom Gross elaborates:

The conference also adopted a position paper which states that the Palestinian national enterprise will not reach fruition until all of Jerusalem, including the outlying villages, comes under Palestinian sovereignty.

“Fatah will continue to sacrifice victims until Jerusalem will be in Palestinian hands, clean of [Jews],” the paper states.

The paper does not make a distinction between the eastern and western halves of Israel’s capital, nor does it distinguish between the territories within the Israeli side of the Green Line and the areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

PULLQUOTE:

“It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.”

The conference also endorsed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as Fatah’s official armed wing, contrary to their repeated promises under various agreements that the Fatah leadership has signed with Israel and the U.S. to dismantle the group. In an interview, Kifah Radaydeh, an Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades activist, said the PA would resume violence against Israel when Fatah is “capable,” and “according to what seems right… It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.”

Tom Gross writes:

Among the dozens of deadly terror attacks carried out in recent years by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians, including many children, are:

The Yeshivat Beit Yisrael massacre (which killed 10 Israelis), the King George Street bombing in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem supermarket bombing in Kiryat Yovel, the Allenby Street coffee shop bombing in Tel Aviv (see my Wall Street Journal article for more on this), the Ben Yehuda Market bombing in Jerusalem, the Petah Tikva shopping mall massacre, the French Hill Junction massacre, the Tel Aviv central bus station massacre (in which several African and Filipino migrants were among the 23 killed), the Kfar Sava train station bombing, the Mike’s Place suicide bombing in Tel Aviv (carried out jointly with British terrorists of Pakistani origin), the Rehavia Jerusalem bus massacre, the Liberty Bell Garden bombing, the Ashdod Port massacre, the Tel Aviv sea promenade bombing, the Beersheba Central Bus Station bombing, the Kdumim bombing, the Tel Aviv Old Central Bus Station bombing, the Eilat bakery bombing, and last year’s Dimona suicide bombing.

Are Fatah really “moderates” as many international news organizations and U.S. State Department officials claim?

Then, there is all the corruption in Fatah. Fatah, having learned well from Yasser Arafat, the Two-Faced (both of them hideous) Crook, is rife with corruption. Tom Gross writes:

The second day of the Fatah conference was marked by a stormy debate on the financial status of the organization. Delegates said they were alarmed to find that there were no financial reports prepared by party leaders. Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had to leave meetings he was holding on the sidelines of the main assembly to quell quarrels between the delegates and the party’s central committee.

Some members accuse Abbas of protecting members of the central committee who have been accused of corruption, fraud and mismanagement. The Palestinians have received more foreign aid per capita than any other people in the world. Billions of dollars of European and American taxpayers’ money have been siphoned off to Swiss banks by Fatah leaders over the years.

Even Nabil Amr, the Palestinian ambassador to Egypt, had this to say last month: “Fatah is full of thieves, spies and corrupt people, enough to destroy any country.”

And, finally, there are the accusations and conspiracy theories which fly right and left among them, all the way up to the highest levels of the Fatah leadership. Tom Gross tells of one such wild account:

Fatah’s veteran General Secretary, Farouk Qaddoumi, has accused PA President Mahmoud Abbas and former PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan of being accomplices in the “assassination” of Yasser Arafat.

In response, Fatah condemned Qaddoumi as “deranged” and “hysterical” and vowed to expel him from the organization. Qaddoumi is not attending the conference and has not been nominated for a place on the Central Committee or the Fatah Revolutionary Council.

The committee said that Qaddoumi was a man suffering from a “sick mind” and was renowned for his “fabrications” and “hallucinations.”

Qaddoumi, who is refusing to attend the Fatah conference, made his remarks at a news conference in the Jordanian capital of Amman shortly before the Fatah conference began. He said Abbas had worked in collusion with U.S. intelligence to assassinate Arafat.

Lashing out at Abbas, Qaddoumi accused him of stealing some of Arafat’s titles and of establishing an autocratic regime in the Palestinian territories.

“The man (Abbas) has fallen in love with titles used by President Arafat,” Qaddoumi said. “First he asked to be named overall commander of the Palestinian revolution and then the exiled president of Palestine.”

So, there you have it: just a small taste of the lunatics with whom Israel is supposed to make peace. And then people wonder why this peace is supposedly so elusive! Can you only imagine what kind of a country “Palestine” would be if it actually came into existence? Can you just imagine what the leadership would be like? Their policies? It’s not hard to imagine what a cesspool of hatred, infighting, terrorism, and corruption such a country would be.

Shelley Berkley, a six-term Democrat congresswoman from Las Vegas (five of those terms as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), was in Israel last week as part of a mammoth, 29-member Democratic congressional delegation brought to the country by the American Israel Education Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

As reported by the Jerusalem Post, she came out strong recently in support of Israel and in opposition to Obama’s ongoing policy of “getting tough” with Israel, putting the onus for peace on Israel, and other stupid policies.

This is not the first time she spoke out in support of Israel. A couple of months ago, she said:

“My concern is that we are applying pressure to the wrong party in this dispute… I don’t think it was particularly productive to publicly dress down our most reliable ally. I think it puts both countries, who are in fact very close friends, strategic partners and allies, in a bit of a bind. And I think the Palestinians and the Arabs are using this to create a division that might not necessarily be there: using Obama’s words against the Israelis and the US, and making it more difficult in some ways to move forward.”

And now, she had the following to say:

“I am quite disappointed in Abu Mazen, I always have been… I think he has it within his power to bring a peaceful resolution to this issue, to create a state for the Palestinian people, to move forward to a brighter future for Palestinian children.. and yet, year after year we seem to be stuck in the same situation, and I think he has done very little over the years in preparing his own people for peace.”

Referencing this week’s Fatah conference as an example, she asked:

“Are we still hurling accusations against the Israelis that they are somehow responsible for the death of Yasser Arafat? Isn’t that somewhat counterproductive to moving forward toward peace?”

The only thing I can argue with about her recent statements regarding all of this is the one where she said:

I don’t see this administration being stubborn in a way, or arrogant in a way, that would prevent it from taking a different tack if necessary.

In that respect, I think she’s being a bit too hopeful…

Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writes a great analysis of the United States’ role as an “honest broker” in the Middle East, especially with recent developments.

He discusses the history of the term “honest broker” and what it means, going back to the original “honest broker”, Otto von Bismarck, and discusses whether it applies to our position today. He intelligently refutes claims that America’s friendship with Israel detracts from the “honesty” in “honest brokering” and explains that just the opposite is true:

…it is not indifference or equidistance that makes America an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; if seeking these attributes, the parties would more likely turn once again to a disinterested but friendly country like Norway. Rather, America’s status rests upon the combination of impartiality with respect to the particulars of an agreement, strong relationships with and ability to provide assistance to both key parties to the dispute, and a unique diplomatic standing in the broader region. Thus we can dismiss two of the arguments often made in marshalling a case that America is not an honest broker — that it is too close to Israel on the one hand, or not close enough to Hamas on the other. Maintaining the trust and confidence of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are critical to successfully convening and concluding negotiations, as any agreement will require both to stake much on the good faith and reliability of the United States and its assurances.

Being an honest broker is not a zero-sum game. Strong American relations with one party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need not detract from relations with the others. Indeed, insofar as they seek a resolution to the conflict, a close American relationship with Israel benefits the Palestinians, and vice versa. This is not to say that a “tough” approach to one party or another is inconsistent with being an honest broker, simply that such an approach should be carefully aimed at making progress toward a resolution and calibrated to preserve future co-operation.

Singh ends the essay addressing the recent development of Obama’s administration coming down hard on Israel and their settlements’ natural growth, and how it affects America’s effectiveness at “honest brokering”:

In this respect, the Obama administration’s decision to take a stand on the issue of “natural growth” in settlements was tactically unsound. Securing the agreement of hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition to the sort of settlement freeze (near-comprehensive but with an exception for “natural growth”) that prevailed under Prime Ministers Sharon and Olmert would have been a significant accomplishment and served as a good basis for future progress. “Natural growth,” on the other hand, is a peripheral issue, with little relevance either to Palestinians’ quality of life or to the ultimate disposition of territory in the West Bank. As time has passed, the fracas over this issue has stalled the peace process and shifted its focus from Arab-Israeli to American-Israeli relations.

According to recent polling, the dispute has already taken a toll, having diminished Israelis’ confidence in the United States. That confidence — which former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently wrote was vital to Israel’s decision to pull settlers out of Gaza and engage in the Annapolis peace process — is a valuable asset indeed. Its diminution would not only put in question the United States’ effectiveness as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but would be a setback for America, Israel, Palestinian Authority, Arab leaders, and others who face common threats across the region and for whom American-Israel cooperation is of mutual benefit. The test now for President Obama is to manoeuvre out of the present crisis with that co-operation intact, and with the stage set for progress on the peace process, Iran, and the rest of America’s Middle East agenda.

Arutz Sheva reports that the Palestinian Authority (Israel’s supposed “partner for peace”) has plans to rename over 100 streets after convicted terrorists to commemorate their “heroic actions”. This is in addition to “hundreds of streets, schools, and other institutions under the control of the Palestinian Authority are already named after ‘martyrs’ – terrorists who were killed by the IDF when they attacked Israeli civilians.”

The fact that they could openly and publicly name streets after people who attempted to kill civilians is not just a disgusting black mark on the Palestinians, but a disgusting black mark on the United States and every other country who props up the Palestinian Authority as a legitimate partner for peace. That they have no reservations about making these things known indicates just how much leeway they take for granted with the Western world, knowing that they could do virtually anything and still get away with it.

As if to underscore this point of the world’s emboldening the Palestinians through their silence and acceptance of their terrorist actions, the Palestinian Media Watch reports on a recent Arabic-language interview that the PA’s Muhammad Dahlan had on PA TV, in which he specifically said regarding terrorism: “This is our right, a legal right. The international community affirms it for us.”

(Incidentally, he also reveals the not-exactly-shocking news that Arafat used to condemn terrorism for the Western media by day, while planning it by night: “Arafat would condemn [terror] operations by day, while at night he would do honorable things.”)

Shame on the United States for still propping up such a sick, twisted, evil “moderate government”!