Love of the Land: Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Elder of Ziyon
22 March '10

One of the more frustrating parts of watching the Middle East is when one sees that people who should have some basic knowledge, who present themselves as experts, and who urge actions based on their experience and expertise, are completely clueless.

Meet Catherine Ashton.

Lady Ashton is the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission. She visited Gaza last week, and, armed with the latest on-the-ground intelligence, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times describing exactly what needs to be done to make the Middle East a happy place again.

Here is her first paragraph:

It is the process of entering the Gaza Strip that strikes you most. At the Erez checkpoint you go into what looks like a modern airport terminal. Leaving it you move through a winding maze of gates and walls and emerge, like a time-traveler transported backwards, on a dirt track. This is where the industrial center of Gaza used to be, before the shelling just over a year ago. Now, people with donkeys and carts carry stones from the rubble.

Ashton is stating as fact that the heartless Israelis, for no discernible reason, reduced the Erez area to rubble during Operation Cast Lead and bombed the formerly prosperous industrial area to the stone age.

Love of the Land: Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Love of the Land: Should Jordan's King Get A Free Pass When He Slams Israel?

Should Jordan's King Get A Free Pass When He Slams Israel?

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
Weekly Commentary
18 March '10

Why should Jordan's King Abdullah II get a free pass when he slams Israel with criticism that grossly misrepresents the situation in Jerusalem?

"Jerusalem is a red line and the world should not be silent about Israel's attempts to get rid of Jerusalem's Arabs residents, Muslims or Christians," the king told visiting EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton this week, claiming that Israel seeks to "change Jerusalem's identity and threaten holy sites there."

King Abdullah knows damn well that this is baloney.

Israel isn't clearing out Arabs from Jerusalem. If anything, Arabs from the West Bank are trying to move into Jerusalem in the hopes that they will be able to remain in territory under Israeli control if and when a Palestinian state is formed.

Jordan knows that Israel doesn't threaten the holy sites of Islam or Christianity.

In point of fact, King Abdullah knows that crowd capacity of the Temple Mount for Moslem prayer was dramatically increased under Israeli rule with the huge expanded underground Marawani Mosque in Solomon's Stables.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Should Jordan's King Get A Free Pass When He Slams Israel?

Love of the Land: Israel's Right to the 'Disputed' Territories

Israel's Right to the 'Disputed' Territories

Danny Ayalon
Wall Street Journal
30 December 09

The recent statements by the European Union's new foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton criticizing Israel have once again brought international attention to Jerusalem and the settlements. However, little appears to be truly understood about Israel's rights to what are generally called the "occupied territories" but what really are "disputed territories."

That's because the land now known as the West Bank cannot be considered "occupied" in the legal sense of the word as it had not attained recognized sovereignty before Israel's conquest. Contrary to some beliefs there has never been a Palestinian state, and no other nation has ever established Jerusalem as its capital despite it being under Islamic control for hundreds of years.

The name "West Bank" was first used in 1950 by the Jordanians when they annexed the land to differentiate it from the rest of the country, which is on the east bank of the river Jordan. The boundaries of this territory were set only one year before during the armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan that ended the war that began in 1948 when five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish State. It was at Jordan's insistence that the 1949 armistice line became not a recognized international border but only a line separating armies. The Armistice Agreement specifically stated: "No provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims, and positions of either Party hereto in the peaceful settlement of the Palestine questions, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations." (Italics added.) This boundary became the famous "Green Line," so named because the military officials during the armistice talks used a green pen to draw the line on the map.

(Read full article)

Mr. Ayalon is the deputy foreign minister of Israel

Love of the Land: Israel's Right to the 'Disputed' Territories

Love of the Land: Europe's Israel Obsession

Europe's Israel Obsession

Too bad Ms. Ashton didn't visit the Jewish state before bashing it.

Wall Street Journal
22 December 09

Baroness Catherine Ashton of Upholland (the European Union's new chief diplomat in the likely case you don't know her) isn't exactly what one would call "experienced." Perhaps to shed her much-deserved reputation as a foreign-policy novice, she used her maiden speech in the European Parliament to fuel the Continent's No. 1 international-affairs obsession: trashing the Jewish state.

"We're deeply concerned about daily living conditions of people in Gaza," she told law makers last week. "Israel should reopen the crossings without delay."

It's rather odd, to say the least, that no sooner had Israel left Gaza in 2005, than the same people who so anxiously had called for Israel to "end the occupation" wanted it back in the picture. Even though Hamas returned Israel's peace gesture with relentless rocket attacks, Israel is nevertheless expected to establish some sort of free-trade zone with the Islamists and open its borders again to Palestinian suicide bombers.

Egypt, the Palestinians' Arab brother nation, meanwhile, can quietly build a steel wall—yes, steel—at its Gaza border without having to fear negative Western press coverage, let alone the Baroness's wrath. She has only Israel in her crosshairs, even though Jerusalem is actually still providing a lifeline to the Palestinians.

Despite all the misreporting about a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza as a result of Israel's blockade, the flow of aid support from Israel to the narrow strip is uninterrupted. In the week of Dec. 13 -Dec. 19 alone, 553 truckloads with 13,587 tons of merchandise reached Gaza from Israel, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.

The result is obvious. For an authentic look at life in Gaza, check out the photos of crowded markets filled with food, clothing and candy, published last month on the Web site of "Palestine Today," a Gaza newspaper, as first reported on these pages by Mideast analyst Tom Gross.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that the Baroness cannot summon insights into the Gaza situation. She cannot get the EU's own policy straight, either.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Europe's Israel Obsession

Love of the Land: Ahmadinejad and the four-letter word

Ahmadinejad and the four-letter word

Petra Marquart-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
20 December 09

"Ahmadinejad is, believe it or not, a very childlike man. [...] He giggles like a little boy. [...] there's an innocence about his eyes." That's how The New Yorker's photographer Platon described his impression of Iran's president after he photographed him and other world leaders last September at the UN. The portrait series is featured on the magazine's website, and you can click on each of the alphabetically arranged pictures and listen to the photographer's commentary.

Does it matter that the New Yorker's photographer wanted to capture the "innocence" he perceived in the eyes of a politician who suppressed protests against his disputed re-election with savage brutality? Ahmadinejad is also a political leader who doubts that the Holocaust has been properly researched, and who talks about Israel like the Nazis talked about Jews. He is a leading member of a regime that for years has subordinated the welfare of Iranians to the overriding priority of developing nuclear technology, and now the regime seems close to realizing its ambition of having nuclear arms.

The New Yorker's photographer Platon certainly knows all this; yet, he wanted to capture the "innocence" in the Iranian president's eyes.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, thinks this matters, because it says something about our time:

We have become too smart and too sensitive for indignation. We regard the hatred of evil, even the talk of evil, as a preparation for war. We are beyond good and evil and we are beyond zero sum. To be sure, hatred is not quite an analysis; but still a word must be said on its behalf. Hatred may be a sign that something has been properly understood. If you do not hate racism, then you do not understand what it is. If you do not hate Ahmadinejad, then you do not understand who he is. In Washington, however, indignation is scorned as impractical."

But Wieseltier is not entirely right, because fierce political partisans often don't hesitate to denounce their opponents' worldview as evil, and it wouldn't be particularly difficult to find people who would happily condemn America or Israel as evil, but would be outraged to hear Ahmadinejad described so.

(Continue reading)

Love of the Land: Ahmadinejad and the four-letter word

Love of the Land: Eurabia vs. Israel on Jerusalem

Eurabia vs. Israel on Jerusalem

P. David Hornik
FrontPagemag.com
21 December 09

The recent Swiss vote to ban minarets was seen by many as a further indication that European populations are waking up to the threat of Europe’s Islamization and the need to stop the trend. If so, the European Union—the centralized bureaucracy that, as documented in Bat Ye’or’s important book Eurabia, went “over the heads” of European publics to meld the European and Arab/Muslim civilizations in the first place—still hasn’t caught up and remains locked in a pro-Arab/Muslim disposition.

At least, the EU’s stance on Jerusalem would suggest so. Last week the new EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, “came down hard on the Israeli government” in her maiden speech to the European Parliament and said:

“East Jerusalem is occupied territory together with the West Bank. The EU is opposed to the destruction of homes, the eviction of Arab residents and the construction of the separation barrier.”

Her words prompted Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon to reply:

“Just as the Romans did not succeed in cutting off Jerusalem from Israel, so too will diplomats from the UN and the EU be unsuccessful as well.”

Ashton, previously the EU’s trade commissioner and expected to be given considerable authority as a new sort of EU foreign minister, also called Israel’s recently launched ten-month moratorium on settlement construction a “first step”—representing, as the EUobserver comments, “a cooler tone than EU foreign ministers who last week took ‘positive note’ of the move.”

The EUobserver also pointed out that the speech was

“significant for what it left out: Ms Ashton did not say that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it faces a security threat from Palestinian ‘terrorists’ or that Palestinians should immediately return to formal peace talks—the classic tenets of Israeli supporters.”

Ashton’s statements also come hard on the heels of an EU-Israel spat over Jerusalem in which the EU explicitly called for East Jerusalem to become the capital of a Palestinian state. That demand was later only partially toned-down under intense Israeli objections.

(Full article)

Love of the Land: Eurabia vs. Israel on Jerusalem

Love of the Land: The EU's Jerusalem policy

The EU's Jerusalem policy

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
06 December 09

Last week, the international media were abuzz with reports that the European Union (EU) planned to act on a Swedish initiative that called for the formal recognition of east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. The endorsement was apparently expected in the wake of a meeting of EU foreign ministers scheduled for December 7-8 in Brussels, where the EU's policy on Mideast peace was among the issues on the agenda.

It is important to understand that the EU is currently trying to assert itself as a major player on the world stage. Europe has just filled two newly created leadership positions by appointing the first President of the European Council and the first High Representative for Foreign Affairs. Both positions went to "surprise" candidates who are hardly known on the European stage, and the appointments were widely criticized and even ridiculed. Indeed, it was rather fitting that one of the first media reports on the appointments concluded with some culinary revelations: "The decision was made last night over a dinner of wild mushrooms, spiced sea bass and chocolate fondant."

However, life in the service of the EU is not all about gourmet pleasures, and there has been quite a bit of concern recently because European politicians feel that they are no longer enjoying a "special relationship" with the US. A recent study on the subject warned gloomily:

An unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose. In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners. If Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with."

The EU's proposed stance on east Jerusalem may well be an exercise in muscle-flexing designed to show Obama that Europe is ready to fully back demands for a complete settlement construction freeze that would include Jerusalem. While searching for some background information on the subject, I came across a Web site called EUobserver that featured two relevant reports on its home page.

One report describes the apparently somewhat tense atmosphere during the first encounter between the EU's inexperienced new foreign policy chief and EU parliamentarians:

(Continue article)

Love of the Land: The EU's Jerusalem policy