Love of the Land: Obama ensures that terror has no consequences

Obama ensures that terror has no consequences

Elder of Ziyon
26 March '10

From YNet:

The Obama Administration is demanding that Israel hand over more West Bank land to exclusive PA control, including the Abu-Dis area adjacent to Jerusalem, Palestinian sources told Ynet Thursday.
According to the US vision, the move will take place as part of reverting to the state that prevailed in the West Bank before the outbreak of the last Intifada.

"The most significant demand is to restore the situation to what it was on the eve of the Intifada," one source said.

Because what could possibly be wrong with turning back the clock to the day before a war began that killed a thousand Israeli civilians?
Starting and losing a war has consequences in every part of the world except for one. Since 1967, the world - and "international law" as interpreted by most - is fixated on the idea that the Arabs can start all the wars they want against Israel. If they lose, international pressure will ensure that the previous status quo can be returned to, so there are no consequences for losing.

We have seen Egypt, Syria, the PLO, the PLO again, Hezbollah and Hamas start wars with Israel, secure in the knowledge that they will not lose anything of consequence if they lose the war. Just expendable people who are less important than "The Struggle" and perhaps a few years of negotiations and pressure.

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Love of the Land: Obama ensures that terror has no consequences

Love of the Land: The Orwellian Peace Process

The Orwellian Peace Process

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
24 March '10

We are indebted to George Orwell for the observation that the corruption of public life begins with the corruption of language, and nowhere has that been more evident than in the “peace process” — whose very name has proved Orwellian.

The “peace process” has so far produced three wars. The first occurred in 2000, after Israel offered the Palestinians a state on all of Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank. Yasir Arafat rejected the offer, returned home to a hero’s welcome, and commenced a barbaric terror war, quaintly named an “intifada,” waged in Israeli restaurants, discos, hotels, schools, and buses. In 2005, Israel removed every soldier and settler from Gaza to enable the Palestinians to demonstrate their willingness to live “side by side in peace and security”; the result was a rocket war against Israel from new forward positions. In 2008, Israel offered a state on 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza (after land swaps) with a shared Jerusalem; the “peace partner” rejected the offer. A month later, a new war in Gaza became necessary to bring the rockets to a halt.

In 2003, the Palestinians agreed to a three-phase “Performance-Based Road Map” and then failed to perform Phase One — dismantling terrorist groups and infrastructure — much less Phase Two. The result was that their “performance” was waived and the U.S. pushed immediate Phase Three final-status negotiations. The failure to abide by the Road Map was called “accelerating” it.

“Peace process,” “peace partner,” “intifada,” “side by side in peace and security,” “accelerating” — these are all Orwellian terms designed to mask the fact that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected a state in order to pursue the Orwellian “right of return” — an alleged “right” not given to the millions of other 20th century refugees (including the 820,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands), much less to those whose refugee status resulted from their decision to reject a two-state solution in 1948 and start a war instead.

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Love of the Land: The Orwellian Peace Process

Love of the Land: Israel's Last Chance of Survival

Israel's Last Chance of Survival

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
22 February '10

In the summer of 2011, it will have been 18 years since the Oslo Accords were signed by Shimon Peres, secretly and without the knowledge of the Israeli public whose rights to their own land were being signed away. The accord was based on meetings by left wing academics with terrorists that were illegal under Israeli law, signed covertly by a disgraced politician who had been an admirer of Marx and finally sealed with a public handshake between the world's greatest terrorist and an Israeli Prime Minister suffering from such severe dementia that he had trouble recognizing the man beaming down on them both as the President of the United States, who 5 years later would be facing impeachment.

That handshake with Arafat took place on September 13th, 8 years minus 2 days, before terrorists would duplicate a feat that only Arafat's own terrorists had previously accomplished, by simultaneously hijacking 4 aircraft. Even as the United States had begun pandering to Arafat, the rise of the next wave of terrorism was already underway with Bin Laden hard at work on the organization that would evolve into the Al Queda we know today. The Oslo Accords would play a crucial role in the rise of Islamist terrorism creating a vacuum into which the Muslim Brotherhood could step into with groups such as Hamas and Al Queda. And the Oslo Accords would also come to define Israel's worst defeat since the accords it had signed with Rome over two thousand years ago.

Now as that fateful 18 year mark approaches, there is still a crack in the door remaining through which Israel can save itself. In Hebrew the word for life is Chai, whose letters code as 18. And eighteen years after the scourge of Oslo has brought war and death into the heart of Israel, turned its town and cities into targets for missiles, made its roads into highways of death and now threatens to divide Jerusalem itself-- Israel has the chance to choose life over death by appeasement.

Each year since Oslo, the situation has grown steadily worse. Not just militarily, not just in relation to the children who have been left without arms and legs by Arab terror. But even diplomatically as well. The political war against Israel has reached an unprecedented height with no comparison to even the ugliest days of the Intifada. And all of it has one common element, a blood lust spurred on by Israel's willingness to accommodate, appease and retreat. Not only has any Israeli concession, any act of goodwill and compassion, not changed the way Israel is portrayed-- but each one has only fed the furious hate that Islam and the international left feels for it.

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Love of the Land: Israel's Last Chance of Survival

Love of the Land: A Third Intifada, of What Nature?

A Third Intifada, of What Nature?

Tamar Sternthal
Snapshots/CAMERA
22 November 09

Reading Jack Khoury in Ha'aretz today, one would think that Mahmoud Abbas and senior Fatah officials have launched a campaign to advocate for a third, nonviolent intifada. Indeed, the headline and sub-headline, on page 2, read:

Abbas promotes 'popular resistance' to occupation, such as Bil'in protests

Palestinian president agrees to new intifada as long as it is not violent

The article notes that in a BBC interview [BBC Arabic, on Thursday, Nov. 19], Abbas said:

There is the armed struggle and I am against that because it will only bring destruction and devastation to the Palestinian people, which the last war in Gaza proved

Likewise, further along the article states:

Abbas' statements are in the context of recent statements by senior Fatah officials in the West Bank on the possibility of a third intifada as a response to the failure of the peace process and what they call Israel's rejectionism. In an interview with the Nazareth-based newspaper Hadith al-Nas, senior Fatah officials said Fatah wants to implement resolutions made at the Fatah convention in Bethlehem last summer. One senior official said "We want thousands of Palestinians to demonstrate daily near the settlements of the occupation, carrying out a human siege and calling for the end of the occupation," one senior official said.

However unlike the previous intifada, the movement will not endorse an armed struggle or the use of firearms, the official added.

And what is one supposed to make of the context of eight recent Arabic statements in favor of armed conflict uttered by various Fatah officials, including Abbas himself, and distributed in English in Friday by MEMRI ("Palestinian Officials Threaten to Renew Armed Struggle, Launch Third Intifada")?

From MEMRI we learn that a week before his BBC interview, Abbas stated at a rally marking the five-year anniversary of Arafat's death:

"We will continue [Arafat's] long and exhausting struggle [that was] fraught with blood, sweat, and tears. The road [we are traveling] today is anchored in a noble heritage of struggle that we built with brave hands, an enlightened mind, and a national thinking [rooted in] long experience. We combined armed struggle with political activity. Our guns were not the guns of highway robbers. They were political guns [promoting] a noble goal." [Al Ayyam, Nov. 12, 2009]

Other statements in support of armed violence are voiced by Nabil Sha'ath, Amin Maqboul, Marwan Al-Barghouti, Hafez Al-Barghouti, among others.

Beyond cherry-picking quotes and ignoring contrary statements, Ha'aretz is also at fault for promoting the falsehood that Bil'in protests are nonviolent and for not clarifying that resolutions passed at the Fatah convention last summer do call for violence.

Love of the Land: A Third Intifada, of What Nature?

Love of the Land: Notes From the Eternal and Undivided Capital of the Jewish People

Notes From the Eternal and Undivided Capital of the Jewish People

Rachel Abrams
The Weekly Standard
26 October 09

A young eastern European girl survives the Holocaust, but she has lost all. First, perhaps, like so many countless others, her father is shot in the street before her eyes among scores of men rounded up in the ghetto in which her family has been living in starvation and rising terror; next, possibly, her mother dies of dysentery in the train to Auschwitz; later, maybe, when they arrive at the camp she is separated from her two brothers and they are never seen again. How does she survive and make it to Palestine? Somehow. She doesn’t speak of it, and it does not in any case seem to be the question that plagues her. In time, she marries, creates a new family, watches as her refuge becomes the State of Israel. The question that does interest her, and which she continues to ask herself, over and over again, and with which she haunts everyone among the living around her, is why she alone of all her family survived. Her son grows up; the question permeates his life. It enters the army with him, accompanies him as he rises through the ranks to become a major general. On the day on which he is named to one of the highest posts in the Israeli military, she, his mother, sits through the ceremony, then comes to him and tells him: “Now I know. Now I know why I survived.”
***
My sister, who has lived here for three decades and has just sent her third and fourth children to the army, called information a while ago to get the number of a Jerusalem restaurant. “What?” demanded the operator. “Why are you going to that restaurant? It’s terrible!” It’s better in Hebrew. But still.
***
"The fate of Jerusalem will be determined only by confrontation and not by the negotiating tables," says a survivor of a different stripe, Hamas “leader” Khaled Meshaal, from his hidey hole in Damascus, as a day of rioting by Palestinian Arabs on the Temple Mount ends. "Jerusalem is all of Jerusalem . . . . The Arabs and Muslims are [the city's] residents, and the Zionists have no claim over it." How much of this is due to the Obama Middle East policy? An un-keepable promise is made to the Palestinians that a negotiation in their favor will take place in exchange for little beyond words from their mouths (their word is their bond). Their response to the slow dawning upon them that this is a chimera is rage. A bunch of “Muslim youths” occupy the al Aqsa Mosque—one of their holiest sites—and from the windows of that sacred precinct stone and firebomb Israeli police. "I call for angry protests in Palestine and in the Arab world,” says Meshaal. “We must send a message to the world: In light of the settlements and actions in Jerusalem, there are no negotiations and we must rethink our steps."
***
Israelis are more and more openly expressing their disgust with the latest and most dangerous incarnation of the so-called peace process. They worry, with growing intensity with every escalation of violent Arab rhetoric and rage, that in the end the process will have wrought not peace but the Third Intifada. And who can argue with that? I can't help wondering, though, as I listen to the muezzin's call to morning prayers, just what question it is the Arabs are answering when they raise their children to fight for a state this way.

Love of the Land: Notes From the Eternal and Undivided Capital of the Jewish People

Love of the Land: The Incitement Towards a Third Intifada

The Incitement Towards a Third Intifada

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
08 October 09

There are clear attempts being made to spark a third intifada in Jerusalem. Violence by Israeli Arabs started two weeks ago in the wake of the meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Obama and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and Obama’s inflammatory call at the UN for a Palestinian state that ends the occupation that began in 1967.

In an ominous echo of the ‘spontaneous’ rioting over Ariel Sharon’s walk on the Temple Mount in 2000 which was used as the pretext for the mass murder of Israelis through years of suicide bombings (Palestinian leaders later admitted the riots had been part of a planned strategy) the current spate of riots followed all-too familiar and demonstrably spurious claims that Israel was threatening the al Aqsa mosque. Last Sunday, after Palestinian Authority calls for Arabs to flood the site of al Aksa to protect it from so-called Jewish extremists (of whom, it goes without saying, there has been no evidence whatever) Israel barred men between the ages of 18 and 45 from ascending the site, whereupon Arabs hurled rocks and bottles at the police.

In the Jerusalem Post, Aaron Klein identifies the instigators of the unrest as Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority:

The riots are being directly incited by the PA, whose official media outlets and institutions are stoking Arab flames by claiming right-wing extremist Jews are attempting to threaten Al-Aksa Mosque - a decades-old blood libel that should be easily dismissible in light of heavy Israeli restrictions on Jews and Christians from ascending the Mount during most hours of the day, whereas Muslims are usually free to access the site 24/7.

Indeed, Israeli law prohibits Jews and Christians from praying on the site. If any so-called extremist Jew attempted to enter Al-Aksa, he or she would likely be immediately removed from the Temple Mount by Israeli police, who follow Jewish tour groups very closely and coordinate with the Wakf, the Islamic custodians of the site.

The PA is not just inciting violence; its officials also assist the riots. On Monday Israeli security forces released from custody Jerusalem's senior PA official, Khatem Abed Al-Kadr, who had been detained on suspicion of inciting riots. The PA-aligned Islamic Movement is reportedly even sponsoring buses to transport young, riled-up Israeli Arabs to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from Umm el-Fahm.

Klein identifies two reasons for Abbas’s incitement:

It seems the PA, emboldened by Obama's speech, may be using the riots as a pressure tactic to send a clear message to Israel - if negotiations do not create a state in the near future, expect another intifada. The PA under Arafat was notorious for negotiating on the one hand while leading a violent campaign against Israel on the other.

Already, some of Obama's policies have hardened Palestinian bargaining positions. Most notably, the PA is now demanding a complete halt to Jewish construction in the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem in line with the US president's same demand. The PA never before set a settlement freeze as a prerequisite for talks.

The second suggested reason is that Abbas is trying to deflect Palestinian anger over his decision to call for a delay in the proposed UN show-trial of Israel over the Goldstone report.

Let us not forget that it is the ‘moderate’ Abbas and the forces he leads who America and the west say are ‘entitled’ to a state of their own, to which Israel is unreasonably providing obstacles. Without any doubt, Obama’s bullying of Israel has strengthened Arab rejectionism, undermined any fragile moves towards moderation and helped incite the Arab mobs to further hysteria. This is particularly irresponsible since Jerusalem’s Arabs, along with the rest of the region (as with Muslims in the rest of the world, including Britain), are steadily being radicalised by jihadi influence.

On Tuesday night, the Israeli Islamic leader Raed Salah was arrested on charges of inciting the rampage on Temple Mount. The flashpoint now threatens to be this Friday’s prayers after Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (and the ‘moderate’ infamously embraced in London by Ken Livingstone), called for Arabs and Muslims to make next Friday a day of anger... to confront the ferocious Zionist attack against the Aqsa Mosque and the occupied city of Jerusalem.

We hold our breath.

Love of the Land: The Incitement Towards a Third Intifada

Love of the Land: The Old "Aksa is in Danger" Trick (2000)

The Old "Aksa is in Danger" Trick (2000)

In September of 2000, Arik Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. A place "Holy to Christians, Moslems, and Jews". The visit seemed to spark wild rumors of an attack on Al Aksa. Al Aksa is the Mosque built (between 709-715 C.E.) over the ruins of the temple built by Solomon almost 3,000 years ago and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., and later of the second temple, razed by the Romans in 70 C.E..

The irrational hysteria built, rioting spread, and ballooned into the grotesque violence called "the Al Aksa Intifada."

Months later that we discovered that the whole operation had been carefully planned in advance.

As I write this commentary, in February of 2007, wild rumors of an attack on Al Aksa are once again being spread. The hysteria is, once again, building rapidly.

- - - - - - - - - -

Maxwell Smart was the funny American Secret Agent in the 1960's"Get Smart" TV comedy. Each week Max would fall into some outlandishly improbable trap. Then, showing his professionalism, he'd explain that he had fallen for "The Old Roller Skate on the Stairway Trick" or "The Old Bomb in the Pizza Trick" or whatever. Funny enough, but without fail, the real belly laugh came when poor Max would get tricked again ...the same way!

As I read of the new rumors of a Jewish attack on Al Aksa, in my mind I hear the voice of Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent number 86.

What he's saying is: "It's the Old 'Aksa is in Danger' Trick, ...Again."

Love of the Land: The Old "Aksa is in Danger" Trick (2000)