Tag Archives: #Palestinians

Posted on by

Khader Adnan has gone to his eternal reward

Khader Adnan was a long-time Palestinian Arab activist, and at one point a spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Arrested many times, Mr Adnan’s weapon of choice in detention was the hunger strike. His first hunger strike, ten days long, occurred in 2000, when he was locked up not by the Israelis, but the Palestinian National Authority. In 2011, he began another hunger strike, one which lasted 66 days. In 2015, he undertook a 56-day hunger strike, which resulted in Israel releasing him.

In spite of the agreement to end his first hunger strike (see above), Adnan was arrested again on 8 July 2014, at the beginning of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, and has been held in detention ever since, beginning his second hunger strike on 5 May 2015. The government of Israel was seemingly determined to break Adnan’s hunger strike using force-feeding techniques similar to those used by the USA in its Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Israeli Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan was quoted as saying “Security prisoners are interested in turning hunger strikes into a new kind of suicide attack that would threaten the State of Israel. We cannot allow anyone to threaten us and we will not allow prisoners to die in our prisons.” However, the Israeli Medical Society and various human rights groups were deploring this planned course of action by Israel, with the Medical Society issuing orders to Israeli doctors to not participate in any planned forced feedings except under certain limited circumstances not applicable to Adnan at this point in time.

Palestinian Khader Adnan, center, is greeted by Palestinians after his release from an Israeli prison in the West Bank village of Arrabeh near Jenin on July 12, 2015. Photo by Majdi Mohammed/AP, via CNN. Click to enlarge.

Adnan was again detained without charge in 2015 and again started a hunger strike on 4 May that lasted 56 days until Israel agreed to release him in July. He was arrested again in 2017 and again immediately began a hunger strike that lasted 58 days. Arrested once more in 2021 after being detained at an Israeli checkpoint, and he again went on hunger strike in protest, this strike lasting 25 days.

You can see how Mr Adnan was greeted by the Palestinians after his release. He was never going to be anything other that a pain in the ass for Israel.

Well, he was arrested again on February 5, 2023, and began another hunger strike, which would be his last: he died on May 2nd, after 87 days. Some in the Israeli media are upset about that:

Khader Adnan’s death in prison: A preventable crisis – opinion

A number of democratic countries permit force-feeding to rescue the life of a fasting prisoner. Israel could have saved Khader Adnan’s life.

By Shimon Glick | Thursday, May 11, 2023 | 1:01 AM Jerusalem Time

Following a series of security events which we recently faced, it is incumbent upon us to do some serious examination, without the involvement of political considerations. The events began with the death of a hunger-striking prisoner, Khader Adnan, and then deteriorated in an almost predictable manner. But with some different behavior on our part, much of the crisis could have been avoided.

Why was the death of Adnan not prevented by force-feeding him when his health deteriorated seriously? The answer is that the Israel Medical Association accepts the position of the World Medical Association that it is forbidden to force-feed a hunger-striking protesting prisoner.

Such a step is regarded as a violation of the autonomy of the prisoner. But it is important to be aware that this view is far from a unanimous international consensus and from Israeli court decisions.

Dr Glick, a professor emeritus of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, continues to note the history and precedence of force-feeding a hunger-striking prisoner in Israel.

Let us think how much of what’s been occurring recently we would have been spared if we would have saved the life of Adnan, in the spirit of Jewish culture and without violating ethical norms.

While I hesitate to go all-out “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?“, none of the references I have found have stated that Israel ever broke one of Mr Adnan’s hunger strikes via force-feeding, but he did win some concessions in his various attempts. I have to ask: did the Israelis finally say to themselves, “if he wishes to kill himself, let him”? Israel is a liberal democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and Dr Glick expresses that.

But Mr Adnan found a weapon he could apparently tolerate, better than most, and used it to his political advantage. By not force-feeding him, by letting him starve himself to death, Israel rid itself of a turbulent problem.

Dr Glick is wrong: force-feeding Mr Adnan, if they had “saved the life of Adnan,” the Palestinians would still hate the Israelis, and Hamas and their ilk would have continued to occasionally shoot rockets into Israel proper, and launch the occasional terror attack. The Arabs were given to violence and terror against Jews migrating to the Levant even when they were few in number, well before the re-establishment of Israel, well before World War II and the shoah, really for the entire 20th century.

Mr Adnan has gone to his eternal reward, and Israelis will not miss him.

Posted on by

America’s disastrous Middle Eastern policies under Joe Biden.

Remember when the Democrats were telling us that the election of Joe Biden would usher in a new-found respect for the United States around the world? Remember when we were told by the credentialed media assured us that the end of Donald Trump’s wicked regime and ‘America First’ policies would bring foreign relations back to normalcy?

Yet, as we have previously reported, things have not quite gone as well as we might like. Now, from The Wall Street Journal:

Saudi Officials, Hamas Leaders Set to Meet in Jeddah to Discuss Re-Establishing Ties

A reset would mark a setback for U.S. and Israeli efforts to counter Iranian influence in the Middle East

By Summer Said, Dov Lieber, and Aaron Boxerman | Updated Sundy, April 16, 2023 | 12:55 PM EDT

Senior Saudi officials were planning to meet with leaders of the Palestinian militant and political group Hamas on Sunday to discuss renewing diplomatic ties which have been cool since 2007, part of a diplomacy spree led by Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman that has seen Riyadh move closer to Iran.

In other words, diplomacy at least partly aided by the younger President Bush helped to push the terrorist organization Hamas away from Saudi Arabia, while American diplomacy under President Biden has undone that, and a lot more. Mr Biden took a politically risky trip to visit the Crown Prince in October of 2022, and through either planning or simple ineptitude, managed to insult the Prime Minister in private, and later call him a liar, in public. As the de facto authoritarian ruler of Saudi Arabia, perhaps that wasn’t the wisest idea. A brief description from Wikipedia:

Mohammed rules an authoritarian government. There are no democratic institutions in Saudi Arabia, and elements of repression are evident. Islamic scholars, human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists, former insiders, Islamists, and other political dissidents are systematically repressed through tactics including torture and jailing, and some reports have alleged that Mohammed uses a group known as the Tiger Squad to carry out extrajudicial killings. He was personally linked to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian Washington Post columnist who had criticised the Saudi government, but he has denied involvement in the killing. Mohammed was the architect of Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen which has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and famine there. His government was also involved in the escalation of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, the 2017 detention of Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, a 2018 diplomatic spat with Canada, the arrest of Saudi princes and billionaires in 2017, the 2018–2019 Saudi crackdown on feminists, an alleged phone hack against Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos in 2019, and treason charges against his cousin and rival Muhammad bin Nayef in 2020. Saudi Arabia’s relations with the Biden administration have been strained, especially after Mohammed’s refusal to increase oil production in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman on arriving at Al Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on December 8. Photo: Saudi Press Agency via AP

Prince Mohammed was hardly well disposed to the United States, and the ideas of Western classical liberalism even prior to being insulted by President Biden, despite a couple of ‘liberalizing’ changes regarding the religious police and restrictions on women. But now the Crown Prince is moving in a direction which directly endangers the fragile not-exactly-peace-but-not-outright-war in the Middle East.

Re-establishing ties between Iran-backed Hamas, which is a U.S. designated terrorist group, and the Saudi kingdom would mark a setback for efforts by the U.S. and Israel to establish a military alliance between Israel and other Sunni-majority countries against Iran and its allies. They also complicate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of normalizing relations with Riyadh, with opposition to Iran as their primary shared interest.

Hamas exists, of course, solely to destroy Israel. While Hamas are also the de facto government in the Gaza Strip area of the Palestinians, an area that Israel completely evacuated under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, their policies have been nothing but resistance and war. When Israel pulled out, in 2005, the Palestinians were given control of the area and the ability to make it into whatever they could. With fabulous beaches, the Palestinians could have turned the area into a warm-water beach resort which would have drawn Europeans, and euros, by the hundreds of thousands.

Instead, they turned it into just another Palestinian base from which to attack Israel, and Israel retains some external control over the 141 mi² territory.

Hamas was invited to the kingdom by Saudi leaders, Hamas officials said. Senior officials are expected to land in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, late Sunday, the officials said. The effort to re-establish ties is being pushed by Iran and Syria, said Saudi officials.

As part of the talks, Hamas officials hope to free scores of Palestinian prisoners held in Saudi Arabia who were imprisoned when the two sides were at odds, according to Saudi officials and a diplomat familiar with the matter.

“We seek relations with all forces in the region and the world, and we have no enmity toward anyone, except for the Zionist enemy,” tweeted Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas official who will be attending the meeting on Sunday.

Jewish voters in the United States normally give around three-quarters of their votes to Democrats; this is what they’ve achieved with that.

Also see: William Teach: Yet Another Ally, Israel, Turns To China

Israel is the only real democracy in the entire area, the only one with a Western civilization culture, one which, though officially Jewish, tolerates Islam and Christianity. Yet we have previously had fairly strong and respectful relations with Saudi Arabia . . . and President Biden has managed to help torpedo that. American policy has been, for decades, the isolation of Iran, but with the Iranian nuclear deal under President Obama, and Mr Biden’s current diplomacy, American Democrats have managed to not just weaken that isolation, but help Iran to gain allies. More, in our attempts to fight Russia in Ukraine, it has pushed Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China into closer ties with Russia.

With Joe Biden as President, you can count on it: things will only get worse.
_______________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

Posted on by

The Arabs are all butthurt because an Israeli government minister went to the Temple Mount

The Temple Mount. Photo by D R Pico, which may be freely used, with proper attribution. Click to enlarge.

On Sunday, November 13, 2022, my older daughter and I had the privilege of visiting the Temple Mount in the Old City in Jerusalem. Yes, we had to go through security, but it wasn’t all that tight. We were not asked about our nationality or our religion — we’re Catholic — and the visit was perfectly pleasant. The al Aqsa Mosque itself was closed at the time, but the elevated plaza — is plaza the right word here? — on which it sits is far larger than the mosque itself.

Formerly under Jordanian control, Israel captured the eastern half of previously divided Jerusalem in the Six Day War, including the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount has been under the control of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf in one form or another since the Islamic reconquest of Jerusalem by Yusuf ibn Ayyub ibn Shadi, commonly referred to as Saladin, from the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. Israel returned control of the site to the Waqf shortly after its capture in 1967, and the Waqf is under the custodianship of the Hashemite Kings of Jordan.

The Muslims appear to have no problem with non-Muslims visiting the Temple Mount — they certainly did not stop two American Catholics, Catholics who went to Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcre — but when it comes to Jews, well they wax apoplectic over that! Naturally, President Joe Biden, perhaps taking a clue from former President Barack Hussein Obama’s attempts to restrict American policy toward Israel just a few weeks before he left office, didn’t like it.

Israel’s new far-right government draws an early rebuke from the U.S.

Story by Haley Ott | Wednesday, January 4, 2023

The U.S. spoke out Tuesday against “any unilateral actions that undercut the historic status quo” in the heart of the Middle East after a member of Israel’s new ultranationalist cabinet visited a sensitive Jerusalem holy site sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

Note how the CBS News report used the inflammatory “ultranationalist cabinet” to describe the Israeli government. That’s what the left have been doing ever since Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its conservative coalition members won the recent elections.

Such moves “are unacceptable,” said State Department spokesperson Ned Price.

Israel’s new far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has previously been convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist group, visited the site known by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as Al-Aqsa Mosque. He was surrounded by security guards.

It should be noted that Mr Ben-Gvir made his visit to the Temple Mount after sunrise but nevertheless in the early morning, when the sahn was, if not deserted, fairly empty.

Tension has mounted in the Israel-occupied West Bank for months, with 2022 being the deadliest year for Palestinians in the territory in nearly two decades, according to the United Nations.

Really? Guess who was not Prime Minister of Israel for all but the last three days of 2022. Benjamin Netanyahu was not Prime Minister, but Neftali Bennett to begin the year, followed by Yair Lapid on July 1st. Elections on November 1st gave Likud the plurality, and the ability for Mr Netanyahu to negotiate a coalition. It was the Israeli voters who chose the conservative coalition. Apparently, what then-Prime Minister Lapid was doing wasn’t seen as all that good by those voters.

Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Muhammad Shtayyeh called Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Jerusalem holy site “a violation of all norms, values, international agreements and laws, and Israel’s pledges to the American president,” BBC News reported.

The Mount of Olives, as viewed from the Temple Mount. Photo by D R Pico, which may be used freely with proper attribution. Click to enlarge.

I have to ask: why should a Jew visiting the plaza around the al Aqsa Mosque be a violation of anything? While there is security in visiting the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, there is nothing prohibiting Muslims from doing so. And if there is ever to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the kind of tolerance the Jews show to non-Jewish visitors to the Western Wall must also be shown to Jews who wish to visit the Temple Mount.

I am a bit surprised that President Biden didn’t call this off:

Signal to Iran? Israel, US air forces conduct joint drills

Israel’s F-35 fighter jets and six F-15s from the US Air Forces Central Command took part in multi-day joint drills in souther Israel on Wednesday.

By Yonah Jeremy Bob | Wednesday, January 4, 2023 | 18:58 Jerusalem Time

Israel’s F-35 fighter jets and six F-15 fighter jets from the US Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT) took part in multi-day joint drills at the Nevatim air force base in southern Israel on Wednesday in what could be a signal to Iran in the ongoing nuclear standoff.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, F-35 Squadron 140 commander Lt. Col. “M” and Capt. “I,” who ran the drill from the Israeli side, both stayed away from getting too specific about the F-35s capabilities regarding any specific country but made it clear that they were ready and capable to strike anywhere that the IDF high command ordered them to go.

Further, the goal of the joint flights and simulated attacks was to train for hitting targets in “deep” enemy territory, often a euphemism for Iran and other countries who do not have immediate borders with Israel.

At a recent graduation ceremony of air force personnel, then-defense minister Benny Gantz said that the graduates would need to be ready to potentially attack Iran in “two to three years.”

There’s more at the original, and The Jerusalem Post does not appear to be behind a paywall.

So, there’s an adult at least somewhere in the Biden Administration, albeit possibly deeply hidden. He’ll probably be gone soon.

Posted on by

There can be no negotiated peace with the ‘Palestinians’

For a devout Catholic, it’s the (too short) trip of a lifetime. My older daughter, an Army Reservist currently deployed to the Middle East, has a four-day out-of-country pass, and I’m meeting her in Jerusalem. I told a couple of my fellow parishioners that I’d miss Mass next Sunday, but that actually means I’ll miss Mass at my home parish; my plan is to attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!

That only brought my attention more to this article which appeared on my feed this morning, in which the activists said the quiet part out loud.

‘Defeating Israel means defeating the US,’ Canada, EU -Brussels activists

by Michael Starr | Monday, November 7, 2022 | 9:09 AM

Defeating Israel is part of a process to defeating the United States of America, the European Union and Canada, the leader of a Palestinian protest in Brussels declared in new footage released on Thursday by the NGO Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

“Defeating Israel means defeating the US. Defeating Israel means defeating Canada, these settlements who [sic] exist on the backs of the indigenous and the black people. Defeating Israel means defeating this colonial institution [European Parliament], means payback for all Africans, Algerians, Moroccans, Sahraoui,” said Samidoun Europe coordinator and Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement (Masar Badil) member Mohammed Khatib at the March for Return and Liberation for Palestine last Saturday.

Translation: the “Palestinians” don’t just hate Israel and the Jews, they hate all of Western civilization.

Khatib — who previously lead the organization of protests against the 125th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress event in Basel, Switzerland in late August — has also been described by Palestinian and Arab media as a spokesman and activist for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.

“Second and third generations are in Brussels,” Khatib said in front of the EU parliament. “We’ve built this city and we still face fascism and racism. So we will say no to this not only in Palestine but here in Europe, there in the United States and in all Arab countries. Together, as comrade Georges Abdallah said, ‘we must gather together and we will win only together.'”

Abdallah is an imprisoned PFLP member and Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, co-founder. Protestors called for the release of several terrorist organization members and raised posters of dead terrorist figureheads.

I have said it before: Israel faced two logical choices at the end of the Six Day War in 1967:

  1. Israel could return the land it captured to Jordan, Syria and Egypt quickly; or
  2. Israel could expel the entire Arab population of those lands, and annex the territory.

Instead, the Israelis chose a third alternative: keeping the lands under military occupation, hoping that the unpleasant conditions would ‘encourage’ the Arabs to emigrate. The Israelis should have learned from their own history in Europe: regardless of how tough the Nazis made staying put in their homes in Germany, and then occupied France and Poland, few chose to emigrate, choosing instead to just tough it out, as most Jews had done before them in the many pogrami that they had borne in the past, because things would get better eventually. What the Nazis did them was so far out of human experience that no one in Europe, Jew or Gentile, could conceive of it.

The Israelis of 1967-68 should have realized it: if Jews for generations had decided to stay in their homes and tough out the bad times, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria could do that as well.

The result? Fifty-five years of occupation have created three generation of angry Arabs, and sympathy among the liberal dolts in the West for their poor, poor plight.

Terrorist paraphernalia was readily apparent in previously released footage. Some marchers wore headbands showing allegiance to Lions’ Den, a terrorist group that has been responsible for several recent terrorist attacks and battles with IDF soldiers. One prominently displayed banner depicted the launch of rockets, and another poster depicted a gunman with a Carlo submachine pistol, a firearm favored by Palestinian terrorists.

“Participants saluted the Palestinian resistance, including Mohammed Deif, leader of the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza,” Samidoun declared last Sunday. Deif is a leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

Khatib urged protest participants to join Masar Badil, Samidoun or similarly-minded organizations. The two groups organized the march.

“We will not accept any more, as Palestinians, this rhetoric of a two-state solution as a way to support Palestine,” said Khatib. “Only one free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Let’s tell the truth here: many “Palestinians” have never accepted the “rhetoric of a two-state solution”, as evidenced by Yassir Arafat’s angry rejection of the supposed compromise he negotiated with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton. Mr Clinton later said that it was the biggest mistake Mr Arafat could make, a “colossal historical blunder,” because he’d never be able to negotiate a treaty more favorable to the “Palestinians” than the one he had before him.

Of course, Yassir Arafat knew that if he had signed a peace agreement with Israel, the irredentists would kill him.

And nothing has changed. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came up with a plan to simply evacuate all Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was done in August and September of 2005. Israel said to the “Palestinians”, in effect, ‘Here it is; do with it what you will.’

Gaza is resource-poor, and it depends upon Israel for public utilities, but it also has the best beachfront property in the entire region, and the “Palestinians” could have turned it into the greatest beach resort for well-to-do Europeans, bringing in tons of money. Instead, they chose Hamas to lead them, to create just more poverty, and a base from which to occasionally lob rockets into Israel. The Israel Defence Force responds, with bombing and artillery strikes against the suspected terrorist hideouts, which are blended in with the civilian population, and Western leftists then blame Israel, because leftists are just plain stupid.

Well, in honor of my upcoming visit, the Israelis wisely voted the center-right Likud Party, along with its conservative allies, into a Knesset majority, meaning the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Mr Netanyahu knows the “Palestinians” for what they are: a population which hates Israel and the Jews and, if most of the people aren’t the guerrilla fighters, are still willing to be led by Hamas and the other hardline factions which are still pushing for military victory over Israel, and simply are not interested in any peace agreement. The demonstrators in Brussels, a wealthy city in a peaceful and prosperous country in which many of the Arabs live, simply proves the point once again. That Israeli voters gave Likud and its allies a 65-55 majority in the Knesset — and remember: Israel has two million Arab citizens, and approximately 54% of the adults voted, very few of whom would have voted for conservatives — meaning that Israeli Jews must have given the Likud bloc a tremendous majority of their votes. The Israeli Jews are showing now that they very much understand that there can be no negotiated peace with the Arabs, at least not with the “Palestinians” as they are now.

Posted on by

Is it possible to support the Palestinians and not be anti-Semitic? Perhaps, but I've yet to see it done

I have said it before: it is philosophically possible to be opposed to Israeli foreign policy and not be anti-Semitic, but it is a trick I have never seen accomplished. But, let’s be honest: most of the pro-Palestinian agitators don’t even try anymore. Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-born former porn actress tweeted:

You can see the actual tweet if you follow the link; what is presented here is a screen capture of it, because it’s very possible that the lovely Miss Khalifa will delete it.

Why? As the New York Post noted:

one of the bottles with Khalifa bore the date 1943 and contained champagne produced in Nazi-occupied France.

“Owning the Jewish state by proudly drinking wine from Vichy France,” one user wrote. “About right, yes.”

The Post noted that drinking that wine in Gaza is illegal.

Why do the left support the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general? The Advocate is a very leftist homosexual rights publication, but even they can’t stomach the idea of “Queers for Palestine”:

Queers for Palestine?

By James Kirchick | January 28, 2009 | 12:00 AM EST

Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely “Queers for Palestine” ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco–based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.

Mr Kirchick, the author, used the wrong word: it isn’t “oxymoronic” but just plain moronic. Any liberal who supports the Palestinians is just plain stupid.

What makes QUIT oxymoronic is that their affinity for Palestine isn’t reciprocated. There may be queers for Palestine, but Palestine certainly isn’t for queers, either in the livable or empathetic sense. Like all Islamic polities, the Palestinian Authority systematically harasses gay people. Under the cloak of rooting out Israeli “collaborators,” P.A. officials extort, imprison, and torture gays. But Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn’t merely a matter of state policy, it’s one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews. Last October, a gay Palestinian man with an Israeli lover petitioned Israel’s high court of justice for asylum, claiming that his family threatened to kill him if he did not “reform.” He’s one of the few lucky Palestinians to be able to challenge his plight.

And that’s only in the relatively benign West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which has stagnated under the heel of Hamas’s Islamofascist rule since 2007, is an even more dangerous place for gays, “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,” in the words of a senior Hamas leader. As in Iran, Hamas’s patron and the chief sponsor of international terrorism, even the mere suspicion of homosexuality will get one killed in Gaza, being hurled from the roof of a tall building the method of choice.

Virtually none of the current political left’s opinions fare very well in the Muslim Middle East. Women’s rights? While the laws differ in the specifics, in no country in the Muslim Middle East do women have equal rights with men. Racial equality? Among the Arabs, blacks are considered inferior, and have far fewer rights. Freedom of religion? To varying degrees Islam is the official religion in these areas, and not only are adherents of other faiths, or of atheism, subject to discrimination, apostasy laws exist throughout the Muslim Middle East, and Muslims renouncing Islam, or anyone criticizing Islam, can be subject to criminal penalties, up to and including capital punishment.

Miss Khalifa? She’s an idiot. In a video, she complains about the difficulty of getting into a non-pornography workforce, but she’s wearing a suit jacket without a blouse, to show off deep cleavage. Now, she’s drinking wine from Vichy France, which was controlled by the Nazis, and proudly saying that her wine is older than the state of Israel. But if she is a particularly clueless advocate, she isn’t qualitatively different from the American and European left in their support of the Palestinians.

Posted on by

The #woke really do hate them some Israelis! The left love the people who would kill them first

The Israelis made a huge mistake in 1967-68. When they conquered Gaza, the Sinai, Judea and Samaria, they should have decided, right then, that if they wanted to keep that territory, that they needed to round up and expel every last Arab living in those lands. It would have been harsh, it would have been brutal, and it would have been too reminiscent of the Nazis’ roundup of the Jews, but it would have settled things over fifty years ago. Israel would have the land they want, along with shortened, more defensible borders, while the Palestinians would be problems for Jordan and Syria, not Israel.

The world might not have liked it, the world might have shaken its collective finger in disapproval, but the world would have gotten used to it.

That they didn’t do. Rather, Israel decided to just make life tough on the Arabs living there, thinking that they’d all emigrate to Syria and Jordan and Egypt. That didn’t happen, and now hundreds of thousands of Arabs have turned into millions of Arabs. The Israelis are strong, tough, and smart, but they have proven to be piss poor conquerors.

So, now they are stuck with millions of Arabs who hate their guts, and don’t know what to do about them. The Israelis want the land in Judea and Samaria, and are slowly trying to colonize it, but that isn’t really going to work.

Arial Sharon ordered the Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, turning the land over to the ‘Palestinians’ to do with what they would. The hope was that the Arabs would actually be responsible, and turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed Palestinian enclave. Gaza is on the resource-poor side, but it does have the best beaches in the Mediterranean. The Arabs could have built a tourist Mecca serving all of Europe, but, instead, they let their hatred of the Jews fester and flourish, and simply built a stronghold for Hamas.

So, every so often, Hamas shoot rockets into Israel, and Israel returns the favor, in kind and in spades. The majority of the Palestinian population are too f(ornicating) stupid to realize that all they are doing is setting up getting their own homes destroyed, and keeping themselves poor, by providing cover and support for Hamas. The Palestinians couldn’t turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed area because they are too stupid to do so, and have proven that for the past 15½ years.

You think the NYT isn’t liberal? This is a screen capture from today’s NYT webpage.

William Teach noted how the Grey Lady, The New York Times, believe we can control the Israelis through our tax dollars. In the land of the left, the Palestinians are the poor, down-trodden good guys while the Israelis are the big, bad bullies of the Middle East. If the Israelis were truly the big, bad bullies, they’d have done what I said they should have done in 1967.

The Biden administration has been timid and restrained, slowing the U.N. Security Council’s engagement on the issue, and it has yet to name an ambassador to Israel. But the stakes are too high for evasions, and President Biden should stand with others on the Security Council to demand a cease-fire before this escalates further.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken helpfully said “it’s vital now to de-escalate.” The administration should also express strong concern about the planned evictions of Palestinians that provoked the crisis. Dithering and vacillation help no one.

Nicholas Kristof, the column author, admitted that the United States have little influence on Hamas, but that our aid to Israel gives us more leverage, and he believes we should pressure the Israelis to back off. The notion that the US should be pressuring Hamas to stop shooting is regarded as silly.

Mr Teach pointed to another article:

Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?

The global woke loathing for Israel is taking an even darker turn.

by Brendan O’Neill | May 12, 2021

Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

No other nation would be expected not to respond either to internal disarray – Hamas supporters have rioted in parts of Jerusalem and around Al-Aqsa Mosque – or to foreign attack. Imagine if the Isle of Wight was home to a movement whose founding constitution expressed loathing for all ethnic Britons and which regularly fired hundreds of missiles into Sussex, Kent, Hampshire. Wouldn’t the British military respond? Of course it would. But the woke demonisation of Israel is now so acute that Israel is expected to take the military assaults of the radical Islamists to its south. To Western activists who find the very existence of Israel abhorrent, any effort Israel makes to protect its borders or its citizens is an affront to global peace and decency. They cannot understand why Israel doesn’t hate itself as much as they hate it, and therefore will not allow itself to be punished by its righteous enemies. How dare you live?

The article is so good that I’d like to reprint the whole thing, but that would be plagiarism. But it doesn’t take much awareness at all to see how der Führer was able to get millions, tens of millions of Germans, and of Frenchmen and Ukrainians and Poles and Belgians and Czechs and others in lands they occupied to cooperate in the Shoah — the Israeli name for the Holocaust — in turning in Jews, in exposing Jews in hiding, in helping to put Jews into the railcars, in helping the Einsatzgruppen and the rest of the Schutzstaffel to guard and herd the Jews right into the gas chambers and the mass graves.[1]Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven. The Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, don’t you know?

More, it explains how the British, one of the victors against the Third Reich, one of the countries which saw Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor first hand, could have erected their own prison camps and set up their blockades, trying to keep the dispossessed Jewish survivors of the from leaving a blasted Europe, a Europe in which they had no homes, to immigrate back to their ancestral homelands in the Levant. The British Foreign Office, eager to retain what was left of their Empire after World War II, were friendly with the Arabs, and the oil under the Arab lands.

Max Boot, from his Twit pic.

As Mr O’Neill noted, the #woke hate them some Israelis, so much so that #NeverTrumper Max Boot, of Jewish descent himself, tries to blame the whole thing on, you guessed it, President Donald Trump, who helped get the ‘Abrahamic Accords’ between Israel and several Muslim nations signed, and who has been out of office for 3¾ months. But, then again, I never expect anything sensible from Mr Boot.

The silliness of the left when it comes to the Palestinians, to the Arabs in general, and to Muslims, is obvious. Israel is the only functioning democracy on the Middle East. Human rights? The left almost unanimously support homosexual and transgender rights, but try being homosexual in the Muslim-ruled nations: if you get caught, Da’ish will throw you to your death off a tall building, Iran will hang you, and other Islamic countries have their own punishments. Six countries, all majority Muslim, impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex sexual acts: Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia.

Women’s rights? Women are, to varying degrees, second-class citizens throughout the Middle East . . . except in Israel. Virtually nothing for which the American and Western left stand is supported in any Middle Eastern country except Israel.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev once said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which the communists would hang them; in today’s left, “LGBT” groups support the Islamic groups which would, were they living under Islamic rule, throw them in jail, at the very least.

References

References
↑1 Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven.
Posted on by

This is why I have no sympathy for the Palestinians!

Given the chance to build something, and some of the best beachfront property in the world — the Palestinians could have created a real tourist Mecca to bring in literally billions of euros into an otherwise poor land — the irredentists decided that what they really wanted to do was continue to attack Israel. They didn’t care about their families, they didn’t care about Palestinian poverty, they didn’t care about anything but their own seething hatred of the Jews.

The Hamas terrorists are actually few in number, but like guerrilla fighters everywhere, they depend upon the support, tacit or otherwise, of the larger populations around them. The Hamas terrorists live among the Palestinian people, are housed and clothed and fed and supported by them; they are no different from the inner-city thugs in Chicago and Philadelphia and St Louis, hiding from the police and destroying their own neighborhoods with destruction and death.