Category Archives: Israel
Obama and the "Official Truth"
Caroline Glick demonstrates that Barack Hussein Obama and his Executive Branch Administration has been giving the American public an Official Truth that is in reality a pack of lies. The list of people Glick writes about is probably a short list rather than an exhaustive; nonetheless the Obama persecuted people and organizations are Conservatives or pro-Israel. If this kind of political harassment isn’t impeachable than nothing is and that means the Office of President has turned into a dictatorship above the laws founded in the U.S. Constitution.
JRH 5/21/13
My Caroline Glick Introduction
Moral relativism and jihad
John R. Houk
© April 16, 2013
Caroline Glick wrote a scathing yet appropriate exposé on the ignorance of Jewish-American organizations when it comes to Israel and Jew-hating Muslims. It is not surprising that that Left Wing self-loathing Jews moronically support anti-Israel agendas but I find it particularly loathing that Jewish organizations that are considered respectable Right leaning on issues and decidedly pro-Israel remained silent in the face of anti-Israel support given to Radical Islamic governments by the Obama Administration. Glick goes further in criticizing Orthodox Jews for supporting a musician that is virulently involved in anti-Israel Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS) activities that support Palestinian Statehood while Synagogues that invite Counterjihad speakers like Pamela Geller cave in to American Radical Islamic organizations to cancel exposés of Muslim hatred by actually accusing Geller-like speakers of racist bigotry.
Defend Israel against claims of excessive force!
JRH 4/16/13
YouTube blocks PMW video that exposes PA TV hate speech to kids
Unsurprisingly Youtube blocked Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) video exposing Hate-Speech broadcast from Palestinian Authority (PA) operated television. The irony is Youtube was not Censoring the PA from Hate-Speech but rather was Censoring PMW from exposing the PA as a Jew-Hating/Israel-Hating organization backed by major global governments including the USA to become an independent sovereign nation to be named Palestine. This also includes stealing half the Israeli capital city of Jerusalem to make it the capital of the only nation in the world that has one to exist; i.e. to kill Jews and overthrow a democratic nation and member of the United Nations.
JRH 4/10/13
*******************************
YouTube blocks PMW video that exposes PA TV hate speech to kids
YouTube accuses PMW of “spreading hatred” and threatens to close down PMW’s YouTube account
By Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Apr. 7, 2013
Last week, Palestinian Media Watch released a video-bulletin showing a Palestinian Authority children’s TV broadcast of a hate-poem. A young Palestinian girl recited a poem referring to Jews as “Allah’s enemies, the sons of pigs” who “murdered children,” “cut off their limbs,” “raped the women in the city squares” and “defiled Allah’s book.” The host responded with enthusiastic applause and “Bravo!”
The following day, YouTube blocked access to PMW’s video, defining it as a “violation of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech.”
In the past, YouTube has closed PMW’s account or frozen PMW’s account for exposing PA religious leaders promoting genocide of Jews. This is the first time YouTube has defined a broadcast on PA children’s TV as hate speech, and blocked PMW from exposing it.
PMW does not promote hate speech, but exposes it. PMW believes that the only way to stop the Palestinian Authority’s ongoing Islam-based hate speech and terror glorification is to expose it. By preventing PMW from exposing PA hatred, YouTube is actively impeding our ability to fight the PA’s hate promotion.
YouTube has even threatened PMW with termination of its YouTube account should PMW continue exposing this hate speech:
“Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the permanent termination of your account.”
PMW has requested that YouTube return the video. PMW has no direct line of contact with YouTube administrators, other than their standard appeal option on their website. Therefore, we ask anyone who has contacts at YouTube to please help encourage YouTube to make our video accessible again.
For now, we have uploaded the children’s TV video to a different server and it can now be viewed here.
The following was the original bulletin last week:
Religious hate speech for children on PA TV
Child recites poem:
Jews – “Allah’s enemies, the sons of pigs”
“murdered children,” “cut off their limbs,”
“raped the women in the city squares”
and “defiled Allah’s book”
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Recently, Palestinian children were taught Islam-based hatred of Jews on the weekly PA TV children’s show The Best Home. A young girl recited a poem filled with both Islamic hate messages and other libels demonizing Jews. The poem taught Palestinian children that Jews, “Allah’s enemies, the sons of pigs,” defiled the Quran and Jerusalem, both crimes against Islam, and “murdered children,” “cut off their limbs,” and “raped the women in the city squares.” Palestinian Media Watch has documented that this weekly PA TV children’s program teaches hatred and denial of Israel’s existence.
Youtube VIDEO (Unless removed or suspended again): Jews are “Allah’s enemies, the sons of pigs” – in poem recited
The suggested response to Jews and Zionists offered in this hate poem is military and Islamic:
“Where is the nation of Islam?
Where are the nation of Islam and the Jihad fighters?”
At the end of the recital of the hate poem, the young program host applauded enthusiastically and said:
“Bravo, applause, applause, applause to Hadeel.”
The poem also included a tribute to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization and Arafat:
“From between the whistles of the bullets I sing:
‘Long live the nation of Fatah and Yasser Arafat.’”
This Islam-based hatred that in the past was associated exclusively with Hamas is now appearing in mainstream PA children’s education as well.
The following is the text of the hate poem recited by a young girl on PA TV’s children’s program:
Girl: “Allah created me and formed me
He made me prouder and made me a Palestinian
He made defiance flow like blood in my veins
And I made the revolution burst forth like clay stones
I raised the flags of certain victory:
Allah’s book [the Quran] and the tradition of the most esteemed among prophets [Muhammad].
I called in the voice of hidden justice
I lit a fire like volcanoes under their feet
I refused to be submissive and degraded
I rejected [everything] but dying with the honor that will give me life
From a nation that has forgotten the Muslims’ heroism
- Omar ibn al-Khattab and Saladin – [Muslim fighters who conquered Jerusalem]
from between the whistles of the bullets I sing:
‘Long live the nation of Fatah and Yasser Arafat’
Allah’s enemies, the sons of pigs (i.e., Jews, in Islamic tradition)
Destroyed and uprooted the olive and fig trees
They murdered children with guns, like snakes
They cut off their limbs with stones and knives
They raped the women in the city squares
They defiled Allah’s book [the Quran] in front of millions
Where is the nation of Islam?
Where are the nation of Islam and the Jihad fighters?
Where is the fear of Allah in Jerusalem, which has been defiled by the Zionists?”
PA TV host: “Bravo, applause, applause, applause to Hadeel.”
[PA TV (Fatah), March 22, 2013]
PMW has documented the PA’s promotion of Antisemitic messages.
PMW has documented the PA’s promotion of libels and lies about Jews and Israelis.
_______________________
|
© 1997-2013 Palestinian Media Watch |
| |
About PMW
Founded in 1996, Palestinian Media Watch is an Israeli research institute that studies Palestinian society from a broad range of perspectives by monitoring and analyzing the Palestinian Authority through its media and schoolbooks. PMW’s major focus is on the messages that the Palestinian leaders, from the Palestinian Authority, Fatah and Hamas, send to the population through the broad range of institutions and infrastructures they control.
PMW’s many reports and studies on Palestinian … READ THE REST
Israel Apartheid Week is Hate Jews and Lie about Israel Week
John R. Houk
© March 11, 2013
VIDEO: Is There Anti-Semitism on College Campuses?
This video was posted in February 2012 to briefly let people know that Antisemitism is alive and well on U.S. university campuses. Unfortunately I am a little late with this post which is a condemnation of a pro-Palestinian/Anti-Israel propaganda seminar accusing Israel of human rights violations and completely letting Islamic terrorists off the hook for their murder and mayhem of Jews in Israel. That propaganda seminar is called Israel Apartheid Week.
Below is an email from David Horowitz that tells what really happens in Israel and on American College Campuses pertaining to Jews. Tragically Jews are persecuted by Islamic terrorists in Israel with blood and mayhem and Jews and supporters of Israel are vilified by Islamic racists often connected to either Palestinian (Islamic) terrorists or from organizations affiliated with the Jew-Hating Muslim Brotherhood. This week of Antisemitic lies is allow to occur on college campuses that have bought into the propaganda disseminated by Islamic terrorist connected organizations operating with near impunity in the USA.
I am cross posting the Horowitz email but first You should take the time to view this video exposing the lies of Jew-Haters that are the supporters of Israel Apartheid Week:
VIDEO: Israeli Apartheid Week 2013 (The Real Truth)
JRH 3/11/13
**********************
Must Read Article
[Islamic Apartheid Week]
Sent by David Horowitz
Sent: March 8, 2013 9:03 AM
Sent from David Horowitz Freedom Center
Dear Friend,
Earlier this week, I sent you an email about the advertisement the Freedom Center will be running in campus newspapers at Colleges and Universities around the country. Today, I wanted to share with you an article, written by the Center’s Daniel Greenfield, which illustrates why getting this ad distributed as far and wide as possible is so critical.
I hope you’ll take a moment to read this article, and if you haven’t already, make a generous, tax-deductible donation to support our efforts.
Thanks,
David
A Double Standard on Hate
By Daniel Greenfield
Every year college campuses across the country hold a festival of hatred aimed at Jews and the Jewish State. Israeli Apartheid Week has become notorious for the targeted harassment of Jewish students, support for Hamas and even physical violence.
This year the David Horowitz Freedom Center has responded to Israeli Apartheid Week with Islamic Apartheid Week. Unlike Israeli Apartheid Week, which is based on a lie, Islamic Apartheid Week addresses the sexism, homophobia and religious bigotry threatening minorities in the Muslim world. To promote Islamic Apartheid Week, the Freedom Center attempted to place an ad in forty college papers.
The ad called “Faces of Islamic Apartheid” drew attention to the victims of Islamic sexism, homophobia and theocracy by briefly telling the stories of gay men hanged in Iran, women and girls murdered by their governments and their families for the crime of falling in love and the Christian Minister for Minorities Affairs in Pakistan’s cabinet who was murdered for trying to reform his country’s theocratic blasphemy laws.
These four women, three men and one little girl were the victims of Islamic Apartheid. Five of them have been murdered. Their memory lives on only when they are remembered. One has been on death row for six years. Telling her story may help save her life. The remaining two live under threat of death.
Instead of listening to their stories, the campus culture of political correctness drowned out their voices and apologized for even allowing their stories to be told.
Nine college papers turned the ad down, five of them in the University of California system which has been criticized for tolerating anti-Semitism. When the California State Assembly passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on campus and warned that no public resources should be used for anti-Semitic hate, the University of California objected on free speech grounds. However free speech for Israeli Apartheid Week did not translate into free speech for Islamic Apartheid Week.
Seven college papers took the advertisement. Of those papers, Tufts University’s Tufts Daily and Austin’s Daily Texan both ran apologies from their editors for even printing the ad.
Tufts Daily editor Martha Shanahan called the decision to run the ad an “editorial oversight.” Daily Texan editor Susannah Jacob denounced the attempt to tell the stories of victimized women and children as “hateful” and “an unspoken incitement to violence.”
Martha Shanahan spent two pages apologizing for the existence of the “Islamophobic and violently offensive” advertisement, the existence of Tufts Daily, its staff and her own existence. At no point during her long series of apologies, did Martha acknowledge that her paper had run four editorials in a single week from Students for Justice in Palestine attacking Israel and promoting hatred for the Jewish State. And in an unequal response to this, it also ran a brief letter from Tufts Friends of Israel distancing itself from the ad and politely suggesting that apartheid shouldn’t be used to refer to Israel.
Anthony Monaco, the President of Tufts University, took to Twitter to denounce the advertisement for vilifying Islam, but made no such denunciation of the Tufts Daily’s op-ed, “The Case for Israeli Apartheid” which (not coincidentally) appeared on the same day as the ad. At Tufts, no one apologizes for accusing democratic Israel of apartheid. There are only apologies when theocratic Iran and Pakistan are accused of practicing Islamic Apartheid.
When anti-Israel voices are outweighed 4-to-1 and the editor apologizes for publishing another perspective that would have made it 4-to-2 then the freedom of debate at Tufts University is in a very sad state. When that same editor prints editorials describing Israel as an apartheid state, but promises to put in place an entire system of oversight to make certain that no advertisement challenging Islamic Apartheid is ever printed again, then a system of censorship has been put into place silencing the voices of victims and encouraging their persecutors.
The Daily Texan’s Susannah Jacob claimed that the crosshairs over the faces of the victims were an incitement to violence when they were actually a way of bringing urgency to the violence that had been committed against them. And making it clear that she never even saw the advertisement that she was denouncing, Susannah described the ad as depicting six women, when it included two gay men, one Christian man and one little girl.
Susannah further distorted the truth about Islamic Apartheid when she described the pervasive sexism, homophobia and theocracy that these people fell victim to as “discrete incidents of violence by Muslims” being used “to implicate all Muslims” while ignoring the fact that five of the victims in the ad had been targeted by their governments or with government backing.
Can the Daily Texan’s editor honestly claim that Iran’s persecution of women and gay men or Pakistan’s persecution of Christians are “discrete incidents of violence”, rather than state policy? Could she find a single human rights organization that would agree with such a dishonest whitewashing of the terror under which millions live?
The responses to the advertisement have established once again that some forms of apartheid are privileged on campus and that some forms of persecution cannot be talked about. Demonizing the Israeli victims of Islamic terror is within the realm of campus free speech, but speaking about the vulnerable minorities in the Muslim world is not.
If the advertisement was wrong, then there would have been no need to censor it. False claims can easily be disproven. Five minutes with Google would have told every reader and editor whether there was any truth to the Faces of Islamic Apartheid.
It is never necessary to censor lies. It is only necessary to censor truth.
That is why the majority of campus papers – ten so far, including Harvard whose editors said they would not print it under any circumstances — refused to run this paid advertisement. It is why those few who did have begun making ritual apologies while lying about its contents. It is why the attacks on the advertisement have taken refuge in vague platitudes about offensiveness, without a single attempt at a factual rebuttal. It is why every response to the advertisement has consisted of claiming that speaking about Islamic bigotry is the real bigotry.
There were eight faces and eight names in the censored advertisement that the President of Tufts, the editors of Tufts Daily, the Daily Texan and the editors of ten college papers that turned down the ad, did not want their students to see or know about because it might disturb the manufactured campus consensus that they have constructed with great effort around Israel and Islamic terrorism.
These are the names. Amina Said. Sarah Said. Afshan Azad. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Shahbas Bhatti. Rimsha Masih. Mahmoud Asgari. Ayaz Marhoni.
They were repressed as individuals. Now their story is being repressed on the American campus.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center
_________________________
Begin forwarded message:
From: David Horowitz
Date: March 5, 2013 11:05 AM EST
Subject: Expose the lies on our campuses
Dear Freedom Center Supporter,
Anti Semitism on America’s campuses—nonstop bashing of Israel and glorification of Hamas and other jihad groups, and even physical intimidation of Jewish students—is worse than ever. Administrators and faculty accepts all this as part of the university’s standard operating procedure. But the Freedom Center calls it for what it is—an intellectual reign of terror.
And we’re fighting back!
Think of what is allowed to take place these days as part of our universities’ business as usual:
|
|
|
|
These unrelenting attacks against Israel and Jewish students are shameful and disgusting. Will you help the Freedom fight back today with a tax-deductible donation of $25, $50, $100 or more?
While the truth about the Middle East is systematically turned upside-down and inside-out, no one is stepping forward to defend Israel and remind her enemies that:
|
|
|
There’s only one organization willing to go onto our campuses to tell our students the truth about this brutal discrimination that occurs under Islamic Sharia Law—and that’s the Freedom Center.
This year the Freedom Center is sponsoring “Islamic Apartheid Weeks” on over 50 campuses across the country. These events will provide a truth-telling, in your face response to the Big Lies that are at the foundation of the leftist “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” They will explain and explore the many forms of Islamic apartheid—racism, ethnic cleansing, gender discrimination, political oppression and slavery—that have been part of the Middle East for over a millennium and are now spreading into Africa and other regions of the world.
One of the main components of the Freedom Center’s campaign is to insert full-page ads like this one in campus newspapers across the country. Under the headline “Faces of Islamic Apartheid,” the advertisement will features victims of Sharia law abroad and in the U.S. such as Amina and Sarah Said, murdered in Texas by their father for dating non-Muslims, and Shahbas Bhatti, the sole Christian minister in Pakistan’s cabinet who was murdered by members of the Taliban for advocating reform of Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws.
While our college students hear the Big Lie about Israel every day, they never hear the truth about the body count, even in the U.S., that results from the teachings of radical Islam. And we need them to! So will you support our efforts with an immediate tax-deductible donation of $25, $50, $100 or more?
We are currently submitting this ad to 50 campus papers around the country to coincide with March’s “Israel Apartheid Week” events. We have already received confirmations that the ad will run in the papers at the following Colleges and Universities,
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We are targeting at least another 40 campuses this week. But the cost of running ads in just these newspapers is about $75,000! So please follow this link right now to make a tax-deductible donation of $25, $50, $100 or more to support our efforts.
These ads do what nothing else can do—highlight the true sources of “apartheid” in the Middle East put the campus Islamists attacking Israel on the defensive. The Freedom Center is on the front lines in the war on campus between the Big Lie and the truth in the Middle East. Your support is critical to making this effort a success.
Thank you for everything you do to help me and the Freedom Center.
Sincerely,
David Horowitz
President & Founder
P.S. We need your help to place this ad in campus newspapers at Colleges and Universities across the country. Will you make a tax-deductible donation of $25, $50, $100 or more to the Freedom Center right away? We must raise $75,000 by midnight tomorrow, so I’m counting on you. Thanks—David
_________________________
Israel Apartheid Week is Hate Jews and Lie about Israel Week
John R. Houk
© March 11, 2013
_______________________
Must Read Article
The David Horowitz Freedom Center
P.O. Box 55089
Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964
www.FrontPageMag.com
About David Horowitz Freedom Center
OUR MISSION: The DHFC is dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad…. READ THE REST
The Myths
The haters and liars of Israel are having their annual Israel Apartheid Week. The Wall of Truth tears down ten myths negatively aimed at Israel and Jews.
JRH 3/11/13
****************************
The Myths
MYTH 1: ISRAEL OCCUPIES ARAB PALESTINE
This is a genocidal claim made by the Muslim Students Association and other pro-Arab groups. It is genocidal because it obliterates the Jewish state. If Israel is actually “Occupied Palestine” then there is no legitimate Jewish state in the middle east.
Since Roman times when the Philistines inhabited the region around the Jordan (hence the name “Palestine”) there has never been a political entity – neither a province nor a state – called “Palestine” and no one claimed there was until well after the United Nations created Israel in 1948. The land on which Israel was created by the U.N. was also used by the colonial powers to create Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. It was land that had belonged to Turkey for 400 years. The Turks are not “Palestinians” and are not even arabs.
There never was an Arab country called “Palestine” or inhabited by “Palestinians.” Before the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, which was sixteen years after the birth of Israel, no Arab political entity was called by that name.
MYTH 2: ISRAEL IS AN APARTHEID STATE
The term Apartheid refers to the segregation of groups on the basis of ethnicity or race, and the denial of basic civil rights to the segregated group. There is no such segregation in Israel. Arabs are granted full civil rights under Israeli law, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or sex. Arabs take part fully in Israeli society and government. Arab citizens of Israel vote in national elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, sit on the Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court benches, and serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities. The Arab citizens of Israel have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the Arabs of any Arab state.
MYTH 3: THE ARABS WANT PEACE AND A STATE ON THE WEST BANK
The Arab nations rejected peace and a state on the West Bank first in 1948 when it was offered to them by the U.N. and then in 2000 when it was offered by Presidents Clinton and Barak. In 1949, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which the U.N. had designated as a homeland for the Arabs, were annexed respectively by Jordan and Egypt. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964 its covenant made no mention of liberating the West Bank or Gaza from Jordan and Egypt. The PLO leadership stated that its goal was to “push the Jews into the sea.” Today the “liberation” of Palestine “from the river to the sea” is still the goal of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The war in the Middle East is about the desire of the Arab nations and Muslims to destroy Israel; it is not about the desire for a Palestinian state.
There are 1.4 million Arabs living in Israel with civil rights that are the envy of the Arab world. Israeli Arabs vote in Israel’s elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, sit on Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court, and serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities. The Arab citizens of Israel have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the inhabitants of any Arab or Muslim state.
MYTH 4: THE HOLOCAUST IS EUROPE’S PROBLEM; PALESTINIANS HAD NO ROLE IN IT
The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, planned death camps for the Jews in the Middle East. Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was a devoted follower of Hitler who spent the war in Berlin, recruited an Arab legion to the Nazi cause and planned a “Final Solution” for the Jews of the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, the government of Gaza, translated Mein Kampf into Arabic in the 1930s and called for the destruction of the Jewish state at its birth.
MYTH 5: ISRAEL’S SECURITY FENCE IS AN “APARTHEID” WALL
This is two myths in one. The West Bank fence is a fence, not a wall. About 97% of the fence is made of chain-link material. The remaining 3% is concrete, designed to repel sniper fire in particular areas. The fence was built in 2003 in response to thousands of suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinian terrorists, sponsored and armed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The fence was built to keep out terrorists, not Arabs.
In the years since the construction of the fence, terrorist attacks have declined by more than 90%. The fence is Israel’s legitimate defense against a ruthless and amoral terrorist aggressor.
MYTH 6: ISRAEL IS THE CAUSE OF THE REFUGEE PROBLEM
The Palestinians claim there are 5 million Palestinian refugees who fled Israel during the 1948 war. This is false. There were only 500,000 Arab refugees from the 1948 war – an unprovoked war that Egypt and four other Arab states had launched against the newly created state of Israel. In the aftermath of the war, 500,000 Jewish refugees were driven out of the Arab states in the Middle East. There are no Jewish refugees today, sixty years later, because Israel resettled them. Why are there still Arab refugees? The Arab regimes have been given billions of dollars by Israel and the United States to relocate their refugees. But the Arabs are still in refugee camps. While Israel resettled Jewish refugees, no Arab country would take in the “Palestinians” who were forced into camps and were kept there by the Arab regimes to stir up hatred against the Jews. The refugee “issue” has been created by the Arab regimes as a weapon in their war against the Jews. It should be resolved by resettling the inhabitants of the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza where almost all of them have lived all their lives.
MYTH 7: ISRAEL COMMITS WAR CRIMES BY KILLING CIVILIANS
This is the Big Lie, coming as it does from some Palestinians who have made terrorist attacks on civilians a weapon of choice, and who make martyrs and national heroes out of suicide bombers.
The Gaza strip was a base for 7,000 rocket attacks against schoolyards and townships in Israel before the Israelis responded in 2007. During Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza rocket sites there was one civilian death for every 30 terrorists. By contrast, a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross found that the civilian-to-military death ratio in wars fought since the middle of the 20th Century has been 10:1 – ten civilian deaths for every soldier death. In other words, the Israelis protect civilians at a rate 300 times greater than any other national army. As Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz observes, “No army in history has ever had a better ratio of combatants to civilians killed in a comparable setting.”
MYTH 8: JEWS HAVE LITTLE HISTORICAL CONNECTION TO ISRAEL
Jews have lived continuously in the land of Israel for over 3000 years; the Arabs arrived through multiple invasions, beginning in the 7th Century AD. In the year 70 AD, when the Jewish civilization was already over 1000 years old, the Romans forced most of the Jews of Judea and Samaria (now the West Bank) into exile. By the end of the 19th Century, the majority population of Jerusalem was Jewish.
MYTH 9: THE KORAN DESCRIBES JERUSALEM AS HOLY TO ISLAM
The Koran does not mention Jerusalem because Mohammed never set foot in the city. Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies in 636 after the death of Mohammed. Muslim jihadists claim that the Koran mentions “The Furthest Mosque” — Al-Aqsa in Arabic – and that this is a Koranic reference to Jerusalem. This is a lie. The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem had not been built when the Koran was written, so the reference is to some other (or any other) “furthest mosque.” In contrast, Jerusalem is and has always been a holy city to Jews. The daily prayers of the Jews are focused on Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible mentions Zion and Jerusalem a total of 809 times.
MYTH 10: THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON IS NOT JEWISH
This myth is one of many designed to steal the history of the Jews in order to justify erasing them from the Middle East. When the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, it immediately began a campaign to delegitimize Israel by rewriting history with the intention of denying Israel’s right to exist. Among its false claims is that the remains of the Temple of Solomon – the Western Wall – are in fact the remnants of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was deliberately built on top of the Temple after the Muslim conquest to humiliate the conquered.
________________________
Wall of Faith Links & Video
Israel is for the Jews, Jerusalem for Israel and Christ’s Kingdom for ALL
John R. Houk
© March 5, 2013
Jerusalem is the capital city of the nation Israel. In case you didn’t get that let me say it another way: Jerusalem is the heritage of Jews!
Now here is something Jews are critical of: (Biblical) Christians believe the return of the Jews to the Holy Land reestablishing Israel as the Land of the Jews is a huge sign that Christ Jesus the Son of God is coming soon to establish His Kingdom on the throne of David. Not only as King of the Jews but also as King of all those that believe Jesus is the Risen Savior of all humanity. Christians believe that Jesus is the Priest-King prophesied to possess the Throne of David to rule and reign as King and God of all the earth.
Ironically in the eyes of Israel faithful Jews, Christians are viewed both as enemies and friends. From the days that Gentiles dominated the Christian faithful history shows an unbiblical persecution of Jews by Christians. Since the Christians that believe that Israel and Jerusalem are Jewish Biblically are evangelical in nature coupled with a sour history with Christians, there is a difficulty to view Christians as friends.
Regardless of Jewish acceptance of Christian motives I am one that completely stands with Israel to be an independent nation with the City of David – Jerusalem – as the God certified capital city. Arabs that call themselves Palestinians have no claim to Jerusalem on the basis of a religion founded about 600 years after Christ’s Resurrection and around two thousand years after Joshua led the twelve Hebrew Tribes to dispossess the ungodly Canaanites that God deemed unworthy thus fulfilling the Promise to Abraham to possess the Land forever.
All these pro-Israel Christian Zionist thinking is a result of an email I received from Mike Evans of Jerusalem Prayer Team relating that President Barack Hussein Obama is scheduled to travel to Israel with the intention to bully Israel to divide Jerusalem between Israel and the usurping Arabs that call themselves Palestinians.
Mike Evans believes that if BHO is successful in his agenda that the USA will be under the curse of God for working against the legacy of the Jews and the Land of Israel. I am going to post that email, but first I want to post numerous Scriptures to think about while reading the Evans email.
Israel is the Promise to Jews and Christ is the Messiah
1 Now the Lord had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.
2 I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4 So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Then Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, and they departed to go to the land of Canaan. So they came to the land of Canaan. 6 Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh.[a] And the Canaanites were then in the land.
7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” And there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 And he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. (Genesis 12: 1-8 NKJV)
1 For Zion’s sake I will not hold My peace,
And for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
Until her righteousness goes forth as brightness,
And her salvation as a lamp that burns.
2 The Gentiles shall see your righteousness,
And all kings your glory.
You shall be called by a new name,
Which the mouth of the Lord will name.
3 You shall also be a crown of glory
In the hand of the Lord,
And a royal diadem
In the hand of your God.
4 You shall no longer be termed Forsaken,
Nor shall your land any more be termed Desolate;
But you shall be called Hephzibah,[a] and your land Beulah;[b]
For the Lord delights in you,
And your land shall be married.
5 For as a young man marries a virgin,
So shall your sons marry you;
And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
So shall your God rejoice over you.
6 I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem;
They shall never hold their peace day or night.
You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent,
7 And give Him no rest till He establishes
And till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
11 Indeed the Lord has proclaimed
To the end of the world:
“Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Surely your salvation is coming;
Behold, His reward is with Him,
And His work before Him.’”
12 And they shall call them The Holy People,
The Redeemed of the Lord;
And you shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken. (Isaiah 62: 1-7, 11-12 NKJV)
1 I was glad when they said to me,
“Let us go into the house of the Lord.”
2 Our feet have been standing
Within your gates, O Jerusalem!
3 Jerusalem is built
As a city that is compact together,
4 Where the tribes go up,
The tribes of the Lord,
To the Testimony of Israel,
To give thanks to the name of the Lord.
5 For thrones are set there for judgment,
The thrones of the house of David.
6 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
“May they prosper who love you.
7 Peace be within your walls,
Prosperity within your palaces.”
8 For the sake of my brethren and companions,
I will now say, “Peace be within you.”
9 Because of the house of the Lord our God
I will seek your good. (Psalms 122: 1-9 NKJV)
“For behold, in those days and at that time,
When I bring back the captives of Judah and Jerusalem,
2 I will also gather all nations,
And bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat;
And I will enter into judgment with them there
On account of My people, My heritage Israel,
Whom they have scattered among the nations;
They have also divided up My land.
3 They have cast lots for My people,
Have given a boy as payment for a harlot,
And sold a girl for wine, that they may drink.
4 “Indeed, what have you to do with Me,
O Tyre and Sidon, and all the coasts of Philistia?
Will you retaliate against Me?
But if you retaliate against Me,
Swiftly and speedily I will return your retaliation upon your own head;
5 Because you have taken My silver and My gold,
And have carried into your temples My prized possessions.
6 Also the people of Judah and the people of Jerusalem
You have sold to the Greeks,
That you may remove them far from their borders.
7 “Behold, I will raise them
Out of the place to which you have sold them,
And will return your retaliation upon your own head.
16 The Lord also will roar from Zion,
And utter His voice from Jerusalem;
The heavens and earth will shake;
But the Lord will be a shelter for His people,
And the strength of the children of Israel.
17 “So you shall know that I am the Lord your God,
Dwelling in Zion My holy mountain.
Then Jerusalem shall be holy,
And no aliens shall ever pass through her again.”
20 But Judah shall abide forever,
And Jerusalem from generation to generation.
21 For I will acquit them of the guilt of bloodshed, whom I had not acquitted;
For the Lord dwells in Zion.” (Joel 3: 1-7, 16-17, 20-21 NKJV – Should read ALL Chapter 3)
11 The people shall dwell in it;
And no longer shall there be utter destruction,
But Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.
12 And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem:
Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet,
Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets,
And their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths. (Zechariah 14:11-12 NKJV)
4 Nevertheless for David’s sake the Lord his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem, by setting up his son after him and by establishing Jerusalem; 5 because David did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and had not turned aside from anything that He commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite. 6 And there was war between Rehoboam[a] and Jeroboam all the days of his life. (1 Kings 15:4-6 NKJV)
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent:
“Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.” (Bold Emphasis Mine – Genesis 3: 14-15 NKJV)
15 “The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren. Him you shall hear, 16 according to all you desired of the Lord your God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, nor let me see this great fire anymore, lest I die.’
17 “And the Lord said to me: ‘What they have spoken is good. 18 I will raise up for them a Prophet like you from among their brethren, and will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him. 19 And it shall be that whoever will not hear My words, which He speaks in My name, I will require it of him. (Bold Emphasis Mine – Deuteronomy 18:15-19 NKJV)
30 Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. 33 And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.”
34 Then Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?”
35 And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. (Luke 1: 30-35 NKJV)
25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”
26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.” (John 4: 25-26 NKJV)
49 Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon; but I honor My Father, and you dishonor Me. 50 And I do not seek My own glory; there is One who seeks and judges. 51 Most assuredly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he shall never see death.”
52 Then the Jews said to Him, “Now we know that You have a demon! Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and You say, ‘If anyone keeps My word he shall never taste death.’ 53 Are You greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? And the prophets are dead. Who do You make Yourself out to be?”
54 Jesus answered, “If I honor Myself, My honor is nothing. It is My Father who honors Me, of whom you say that He is your[a] God. 55 Yet you have not known Him, but I know Him. And if I say, ‘I do not know Him,’ I shall be a liar like you; but I do know Him and keep His word. 56 Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.”
57 Then the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?”
58 Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” [SlantRight Editor: Jesus is referencing the ‘I AM’; i.e. God Almighty that spoke to Moses in the Burning Bush of Exodus 3: 14-15]
59 Then they took up stones to throw at Him; but Jesus hid Himself and went out of the temple,[b] going through the midst of them, and so passed by. (John 8: 49-59 NKJV – Read ALL of Chapter 8)
1 Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. 2 Then I, John,[a] saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God.
9 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls filled with the seven last plagues came to me[a] and talked with me, saying, “Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.”[b] 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy[c] Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, 11 having the glory of God. Her light was like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. 12 Also she had a great and high wall with twelve gates, and twelve angels at the gates, and names written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: 13 three gates on the east, three gates on the north, three gates on the south, and three gates on the west.
14 Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names[d] of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
22 But I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it,[a] for the glory[b] of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light. 24 And the nations of those who are saved[c] shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it.[d] 25 Its gates shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there). 26 And they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it.[e] 27 But there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes[f] an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. (Revelation 21: 1-3, 9-14, 22-27 NKJV)
Yeah, I did say numerous Scriptures. Anyway, these Scriptures are an excellent preparation for Mike Evans’ warning that a BHO agenda could be a curse upon the United States of America.
JRH 3/5/13
*******************************
President Obama’s plan for Jerusalem will bring God’s judgment on America
By Mike Evans
Sent: March 4, 2013 6:48 PM
Sent by Jerusalem Prayer Team
In a few days, President Obama will be going to Israel. This is his first trip to the Jewish state since he became president, and he is going with an urgent agenda—to divide the Holy City of Jerusalem and rush the creation of a Palestinian state with much of Jerusalem as its capital. He is hoping this will be the great international legacy of his second term in office.
There is no doubt in my mind that if this plan succeeds, God will judge America in a way we have never seen in our history. Our nation is in the process of touching God’s prophecy and that is a very dangerous thing. The outcome of this plan does not just threaten Israel’s future, but that of America and every other nation that supports it as well. God will not allow us to contradict His Word in such an open and blatant way.
I am going to Israel next week on an urgent mission as your ambassador. The next few weeks are literally some of the most critical times in the entire modern existence of the nation of Israel. The Jewish state is surrounded by enemies. The future of the government of Israel is uncertain. My old friend Prime Minister Netanyahu has so far been unable to form a new government after the recent election…and members of the Obama Administration are pushing the Israeli political leaders not to join a new government in an attempt to remove him from office even though he won a majority of votes to be Prime Minister.
Please start praying right now for me on this trip. God has planned my schedule, and I must take His message to the nation of Israel. I have no doubt that God brought us together “for such a time as this.” He knew Israel would be surrounded by enemies and abandoned by friends…and he called the Jerusalem Prayer Team into existence to raise up a great host of Believers who would stand faithfully in prayer for the nation of Israel and the Jewish people.
I urgently need your financial help as well. The work of the Jerusalem Prayer Team is vital, but we cannot continue without your support. This effort is completely supported by our members—friends like you who share our belief in the power of prayer and our love for Israel and the Jewish people.
VIDEO: SEE HOW YOUR LOVE TOUCHED THE LIVES OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
In just three weeks, the celebration of Passover begins. This is a holy and sacred time of year. The weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread is a celebration of God’s deliverance and protection for His people. But for the poor and hungry, especially for the elderly Holocaust survivors, it is anything but a happy time.
Today I’m asking you to help us provide food for the Seder and the week of Passover for these precious people. I will be there in Jerusalem to represent you as we share the message of hope and Christian love with them. Your gift today will provide meals for the hungry—meeting one of their most urgent needs.
In faith I have told the director of our outreach to go ahead and plan for a Passover Party and a major food distribution, but we can’t do this unless you help. Please send your gift today to bless the Holocaust survivors of Jerusalem and the poor of the house of Israel.
When you send your gift today, we will send you this beautiful Jerusalem peace print. Since the City of David is the focal point of the enemy’s attack, it must be the focal point of our prayers as well. Suitable for framing, this lovely picture will be a constant reminder to you to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
Since ancient times, prayer shawls like these have been worn by the Jews as they went before the Lord. This piece, especially designed and created for Jerusalem Prayer Team members, is our gift to you when you send your gift of $77 or more. (*While supplies last)
Your support of the Jerusalem Prayer Team allows us to continue our work on the Christian Zionist Heritage Center, to stand up and speak out for Israel, and to meet urgent humanitarian needs among the poor Jewish people living in Israel. Thank you so much for being part of this vital worldwide prayer movement.
Barukh atah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam, ozier Yisrael bigvurah.
Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who girds Israel with might.
Your ambassador to Jerusalem,
Dr. Mike Evans
VIDEO: SEE THE JERUSALEM WORLD CENTER AT 20 RIVLIN STREET
______________________________
Israel is for the Jews, Jerusalem for Israel and Christ’s Kingdom for ALL
John R. Houk
© March 5, 2013
______________________________
President Obama’s plan for Jerusalem will bring God’s judgment on America
Click to join the Jerusalem Prayer Team Today
Visit us Online:
Corrie Ten Boom – Hiding Place
To give by phone, please call:
1-888-390-7946
fax: 281-257-2476
Write us, or give by mail:
P.O. Box 30246 Phoenix, AZ 85046
Please address email inquiries to memi@jpteam.org.
The Jerusalem Prayer Team is a non-profit, non-denominational, 501c3 organization dedicated to developing a prayer movement of people around the world. It receives no support from the Nation of Israel. Donations are tax deductible. The mission of the Jerusalem Prayer Team: To guard, defend and protect the Jewish people and Eretz Yisrael until Israel is secure, and until the Redeemer comes to Zion. Dr. Tim LaHaye, Mr. Pat Boone, Mr. Bill McCartney, Rev. Tommy Tenney, Dr. A.R. Bernard, and Dr. Jay Sekulow are just a few of the more than 300 Christian Leaders who are part of the Jerusalem Prayer Team.
In the event that all the required funds are received for a specific project, the Board of Directors reserves the right to use any additional funds received for other projects or outreaches of The Jerusalem Prayer Team.
The UN vs. Israel
Israel is a very small nation established in part because of thousands of years of gross persecution culminating with Hitler’s Holocaust which murdered around SIX MILLION Jews. More importantly from a religious Jewish and Biblical Christian perspective, Israel’s reestablishment is prophetic. I can’t speak for Jews but Biblical Christians believe Israel’s return as a Jewish homeland is a prophetic precursor to the Return of King Jesus to sit on the Throne of David to rule the nations of the world.
AISH.com has a video on their website showing how the United Nations goes out of its way to publish Palestinian propaganda about Israel human rights violations while totally ignoring the brutal butchery of Islamic terrorists upon Jews attempting to terminate the Jewish State. Also the video points out the HUGE human rights violations in other larger nations than Israel ARE NOT APPROACHED nearly as much as the UN comes after Israel that is merely trying to defend its existence surrounded by a sea of hostile Muslim States.
Below is the video:
JRH 3/4/13 (Hat Tip: Nora Mitchell – World News & Events Dissected)
*******************************
The UN vs. Israel
The UN is obsessed with one country’s human rights record, and it’s not North Korea, Iran or Syria.
By Anne Bayefsky and Prager University
March 2, 2013
Youtube version: Prager University: The UN vs. Israel
Posted by: Prager University
Published on Feb 24, 2013
In the last few decades the United Nations has been obsessed with one country. Is it North Korea, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria, China or some other nation with a reprehensible human rights record? Those would all be fair guesses and they would all be wrong. Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Human Rights Institute, answers this riddle and explains the upside down moral universe in which the United Nations resides.
_______________________
© 2013 Aish.com
About Page:
Since its launch in February 2000, Aish.com has become the world’s largest Jewish content website, logging over a million monthly user sessions with 380,000 unique email subscribers.
We’ve published over 10,000 articles — on career, dating, parenting, spirituality, Israel events — offering “wisdom for living” for the modern world.
Aish.com’s goal is to give every Jew the opportunity to discover his or her heritage in an atmosphere of open inquiry and mutual respect.
Aish.com, a 3-time winner of USA Today’s Hot Site award, has been heralded for its technical sophistication and sleek graphic design. James Besser, the New York Jewish Week columnist, writes: “The supersite, Aish.com, reacting to … READ THE REST
Obama uses Taxpayers to Fund Israeli Leftists
John R. Houk
© February 17, 2013
I am certain you have heard President Barack Hussein Obama refute his critics that claim Obama is anti-Israel, right?
I was one of the Jewish leaders in that meeting. I remember precisely what happened; it was not as represented in this video.
The truth is that President Obama spent an hour with 16 Jewish leaders from a wide spectrum of the American Jewish community. We dialogued with the president about ensuring the security of Israel, plans for advancing peace in the Middle East and strategies for ending Iran’s growing nuclear capacity.
The president was clear, unequivocal and passionate. The president articulated that he and his administration are resolutely committed to the security and safety of Israel, to the survival of Israel as the Jewish homeland, and to the pursuit of sustainable peace in the Middle East, a peace that secures Israel.
I, along with many other Jewish leaders, left that meeting confident about President Obama’s commitment to Israel and promising vision for moving towards peace in the region. I left a proud American and a secure Jew. (President Obama is Israel’s ally; Nancy Ratzan; Miami Herald; 10/15/12)
“Now, I feel an obligation – not pressure but obligation — to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis on these issues because it affects them deeply,” Obama said. “They’re one of our closest allies in the region. And we’ve got an Iranian regime that has said horrible things that directly threaten Israel’s existence.” (Obama: Israel ‘One of Our Closest Allies’ in the Middle East; Fred Lucas; cnsnews.com; 9/24/12)
“Israel is a true friend, it is our greatest ally in the region and if Israel is attacked, America will stand with Israel. I’ve made that clear throughout my presidency.” (DEBATE QUOTE: Obama — “If Israel Is Attacked, America Will Stand With Israel;” Fox News Insider; 10/22/13 9:59 PM ET)
Barack Obama makes no bones about it; he alleges that he and the Obama Administration are committed to our ally Israel in the Middle East.
Just like any other good Leftist and Muslim Apologists, Obama tells American voters one thing and takes action that indicates an aversion to Israel. Caroline Glick exposes that the Obama Administration is utilizing U.S. taxpayer money to support Leftist organizations in Israel that have the typical Leftist policies that will lead to the destruction of Israel. It is unimaginable but there are a huge contingent of Jewish Leftist that actually believe that the establishment of a Jew-hating sovereign Palestinian State will bring peace between Israel and the Arab refugees that call themselves Palestinians. Read Glick’s article to discover the reality of President BHO’s efforts that will destroy Israel.
JRH 2/17/13
****************************
US government funding radical Israeli NGOs’ information operations
By Caroline Glick
February 15, 2013, 2:17 AM
Earlier this month NGO Monitor released its report on foreign government funding of radical political Israeli NGOs which work to undermine Israel’s international standing and subvert Israeli society. Along with the usual European suspects who give millions of shekels (or Euros or pounds) to Israeli groups like this, it works out that the US government is also funding extremely radical organizations, courtesy of American taxpayers. Notably, the three groups that reported receiving funding from the US are all in the business of waging political warfare campaigns directed at the Israeli public.
According to the report, in accordance with the NGO Transparency Law which requires NGOs to report on donations received from foreign governments, three Israeli NGOs received funding from the US.
Keshev, a radical leftist “media watchdog” group run by some of Israel’s most outspoken, and radical journalists and writers received NIS 492,452 in direct aid from the US government. To understand how subversive Keshev is, it suffices to note that they criticized the Israeli media for rushing to judgment about Fatah’s unity deal with Hamas. That is, the group the US supports believes we should not criticize Fatah for joining forces with a genocidal jihadist movement committed to the obliteration of Israel that is in cahoots with the Iranians.
Through Catholic Relief Services, the US also gave NIS 220,304 to the anti-Israel pressure group B’Tselem. The money was used to fund B’Tselem’s video project. B’tselem’s video project involves the distribution of video cameras to Palestinians to film snuff films that portray Israelis as aggressive bullies who seek to harm the Palestinians for no reason.
Numerous examples have already been reported of how those film clips have falsely portrayed events.
Finally, the US government donated NIS 15,474 through the Foundation for Middle East Peace to the far left internet outlet Social TV. To a certain degree, Social TV can be — and has been — portrayed as the anti-Zionist answer to Latma, the Hebrew-language media criticism site that I run. But Latma is wholly funded by private contributors and foundations.
It would have never occurred to me to ask a foreign government to fund the project. It never would have occurred to me to ask a foreign government to get into the media watchdog game in Israel. But then, from reading the report it is clear that the aim of the US government is not, in fact to help Israeli media outlets do a better job reporting on events. Rather, the report indicates that the US government has decided to use radical Israeli NGOs to wage political warfare in Israel. The aim of this campaign is to convince the public that Israel is to blame for the absence of peace with our neighbors.
It is worth noting that through US Embassy cables published by Wikileaks we learned from B’Tselem’s Executive Director Jessica Montell that B’Tselem is almost entirely dependent on foreign governmental assistance. She said that 95 percent of B’tselem’s budget is paid for by foreign governments. Montell told her interlocutor at the Embassy that B’Tselem wished to engender an international climate of hostility towards Israel that would make Israeli leaders fear the international response to IDF operations against Palestinian terror campaign so much that they would fear taking action. The cable was written after Operation Cast Lead. B’Tselem was one of the Israeli NGOs that told the Goldstone Commission Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza.
According to the leaked cable:
She [Montell] wanted the highest level decision-makers held accountable for the decisions they made on how to prosecute the conflict, including, Military Advocate Gneral (MAG) [BG Avi] Mandelblit…Her aim she said, was to make Israel weigh world opinion and consider whether it could “afford another operation like this.”
The Israeli media itself is already controlled in large part by the far Left. Channel 2 news and the station’s flagship satire program “Eretz Nehederet” played a huge role in shaping public perceptions in the last elections. Both worked overtime trying to demonize Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home Party. This they did after they worked overtime demonizing the winners of Likud’s party primaries as right wing extremists. Muli Segev, Eretz Nehederet’s editor in chief bragged in an interview in Haaretz that his show was directly responsible for the party’s loss of several Knesset seats.
The media’s overwhelming far left bias has been on shocking display this week with their wall-to-wall coverage of the story of the prison suicide of suspected traitor Benjamin Zygier. This man was apparently a double agent, a turncoat. He was imprisoned under a false name, as agreed to by him, his attorneys and his family. He killed himself. His body was sent to his family in Australia for burial. End of story.
Who cares about him? He was a traitor.
The entire story was brought to light because three radical post-Zionist and anti-Zionist members of Knesset abused their parliamentary immunity to announce on live television what the military censor had, for reasons of national security placed a gag order on. That is, by covering this story — and for the past two days, Channel 2, which has a monopoly share of the prime time news ratings — has devoted half of its broadcast time to the story — the media is dancing to the tune dictated by the most radical leftist forces in Israeli politics. It is a travesty.
But apparently, the State Department thinks this anti-Israel activism posing as the local media is insufficiently pro-Arab. And so it is funding these even more radical Israeli pressure groups.
_____________________________
Obama uses Taxpayers to Fund Israeli Leftists
John R. Houk
© February 17, 2013
_____________________________
US government funding radical Israeli NGOs’ information operations
© 2013 Caroline Glick
About Caroline Glick:
I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal, anti-American and anti-Israel stronghold of Hyde Park. Hyde Park’s newest famous resident is Barack Obama. He fits right into a neighborhood I couldn’t wait to leave.
I made aliyah to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving my BA in Political Science from Beir Zeit on the Hudson — otherwise known as Columbia University. I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.
From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, I served as Coordinator of Negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In this capacity I … READ THE REST
Nuclear weapons replace depth of defense
Samson Blinded is one of those blogs you probably will not locate unless you specifically look for it. The posts at Samson Blinded are pro-Israel on the militant side of political incorrectness. The Jewish authors are not necessarily friendly to Christian Zionists as me; nonetheless the irony is I often agree with the Samson Blinded author. Below is a cross post with the theme of nuclear weaponry as a credible defense for little Israel to survive being surrounded by a sea of Jew-Hating Muslims that are actually acquiring sophisticated offensive capability thanks to both the USA and Russia.
JRH 2/11/13
****************************
Nuclear weapons replace depth of defense
By Obadiah Shoher
Email sent: 2/8/13
Peace, and even neutrality, have protected no state, ever. Small irrelevant states are tolerated, but they are rolled over without remorse when military needs arise. Germany occupied Belgium, and Italy annexed almost all the lands of the Vatican. Belgium was neutral, and the Vatican was even culturally indispensable for Catholic Italy. Israel cannot hope to convince the Muslims of her peaceful intentions and enjoy peace with them.
Hong Kong and Switzerland provide different examples. The evil empires of Communist China and Nazi Germany tolerated them out of utter economic necessity. But Hong Kong and Switzerland were indispensable for their imperial neighbors only because the evil states were isolated from the rest of the world. Muslim oil economies are very open, and do not need Israel as their gate into the world. Muslims won’t hesitate to wipe Israel off the map.
Could Israel possibly rely on outside protection, such as a mutual defense treaty? No country rose to defend Poland in WWII. Protection—however unreliable—could only come from the US, but its behemoth army wouldn’t be able to deploy in Israel before the Muslims overran her forty-mile depth of defense and annihilated the Jews.
Whatever are the peace arrangements, Israel would have to maintain military preparedness. Israel cannot conduct a defensive war in the current borders. Arab enemies could repeatedly mobilize at Israel’s borders without attacking her; Israel could either respond by mobilizing every time and eventually ruining her economy, or gamble that the Arabs won’t attack—and only once lose the gamble.
A peace treaty with the Muslims won’t help. Every war violates a peace treaty. Muslims fight their brethren, and won’t hesitate to attack Israel if her military might dwindles.
Israel is left with two choices. One is to maintain military capability indefinitely. That path is economically unsustainable. Another is to discourage the Arabs from encroaching on Israel. For that approach to work, our threat of must remain extremely credible; bluffing does not work long in international relations. Arabs must be unable to test Israeli defenses to see how Israel would react to this or that provocation, or to look for the breach in the retaliation doctrine. Israel should treat any clearly dangerous acts as casus belli. Israel may not tolerate Muslim acquisitions of WMD, modern aircraft and air defense systems, tanks and anti-tank missiles, or mobilizations. Confronting Syria over its military upgrade now makes more sense that defending Israel from a fully revamped Syrian army a few years later. Israel won’t need to fight very often. Once the credibility of Israeli response is established, Arabs will stop provoking her.
Israel must maintain a credible threat, but not an expensive, economically unbearable army. How so? Nuclear retaliation is the answer. Israel should not hesitate to employ nuclear weapons. Extensive and costly bombing of Lebanon could be replaced with pinpoint strikes with 10kt nuclear microcharges. A weapon of that size won’t even destroy a medium-sized village, and would cause no fallout dangerous to Israel. Numerous nuclear mushrooms, however, would terrify our enemies.
Attacks by regular Arab armies should be similarly countered with 20–50kt nuclear microcharges. Even the small 20kt weapons would not endanger the Jewish cities ten to fifteen miles away from the battlefield; the populations that have been exposed to the moderate levels of radiation around Hiroshima and Chernobyl are not particularly unhealthy. Israel could emulate the depth of defense by striking deep into the enemy’s territory. Large-scale bombing raids against Damascus, Cairo, or Tehran are prohibitively expensive, but 100kt nuclear bombs offer a practical solution: large enough to damage and frighten the enemy, yet small enough to avoid exposing Israeli cities to a radiological threat. Enemies will know that they cannot succeed even if they overrun narrow Israel.
Would the Muslims escalate in response to the Israeli nuclear threat? Yes, unless Israel proves the escalation to be a dead-end. During the Cold War, the US answered similar challenges with a doctrine of gradual escalation. Likewise, Israel would employ nuclear microcharges against the guerrillas, their supporters, and regular armies, and small bombs against the attacking enemy’s cities. If attacked with WMD, however, Israel would immediately demolish the Dome of the Rock, employ nuclear weapons against Mecca and Medina, and drop really large bombs on the enemy’s capitals.
That sounds like madness, but MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, prevented the Cold War from becoming WWIII. Arabs won’t attack a dangerously mad Israel. A country prepared for total war will live in total peace. Besides, Israel has no choice economically other than to rely on nuclear weapons.
_____________________
Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict, by Obadiah Shoher, abandons moralizing to view Israeli-Muslim struggle in terms of raw realpolitik. FREE BOOK DOWNLOAD
Google banned our site from the AdSense advertising program for “unacceptable content,” “advocating against a group,” and “sensitive content.” Yahoo/ Overture restricted our ads to a few odd keywords. Adbrite closed our account. Amazon deleted all reviews to stop the discussion. Russian ad provider Begun rejected our ads as “extremist.” Many other sites and conventional media outlets refused our ads. China blocked our site. We depend on word of mouth. Please help us to bring Shoher’s message: tell your friends about this site. Link exchange suggestions are welcome. For the link code, please visit www.samsonblinded.org/banners.php If you only add text links, ours is www.samsonblinded.org/blog
Why Samson Blinded? Biblical Samson, blinded by the Philistines, killed thousands of them in suicide attack. Israeli nuclear weapons are aptly called the Samson Option.
Obadiah Shoher is a pen name for veteran politician. Obadiah lived in the USSR, and sufficiently hated socialism to emigrate. It was quite a disappointment to find that Israeli socialism is in many respects worse. Obadiah contends that socialism, combined with quasi-liberal leftism – the infamous political correctness – spells Israeli destruction, as it has destroyed other societies before. Shoher despises Israeli ostriches who keep their heads in sand preferring not to see the uncomfortable questions: changing demography of the ostensibly Jewish state, accumulation of nuclear weapons by hostile regimes, radicalization of Islamic societies, and the economic dead end of maintaining Israeli military capability regardless of paper treaties.
Why the pen name? Rav Kahane’s example is one obvious reason: he was kicked out of the Knesset for “racist” opinion that Jewish state cannot have Arab majority. Security is another reason: Obadiah receives plenty of threats.
Write us at nospam@samsonblinded.org
Legal stuff in plain text: Wherever this site or its authors advocates expulsion of Arabs from the Land of Israel, annexing Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and cruel retaliation against Israel’s enemies, it is implied that all such acts should be committed legally, by prior adopting the necessary laws. Our sole intention in regards to those acts is influencing the Knesset to adopt the necessary laws which would facilitate relocation of Arabs to Jordan, annexing the core Jewish territories, and retaliating in full force against Israel’s enemies. Neither this site, nor any of its authors advocates genocide.
WHAT OCCUPATION?
Intro to ‘What Occupation?’
John R. Houk
© February 8, 2013
Westerners are beginning a resurgence of Jew-hatred which is being expressed today in the support of Islamic nations because most of the oil producing nations of the world is Muslim. The narrative of Muslim dominated nations is that Israel existence came to be at the expense of Muslim Arabs that lived there before European Jews began to immigrate back to the Land of their God-given heritage.
Thus Westerners – especially Europeans – are believing the lie that all economic woe is due to Muslim Jew-hatred thus the petroleum economy is a dagger to oil-blood that ultimately fuels the global economy. Muslims have been winning the propaganda war making the nation Israel – you have to use a magnifying glass to view Israel on a global map – the villain of all that ails the world. The most common lie today is that the Israeli government is on par with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Hitler successfully murdered twelve million people in a racist attempt to cleanse German dominated area of the gene pool that pollutes the so-called Aryan race of Germans. Nearly SIX MILLION of those ethnically cleansed people were European Jews. The propaganda is this miniscule Israel does not have the right to exist coupled with the bad logic that the Land Israel won back in 1967 is occupied land with those Muslims being treated like Hitler’s Jews.
The propaganda is a load pig oil and Efraim Karsh writing for Think-Israel has the factual statistics to prove it.
JRH 2/8/13
****************************
WHAT OCCUPATION?
By Efraim Karsh
November/December 2012
Alert sent: Feb 4, 2013 at 4:58 PM
Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza.
No term has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than “occupation.” For decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the international media of Israel’s supposedly illegitimate presence on Palestinian lands. This presence is invoked to explain the origins and persistence of the conflict between the parties, to show Israel’s allegedly brutal and repressive nature, and to justify the worst anti-Israel terrorist atrocities. The occupation, in short, has become a catchphrase, and like many catchphrases it means different things to different people.
For most Western observers, the term “occupation” describes Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas that it conquered during the Six-Day war of June 1967. But for many Palestinians and Arabs, the Israeli presence in these territories represents only the latest chapter in an uninterrupted story of “occupations” dating back to the very creation of Israel on “stolen” land. If you go looking for a book about Israel in the foremost Arab bookstore on London’s Charing Cross Road, you will find it in the section labeled “Occupied Palestine.” That this is the prevailing view not only among Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian “right of return” that is meant to reverse the effects of the “1948 occupation” — i.e., the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel’s actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today’s terrorist attacks were “what you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of another people” — a historical accounting that, going back to 1948, calls into question not Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.
Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause, has been even more forthright in erasing the line between post-1967 and pre-1967 “occupations.” “I come to you today with a heavy heart,” she told the now-infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban last summer, “leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing naqba [catastrophe].”
“In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population … On the other hand, those who remained were subjected to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights and liberties.”
This original “occupation” — that is, again, the creation and existence of the state of Israel — was later extended, in Ashrawi’s narrative, as a result of the Six-Day war:
“Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.”
Taken together, the charges against Israel’s various “occupations” represent — and are plainly intended to be — a damning indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. In almost every particular, they are also grossly false.
In 1948, no Palestinian state was invaded or destroyed to make way for the establishment of Israel. From biblical times, when this territory was the state of the Jews, to its occupation by the British army at the end of World War I, Palestine had never existed as a distinct political entity but was rather part of one empire after another, from the Romans, to the Arabs, to the Ottomans. When the British arrived in 1917, the immediate loyalties of the area’s inhabitants were parochial-to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect-and coexisted with their fealty to the Ottoman sultan-caliph as the religious and temporal head of the world Muslim community.
Under a League of Nations mandate explicitly meant to pave the way for the creation of a Jewish national home, the British established the notion of an independent Palestine for the first time and delineated its boundaries. In 1947, confronted with a determined Jewish struggle for independence, Britain returned the mandate to the League’s successor, the United Nations, which in turn decided on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab.
The state of Israel was thus created by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination — an act, moreover, undertaken by an ancient people in its own homeland. In accordance with common democratic practice, the Arab population in the new state’s midst was immediately recognized as a legitimate ethnic and religious minority. As for the prospective Arab state, its designated territory was slated to include, among other areas, the two regions under contest today — namely, Gaza and the West Bank (with the exception of Jerusalem, which was to be placed under international control).
As is well known, the implementation of the UN’s partition plan was aborted by the effort of the Palestinians and of the surrounding Arab states to destroy the Jewish state at birth. What is less well known is that even if the Jews had lost the war, their territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians. Rather, it would have been divided among the invading Arab forces, for the simple reason that none of the region’s Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. As the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.”
This fact was keenly recognized by the British authorities on the eve of their departure. As one official observed in mid-December 1947, “it does not appear that Arab Palestine will be an entity, but rather that the Arab countries will each claim a portion in return for their assistance [in the war against Israel], unless [Transjordan's] King Abdallah takes rapid and firm action as soon as the British withdrawal is completed.” A couple of months later, the British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, informed the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, that “the most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdallah, and the south to Egypt.”
The British proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank — which were, respectively, the parts of Palestine conquered by them during the 1948-49 war. Indeed, even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which after the Six-Day war of 1967 established the principle of “land for peace” as the cornerstone of future Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, did not envisage the creation of a Palestinian state. To the contrary: since the Palestinians were still not viewed as a distinct nation, it was assumed that any territories evacuated by Israel, would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiers — Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention the Palestinians by name, affirming instead the necessity “for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem” — a clause that applied not just to the Palestinians but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states following the 1948 war.
At this time — we are speaking of the late 1960′s — Palestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community, including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. “Moderate” Arab rulers like the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent Palestinian state as a mortal threat to their own kingdom, while the Saudis saw it as a potential source of extremism and instability. Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly opposed, having their own purposes in mind for the region. As late as 1974, Syrian President Hafez al Assad openly referred to Palestine as “not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria”; there is no reason to think he had changed his mind by the time of his death in 2000.
Nor, for that matter, did the populace of the West Bank and Gaza regard itself as a distinct nation. The collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society following the 1948 defeat had shattered an always fragile communal fabric, and the subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the Palestinian diaspora prevented the crystallization of a national identity. Host Arab regimes actively colluded in discouraging any such sense from arising. Upon occupying the West Bank during the 1948 war, King Abdallah had moved quickly to erase all traces of corporate Palestinian identity. On April 4, 1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan, its residents became Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom’s economic, political, and social structures.
For its part, the Egyptian government showed no desire to annex the Gaza Strip but had instead ruled the newly acquired area as an occupied military zone. This did not imply support of Palestinian nationalism, however, or of any sort of collective political awareness among the Palestinians. The local population was kept under tight control, was denied Egyptian citizenship, and was subjected to severe restrictions on travel.
What, then, of the period after 1967, when these territories passed into the hands of Israel? Is it the case that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been the victims of the most “varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution” ever devised by the human mind?
At the very least, such a characterization would require a rather drastic downgrading of certain other well-documented 20th-century phenomena, from the slaughter of Armenians during World War I and onward through a grisly chronicle of tens upon tens of millions murdered, driven out, crushed under the heels of despots. By stark contrast, during the three decades of Israel’s control, far fewer Palestinians were killed at Jewish hands than by King Hussein of Jordan in the single month of September 1970 when, fighting off an attempt by Yasir Arafat’s PLO to destroy his monarchy, he dispatched (according to the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh) between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians, among them anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500 civilians. Similarly, the number of innocent Palestinians killed by their Kuwaiti hosts in the winter of 1991, in revenge for the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein’s brutal occupation of Kuwait, far exceeds the number of Palestinian rioters and terrorists who lost their lives in the first intifada against Israel during the late 1980′s.
Such crude comparisons aside, to present the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as “systematic oppression” is itself the inverse of the truth. It should be recalled, first of all, that this “occupation” did not come about as a consequence of some grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel’s success against a pan-Arab attempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of Israeli-Egyptian hostilities on June 5, 1967, the Israeli government secretly pleaded with King Hussein of Jordan, the de-facto ruler of the West Bank, to forgo any military action; the plea was rebuffed by the Jordanian monarch, who was loathe to lose the anticipated spoils of what was to be the Arabs’ “final round” with Israel.
Thus it happened that, at the end of the conflict, Israel unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with no definite idea about their future status and lacking any concrete policy for their administration. In the wake of the war, the only objective adopted by then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was to preserve normalcy in the territories through a mixture of economic inducements and a minimum of Israeli intervention. The idea was that the local populace would be given the freedom to administer itself as it wished, and would be able to maintain regular contact with the Arab world via the Jordan River bridges. In sharp contrast with, for example, the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan, which saw a general censorship of all Japanese media and a comprehensive revision of school curricula, Israel made no attempt to reshape Palestinian culture. It limited its oversight of the Arabic press in the territories to military and security matters, and allowed the continued use in local schools of Jordanian textbooks filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.
Israel’s restraint in this sphere — which turned out to be desperately misguided — is only part of the story. The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli “oppression.” At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.
In the economic sphere, most of this progress was the result of access to the far larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.
During the 1970′s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world — ahead of such “wonders” as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan’s $1,050, Egypt’s $600, Turkey’s $1,630, and Tunisia’s $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and 10 percent higher than Jordan’s (one of the better off Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.
No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians’ standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980′s, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990′s, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.
All this, as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of Israel’s hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres. Indeed, even as the PLO (until 1982 headquartered in Lebanon and thereafter in Tunisia) proclaimed its ongoing commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, the Israelis did surprisingly little to limit its political influence in the territories. The publication of pro-PLO editorials was permitted in the local press, and anti-Israel activities by PLO supporters were tolerated so long as they did not involve overt incitements to violence. Israel also allowed the free flow of PLO-controlled funds, a policy justified by Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann in 1978 in these (deluded) words: “It does not matter that they get money from the PLO, as long as they don’t build arms factories with it.” Nor, with very few exceptions, did Israel encourage the formation of Palestinian political institutions that might serve as a counterweight to the PLO. As a result, the PLO gradually established itself as the predominant force in the territories, relegating the pragmatic traditional leadership to the fringes of the political system.
Given the extreme and even self-destructive leniency of Israel’s administrative policies, what seems remarkable is that it took as long as it did for the PLO to entice the residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a popular struggle against the Jewish state. Here Israel’s counterinsurgency measures must be given their due, as well as the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians and the sheer rapidity and scope of the improvements in their standard of living. The fact remains, however, that during the two-and-a-half decades from the occupation of the territories to the onset of the Oslo peace process in 1993, there was very little “armed resistance,” and most terrorist attacks emanated from outside-from Jordan in the late 1960′s, then from Lebanon.
In an effort to cover up this embarrassing circumstance, Fatah, the PLO’s largest constituent organization, adopted the slogan that “there is no difference between inside and outside.” But there was a difference, and a rather fundamental one. By and large, the residents of the territories wished to get on with their lives and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Israeli rule. Had the West Bank eventually been returned to Jordan, its residents, all of whom had been Jordanian citizens before 1967, might well have reverted to that status. Alternatively, had Israel prevented the spread of the PLO’s influence in the territories, a local leadership, better attuned to the real interests and desires of the people and more amenable to peaceful coexistence with Israel, might have emerged.
But these things were not to be. By the mid1970′s, the PLO had made itself into the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” and in short order Jordan and Egypt washed their hands of the West Bank and Gaza. Whatever the desires of the people living in the territories, the PLO had vowed from the moment of its founding in the mid1960′s — well before the Six-Day war — to pursue its “revolution until victory,” that is, until the destruction of the Jewish state. Once its position was secure, it proceeded to do precisely that.
By the mid-1990′s, thanks to Oslo, the PLO had achieved a firm foothold in the West Bank and Gaza. Its announced purpose was to lay the groundwork for Palestinian statehood but its real purpose was to do what it knew best-namely, create an extensive terrorist infrastructure and use it against its Israeli “peace partner.” At first it did this tacitly, giving a green light to other terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; then it operated openly and directly.
But what did all this have to do with Israel’s “occupation”? The declaration signed on the White House lawn in 1993 by the PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. During this interim period the territories would be administered by a Palestinian Council, to be freely and democratically elected after the withdrawal of Israeli military forces both from the Gaza Strip and from the populated areas of the West Bank.
By May 1994, Israel had completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of territory containing Israeli settlements) and the Jericho area of the West Bank. On July 1, Yasir Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza. On September 28, 1995, despite Arafat’s abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the territories now under his control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank’s populated areas with the exception of Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On January 20, 1996, elections to the Palestinian Council were held, and shortly afterward both the Israeli civil administration and military government were dissolved.
The geographical scope of these Israeli withdrawals was relatively limited; the surrendered land amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank’s overall territory. But its impact on the Palestinian population was nothing short of revolutionary. At one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over virtually all of the West Bank’s 1.4 million residents. Since that time, nearly 60 percent of them-in the Jericho area and in the seven main cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron-have lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40 percent live in towns, villages, refugee camps, and hamlets where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has maintained “overriding responsibility for security.” Some two percent of the West Bank’s population-tens of thousands of Palestinians-continue to live in areas where Israel has complete control, but even there the Palestinian Authority maintains “functional jurisdiction.”
In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment from Hebron in January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation. By no conceivable stretching of words can the anti-Israel violence emanating from the territories during these years be made to qualify as resistance to foreign occupation. In these years there has been no such occupation.
If the stubborn persistence of Palestinian terrorism is not attributable to the continuing occupation, many of the worst outrages against Israeli civilians likewise occurred-contrary to the mantra of Palestinian spokesmen and their apologists-not at moments of breakdown in the Oslo “peace process” but at its high points, when the prospect of Israeli withdrawal appeared brightest and most imminent.
Suicide bombings, for example, were introduced in the atmosphere of euphoria only a few months after the historic Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn: eight people were murdered in April 1994 while riding a bus in the town of Afula. Six months later, 21 Israelis were murdered on a bus in Tel Aviv. In the following year, five bombings took the lives of a further 38 Israelis. During the short-lived government of the dovish Shimon Peres (November 1995-May 1996), after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, 58 Israelis were murdered within the span of one week in three suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Further disproving the standard view is the fact that terrorism was largely curtailed following Benjamin Netanyahu’s election in May 1996 and the consequent slowdown in the Oslo process. During Netanyahu’s three years in power, some 50 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks-a third of the casualty rate during the Rabin government and a sixth of the casualty rate during Peres’s term.
There was a material side to this downturn in terrorism as well. Between 1994 and 1996, the Rabin and Peres governments had imposed repeated closures on the territories in order to stem the tidal wave of terrorism in the wake of the Oslo accords. This had led to a steep drop in the Palestinian economy. With workers unable to get into Israel, unemployment rose sharply, reaching as high as 50 percent in Gaza. The movement of goods between Israel and the territories, as well as between the West Bank and Gaza, was seriously disrupted, slowing exports and discouraging potential private investment.
The economic situation in the territories began to improve during the term of the Netanyahu government, as the steep fall in terrorist attacks led to a corresponding decrease in closures. Real GNP per capita grew by 3.5 percent in 1997, 7.7 percent in 1998, and 3.5 percent in 1999, while unemployment was more than halved. By the beginning of 1999, according to the World Bank, the West Bank and Gaza had fully recovered from the economic decline of the previous years.
Then, in still another turnabout, came Ehud Barak, who in the course of a dizzying six months in late 2000 and early 2001 offered Yasir Arafat a complete end to the Israeli presence, ceding virtually the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state together with some Israeli territory, and making breathtaking concessions over Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem. To this, however, Arafat’s response was war. Since its launch, the Palestinian campaign has inflicted thousands of brutal attacks on Israeli civilians-suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, lynching, stonings — murdering more than 500 and wounding some 4,000.
In the entire two decades of Israeli occupation preceding the Oslo accords, some 400 Israelis were murdered; since the conclusion of that “peace” agreement, twice as many have lost their lives in terrorist attacks. If the occupation was the cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual occupation, why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of the occupation, and why did it escalate into open war upon Israel’s most far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one might argue with far greater plausibility that the absence of occupation-that is, the withdrawal of close Israeli surveillance-is precisely what facilitated the launching of the terrorist war in the first place.
There are limits to Israel’s ability to transform a virulent enemy into a peace partner, and those limits have long since been reached. To borrow from Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence of war but rather a state of mind: a disposition to benevolence, confidence, and justice. From the birth of the Zionist movement until today, that disposition has remained conspicuously absent from the mind of the Palestinian leadership.
It is not the 1967 occupation that led to the Palestinians’ rejection of peaceful coexistence and their pursuit of violence. Palestinian terrorism started well before 1967, and continued-and intensified-after the occupation ended in all but name. Rather, what is at fault is the perduring (sic) Arab view that the creation of the Jewish state was itself an original act of “inhuman occupation” with which compromise of any final kind is beyond the realm of the possible. Until that disposition changes, which is to say until a different leadership arises, the idea of peace in the context of the Arab Middle East will continue to mean little more than the continuation of war by other means.
______________________
Efraim Karsh is a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London, and editor of the Middle East Quarterly published by the Middle East Forum. This article was published in the 114 No. 1 July-August 2002 issue of Commentary Magazine (www.commentary.com). The present reprint is taken from the Aish.com reprinting of August 2002, which is archived at http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48898917.html
_____________________
SlantRight Editor: Here are some excerpts from the Think-Israel homepage. I am not sure how often Think-Israel updates its homepage so I am posting some of the info here for posterity.
**********************
We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and peaceloving normal Islam.
Judging by their behavior, Muslims are anti-West, anti-Democracy, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Hindu. Muslims are involved in 25 of some 30 conflicts going on in the world: in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Indonesia (2 provinces), Kashmir, Kazakastan, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macedonia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Russia-Chechnya, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.
Doesn’t this mean that extremist Islam is the norm and normal Islam is extremely rare?
##########
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.
“For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.” (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.) The Palestinian leadership, including Ahmed Shukar and Yasir Arafat, has openly admitted Palestinian “peoplehood” is a fraud; Read This (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw).
###########
“It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 5,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan.” (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.)
############
The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.
World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel’s Jewish population: 5.4 million. (Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz)
http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/ apr04/0223.htmldehai.org/archives/ dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html [SlantRight Editor: I could not find a combination in which this link works. If you wish to play with it perhaps you can start HERE]
#############
“… during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refuges around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the “right of return” to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist.” (Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.)
###############
Some 900,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from the Arab countries in the 1940s. They hold deeds for five times Israel’s size. (Independent Media Centre, Winnipeg)
##############
Re Israel’s irrevocable ownership of Israel, Golan, Samaria, Judea and Gaza: “Nothing that Israel’s legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity.” (Professor Julius Stone)
#############
“By 1920 the Ottoman Empire had exercised undisputed sovereignty over Palestine for 400 years. In Article 95 of the treaty of Sevres, that sovereignty was transferred to England in trust for a national homeland for the jews. The local Arabs had never exercised sovereignty over Palestine and so they lost nothing. Their rights were fully protected by a provisio in the grant: ‘…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…’ The proviso has been fully observed by the Israelis. Since 1950 the Arabs have built some 261 new settlements in Judea and Samaria — more than twice as many as the Jews, but you never hear of them. They fill them with Arabs from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and by the grace of God they become Palestinians. Allahu Akbar! The Arabs call Judea “the West Bank’ because they would look silly claiming that Jews are illegally living in Judea.” (Comment by Wallace Brand on Martin Peretz “Narrative Dissonance” The New Republic, July 1, 2009)
Read More Quotes Here
###################
STEPS TO CARRY OUT THE MANDATE FOR PALESTINE
Allowing the Arabs and their European friends to set the agenda, Israel has pursued a useless peace policy, bending over backwards to persuade the Arabs to become genuine peace partners. It has brought them nothing but grief, ever more dead Israelis and more acts of terror against more of their citizens. The world hasn’t appreciated that Israel has jeopardized the safety of its own citizens to reduce harm to the Arabs. Instead, the world demands Israel do more “for peace” while asking nothing of the Arabs. How does Israel get back on the right track of making the safety of its own citizens its priority?
§ The first step is to understand that ALL of Mandated Palestine belongs to Israel and was authorized by the same international authority that gave the other 99.99% of the Middle East to the Arabs.
§ The second step is to recognize that the peace process is a scam to deprive Israel of its land. As Efraim Karsh points out, “Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza.”
§ The third is to stop going down the wrong road and, as Caroline Glick recommends, change current Israeli policy. Israel needs to stop being an enabler that gives the Arabs immunity while they work to destroy Israel.
§ More and more Israelis are considering annexing Samaria and Judea officially and putting all of the Territories under Israeli law. See “On Reclaiming Jewish Land” here, including Hausman’s article, “Reclaim Jewish Land; Reject The Two-State Solution” here.
§ Others, Think-Israel included, believe annexation is insufficient. Israel will sooner or later be confronted by a choice that can be simply stated this way: Keep The Land And Expel The Arabs — OR — Keep The Arabs And Lose The Land. Phrased thus, the solution becomes obvious. Just as the Jews were forced from the Arab countries, it is time for the second phase of this population exchange, moving the local Arabs to some part of the vast land area controlled by the Arabs. This would be an upgrade. They would have more space while living in the same environment, life style and culture they are accustomed to having. It would allow them — and this includes all the Arab refugees now scattered in the different Arab countries — the ability to govern themselves. Or carry on their way of death, but only against each other. Their choice.
This set of papers lay out the first steps of a policy based on reality. At the very least, it protects the character of the Jewish state.
#################
This is Additional Material on San Remo and Israel’s ownership of Mandated Palestine:
“The San Remo Mandate” here.
Interview with Howard Grief in Norway March 21, 2011 on “The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under international Law.”
Part 1 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zkjC7tNOrI
Part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF4_hM8kbfc
Another set of videos interviewing Howard Grief are at:
1. watch?v=ROumSVr7MFc&list=PLE3AB68BC6C75748F&index=2
2. watch?v=ROumSVr7MFc&list=PLE3AB68BC6C75748F&index=3
3. watch?v=ROumSVr7MFc&list=PLE3AB68BC6C75748F&index=4
Yoram Shifftan has written a series of articles on Israel’s ownership of Mandated Palestine by an irrevocable trust to the Jewish people. See e.g., here, here, and here. See also inter alia: Wallace Edward Brand, “Israeli Sovereignty over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria,” here; “A Landmark Work” by William Mehlman here; Michael C. Duke, “Jerusalem: Our Redeemable Right” here; Ted Belman, “Summary Of Israel’s Legal Rights To Judea And Samaria,” here.
In the box above, google san remo, league of nations, irrevocable trust, mandated palestine, Israel’s legal right for a more complete selection of relevant articles on Think-Israel.
