Ambassador Michael Oren: Obama Wants Israel to Placate Erdogan

This is an amazing revelation. It was long obvious that Obama wanted Israel to placate Erdogan. After all, it was when Obama was here in Israel (early 2013) that Netanyahu offered Erdogan his best non-apology for resisting the pro-Hamas efforts of Turkish jihadis and other jihadis on the Mavi Marmara. Nine of hese jihadis were killed when they were on their way to Gaza, declaring that their purpose was to break Israel's justified blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. Hamas, let us not forget, openly advocates genocide of the Jews in its charter (Article 7), as well as promoting the forged and plagiarized Protocols of the Elders of Zion in that charter. Obama hardly disguised his sympathies for Hamas and for Erdogan's Turkey, now becoming more and more Islamist because of him. Obama also directly intervened with Israel on behalf of the prisoners taken on the Mavi Marmara and other boats taking part in the pro-Hamas convoy that was falsely named "the Free Gaza Flotilla."

We knew all that. But now, Michael Oren, formerly Israel's ambassador to the USA, reveals that Israel's cooperation in a triangular alliance with the USA and Turkey was a paramount US interest, in Obama's eyes. However, Erdogan is a Judeophobic Islamist provocateur. Israel should not apologize to Turkey or Erdogan in any way for resisting Erdogan's provocation by sponsoring the Mavi Marmara, which enjoyed Obama's support too. This support for Erdogan is another sign of Obama's basic Judeophobia.

Here are Oren's words [JPost, 12-19-2015]:
“The reason that apology took place was that in every single meeting we had with the president of the United States, Obama, he made it clear that his first priority was the reconciliation between Israel and Turkey,” Oren said. “He viewed the Israeli-Turkish-American triangle as a-close-to-paramount American strategic interest.” [see JPost here]. 

Obama has had a pro-Islamist policy from the beginning. And we have pointed this out before. He is seven-fold more dangerous because he is the president of the USA, the most powerful country in the world. This policy can be seen in his and his flunkeys indulgence of Islamists in Turkey (erdogan), Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood, called the Ikhwan) and various and sundry Arab terrorist factions such as Fatah and Hamas (the Palestinian Arab branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood). Obama knowingly tolerated these Islamists, including the jihadists on the Mavi Marmara.

The recent agreement to placate Erdogan is undesirable and unjustified but is understandable given Obama's pressure for it. Avigdor Lieberman's criticism of the accord is basically sound. Obama shows his own hypocrisy, his own false "humanitarianism" and faux "righteousness"  by overlooking Turkey's own embargo of Armenia starting about 1992 which was put in place by the previous government of Turkey but which  Erdogan has continued, while hypocritically denouncing Israel's justified blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza.

More than 900,000 Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands

Given the general state of ignorance of history worldwide, it is no surprise that most people, even many Jews, are not aware of the  Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Of those who know something of this forgotten history, few know that these Jewish refugees outnumbered the Arab refugees who fled the Arab-initiated war on the not yet born Jewish State of Israel which started on 30 November 1947. Last year, Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed a law that every 30 November is to  be a day to commemorate the Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran. Arab attacks on Jews on Arab lands accelerated after that date, which was the date, by Middle Eastern time, that the UN General Assembly  recommended partitioning the Land of Israel ["palestine" in Western parlance] between a Jewish state, an Arab state, and and international enclave in and around Jerusalem [corpus separatum]. After more than 1000 years of oppression, inequality, humiliation and recurrent persecution and pogroms in Arab/Muslim lands in the inferior status of dhimmis, the Arab states wanted to get rid of the local Jews, since they could not tolerate Jews sharing an equal status with Muslims.

Ashley Perry and Lyn Julius have written separately on this day of commemoration, a day to remember what has been too long forgotten and relegated to the periphery of discussion of Arab-Israeli issues, of Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

Here is Lyn Julius:
The date chosen was 30 November - to recall the day after the UN passed the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine. Violence, following bloodcurdling threats by Arab leaders, erupted against Jewish communities. The riots resulted in the mass exodus of Jews from the Arab world, the seizure of their property and assets and the destruction of their millennarian, pre-Islamic communities. In 1979, the Islamic revolution resulted in the exodus of four-fifths of the Iranian-Jewish community.

Refugees are much in the news these days. Until the mass population displacement caused by wars in Iraq and Syria, however, the world thought that 'Middle Eastern refugee' was synonymous with 'Palestinian refugee.' Yet there were more Jews displaced from Arab countries than Palestinians (850, 000, as against 711,000 according to UN figures.)

The majority of Jewish refugees found a haven in Israel. For peace, it is important that all bona fide refugees be treated equally, yet Jewish refugee rights have never adequately been addressed. The 30 November commemoration is first and foremost a call for truth and reconciliation.

The Jewish refugee issue is more than simply a question to be resolved at the negotiating table. It is a symptom of the Arab and Muslim world's deep psychosis - an inability to tolerate the non-Arab, non-Muslim Other.

Today, both Muslim sects and non-Muslim minorities are being persecuted in the Middle East, but people are apt to forget that the Jews were one of the first. As the saying goes, 'First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.' And it does not stop there. A state that devours its minorities ends up devouring itself.
This Arab/Muslim psychosis is the product of fundamentalist ideologies, many of them Nazi-inspired, which took root in the first half of 20th century. These ideological forces left a legacy of state-sanctionedbigotry and religiously-motivated terrorism. That legacy is with us today, in the atrocities in Paris, in Mali and in the stabbings on Israel's streets.

. . . .

The Israeli government is telling the Jewish refugee story at the UN on 1 December. From Amsterdam to Sydney, Toronto to Geneva, Liverpool to New York, San Francisco to London, Jewish organisations worldwide - my own (Harif) included - are organising lectures, film screening and discussions.

Read article in full 
Same article in The Algemeiner 
It's time to remember the other refugees on 30 November (Jewish Weekly)

here is Ashley Perry:

Making 2016 the Year of the Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries
. . . . . .
One of the issues I was able and proud to raise during my time in Government was the issue of the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, many of these communities massively predating Islam and the Arab conquest of the region in the Seventh Century, and the appropriation of their assetsestimated in today’s prices to be many billions of dollars.
. . . . . . . .

Growing up in a thriving Jewish community, attending a Jewish school and being involved in the Jewish community and Zionist organizations, I am amazed now, thinking back, how little was taught about the long and illustrious history of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa and their subsequent expulsion.

How many are taught about the Jewish communities of Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Yemen, to name but a few of many nations now completely without a Jewish presence?

We often raised this issue on the international stage and at the Foreign Ministry under the leadership of then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, and even initiated a now annual event at the United Nations solely devoted to the issue of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries with our partners in the World Jewish Congress and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

However, the more we pressed the issue, which by international and Israeli law must be part of any resolution to our conflict, the more I understood that Jews in Israel and abroad are not even aware of it.

. . . . now more than ever, it is vitally important that the issue of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa is studied and discussed in Jewish schools and educational and communal institutions across the Diaspora.
. . . . . .
In 2014, the United Nations General Assembly recommended that 2014 [be] a year of solidarity with the Palestinian people and called on people around the world to recognize their “inalienable rights”. Perhaps 2016 should become the Jewish year of solidarity with the Jewish refugees from Arab countries and there should be greater recognition, understanding and education of the inalienable rights of these people to rights and redress.

 We should not allow the suffocation and extinction of these historic communities to be erased from the pages of history. We should share their stories, and keep their memory alive, especially their destruction which was largely ignored around the world.

Let’s make 2016 the year where this changes.
[See full article here]
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Report on the upcoming commemoration on the News1 web site [in Hebrew]:
נתניהו: להרחיב לימודי יהודי המזרח
תישקל הצעת השרה גמליאל לתת פרס 
 ראש הממשלה לחוקרים ובאקדמיה על 
מחקרים בתחום מורשת היהודים יוצאי 

ראש הממשלה בנימין נתניהו הורה להרחיב את לימודי מורשת היהודים יוצאי ערב ואירן במערכת החינוך וכן לשקול את הצעת השרה לשוויון חברתי גילה גמליאל לקיומו של פרס שיינתן מטעמו של ראש הממשלה לחוקרים ובאקדמיה על מחקרים בתחום מורשת היהודים יוצאי ארצות ערב ואירן.  השרה גמליאל סקרה לפני הממשלה את נושא היציאה והגירוש של יהודים מארצות ערב ומאירן וזאת לרגל ציון יום מיוחד לנושא זה שיחול ב-30.11.15.  במסגרת סקירתה, מסרה גמליאל נתונים על מספר היהודים שעזבו את ארצות מוצאם והבהירה כי כשני שלישים מהם הגיעו למדינת ישראל והשתקעו בה.  היא הציגה גם את החלטות האו"ם בעניין פליטים והחלטות הכנסת באמצעות חקיקה לגבי השמירה על זכויות היהודים לפיצוי על רכושם. כן ציינה השרה את הפעולות הנעשות בארץ ובעולם לציון מורשתם של היהודים יוצאי ארצות ערב ואירן לרבות פעולות שצריך להמשיך ולנקוט בהן בעיקר במערכת החינוך ובאקדמיה.

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More Articles on This Subject
Jewish refugees from the Farhud in Baghdad [here]
A commemoration in Australia [here]
Dr Edy Cohen on Ynet news [here]
Elderly Jewish refugees remember their experiences [here]
Report on the commemoration in Jerusalem [here]
Review by Elliott A Green of a book on this subject compiled by Malka Hillel Shulevitz [here]
Excerpt from the aforementioned book, by Bat Yeor [here]
"Forgotten Oppression of Jews under Islam" by Elliott A Green [here]
Report on the commemoration event at the UN in New York [here]

Greece Opposes Labeling of Goods from Jewish Settlements

Greece has many reasons to resent the European Union, which has hardly treated Greece with brotherly and sisterly solidarity in the case of its debt crisis. In fact, the solutions to the Greek debt crisis, originating mainly in Germany at the German central bank, the Bundesbank, and adopted by the Eurozone, made Greece's debt crisis much worse than it had been before Greece turned to the Eurozone bodies for help, as we have shown in a number of previous posts.

Moreover, the Republic of Cyprus with its ethnic Greek majority that once aspired to join their island to Greece, has been occupied in part since 1974 by Turkey. That was 41 years ago. Some 200,000 Greek Cypriots were "ethnically cleansed" by  the Turkish invasion of the island, and fled to the south of the island as about 35 to 38% of the island was left occupied by Turkey. Or some would say that they were "displaced" in the euphemistic language generally used in the mainstream international press when writing about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Since then, the European Union to which both Greece and their brothers and sisters in Cyprus belong has had little to say in opposition to or criticism of the continued Turkish occupation. This contrasts with the constant EU criticism of Israel for allegedly "occupying" Judea and Samaria, the heart of the ancient Jewish homeland, called Ioudaia in Greek and IVDAEA (Judea) in Latin, both names pronounced about the same.

Furthermore, the international community had asssigned the Land of Israel, the former Roman province of Judea (roughly speaking), to the Jewish people as the Jewish National Home at the San Remo Conference, 1920, and the League of Nations, 1922. The Jewish National Home principle was supported by one of the leading Greek statesmen of the time, Eleftherios Venizelos.
As we know, the United Kingdom received a mandate from the League to foster development of the Jewish National Home. But the UK betrayed that commitment, most notably in the 1939 "Palestine White Paper."

Greece too was betrayed by its World War I allies, most notably France and the UK, who had promised Greece that it could take back Greek-populated territories in Anatolia, such as Smyrna and its hinterland, in return for supporting the Western Allies, the so-called Entente powers, in their war with Germany, Austria-Hungary (the Habsburg Empire) and the Ottoman Empire. The Supreme Allied Council dominated by the UK & France --two of the Principal Allied Powers-- hobbled Greece in its military operations in Anatolia so much that Ataturk's Turkish nationalists were able to defeat the Greeks after an intial Greek advantage and then drive out of Anatolia not only the Greek army but the ethnic Greek population of several million people [see "Smyrna" toward the bottom of the post] (1922). This was one of major instances of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century before WW2.

In another case of betrayal of promises, the EU claims that Judea-Samaria is "occupied" by Israel and constantly vilifies Israel's presence there. The EU also insists incorrectly that Geneva Convention IV 49:6 forbids Jews from moving into Judea-Samaria area because it is "occupied," as they allege. This racist, anti-Jewish policy has been most recently manifested in the call on EU member states to insist that products from Israeli/Jewish settlements in Judea-Samaria be labeled as such, that is, as products of an "occupied territory." This means that the EU wants to foreclose any need for Palestinian Arabs to negotiate with Israel what the future borders between Israel and a Palestinian Arab state will be. They want to force Israel to accept the PA/PLO's demands that Israel retreat to the 1949 armistice lines that were never borders, in order to have peace with the PA/PLO. And the EU wants to use the EU consumers to pressure Israel to submit, by not buying products from supposedly "illegal settlements". But no such pressure on Turkey is visible. Greece realizes that it cannot rely on the EU.

Greece set to oppose EU settlement labeling

Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias has sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informing him of Athens’s opposition to the EU guidelines on the labeling of goods produced in Israeli settlements, The Times of Israel learns.

Kotzias’s message to Netanyahu came three day after Greek PM Alexis Tsipras visited Israel on Wednesday of last week.

Other than Greece, the only countries to break ranks on the measure are Hungary, which has declared its opposition; and Germany, which has yet to say whether it will implement it.

— Raphael Ahren Times of Israel
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More on the Greek position [here]. PM Tsipras also recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's "historic capital."