Mahmoud Abbas Tells European Union that He Wants All of Israel, including west of the Green Line

“We are keen on continuing the way of negotiations,” Abbas said. “We are determined to reunite our people and our land.” [here & here emph. added]

The above is what Mahmoud Abbas told Federica Mogherini, High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs of the European Union and the foreign ministers of the EU states on Monday this week [1-22-2018 & here] in Brussels.

This phrase "to reunite our people and our land" seems to be a euphemism for the Arabs' taking all of the State of Israel including the land that Israel held between 1948 and 1967. In other words, it is a masked refusal to accept Israel in any borders. Now, Abbas and the PLO as a whole and Hamas and the other Palestinian Arab terrorist and political groups believe that all of the Land of Israel belongs to them as well as to Islam. To confirm that consider the word "reunite." If something has to be reunited, that means it was once united but is no longer. They know that they already control part of "palestine" [= the Land of Israel roughly speaking]. And what they don't control must be reunited with what they already control, Abbas implies.
And reuniting "our people" means bringing the dispersed Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere with the status of refugees, back together in one state comprising the whole land of Israel, probably to be ruled by the Fatah and other factions that run the zones of Judea-Samaria now under PA/PLO rule.

The PLO Charter by the way speaks of the whole land that they call "palestine" needing to be "liberated"  from Israel. Likewise the PLO's Declaration of a State of Palestine of November 1988. These were obviously  rejections of peace. But maybe Mogherini and her staff are too ignorant or too stupid or too insensitive to the subtle Arab use of rhetoric to understand Abbas' real meaning. If they did understand Abbas' meaning would they have encouraged him and said they support him on the Jerusalem issue? She said:

“I want to reassure President Abbas of the firm commitment of the European Union to the two-state solution with Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two states,” Mogherini said during the meeting. [here & here]                                        

Let's leave aside the stupidity and impracticality of the notion of one city as the shared capital of two states. Did Mogherini understand that Abbas had just told her that he does NOT support the two-state solution, that he and those he represents are claiming the whole country?

Speaking of refugees, it is curious that the so-called "international community" --no doubt Mogherini is part of it-- seems to forget what happened in other situations where there were refugees on an ethnic basis. How is it that precisely the Europeans forgot that many Greeks were driven out of Anatolia, Turkey of today, and almost nobody in Europe but the Greeks themselves care about Greek rights and claims to the Smyrna [now Izmir] region from which most or nearly all Greeks were driven out? The total number of Greeks driven out is estimated at more than 1,100,000 while another 600,000 to one million were slaughtered in the period of 1914 to 1922 [some researchers put the numbers higher or lower]. Greece accepted more than one million refugees in the 1922-23 period and the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen negotiated an agreement between both Greece and Turkey to accept the principle of population exchange rather than go to war. As part of this agreement, Turkey agreed to let Greece expel some 400,000 Muslims living in northeastern Greece, Thrace, and take them in on Turkish territory. This was in exchange for the 1,200,000 or 1,500,000 Greeks that Ataturk and his army had already driven out of Anatolia, what is now Turkey.

For his services in the cause of mutual ethnic cleansing, Nansen received the Nobel Peace Prize. But that was not the end of Turkish-perpetrated ethnic cleansing. In 1955, while both Turkey and Greece were members of NATO, the Turkish government incited a pogrom in Istanbul, previously Constantinople (a Greek-speaking city before the Turkish conquest of 1453), that ended with the expulsion by the mob of tens of thousands of ethnically Greek Turkish citizens. The Turks got away with it. Somehow NATO let them get away with it.

How is it that the Europeans, including the wonderful folk at EU headquarters in Brussels, Mogherini and her staff, have forgotten that once upon  a time, a man got a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting the principle of population exchange?
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For more info on the expulsions of 1922-23, see:
Ernest Hemingway, "On the Quai at Smyrna" and the epigraph to Chapter II, both in the collection In Our Time
George Horton, The Blight of Asia
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
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What does Fatah, Abbas' faction, mean by "our land"?
It seems that they mean the whole country from the river to the sea, from the Jordan to the Med.
See here.
More EU hypocrisy related to covering up for Abbas [here], for his claims on the reasons for the Shoah.
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Other relevant articles:
Fiamma Nirenstein on Abbas' speech in Ramallah on 1-14-2018 [Italiano qui -English  here]

Why Do the Arabs Oppose Recognizing a Jewish State?

Prime Minister Netanyahu suggested to US  secretary of state John Kerry that the framework he was drawing up for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority include Palestinian Arab recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Kerry did intend to include this Israeli proposal but since has backed away from it in view of Arab opposition, first of all from Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah and Palestinian Authority. Just today, the Arab League voted its support for Abbas' position.

One of the justifications for this opposition that apologists for the PA/PLO present is that by Israel being a Jewish state, the civil rights of Arab citizens of Israel would be adversely affected. However, all states belonging to the Arab League define themselves as Arab states. All Arab League member states but Lebanon define themselves constitutionally as Islamic states in one way or another. This does not stop them from opposing Israel being defined as a Jewish national state. The arguments against Israel as a Jewish state could logically be applied to Arab and Islamic states, and with more justification, since we have the benefit of hindsight to know just how non-Arabs and non-Muslims have been treated in Arab states.

The explanation for the Arab position lies, I believe, in the traditional Arab-Muslim view of Jews as an inferior dhimmi people, a millet [see below] devoid of national rights, and only entitled to live if they pay a yearly head tax on dhimmis called the jizya. The dhimma system applied to all non-Muslims who were subjects of the Islamic state, with individual exceptions. Within this system, the Jews were at the bottom of the barrel, at least in the Fertile Crescent  countries, including the Levant, where the Jews' status was inferior to that of their fellow dhimmis, the Christians.

Whereas the Quran and medieval Arab historiography, such as the writings of Ibn Khaldun, recognize the Jews as a nation or people, the entrenched Islamic view of Jews as an evil, inferior contemptible millet is now dominant. Moreover, in fact, in practice, that was the actual status of Jews in the Arab-Muslim countries for centuries. Even today in the 21st century Muslims believe that Jews do not deserve the dignity of having a national state of their own, the Quran and the old Arab historians notwithstanding.

This contemptuous view of Jews is clearly stated by the PLO in its charter. Article 20, already denies that the Jews are a people, claiming that they are merely a "religious" group. Jewish tradition holds that the Jews are both a people and a  religious group. Here is the relevant text of Art. 20:

"The claim of historical or religious ties between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities nor with the constituents of statehood in their true sense. Judaism in its character as a religion is not a nationality with an independent existence. Likewise the Jews are not one people with an independent identity. They are rather citizens of the states to which they belong."

Note the contempt for Jews which oozes from this text. The history of Israelite/Jewish kingdoms in the country, as well as of the Roman province of Judea, is denied. The setting of much of the Hebrew Bible lies in the Land Of Israel which the PLO denies in a way reminiscent of Holocaust denial. Further, Jews do not have "the constituents of statehood in their true sense." Just by the way, the Nazis and other German Judeophobes claimed that the Jews were not capable of being a "state-forming nation." [see Francis R  Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press 1985)].

For texts of the PLO charter and the  Hamas charter, see here.
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Addition: in ancient Greek Jews were sometimes referred to as Ethnous Ioudaion, Jewish nation.
millet -- Turkish word referring to a recognized, organized religio-ethnic community within the Ottoman Empire [from the Arabic word milla or millatun, meaning originally people or nation but in Turkish usage referring specifically to the legally inferior communities of dhimmis (zimmis in Turkish), who were in turn the non-Muslim subjects of the Islamic states]. The millet was charged with keeping order among its members and often charged with collecting the jizya tax from them, and the millet enjoyed a certain religious autonomy and authority over its members, provided that Islamic restrictions on dhimmis were not violated. The traditional millets were the Armenians, Ermeni millet, like the Jews a religio-ethnic community, the Jews, a millet within the Ottoman Empire and also including Samaritans defined as Jews in Muslim tradition; as well as Greek Orthodox Christians, who were called I believe Rumi millet. The Greek Orthodox millet included Arabic-speaking Christians as well as other Eastern Orthodox Christians, such as Vlakhs [the old name for Rumanians], Bulgars, Serbs, etc. In the 19th century up to 1914, eleven millets were added to the original three, with the new millets representing ethnic subdivisions of the Greek Orthodox.There were no doubt nuances of the law in effect in different places.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's Response to Obama's Sinister Pro-Arab Fascist Speech

UPDATED 6-9-2011 at bottom
The "peace" in "peace process"
stands for peace of mind for
antisemites.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's Office issued the following statement following President Obama's sinister speech that denied Jewish human and civil rights:
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Israel appreciates President Obama’s commitment to peace.
Israel believes that for peace to endure between Israelis and Palestinians, the viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of the viability of the one and only Jewish state.

That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.

Among other things, those commitments relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines.

Those commitments also ensure Israel’s well-being as a Jewish state by making clear that Palestinian refugees will settle in a future Palestinian state rather than in Israel.

Without a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem outside the borders of Israel, no territorial concession will bring peace.

Equally, the Palestinians, and not just the United States, must recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, and any peace agreement with them must end all claims against Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will make clear that the defense of Israel requires an Israeli military presence along the Jordan River.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will also express his disappointment over the Palestinian Authority’s decision to embrace Hamas, a terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction, as well as over Mahmoud Abbas’s recently expressed views which grossly distort history and make clear that Abbas seeks a Palestinian state in order to continue the conflict with Israel rather than end it.
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Needless to say, I do not agree with the first sentence of the Prime Minister's Office's statement that Obama is committed to peace. Obama appears to be committed to undermining peace, encouraging Arab warmongers, and depriving Jews of human and civil rights.
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Daniel Pipes on the speech [here]. In case you're wondering, Pipes considers the speech and the policy that it contains to be "folly."
Omri Ceren, Robert Satloff, Aaron David Miller note that Obama's speech was a grave departure from past US policy on Israel-Arab peacemaking [here]
More Omri Ceren on "change" [here]
Charles Krauthammer on what is new & what old in Obama's allocution [here]
Robert Satloff on Obama's move closer to the Arab position [here]
Jackson Diehl on Obama's mistakes in his speech [here]
Evelyn Gordon on how Obama undermines Israel's negotiating ability and international status [here]
Jonathan Tobin explains that Obama's speech did not appease Arabs angry at his lack of support for Arab uprisings against their own tyrannical regimes, nor did it satisfy the never satisfied PLO/PA leadership, while undermining Israel [here]
Binyamin [Benjamin] Netanyahu's speech after meeting with President Obama [here]. Slightly more of the exchange between the two leaders [here].
Judith Klinghoffer believes that Obama's speech was based on demands from Saudi Arabia that he come out strongly on the Arab side in return for the Saudis bringing down the price of oil on the world market through increased production. The world market price of oil has come down in recent weeks.
Dore Gold on how Obama reversed past US official policy in favor of "defensible borders" for Israel [here]
Wall Street Journal on "The 1967 Line of Fire" [here]
David Bernstein gives some historical perspective on US promises to Israel [here]
Ronald Radosh describes tensions within the White House between now resigned "peace envoy" George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, and Obama himself which led to making Obama's speech less hostile than it otherwise would have been [here]
Yoram Ettinger on Obama's unrealistic understanding and/or ignorance about the Middle East [here]
Washington Times editorial on Obama breaking promises to Israel [here]
Prominent Democratic politicians, Jews and non-Jews, disagree intelligently with Obama's positions on Israel [here] as expressed in the speech of 5-19-2011.
Benny Avni's questions about Obama's speech [here]
Ari Shavit on the bad and the good in Obama's speech [here]
6-9-2011 Carlo Panella on Obama's speech. He upset both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs and demonstrated his ignorance of the situation and the issues once again [qui]

The Turkish "Humanitarian" Armada -- An Italian View

UPDATING 6-14 & 10-17-2010 at bottom

The peace process means peace of mind for antisemites

Fiamma Nirenstein, the deputy chairperson of the foreign affairs committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, discerns a slight improvement in the international view of Israel's action to stop the fake humanitarian Turkish armada from breaking the blockade of Gaza, now ruled by Islamic fanatics and bigots. Her piece is remarkable for her real knowledge of what was going on compared to the fashionable, simplistic Judeophobic accounts elsewhere in the world's "news" media.


The Left Is Now Rethinking: Enough Mud on Israel

Il Giornale 9 June 2‏010

After the accusations poured on Israel, now comes the mea culpa of the international press and observers. Even Bernard-Henri Levy condemns the disinformation. Reuters is accused: blood and knives removed from the photos

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Israel is a major subject for discussion in today’s world. It is the apple of discord, the preferred pretext for attacking the West, the best weapon for legitimizing the old striped totalitarian Soviet peace flag. It is the worm that gnaws at the soul of Leftist Jews who adore their narcissistic-diasporic legitimization that exempts them from the hardly elegant experience of being a people, indeed, a nation. Above all, it is the issue that enables the antisemites to express themselves under cover and enables the automatic UN majority to be strong. It is also the best of the red capes to wave in front of the Islamist bull, as Ahmadinejad did in Istanbul, when he promised to wipe out Israel, and as Bashar Assad did in Syria and Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, did, who is building an Islamist career for his country by threatening Israel.

But excess is deforming and the huge amount of mud poured on Israel lately has disgusted even Bernard-Henri Levy, one of the most active critics of Israeli policy (He and others authored the leftist so-called JCall document against the Israeli government and criticized Israel immediately after the flotilla event). Precisely in HaAretz, a pacifist, hypercritical paper, he condemned the disinformation and criminalization deployed against Israel, while retaining his reservations about the “stupidity” of the operation and of the Netanyahu government.

The world is rethinking, and maybe that is also because the slow realization of reality is weakening the pressure, Israel is showing courage on the issue of a [international investigating] commission. Jerusalem has many good reasons for rejecting an international commission that, according to the UN Council for Human Rights (Italy voted No), is supposed to investigate the behavior of the Jewish State during the unfortunate boarding and takeover of the ship Marmara. The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner considers it a good idea and in order to reinforce the meaning of the commission he requests that Turkey take part in it. That is strange, given the certainly non-neutral role of Turkey in that event and given that Erdogan stokes the fire and threatens, together with Ahmadinejad, to go to the coast of Gaza with his own ships, even personally.

In general, Israel’s experience with investigating commissions, with UN institutions moreover, has been disastrous. An outstanding illustration was the commission directed by Judge Goldstone which used only sources sympathetic to the Palestinians to draw up a devastating report about the Gaza War. In fact, it forbade Israel to defend itself and quoted only activist-witnesses that call armed units and human shields for Hamas “civilians.” Israel, that can judge itself very severely by itself, as demonstrated by the Winograd Commission that was pitiless on the Lebanon War of 2006 and caused the dismissal of many civilians and military men, is planning therefore at the moment two independent investigating commissions, even if Netanyahu is still awaiting American approval for the second: The first, military one, will be guided by General Giora Eiland, a calm personality, admired for being cultured; the second is to be made up of local jurists, expert on international and maritime law and of two international jurists, one an American, as observers. It will not be their duty to interrogate the soldiers, whom Bibi is careful not to let be directly accused. The commission should examine the conditions of the encounter on the ship Marmara, the legality of the naval blockade, the question of “proportion” in the encounter.

In reality, with the passage of the hours, as many international observers, the press, the TV, Bernard-Henri Levy and companions make their mea culpas, the circumstances of the event on the Marmara have become ever clearer. Criticisms have been made by many of the military modality of the attack, but that the “pacifist” ship was transporting armed thugs belonging to an organization that had supplied weapons to Hamas, to the Islamic Jihad and even to al-Qa`ida and that it was sprinkled with persons who wanted to win paradise through becoming shahids, is certain.

What has not been well clarified, however, is the role of Turkey, that launched the fleet although warned of the danger that that entailed; that knew who the men of the IHH were, and that allowed them to embark anyhow in conspicuous numbers from a different port without checking them, that now rides the event in the most blatant way, using Istanbul as a launch platform for bellicose operations. Turkey acts enthusiastically in every domain: It was reprimanded by Angela Merkel by her defining herself as prime minister for the Turks who live in Germany; it raised eyebrows when it sought de facto to save Iran from the sanctions by offering to enrich Iran’s uranium itself; when a radar station within Turkey collapsed unexpectedly while NATO is supposed to have needed information on Georgia, obtained by radar.

Standing out is the fact that Abu Mazen went personally to Erdogan to explain to him that what he is doing gives Hamas an advantage over its worst enemy, Fatah. A fire like the one that Turkey is threatening to kindle to Israel’s detriment can spread even to the detriment of the arsonists.

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It may well be that world public opinion is turning away from the lies of Erdogan and of his Western comrades in the "Free Gaza movement." After all, there has been too much real information that emerged before and after the boarding of the Mavi Marmara about the thuggish character of the IHH operatives on the boat who attacked Israeli commandos who came down one by one from a helicopter, thereby facilitating the endeavor of the Turkish thugs to seize and beat and stab them. That was an Israeli mistake of intelligence evaluation and of command. But the thuggish character of the "peacemongers" was obvious for all to see in many videos and audio recordings and still photos. So even many of the usual anti-Israel hypocrites had to step back and reconsider what went on.

What is disappointing in the article above is that Israel's govt and prime minister seem to be giving in to a hypocritical demand by certain Western govts and the UN, etc., that an "international invesigating commission" be set up to investigate only Israel and not Turkey, an investigation that would supposedly be "transparent" and "impartial" and any other suitable adjective that the reader may care to add . Meanwhile, Erdogan and Ahmadinejad's open incitement to war and threats of war against Israel are not openly or directly condemned by the West, including the USA. Israel should take its case to the so-called International Court of Justice at the Hague where of course, Israel will get no justice because of the inherently political structure of the ICJ and the UN as a whole, but it would be helpful to raise the issue, to make the accusations anyhow, to accuse, in my opinion. The UN "human rights council," which is dominated by tyrannies and, in particular, the Organization of the Islamic Conference [OIC] (its chairman a Turk named Ihsanoglu), should not be allowed to be the party making accusations and demanding investigations. The role of the Islamist Turkish govt of Erdogan in instigating and executing this affair should be exposed to the whole world.
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UPDATING 6-14-2010
Eve Garrard, a writer, points out some of the widespread hypocrisy deployed against Israel, especially on account of the Turkish armada incident [here].
Leon de Winter, Dutch novelist, perceives the international Left's hypocrisy over the Turkish armada [here]
UPDATING 10-17-2010 The important Italian daily, Il Giornale [which Fiamma Nirenstein writes for] of 1 June 2010 judged that "Israel did right to shoot" at violent jihadist thugs on the Mavi Marmara [here]. "With the excuse of pacifism, a fleet of ships wanted to violate the sovereignty of the Jewish state and bring aid to Hamas." The novelist Amos Oz disagreed with the Israeli government decision to stop the "aid convoy." But he adds, "I don't know them, these pacifists. Many of them cannot be defined as such. They are Islamic militants sympathizing with Hamas. They have ties with terrorist organizations. I believe that they were looking for a provocation. This is a fact. Among them, to be sure, were pacifists in good faith. . ." Here's a problem. Can pacifists in "good faith" sympathize with Hamas? Were they so ignorant as not to know what Hamas stands for? That their convoy was making publicity for Hamas? Were they 100%, sincere and consistent pacifists?

A Petition against the Vichyite Petition handed to the Euro Parliament

Professor Shmuel Trigano has asked people to sign the petition below which was drawn up to counter the Vichyite petition submitted to the European Parliament at Strasbourg by a group of foolish, supposedly peace-loving intellectuals, much like those intellectuals in France and Britain before World War 2 who wanted to make peace with Hitler and thought that giving him various territories that he was demanding could lead him to make peace. This madness supported the disastrous Munich Pact of 1938 and culminated in the beginning of the Second World War. In other words, the peacemongers helped bring the world to war. The peace process of the 1930s, called "appeasement" at that time, led to war.

The first link is to the Vichyite, peacemonger petition. The link towards the bottom is to the petition supported by Shmuel Trigano, Professor Richard Landes, Professor Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Professor Raphael Drai, Dr Judith Gachnochi, Dr Georges Gachnochi and by several other professors and intellectuals, as well as by me, Eliyahu m'Tsiyon. The message from Shmuel Trigano and others is below the broken line

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BE REASONABLE !

A group of intellectuals and personalities, ostentatiously claiming their Jewishness as a pledge of objectivity, has taken the initiative to publish an “Appeal to Reason” (http://www.jcall.eu/); an appeal they intend to circulate as widely as possible. Unfortunately this appeal goes against it’s own stated aims: democracy, morality, solidarity within the Diaspora, and the commitment to Israel’s fate. It is clear that this offensive has a self-serving agenda and doesn’t truly stand for the best interests of the Israeli people.

We took into our hands to organise a petition under the name of: “Be Reasonable”.

1) The idea of an imposed peace with Israel under pressure, even with the intervention of the superpowers, is a denial of both the democratic process and the international law, with hints of neo-colonialism. It violates the freedom of choice of the citizens of the Israeli democracy and sets a dangerous precedent for all other democracies.

2) It relies on the cooperation of a U.S. president who fails to face the deadly challenge of Iran, and of the European Union, which has generally identified itself with the Palestinian cause. Israel is under threat of extermination, a threat expressed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its satellites surrounding Israel from the north (Hezbollah) and to the south (Gaza, i.e. Hamas).

3) While these petitioners put the blame and responsibility of political deadlocks on Israel alone, every objective investigation tends to prove that neither the Palestinian Authorities nor the Palestinian society are genuinely interested in a fair peace: according to a poll by the Al-Najah University in Nablus, 66.7% reject the creation of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, 77.4% reject the idea of Jerusalem as the capital of both states (April 2010). Creating a Palestinian state without the assurance that there is a real desire for peace within the Palestinian population as well as in the entire Arab world would expose the small territory of Israel to a fatal strategic weakness.

4) The “Appeal to Reason” is suffering from amnesia. The Oslo Accords led to an unprecedented wave of terrorism. The withdrawal from Lebanon was followed by the establishment of Hezbollah. The withdrawal from Gaza helped legitimise Hamas. Furthermore, the guarantees of the UN Security Council are not worth the paper they are printed on: the disengagement from Gaza led to the election of Hamas and the subsequent daily shower of rockets and missiles. Wouldn’t an independent Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem” as a capital be the hub of even more intensified terrorist activity? By then, expression of regrets by our Reasonable Petitioners would be worthless.

5) The sense of morality, of honour and the commitment to peace are not the monopoly of just one side. They are a permanent challenge. This ill-advised petition could bring serious harm and injury to the citizens of Israel. Indeed, such a position has been used to justify calls for boycott against the State of Israel, its products and its citizens as well as questioning the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

Confronted with the real threats to its security, which compromise any possibility of lasting peace in the Middle East, we intend to establish and promote a public mediation forum within the European Union. This forum will defend and publicise the legitimacy of the State of Israel within the framework of a true and sustainable peace, and continue the fight against anti-Semitism that has been dangerously
resurfacing in Europe.

Please endorse this declaration and show your support for the State of Israel.

Please sign and forward “Be reasonable!”

To sign click the following link: http://www.dialexis.org

First French signers:
Jean-Pierre Bensimon, professor of social science, Raphael Draï, professor of political science and law, Judith Gachnochi, psychologist, Georges Gachnochi, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Nicolas Nahum, architect, Georges Elia Sarfati, university professor, linguist and philosopher, Perrine Nahum Simon, CNRS researcher, historian, Pierre-André Taguieff, research director at CNRS, philosopher, political scientist and historian of ideas, Michèle Tribalat, demographer, Shmuel Trigano, professor of political sociology, editor of revue “Controverses”.
[Note: not all of these signatories are Jews]
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Commentary on the Vichyite JCall petition: Luc Rosenzweig [ici en francais]
Summary of an article on the Peace Process of the 1930s that prepared the road to war [here]
The full article summarized on the previous line is [here]
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Fiamma Nirenstein sent the following critique of the same Vichyite petition sponsored, by the way, by an outfit called JCall, an affiliate of the American JStreet astroturf gang financed by billionaire George Soros, various Arab and Iranian interests, and others. JStreet was set up to help Obama promote an anti-Israel policy in the United States, supposedly with Jewish support. Fiamma Nirenstein is a journalist and member of the Italian parliament, where she is deputy chairperson of the Committee on Foreign Affairs.
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"STAND FOR ISRAEL, STAND FOR REASON"

The attack against Israel by the Jcall document is inspired by a short-sighted view of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, the signatories of this appeal do not have the clear perception of the global physical and moral threat to which Israel is currently exposed. It is indeed incredible that intelligent and cultivated people like Alain Finkelkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy - instead of dealing with Iran that will soon keep the whole world under the threat of the range of its atomic bomb - play with the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu is the true hindrance to peace, that the essential obstacle to a resolution of the conflict is a reproachable attitude of Israel. The intellectuals who have signed the French document ignore history and don’t care about the help that it will give and is already giving to the unprecedented delegitimization threatening the life of Israel.

Pushing Israel to concessions without rewards, simply means to surrender the enemy without any guarantee: the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza has produced disastrous consequences, the land Gush Katif inhabitants has been kicked out from is since then a launching pad for missiles and terrorists; Ehud Barak’s concessions in Camp David, designed to give Arafat practically everything he was asking for, led to the horror of the second Intifada, with its two-thousand people killed by suicide attacks; the evacuation of Southern Lebanon in 2000 strengthened the Hezbollah, supplied them with 40,000 missiles and led to the 2006 war.

Finkelkraut, Henri Levy and their fellow signatories claim that they are concerned about the future and the security of Israel. But they actually ignore the basic element that has prevented success of any peace process, namely the Arab and Palestinian refusal to recognize the very existence of the State of Israel as a permanent nation-state in the Middle East. This all-encompassing rejection of Israel’s right to exist is reflected day by day in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media.

The attack against Netanyahu aims at breaking up his right wing coalition. But it actually never mattered whether an Israeli government was right or left: anyhow the Palestinians refused any proposal of peace.

Israeli land concessions like the ones the French intellectuals advocate will never bring peace. Only a cultural revolution in the Arab world can achieve it, but nobody asks for that, not even Obama, who devotes US great strength to pressure only Israel. This is the current fashion.

Peace will not come because Israel becomes smaller. What will bring us closer to peace is if Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas stops naming public squares after mass-murderers like Hamas bombmaker Yehiya Ayash; if the Palestinians stop passing out candies when Jewish families are murdered by suicide bombers in restaurants; and when the Arab world accepts Netanyahu’s modest request to recognize the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people.

This reality is ignored as well by the Israeli intellectuals who have signed a document against the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who wrote a very noble letter to support Jerusalem spiritual core and historical homeland of the Jewish people.

This sadly politically correct epidemic is probably designed to give some oxygen to the defeated pacifist movements that is actually able only to crash against the rock of the Islamist hatred culture and to defame Israel. But in this approach there is no contribution to any better future for the Middle East: the world must find the courage to face the new Islamist frenzy that springs from Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and points to the destruction of Israel. Iran and its allies are of course arming themselves with lethal weapons, not with vain words, like those who signed “The Call for Reason”. But even words can kill and destroy.

The signatories of the J-Call manifesto show a blatant ignorance of the extended hand policy adopted by Netanyahu since his Bar Ilan speech in June 2009, the ten-months settlements freeze, the lifting of many check points and the adoption of important measures to ease the Palestinian economy. And you can clearly see that the “Finkelkraut document” has an Obama flavour, a prissy and respectable trendy attitude intellectuals are often unable to say no. This makes possible nowadays to the increasing number of Israel’s enemies to delegitimize the Jewish State rejoicing “even the Jews are with us”. If this was the signatories aim, they have indeed achieved it.

SIGN THE PETITION "STAND FOR ISRAEL, STAND FOR REASON"


A large number of distinguished Italian intellectuals and others have signed the statement sent by Fiamma Nirenstein. The Italian original is here.

The "Peace Process" Is a War Process -- Daniel Pipes Realizes

UPDATING 4-19-2010 see at bottom

The "peace process" means peace of mind for antisemites.

Daniel Pipes made some quite correct observations about the "peace process" in a recent column.
They should be obvious to everyone but are not. Pipes makes these observations while writing about the "silver lining" of the present Israel-USA contretemps.

First, the "peace process" is in actuality a "war process." Diplomatic negotiations through the 1990s led to a parade of Israeli retreats that had the perverse effect of turning the middling-bad situation of 1993 into the awful one of 2000. Painful Israeli concessions, we now know, stimulate not reciprocal Palestinian goodwill but rather irredentism, ambition, fury, and violence.
. . . .
Fourth, U.S.-Israel tensions increase Palestinian intransigence and demands. Israel in bad standing empowers their leaders; and if the tensions arise from U.S. pressure for concessions to the Palestinians, the latter sit back and enjoy the show. This happened in mid-2009, when Mahmoud Abbas instructed Americans what to extract from Jerusalem. . . [here]

As a Jerusalemite, I can confirm Pipes' observation that the peace process is a war process. The more "peace processing" going on, the more Arab terrorism. More Israeli withdrawals or concessions of territory lead to rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. We live in an Orwellian world.

And of course, Washington hostility to Israel just encourages the intransigence of Arabs who have no desire to make peace with Israel and are inspired by Washington's hostility to Israel. Indeed, hostility to Jews is deeply embedded in the Muslim religion since Muhammad. Likewise the belief in perpetual war against the infidels is embedded in Islam --with truces, to be sure, when the infidels are stronger. The Quran does not make peace a supreme principle but rather war to subdue and humiliate the infidels and make them pay tribute. This is enunciated in Quran 9:29 in regard to Jews and Christians specifically.

Of course, some Arabs prefer peace to war. But an Arab leader/ruler has to justify peace --needs an excuse for peace-- by pointing to the greater strength of the infidel, in this case Israel. By weakening Israel strategically through territorial concessions of strategic areas needed for defense (such as the Jordan Valley and the north-south Judea-Samaria mountain ridge), Israel becomes obviously weaker. In this case, leaders/rulers who prefer peace would lose their excuse for peace because Israel would seem obviously weaker.

And all of the above does not deal with the issue of denying the human and civil rights of Jews by, for example, forbidding them to live in parts of Jerusalem. Yet Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority population since the mid-19th century, since 1853 at least, according to the French historian and diplomat of that time, Cesar Famin, whose figures were published by Karl Marx in an article in the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley's paper, on 15 April 1854. Furthermore, Arab forces began driving Jews out of parts of Jerusalem in December 1947. These parts became parts of what was the Judenrein "Arab East Jerusalem" for 19 years between 1948 and 1967, a sector of the city occupied by the Arab Legion of Jordan. This is in addition to the importance of Jerusalem to the world, especially to Christians and Muslims, being due to its ancient role in Jewish history and religion.

Obama's anti-Israel policy, his favoring of a racist anti-Jewish apartheid policy is dangerous, threatening and repugnant. However, as Pipes says, it may have its silver lining.
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UPDATING 4-19-2010 Lebanese blogger Tony Badran writes about how Syrian thug-in-chief, Bashar Assad, views peace and war:
"Assad’s mantra is that 'peace and resistance are two sides of the same coin.' As he sees things, it’s not either peace or resistance. For him the two are simultaneous tools of attrition, with peace talks providing Syria with impunity as Assad pursues “resistance.” In his conceptual framework, the peace process is just warfare by other means." [here]
Veteran "peace processor", Aaron David Miller, looks at the "process" and at Washington's ME policy more skeptically now. He compares it to a dogmatic religion [here]. Rick Richman comments on Miller's comments [here]
Youssef Ibrahim of the NYSun, formerly ME correspondent for the NY Times, quotes from and comments on A D Miller's article [here]. Ibrahim shows that the so-called "palestinian" issue is not the main concern of several important Arab govts. Yet the Obama gang keeps on hawking that issue's supposed centrality to Arab and Middle Eastern concerns like a huckster in the marketplace, although nobody's buying.

The Obama Administration Moves into a Full Pro-Nazi, Judeophobic Position

When fascism comes to America,
it will be called anti-fascism.
[attributed to Huey Long]

Little comment from me is needed on Evelyn Gordon's short essay below on the Obama administration anti-Israel position. It is implicitly and fundamentally pro-Nazi. That is, it means to take away Jewish rights in the Land of Israel, national rights to govern the land, rights of residency throughout the Land, rights to Jewish religious and archeological sites, and so on. It means to set up a genocidal Arab terrorist state alongside Israel.

By implicitly rejecting Security Council resolution 242 of 1967 it means to throw Israel to the Arab wolves, without the "secure and defensible boundaries" that SC res. 242 called for. Mitchell is in fact rejecting any real negotiations. He is embracing the position of the Judeophobic Saudi wahhabite Muslim kingdom that actively spreads Islamic fanaticism around the world. Mitchell, Obama & Company are flouting the real international law that recognized the Jewish right to reconstitute the ancient Jewish state in the Jewish national home [Preamble to the League of Nations mandate].

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Evelyn Gordon

HONEST BROKER, ANYONE?

Nothing in George Mitchell’s interview with PBS last week received more attention than the envoy’s implied threat to revoke American loan guarantees to Israel. That’s a pity — because far more worrisome is the goal he set for the negotiations, as highlighted by Aluf Benn in today’s Haaretz. “We think the way forward … is full implementation of the Arab peace initiative,” Mitchell declared. “That’s the comprehensive peace in the region that is the objective set forth by the president.”

The Arab initiative mandates a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines — every last inch of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. It also demands a solution to the refugee problem “in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194,” which Arabs interpret as allowing the refugees to “return” to Israel.

Later in the interview, Mitchell says this initiative requires “a negotiation and a discussion,” and that you can’t negotiate by telling “one side you have to agree in advance to what the other side wants.” Yet by saying his goal is “full implementation” of this initiative, he’s effectively saying, “You can have your negotiation and discussion, but Washington has no intention of being an honest broker: it fully backs the Arab position on borders, Jerusalem, and even (to some extent) the refugees.”

This is the administration’s clearest statement yet that it’s abandoning the position held by every previous U.S. administration: that Israel needs “defensible borders” — which everyone agrees the 1967 lines are not. Mitchell also thereby abandoned the position, held by every previous administration, that any deal must acknowledge Israel’s historic ties to the Temple Mount via some Israeli role there, even if only symbolic (see Bill Clinton’s idea of “sovereignty under the Mount”). The Arab initiative requires Israel to just get out.

And Mitchell effectively took Syria’s side on that border dispute: no Israeli government ever agreed to withdraw farther than the international border, whereas the Arab initiative mandates the 1967 lines — i.e., including the territory Syria illegally annexed pre-1967.

Even worse, the Arab initiative addresses none of Israel’s concerns, such as recognition as a Jewish state or security arrangements. That means Mitchell just announced support for all Arab demands without obtaining any parallel concession to Israel. Under those circumstances, why would the Arabs bother making any?

And his repeated demand that Israeli-Palestinian talks deal with borders first indicates that this was no slip of the tongue. After all, the only thing Israel has to give is territory; having once ceded that via an agreement on borders, it has nothing left to trade for, say, security arrangements — which, as a veteran Israeli negotiator told Benn, has actually proved one of the hardest issues to resolve in previous rounds of talks. Borders first, an Israeli minister summed up, is “a trap. We only give, we don’t get anything.”

George Bush’s Road Map viewed the Arab initiative as merely one of many “foundations” for talks. Mitchell’s adoption of its “full implementation” as a goal thus represents a deterioration in U.S. positions that ought to worry all Israel supporters.

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This stance by Mitchell is Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter's dream. It fulfills their Judeophobic hatred. It was for the purpose of promoting such Judeophobic, pro-Nazi policies that the JStreet lobby was set up using the money of George Soros, the multi-billionaire. Mitchell of course is a flunkey not only for Obama but for the foreign policy establishment. No doubt the British partners in crime of the US foreign policy establishment will soon join in to support this position.

Could the New Obama Learn some Principles from the Old Obama?

Of course, many people have a hard time figuring out who Obama really is, or maybe, who he himself thinks he is. Does he know who he is? Anyhow, having said so many things during his relatively short lifetime, saying one thing and its opposite over and over on many issues, he was bound to say something right for once. Like the broken clock that tells the right time twice a day.

Many years ago, when he was a young, opportunistic college student,

Citing a Rastafarian Reggae musician as his foreign policy authority, Obama ruminated,
"When Peter Tosh sings that 'everybody's asking for peace, but nobody's asking for justice,' one is forced to wonder whether . . . [various] issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem, instead of the disease itself."
[quoted by Carolyn Glick, JPost 7-6-2009]

Well, different people define justice differently. The Muslim definition of justice is especially problematic because in the strict Muslim view, justice exists when and where Muslims rule over non-Muslims with the latter in a distinctly inferior, humiliating position. Now Obama is demanding "peace" without justice, as he claimed in his notorious Cairo speech that building homes for Jews to live in Judea-Samaria "undermines efforts to achieve peace."

Be that as it may, I and many others believe that justice means, among other things, overcoming the bigotry of Muslim law in the Middle East, granting equality of rights and human dignity to non-Muslims as well as Muslims. When Muslims had unchallenged control over the Land of Israel, they humiliated Jews here, who had few rights. As dhimmis, Jews suffered all sorts of indignities, which I have detailed on earlier posts on this blog [search for "dhimma" and "dhimmi"]. The Arab Muslims and many Arabic-speaking Christians in this country denied the Jews' right of return to their land, although this right is specifically acknowledged by the Quran, the Arabs' holy book, itself [search for posts on Quran and Zionism in this blog]. Unfortunately, Britain which had accepted the international commitment of fostering development of the Jewish National Home in Israel violated its commitment. This followed Arab requests/demands to stop Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, demands made in 1939 on the eve of the Holocaust. Now Arabs called "palestinians" make similar demands --Abu Mazen demands a stop to all Jewish settlement as a precondition for negotiations with Israel. Again unfortunately, freshman US president Barack Hussein Obama agrees with the Arab demand that "all settlement activity" must stop. Hence Obama is agreeing with a racist Arab demand, a demand which reflects traditional Arab-Muslim supremacist thinking. Therefore, Obama is a racist against Jews or goes along with racism against Jews. In contrast to his opinion in 1983 when writing for a college student magazine, he no longer is concerned about Justice or, shall we say, he is only adheres to the Muslim notion of justice which is hostile to Jews and other non-Muslims.

In this context, news about the meeting between the Anointed One and 16 so-called "Jewish leaders" reflects a shameful situation of toadying to a Judeophobe. To be sure, Obama stacked the deck by excluding Jewish leaders who were likely to disagree with him or challenge him convincingly. Hence, there was no real meeting between obama and Jewish leaders but only between obama and his Jewish toadies.

Getting back to the quote from Obama above, the "disease," the real "problem," is Judeophobia, both on the part of Arab/Muslims and Westerners. That problem is the main obstacle to peace.