Biden Pressured the Ukraine on Another Matter -- to Vote against Israel

New Material added 10-12-2019
When Biden pressured Ukraine 
to vote against Israel after the 
2016 presidential election [here]

Senator Joe Biden --a Democrat-- is at the center of an energetic effort by his party's members of the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump. The impeachment effort focuses on a phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the new president of the Ukraine. Without reviewing the Democrats' charges against Trump, we point out that President Trump and his supporters such as Rudy Giuliani, former US Attorney in New York City and former mayor of New York, have accused Biden of pressuring the previous Ukrainian leadership --before Zelensky's election-- to dismiss a prosecutor who was investigating a Ukrainian company, Burisma, an energy company, in which Biden's son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board of directors. Now just how and why it came to be that Biden Junior was appointed to the Board of a Ukrainian energy concern when he had little or no expertise in the energy field [oil and gas, etc] nor did he know the Ukrainian or Russian languages, is a matter of great and relevant curiosity. Maybe somebody at the company, Burisma, thought that having the younger Biden on the Board would give the company or maybe the government of Ukraine, a certain influence in Washington on policy making in the energy field or in regard to Burisma in particular or in favor of the Ukrainian government of that time, approximately 2014-2016. Young Biden was supposed to be paid $50,000 per month by Burisma for his services on the Board.

An interesting question. And did Joe Biden pressure the Ukrainian govt to dismiss a prosecutor investigating Burisma? Biden did boast about successfully pressuring or intimidating or blackmailing the Ukrainian leadership of the time in a public speech which was delivered, as far as I know, before the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential and prestigious US organization. A video on the internet shows Biden boasting of his successful extortion of the Ukrainian govt: I gave them six hours [to dismiss the offending prosecutor or US loan guarantees in the amount of $1.5 billion would be withheld].

Interesting questions but be they as they may, I intend now to show that Biden applying pressure on the Ukraine was his practice in his capacity as President Obama's designated liaison between his administration and the Ukrainian govt. Hence Biden was in a good position to apply pressure on the Ukraine and indeed he was responsible for dealing with the Ukraine under Obama and thus his relations with the country had a certain official status.

In fact, in the last month of Obama's presidency in 2016 late in December, Biden served his boss, Obama, in threatening the Ukraine on another matter, the UN Security Council res. 2334, which was a very anti-Israel resolution, essentially saying that Jews/Israelis had no right to live across the 1949 Green Line, even in Jerusalem in places, neighborhoods, where Jews had lived before 1947. This episode seems to support the Trump-Giuliani version of events.

My post on Biden and Obama's role in pressuring the Ukraine on UN SC res. 2334 is here.

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What a Ukrainian member of parliament & former Ukrainian security chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, said in the WSJ about the Biden-Trump Affair

Serious allegations have been made in the U.S. and Ukraine, including that Ukrainian government officials and organizations assisted Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and that Burisma, a major Ukrainian gas company, hired Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, for cynical purposes. Regardless of the implications of these charges within American politics, Ukraine has a responsibility to investigate them completely and transparently.

First, as I have insisted for more than two years, we must resolve the allegation that Ukrainian officials interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. If we find that Ukrainian laws were broken, the perpetrators here must be prosecuted swiftly, to the fullest extent of the law.

Second, Ukraine must resolve the allegations regarding Burisma. As the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine, our version of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, I know there are many accusations of corruption against this company.

It isn’t clear whether Ukrainian officials meddled in the American election, but Parliament must find out. We also do not know if Hunter Biden was complicit in Burisma’s alleged corruption, or why he was appointed to the board of a Ukrainian company. The allegation that Burisma arranged its relationship to the younger Mr. Biden by donating to a U.S. think tank is merely a small part of the larger question about its activities.

[Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 10, 2019]

Moderate Faisal Husseini Says Land of Israel Belongs to Islam, thus Lasting Peace Is Impossible

It is notorious by now that shortly after signing the ceremony for the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, yasser arafat traveled to South Africa where he told a Muslim audience that these accords should be seen like the Hudaybiyyah truce accord that Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, made with the Meccans. It was meant to last ten years. But a couple of years later, after Muhammad felt that the Muslims were now sufficiently strong to defeat the Meccans, he and his men broke the truce and defeated the Meccans and captured Mecca.

What I did not know about is what Faisal Husseini told an Israeli reporter, Daniel Haik, two years after Oslo in 1995:

This celebrated [Arab] notable, nephew of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseni, but more "moderate" in appearance, received me in his luxurious villa in one of the neighborhoods in the eastern part of Jerusalem. I especially remember one question that I asked him during the interview . . .: "Will the Palestinians agree to recognize the presence forever of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel that you call Palestine?" His answer was direct: "That will be impossible because we can never recognize a Jewish presence on land belonging to Islam." [HaGuesher, 1-17-2018 in French ici ]

There you have it. The motive for the Arab refusal of Israel has to do with Islam, with Islam's supposed ownership of the Land of Israel which the Muslims consider to belong to the Islamic nation or Umma in perpetuity by the principle of waqf. But the West and the so-called Leftists invented for themselves all sorts of other reasons and excuses for Arab intransigence. What is interesting here is that the "Leftists" always used to disqualify movements for being religious. It was on that ground that the Communists rejected Zionism. And here we have a frank declaration by a Palestinian Arab leader that the motive for denying Israel's right to exist in perpetuity is -- Islam, a religion. Yet that religious motive does not seem to bother the Left, not the social democrats, not the Marxist-Leninists so-called, nor any other species of Leftist that I am aware of.

Bear in mind that although Jews lived in Arabia in the days of Muhammad, and he fought battles against those Jews and massacred the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe, Jews have been forbidden to live in Arabia [except for Yemen which was under different rulers] for more than 1000 years. Saudi Arabia maintained that law for many years although after the Six Day War of 1967 when Jews came there as representatives of important foreign powers [like Kissinger representing the USA], the law had to be waived.

As to the Land of Israel, Husseini was simply enunciating the old Islamic principle of waqf. Land that has been conquered by Muslims belongs to the Muslim community in perpetuity and cannot, must not, be alienated. Waqf land is sacred, inalienable property of the Muslim Umma, the Islamic nation. Of course, we know that vast areas in Europe and Asia and Africa were once conquered by Muslims.  Most of Spain and large parts of southern Italy, France, Greece, the Balkans, the Ukraine of today, and even Hungary were under Islamic domain for longer and shorter periods. Muslims no longer make a vocal call for that land to come back to Islam. This means that they recognize superior strength as do most people. However, jihadi extremists like the clerics who have guided Hamas, have said that Spain, etc, must come back to Islam. So the claim of waqf ownership of Spain, southern France, etc, is in abeyance but has not been cancelled in principle by the true, strict Islamists. This may seem odd to those aware that the Quran itself recognizes Jewish/Israelite ownership of the Land of Israel, sometimes called Holy Land or blessed land in the Quran. However, other Quranic verses seem to abrogate this recognition of Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel. And the waqf principle is above all. Hence, Islamists challenge not only the legitimacy of Israel but of many other countries.
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Quote in French original of Faisal Husseini's crucial response:
Ce sera impossible, car nous ne pourrons jamais reconnaître une présence juive sur cette terre appartenant à l'Islam [Daniel Haik in HaGuesher, 1-17-2018; p6]
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Italian Jewish Response to the UNESCO Big Lie & Western Collaboration In It

Fiona Diwan, editor of the Bulletin of the Jewish Community of Milan, had some sharp words for UNESCO over its sinister vote "revising" the known history of Jerusalem and the Jewish role in that history. She also had sharp words for her own government and other EU and Western governments that collaborated in that vote by voting in favor or by merely abstaining. By abstaining they refused to take an honest stand on the integrity of known history. The West stays on the route towards barbarism.

Fiona Diwan in Mosaico, il Bollettino of the Milan Jewish Community, November 2016, no. 11:
Every month, here on earth, we cannot even count the pieces of archeological evidence and the discoveries of Jewish, Biblical, Hasmonean, and Herodian antiquities. However, France and Italy pretended not to know that. and were ready to exhibit the most scandalous silence when they abstained from the vote on the motion at UNESCO labeled "occupied Palestine," in which last month any tie between the Temple Mount and Judaism and Christianity was definitively denied. Among so many things that it did, the motion cancelled the Hebrew names of all the places on the Temple Mount in order to keep only the Arabic names. By now, everything has been written about this ignominious text. It is a text that falsifies history, denies the ancestral tie between Jerusalem and the Jewish people, once again giving in to the pressures and the intellectual terrorism of the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority. I want to point out that England, Holland, the United States, Germany, Lithuania, and Estonia voted against the motion.
We hoped that Italy and a France would have been more courageous by rejecting this buffoonish text. We would never have thought that at the session of the definitive vote, they would have chosen to abstain, thereby endorsing UNESCO's perverse calling in the delegitimization of Israel. Because, obviously, this is what was at stake. A delegitimization that runs in parallel with the demonization of Israel and the new European antisemitism with an Arab-Muslim matrix and its demographic explosion on the continent of Europe.

Ogni mese, quaggiù, non si contano le evidenze archeologiche e le scoperte di antichità giudaiche, bibliche, asmonee, erodiane. Eppure Francia e Italia hanno fatto finto di non saperlo, pronte a esibire il più scandoloso silenzio quando si sono astenute al voto della mozione Unesco denominate "Palestina occupata," con cui si è negato il mese scarso, in via definitive, qualsiasi legame tra il Monte del Tempio, l'ebraismo e il cristianesimo.  Tra le tante cose, la mozione cancellava i nomi ebraici da tutti i luoghi del Monte del Tempio per mantenere solo quelli in arabo. Su questo testo ignominioso si è ormai scritto di tutto, un testo che falsifica la storia, nega il legame ancestrale tra Gerusalemme e il popolo ebraico, cedendo, una volta di più, alle pressioni e al terrorismo intellettuale degli stati arabi e dell’Autorità palestinese. Voglio qui ricordare che Inghilterra, Olanda, Stati Uniti, Germania, Lituania e Estonia avevano votato contro. Speravamo in una Italia e Francia più coraggiose nel rigettare questo testo buffone. Mai avremmo pensato che, in sede di voto definitivo, avrebbero scelto l’astensione avallando così la vocazione perversa dell’Unesco alla delegittimazione di Israele. Perché, ovviamente, di questo si tratta.
 Una delegittimazione che corre in parallelo con la demonizzazione di Israele e col nuovo antisemitismo europeo di matrice arabo-musulmana e la sua esplosione demografica in terra d’Europa. [testo qui]

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The Italian daily newspaper, Il Foglio, sponsored a demonstration against the UNESCO in Rome, in front of the UNESCO offices, I believe. It was rather well-attended for an event of this kind.
See the video at the link [qui]