Category Archives: Gaza

Sheikh Qaradawi’s Visit To Gaza

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Youssef Qaradawi

Youssef Qaradawi

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The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) has published a nice summary of Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi’s recent visit  to Gaza and titled “Sheikh Qaradawi’s Visit To Gaza”  ” The JCPA report begins:

 

May 14, 2013 Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, visited Gaza on May 7-10 at head of an entourage of 45, including senior officials of the organization. In the past, Qaradawi was a candidate for leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and over the years he has acquired the status of spiritual leader of this movement and of its Palestinian branch, Hamas.

Qaradawi received a warm welcome, especially from the Hamas leadership. They saw the visit as an important affirmation, by the longstanding and supreme religious authority of the Sunni Muslim world, of Hamas’ rule in Gaza. The visit affirmed Hamas as a faithful exponent of the Palestinian people and the jihadist enterprise, aimed at conquering the State of Israel and making it part of the Islamic state of Palestine – eventually to be one of the provinces of the Islamic caliphate whose capital will be Jerusalem.

Qaradawi’s visit was extensively covered in the Hamas government’s media, which again highlighted the ‘sheikh of jihad’s’ (as Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called him) backing for this Palestinian movement.

On May 10, the headline of the official Hamas daily Falastin was worded in that spirit: ‘Qaradawi calls for liberating the soil of Palestine.’ The subhead was a quotation of the most important statement he made: ‘We will never concede Palestine and we will never recognize Israel.’

During the visit, Qaradawi set forth his political outlook, thereby offering a sort of vision for the future (as well as a sort of last will and testament, given his advanced age (86) and his own recent remark that his days are numbered). The following are the main tenets of that outlook:”

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch reported during the visit that:

  • Upon his arrival, he was greeted by the Hamas Prime Minister and called immediately for “Jihad to death” against Israel.
  • Qaradawi made comments in which he denied Israel’s right to exist and waxed enthusiastically about Hamas rocket fire into Israel.

We also reported that during Qaradawi’s visit, the  Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood held its first ever anti-Israel rally since coming to power, surely no coincidence and likely an attempt to avoid being upstaged by Qaradawi.

Read more at Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch

Also see:

Al-Qaradawi and the New Religious Conflict With Israel (gatestoneinstitute.com)

 

Obama Pressures Netanyahu into Humiliating Apology to Terror-Supporting Turkey Over Flotilla Confrontation

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netPJ Media -  By Andrew McCarthy:

images (36)The lowlight of President Obama’s Middle East trip is his strong-arming of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a humiliating apology to Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist government over Israel’s defense in 2010 of its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The blockade was subjected to a terrorist offensive camouflaged as a humanitarian flotilla. The spearhead of the siege was the Mavi Marmara, a vessel controlled by a Turkish jihadist organization, the IHH, that is a part of the Union of Good, a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. Due to President Obama’s close relations with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Obama administration has resisted congressional calls to designate the IHH itself as a terrorist organization – sparing itself the embarrassment of noticing the intimate collusion of Erdogan’s ruling Islamist party and the jihadist group.

Nevertheless, the 2010 effort to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas (also a designated terrorist organization) was part of a long-term, ongoing, Islamic-supremacist campaign to break the blockade – an act of war against Israel. The Turkey-driven campaign figures prominently in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy – my new book recently published in paperback by Encounter Books (after initially being available only as an eBook), which thoroughly details why the Islam-supremacist ascendancy in Turkey and Egypt prove the “Arab Spring” democracy narrative to be a fraud. As Spring Fever documents, Erdogan’s government and party, which vigorously backs Hamas, helped design the campaign, supported its prior voyages, orchestrated IHH’s purchase of the Mavi Marmara, jointly plotted the flotilla with IHH, arranged for approximately forty IHH jihadists to board the Mavi Marmara without inspection, ignored Israel’s pleas to prevent the blockade from embarking, and stridently condemned Israel when – as foreseeably as it was intentional – the flotilla’s provocation resulted in a violent confrontation with Israeli defense forces. Turkey’s feigned outrage, which even the pro-Islamist United Nations declined to affirm, is especially risible in light of (a) Erdogan’s open and notorious support of Hamas (which our NATO “ally” denies is a terrorist organization), and (b) Turkey’s own siege, partitioning, and occupation of northern Cyprus.

Two sections of Spring Fever deal with Turkey’s aggression against Israel. What follows here on Ordered Liberty beginning this evening is a two-part series culled from those sections. The first describes IHH: its roots in both terrorism and the Turkish regime, as well as its key role in the anti-blockade aggression. The second is an account of the Mavi Marmara incident.

Despite years of Erdogan’s bombast, the Israeli government — until Friday — steadfastly refused to apologize for exercising its sovereign right of self-defense from the flotilla offensive and from the Hamas terrorism that the blockade has righteously curtailed. The Obama administration’s collaboration with the terror-abetting Turkish government shames our nation and undermines America’s commitment to the rule of law, under which supporting Hamas and the Union of Good are serious felonies. It is abominable that President Obama chose to pressure the Netanyahu government to besot itself by apologizing to Turkey under these circumstances, and just days after Erdogan outrageously called Zionism a “crime against humanity.”

Israel will come to regret this capitulation.

Also read: 

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Umm Nidal Farhat: Israelis Are Not Civilians and There Are No Prohibition On Killing Them

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FARHAT-obit-articleLarge

Palestinian Legislative Council Candidate and Bereaved Mother of Three Hamas Terrorists Umm Nidal Farhat: “Israelis Are Not Civilians and There Are No Prohibition on Killing them. I Am Willing to Sacrifice All My Sons”

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UN Confirms Hamas Rocket Kills BBC Reporter’s Son

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WaPo-Cover-540x377by IPT News  •  Mar 8, 2013 at 5:09 pm

 During Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense, media outlets jumped on a report about innocent Palestinian casualties at the hands of the Israeli military. One episode, thedeath of a BBC reporter’s infant son, included heart-breaking images of the grieving father cradling his dead child.

“Spare a thought for Omar, 11-month son of our BBC Arabic Service colleague in Gaza, killed in today’s Israeli air strike,” BBC Washington correspondent Paul Adamswrote in a Twitter post.

The Elder of Ziyon blog reports on a little-noticed investigation by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which determined that Omar Mishrawi died as a result of a Hamas rocket that fell short of Israel. The UN report also made clear that Hamas repeatedly violated international human rights law by launching rockets from densely populated neighborhoods in Gaza and firing “the vast majority” of its rockets at civilian communities. Palestinian terrorists admitted “that their intended targets were civilians or large population centres in Israel, or objects that are prima facie civilian objects, such as Israel’s parliament, in clear violation of international humanitarian law.”

Elder of Ziyon called the Hamas criticism “pretty astonishing” since it came from “the notoriously anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council.”

The report cites a second case of a child, Mahmoud Sadallah, whose death was blamed on Israel but was in fact caused by Hamas.

Palestinian exploitation of casualties is nothing new. In the past, many incidents have been proved to be fabricated or conducted by the Palestinians themselves. This tactic, commonly referred to as “Pallywood,” is vital for the Palestinians to wage the increasingly crucial media war against Israel in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the international community.

While there were civilian casualties, the UN report notes the Hamas rocket fire was coming from residential areas. And it settles the debate over who was responsible for the toddler’s death, showing the BBC and other outlets incorrectly jumped to blame Israel.

 

Pallywood – truth in the middle east hollyland, what goes behind the scenes:

 

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The New ‘Silk Route;’ Weapons to Gaza and Beyond

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by Paul Alster:

November’s “Pillar of Defense” operation by the Israeli military included a couple of unpleasant surprises for Israeli citizens. For the first time, Palestinian terrorists fired missiles at the country’s two population centers, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, sending residents scurrying for shelter.

For years, Palestinian rocket fire was isolated to smaller cities in southern Israel. Israeli military officials say weapons smuggled into Gaza via the new “Silk Route,” a pipeline created and protected by governments including Iran, Sudan and others, made that dramatic new range possible.

In a wide-ranging interview for the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a senior source in the Israeli Defense Force, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained how that smuggling works and what it means.

“You can see how it goes between Iran, northern Sudan, via Egypt. It didn’t gradually evolve and develop like the old merchant trail, ‘The Silk Route.’ It’s not something built thousands of years ago. It is something that we believe government officials sat down and decided on. Let me put it this way; in such countries, under such regimes, we don’t believe that anything is being done without the permission and knowledge of the local power.”

The official, whose assessments are based on his day-to-day experience of combating efforts to supply terror groups in Gaza, said the smuggling of more sophisticated weaponry was facilitated in part by upheaval in North Africa.

“When we are talking about the smuggling of illegal arms into the Gaza Strip” the officer began, “we should focus on a few members of this notorious community; we are talking about Iran, north Sudan, Libya as a state, not a government, and of course, the Sinai Peninsula.”

“Libya has become a serious problem since the fall of the Gaddafi regime because it is an open black market” he said. “Unlike Iran and Sudan, there is no government behind what is going on there. There were huge stocks of weapons (some of it western), that are now being offered to the one able to pay the highest price. The Palestinians are taking advantage of that. They will send procurements missions to look for specific items there (in Libya), or sometimes they are taking part in open auctions in Sinai to whoever will pay the most for weapons like SSR’s, Anti-Tank Guided Missiles, MANPADs etc.”

Read more at IPT

Paul Alster is an Israel-based journalist with a special interest in Israeli/Palestinian relations and Middle East politics. He is a regular contributor to FoxNews.com and the Times of Israel, and blogs at www.paulalster.com

10 Lies About the Israel-Hamas Conflict

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Hw5Refl1IUAwIPT News:

A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas may have been reached on paper, but evidence already indicates that it is unlikely to hold. A top Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader has already warned that the ceasefire would be short and that a “new, more savage round” of fighting with Israel lies ahead. The agreement establishes Egypt as the guarantor of peace between Israel and Hamas even though President Mohammed Morsi and members of his government openly aided and supported Hamas in the conflict.

The ceasefire will likely embolden Hamas, which views it as a victory over Israel. History shows that ceasefires do not deter Hamas from firing rockets into Israel. Further, Iran’s admission that it has given improved weapons technology to Hamas serves as a warning of an increased Iranian effort to destabilize Israel. In the end, this ceasefire represents merely a lull in the fighting, not a beginning of lasting peace. Here are 10 examples of misleading assumptions and conventional wisdom:

1. Hamas Will Adhere to a “Ceasefire”

Hamas accepted a ceasefire with Israel in this latest escalation. However, the Arabic word for truce, “hudna,” is perceived differently within the Hamas mentality. In this modern context, a hudna involves a temporary lull in the violence that allows Hamas the necessary time to organize and re-arm itself in anticipation of a future conflict with Israel. It is different from a ceasefire in that it is an agreement to halt hostilities for a defined period of time only, not a peace agreement.[1]

The duration of Hamas’s current hudna with Israel remains unknown, and we can be assured that fighting will resume once Hamas decides to do so. Once a hudna is agreed to, observing it becomes a religious duty for the Muslim party as long as the non-Muslim party observes it.[2] It runs counter to the term sul d’aim, which means permanent peace and the recognition of the non-Muslim party’s right to exist. [3]

Hudna was the first word used in Muslim history to describe a ceasefire, found in context of the 7th century Treaty of al-Hudaybiyya – referring to a truce that came six years after Muhammad and his followers deserted Mecca for Medina. This agreement allowed Muhammad and his followers to pray in Mecca, which was then under control of the Quraysh tribe, for a decade. However, when Muhammad’s army became strong enough, it used an attack by the Quraysh-aligned Banu Bakr tribe two years into the pact as a pretext to give the Quraysh an ultimatum to disavow their allies, pay restitution for their attack against the Muslims or nullify the treaty. The Quraysh chose the final option and Muhammad marched on Mecca and easily conquered the city.

This event set a precedent, justifying the abandonment of operations for the purposes of regrouping and rearming, allowing for a future attack on the territory left behind.[4] The late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat alluded to the Treaty of al-Hudaybiyya while giving a speech in a mosque in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1994, suggesting that peace with Israel would be temporary.

History has proven that Hamas subscribes to this perspective, and that it uses hudnas as temporary lulls in the fighting prior to renewing hostilities. In June 2003, Hamas announced a hudna with Israel, yet it ended violently with a suicide bombing two months later in Jerusalem that killed 22 people and wounded more than 130. Likewise, Israel’s 2008 incursion into Gaza led to a hudna as well. However, Hamas ended this temporary truce by firing rockets into Israel sporadically since the last “ceasefire,” escalating the attacks dramatically in the past month.

Modern interpretations of hudna mean there will be no end to the religiously-inspired struggle until Israel is defeated. The Hamas covenant proves this point: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” Hamas co-founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin regarded the hudna as a “tactical move” in its war with Israel.[5] Discussing the prospect of peace with Israel earlier this year, Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzook indicated that his organization would be open to a hudna with Israel, but it would never renounce its goal of Israel’s destruction.

2. Hamas is Interested in Peace

Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, does not distinguish between the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and pre-1967 Israel. To it, all of “Palestine” is occupied. The Hamas charter explicitly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state as its top priority. In fact, Hamas prides itself as the main “resistance” (code word for terrorism) movement against Israel. “All the energies of the people and the ummah (nation) [are needed] in order to uproot the oppressive Entity,” al-Qassam Brigades Commander Muhammad al Deif said just before the current ceasefire.

Any recognition of Israel’s right to exist is unacceptable to the Hamas leadership. This belief is the root of the conflict. In light of a Nov. 21 bus bombing of in Tel Aviv, Hamas member Ezzat Rishq confirmed that the attack was a “repercussion of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.” Rishq added that “the Zionist Entity should know that the continuation of aggression and crimes against our defenseless people in Gaza will double the state of rage, boiling excitement and discontent among our people everywhere against their crimes, soldiers and extremists, pointing out that the Zionists have to expect worst.”

3. The Problem is Israel’s Siege of Gaza

With Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, removing every Jewish resident and soldier from the territory, Palestinians were given a chance to fully govern themselves and build their society. However, instead of trying to improve Gaza’s standard of living, Hamas remained focused on its hostility toward Israel by firing rockets at the Jewish state immediately after taking over. Since Hamas first exerted control in Gaza in 2006, 6,109 rockets have hit Israeli territory. It fully seized power in a bloody Palestinian civil war with the rival Fatah faction in 2007. In response, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza in an attempt to curb the flow of arms to Hamas. This year alone, 1,822 rockets have hit Israeli territory. From November 10-13, immediately prior to Israel’s operation, Hamas fired 121 rockets into Israel. Hamas launched another 1,500 rockets after Israel initiated Operation Pillar of Defense on Nov. 14. Israel’s blockade is by no means an “occupation” – rather, it is a necessary response to stem Hamas’ weapons smuggling into Gaza, actions that threatens Israel’s security. This tactic is nothing new, as the United States blockaded Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the United Kingdom blockaded the Falkland Islands during its war with Argentina in 1982. A 2011 United Nations report concluded that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip is legal under international law.

4. Israel Deliberately Targets Civilians

Israel went to extraordinary means to minimize innocent Palestinian casualties in response to the terrorist rocket barrage. Prior to any action, the Israeli military dropped thousands of leaflets in Arabic warning Gaza residents of impending attacks. This effort gave residents time to evacuate the area. Collateral damage happens because Hamas intentionally embeds itself in population centers in violation of international law. If Israel deliberately targeted civilians, its military superiority would allow it to inflict far greater casualties. An Israeli pilot actually aborted a strike mission on a rocket launch pad located in a playground because he saw Palestinian children nearby. That rocket ended up being fired at Tel Aviv, causing Israeli children to run for the bomb shelters. Imagine what the United States government would do if the Mexican drug cartels fired thousands of rockets at San Diego, Phoenix, or other cities along the Mexican border from the safety of Mexico.

5. There is a Moral Equivalence Between Actions by Israel and Hamas

Israel strives to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas tries to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and strike fear into the population. This is self-evident based on the fact that Israel strategically targets Hamas terrorists with accurate, pinpoint airstrikes. Hamas, on the other hand, indiscriminately fires deadly rockets at Israeli cities with the intent of killing or maiming Israeli civilians. Hamas purposefully fires from Palestinian population centers to elicit an Israeli response that occasionally results in civilian casualties that who it can use for strictly propaganda purposes. The terrorist group also uses Palestinians as human shields to protect military targets, which is considered a war crime under international law.

“Hamas … has a media strategy,” Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren wrote last week. “Its purpose is to portray Israel’s unparalleled efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza as indiscriminate firing and children, to Israel’s rightful acts of self-defense into war crimes. Its goals are to isolate Israel internationally, to tie its hands from striking back at those trying to kill our citizens and to delegitimize the Jewish state.”

Unfortunately, many in the mainstream media implicitly allude to a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel by insinuating that both sides are at fault for this recent escalation. For instance, Ethan Bronner from the New York Times started his Nov. 17 report by stating: “When Israel assassinated the top Hamas military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting …” Bronner conspicuously omitted the fact that Hamas fired more than 100 rockets in the days leading up to Israel’s operations. There is absolutely no moral equivalence between actions by Hamas and Israel – this recent escalation would have been avoided had Hamas not initiated the rocket fire.

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No Peace For Israel

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by Justin O Smith

On November 29, 2012, the anti-American and anti-Jew organization of the United
Nations granted “observer” status to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under
Mahmoud Abbas, which has only served to intensify the already fierce struggle of
the Jews to survive in their own land. Beleagured, besieged and constantly
attacked by Her Arab neighbors since 1948, Israel is still surrounded by enemies
and their proxies, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Jaamat el-Fuqra, who
are dedicated to Israel’s destruction. This move by the U.N. materialized after
a year long defense by Israel against over 1500 Katusha and Iranian SR75 missile
attacks by the terrorist group Hamas from the Gaza Strip, which has become one
massive forward positioned armament depot and islamofascist military
base!

Just as a “palestinian state” or government, a palestinian homeland, a palestinian people and language (they are Arabs) are myths, fictions and lies created after 1948 (“palestini” is a Roman word used to describe Arab and Jew alike and translates from Hebrew as “invader”)…so too are the notions of the two state solution and a lasting peace between Israel and the “Palestinians” of Gaza and the West Bank.

In 1982 at Amman, Jordan, journalist and writer extraordinaire, Oriana Fallaci intensely questioned and prodded Yasser Arafat into outlining the desired borders for “Palestine.” Arafat stated that they could be the ones established under the British Mandate, but
continued with, “If we take the Anglo-French agreement of 1918, Palestine means
the territory that runs from Naqurah in the north to Aqaba in the south, and
then from the Mediterranean coast that includes the Gaza Strip to the Jordan
River and the Negev Desert.” When Fallaci pointed out that this included a large
portion of Jordan… and the whole region west of Jordan… Cisjordania, Arafat
replied, “What you call Cisjordania is Palestine.”

Reality and the crux of the matter are illuminated by the words of Salah al-Bardaweel, a Hamas spokesman: “We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and
Israel has no right in Palestine… Our membership in the U.N. bodies is our
natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine’s soil.” In other
words, forget the 1917 Balfour Treaty and the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and
every other initiative taken in the name of a peaceful solution since then,
because Hamas and Bardaweel’s vision is a Palestine extending from the
Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Egypt, Jordan and Syria with Israel no more
and the Jews destroyed!

The U.N. vote was 138-9 to recognize Palestine as a nonmember observer state, and all but one European nation, the Czech Republic, voted with the Palestinians or abstained in the vote, as they cited concerns about settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem territories repatriated by Israel during the 1967 war. And, in a very real sense, this action has revealed an attempt to isolate America and Israel on this issue, as the world faces a rising islamofascist tide, so warmly embraced by the despot infested, anti-Freedom/human rights, anti-Jew crowd of the U.N.

In ‘The Meaning of the Yom Kippur War’, Yehuda Amital illustrated how deep seated fears of annihilation penetrated the psyche of nearly every Jew in Israel, as they were
reminded of their isolation in the Middle East and shown that they were
encircled by enemies. This raised the specter of the Holocaust.

Three months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended the hand of peace to
Mahmoud Abbas, and, as noted by Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor, “He
reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples,
where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish
state.” And yet, the world has never heard the Palestinian leadership use the
phrase “two states for two peoples,” because they do not, nor will they ever,
recognize that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.

It is absurd for so many world leaders, including President Obama, to act so dismayed
over Israel’s retaliation through last Friday’s approval of 3000 new homes in
territory that was originally the land of the Jews, King David and King Solomon.
This should trouble them a damn sight less than a group of terrorists
unilaterally attempting to grab statehood without having to compromise with
Israel.

Saeb Erekat, the PA’s chief negotiatior, stated, “At a moment
where Palestinian leadership is doing every single effort to save the two state
solution, the Israeli government does everything possible to destroy it.” It
must be pointed out that in the West Bank where the PA has largely been residing
peacefully, as of late, Israel has left them to themselves; and in Gaza, Hamas
constantly initiates confrontation and attacks Israel, so the Hamas terrorists
get to fully enjoy the ire and wrath of the Israeli Defense Force… and, as for
the people of Gaza….their continued support of Hamas thugs… their
complicity… makes them responsible for their own misery!

Israel has long maintained its right to develop neighborhoods throughout East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and more than 500,000 Jews are already living there; however, America and Europe have attempted to force Israel not to move into the E1
Development Area, which they see as a “red line.” And, when I hear former U.S.
Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, state, “This is one of the most sensitive
areas in the territory, and I hope the United States will lay down the law,” I
have to highly praise Netanyahu’s firm resolve to safeguard Israel’s interests
and national security concerns.

Shortly before the 1967 Six Day War, Rabbi Kook interrupted his usual sermon with a scream, as he asked a pointed and prophetic question. “Where is our Hebron, Schechem, Jerich and Anatoth, torn from the state in 1948 as we lay maimed and bleeding?” Three weeks later, the Israeli army entered these biblical cities. By the end of this war, Israel had conquered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. Jerusalem, divided between Israel and Jordan since 1948, was annexed and declared the eternal capital of the Jewish state. Jews were once again able to pray at the Western Wall.

Yitzhak Shamir, one time Israeli Foreign Minister who also became Prime Minister, was a strong advocate for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1967 on, however, it was the December 9, 1987 Palestinian uprising (infitada) that deepened divisions between Israel’s leftists, who believed in making concessions to bring peace,
and the right, who believed that Israel’s days without Jerusalem, Judea and
Samaria and the Gaza Strip are gone forever and will not return.

Signing the Oslo Accords in 1993 also signed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s death
warrant. Many Jews and their rabbis saw Rabin as a “rodef”/pursuer, one who
actively threatens the life of a Jew. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, an army
veteran and a student at Bar Ilan University, assassinated Rabin during a peace
rally in Tel Aviv; his study of Jewish law convinced him that Rabin was an enemy
of the Jewish people, and he believed that he had a duty to kill him.

The current crop of Hamas terrorists now occupying the Gaza Strip are no different
from the Muslim Brothers who published their vile “news” articles for decades in
their journal ‘al-Dawah’ (The Call). They describe the enemies of Islam as
Western Christianity (al-Salibiyyah, the Crusade, to  highlight its perceived
imperialism), communism, secularism Ataturk-style and Zionism. “Jewry” in
particular was linked inextricably to the other three enemies and specifically
targeted for destruction by Hamas in its charter. And, these are also the same
sort of islamofascists who followed the teachings of Al-Faridah al-Ghaybah, ‘The
Neglected Duty’ (jihad/holy war) and whose followers in the Muslim Brotherhood
assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, because he dared
deal with “the Jews”; the ideas outlined in ‘The Neglected Duty’ were not
confined to a tiny group of extremists, but were more widespread in Egyptian
society than observers believed at the time.

Israel needs Her warriors to stand firmly beside Netanyahu… Where are the modern day Joshuas, Davids, the Maccabees, the Theodor Herzls, the Ben Gurions and those pioneers of Israel, who were seemingly possessed by their own mystical vision or mad genius?!?…Where are those like the Jews who settled on the site of the biblical city of Schechem in Nablus in the West Bank, because their sacred land was being profaned by the Palestinians?

With Iran still smuggling more powerful and longer ranged
missiles into Gaza by way of Egypt,  Israel’s only real chance for survival and
ensuring its national security and the safety of its citizens lies in the
following course of action. The annexation of the Golan Heights should be
further solidified and made permanent by extending settlements and defense
perimeters across the area; and in conjunction with this, Israel must also annex
the Gaza Strip, the Shaba Heights, the West Bank and the entirety of Jerusalem.
This should be followed with the immediate expulsion of Hamas and all
Palestinians not holding Israeli citizenship, just as Jordan’s King Abdullah
expelled the PLO and Yasser Arafat in the 1970s. The current climate and path in
today’s halls of diplomacy will only serve to hand Israel to Her
enemies!

“Each, the religious and the secularist, gazes at each other in
horror. Neither can see the other clearly. Both recall the excesses, the
cruelties, and the intolerance of ‘the other side’ and wounded to the core they
cannot make peace.” -Israeli novelist Amos Oz

Hamas partners with al-Qaida after U.S.-brokered truce

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121129hamas-340x168 by Aaron Klein

TEL AVIV – Hamas has formed a common committee with al-Qaida-linked groups in the Gaza Strip to strategize the coordination of smuggling weapons into Gaza, according to informed Israeli security sources.

The sources noted that after Israel’s campaign in Gaza two weeks ago – which ended with a U.S. and Egypt-brokered cease-fire – Hamas immediately freed from its jails scores of members of al-Qaida and the related Jihadiya Salafiya terrorist groups.

Previously, Hamas had been fighting those same groups in Gaza, seeing them as a challenge to their own rule. The groups had accused Hamas of selling out by talking to the West and by engaging in elections.

Hamas several times had even engaged in heavy fire clashes with the Islamist organizations in Gaza and put many of their leaders in prison.

Still, Hamas and the al-Qaida organizations have at times worked together, including during the most recent round of fighting in Gaza when both fired rockets into Israel.

Now Hamas and the al-Qaida groups are working together again, this time to smuggle more weapons into Gaza, said the security sources.

WND reported that even before Israel’s operation in Gaza ended two weeks ago, Iran and Hezbollah were trying to resupply Hamas with more long-range missiles to fire into Israel, according to Israeli defense sources.

Read more at WND

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U.N. Says ‘Aye’ to Palestinian Terror State

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large-450x313By P. David Hornik

Late Thursday evening, Israel time, the UN General Assembly voted to confer nonmember statehood on the Palestinian Authority by a sweeping majority.

Even Israel’s hopes of putting together a “moral minority” of Western-country nays had crumbled, with France and Italy pronouncing themselves in favor of the Palestinian nonmember state and Britain and Germany abstaining. Israel, the United States, Canada, and the Czech Republic stood virtually alone in opposing the move by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

The nonmoral majority of Western countries ratified Palestine (actively with ayes or passively with abstentions) even though doing so is a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords they had once piously sanctioned. And they did so even though last week and the week before, Gaza—where almost half of Palestinian Authority Palestinians live—had fired 1600 hundred rockets at civilian targets in Israel, every single firing a manifest war crime intended to kill and injure men, women, and children.

It is said that the Gaza eruption led some European countries to change their minds and vote in favor of the resolution (or abstain) so as to strengthen Abbas’s “diplomatic” approach over Hamas’s violence. Abbas’s diplomatic polish and peacemaking disposition were well in evidence when he addressed the General Assembly in September, saying among other things:

During the past months, attacks by terrorist militias of Israeli settlers have become a daily reality, with at least 535 attacks perpetrated since the beginning of this year. We are facing relentless waves of attacks against our people, our mosques, churches and monasteries, and our homes and schools; they are unleashing their venom against our trees, fields, crops and properties, and our people have become fixed targets for acts of killing and abuse with the complete collusion of the occupying forces and the Israeli government.

As Israel’s UN ambassador Ron Prosor noted in a stinging op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Many countries in the Assembly are taking an approach to Palestinian statehood that is…Pavlovian…. For decades, the body has rubber-stamped any Palestinian whim no matter how ill-advised, ill-conceived or illogical.”

Prosor went on to list some glaring shortcomings of the Palestinian Authority/Gaza that—seemingly by any normal calculus of Western countries—would disqualify it rather than qualify it for statehood, such as:

● Lack of control over territory, with Abbas’s Ramallah-based, official Palestinian Authority having had zero control over Gaza since Hamas seized power there in 2007. Prosor could have added the tenuousness of Abbas’s rule in the West Bank itself, where towns are run by clan-based extortion gangs and Israeli forces are all that prevents a Hamas takeover.

● The fact that Gaza is a terrorist state in every sense of the term, “a haven for global jihadist organizations like al Qaeda,” a beachhead for Iran in its ongoing war for Israel’s annihilation.

● The fact that democracy has not exactly flourished in Islamist Gaza or, for that matter, in the West Bank, where “journalists, bloggers and activists continue to be jailed and tortured…for crimes such as ‘extending their tongues against the Palestinian President’” (see reports here and here).

● The fact that the Palestinian Authority is bankrupt, totally dependent on foreign aid, yet “devotes 6% of its annual budget to payments for imprisoned terrorists and the families of suicide bombers”—while using its educational autonomy to instill a culture of hatred of Israel.

And to all this Europe voted yes—or at best took refuge in a cowardly neutrality.

Read more at Front Page

 

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Gaza’s Not the Key, Philadelphi Is

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By Daniel Pipes

The Second Hamas-Israel War of Nov. 10-21 inspired a mighty debate over rights and wrongs, with each side appealing to the large undecided bloc (19 percent of Americans according to CNN/ORC, 38 percent according to Rasmussen). Is Israel a criminal state that has no right to exist, much less to deploy force? Or is it a modern liberal democracy with the rule of law that justifiably protects innocent civilians? Morality drives this debate.

To any sentient person, it is obvious that Israelis are 100-percent justified to protect themselves from wanton attacks. A cartoon from the First Hamas-Israel War of 2008-09 symbolically showed a Palestinian terrorist shooting from behind a baby carriage at an Israeli soldier in front of a baby carriage.

The tougher question is how to prevent further Hamas-Israel wars. Some background: If Israelis are 100-percent justified protecting themselves, their government also bears complete responsibility for creating this self-inflicted crisis. Specifically, it made two misguided unilateral withdrawals in 2005:

  • From Gaza: Ariel Sharon won reelection as prime minister in Jan. 2003 in part by mocking a rival who called for the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli residents and soldiers from Gaza; then, inexplicably, in Nov. 2003 he adopted this same policy and put it into effect in Aug. 2005. I dubbed this at that time, “one of the worst errors ever made by a democracy.”
  • From the Philadelphi Corridor: Under U.S. pressure, especially from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sharon signed an agreement in Sep. 2005, called “Agreed Arrangements,” that withdrew Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor, a 14-km long and 100-meter wide area between Gaza and Egypt. The hapless “European Union Border Assistance Mission at the Rafah Crossing Point” (EUBAM Rafah) took their place.

Trouble was, the Egyptian authorities had promised in their 1979 peace treaty with Israel (III:2) to prevent “acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence” but in fact permitted massive smuggling of armaments to Gaza via tunnels. According to Doron Almog, a former head of Israel’s Southern Command writing in early 2004, “smuggling has a strategic dimension” because it involves sufficient quantities of arms and materiel “to turn Gaza into launching pad for ever-deeper attacks against Israel proper.”

Almog considered these policies “a dangerous gamble” by the Mubarak regime and a “profound strategic danger” that could “endanger the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord and threaten the stability of the whole region.” He attributed the lax Egyptian attitude to a mix of anti-Zionist views among officialdom and a readiness to vent the Egyptian public’s anti-Zionist sentiments.

Sharon arrogantly signed the “Agreed Arrangements,” contrary to the strong opposition of Israel’s security establishment. Of course, by removing this layer of Israeli protection, an “exponential increase” in the Gaza arsenal predictably followed, culminating in the Fajr-5 missiles that reached Tel Aviv this month.

To permit Israeli soldiers effectively to prevent armaments from reaching Gaza, David Eshel of Defense Update argued in 2009 for the IDF taking back the Philadelphi Corridor and increasing its size to “a fully sterile security line of about 1,000 meters,” even though this would mean having to relocate about 50,000 Gaza residents. Interestingly, the Palestinian Authority’s Ahmed Qurei privately endorsed similar steps in 2008.

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Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum

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