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Obama to Palestinians: Accept the Jewish State

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by Daniel Pipes
Washington Times
March 26, 2013

 

Title page of Theodor Herzl's 1896 book, "Der Judenstaat" ("The Jewish State").

Title page of Theodor Herzl’s 1896 book, “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”).

One key shift in U.S. policy was overlooked in the barrage of news about Barack Obama’s eventful fifty-hour visit to Israel last week. That would be the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, called by Hamas leader Salah Bardawil ”the most dangerous statement by an American president regarding the Palestinian issue.”

 First, some background: Israel’s founding documents aimed to make the country a Jewish state.Modern Zionism effectively began with the publication in 1896 of Theodor Herzl’s book, Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). The Balfour Declaration of 1917 favors “a national home for the Jewish people.” U.N. General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947, partitioning Palestine into two, mentions the term Jewish state 30 times. Israel’s Declaration of Establishment of 1948 mentions Jewish state 5 times, as in “we … hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

Because of this tight connection, when Arab-Israeli diplomacy began in earnest in the 1970s, the Jewish state formulation largely disappeared from view; everyone simply assumed that diplomatic recognition of Israel meant accepting it as the Jewish state. Only in recent years did Israelis realize otherwise, as Israeli Arabs came to accept Israel but reject its Jewish nature. For example, an important 2006 publication from the Mossawa Center in Haifa, The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel, proposes that the country become a religiously neutral state and joint homeland. In brief, Israeli Arabs have come to see Israel as a variant of Palestine.

Awakened to this linguistic shift, winning Arab acceptance of Israel no longer sufficed; Israelis and their friends realized that they had to insist on explicit Arab acceptance of Israel as the Jewish state. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert announced that unless Palestinians did so, diplomacy would be aborted: “I do not intend to compromise in any way over the issue of the Jewish state,” he emphasized. ThePalestinian Authority immediately and unanimously rejected this demand. Its head, Mahmoud Abbas, responded: “In Israel, there are Jews and others living there,. This we are willing to recognize, nothing else.”

Netanyahu and Olmert agree on the need for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish state

Netanyahu and Olmert agree on the need for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish state

When Binyamin Netanyahu succeeded Olmert as prime minister in 2009, he reiterated this demand as a precondition to serious negotiations: “Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples.” The Palestinians not only refused to budge but ridiculed the very idea. Again, Abbas: “What is a ‘Jewish state?’ We call it the ‘State of Israel.’ You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it. … It’s not my job to … provide a definition for the state and what it contains. You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic] call it whatever you like, I don’t care.”

Only six weeks ago, Abbas again blasted the Jewish state concept. The Palestinian rejection of Jewish statehood could not be more emphatic. (For a compilation of their assertions, see “Recognizing Israel as the Jewish State: Statements” at DanielPipes.org.)When Binyamin Netanyahu succeeded Olmert as prime minister in 2009, he reiterated this demand as a precondition to serious negotiations: “Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples.” The Palestinians not only refused to budge but ridiculed the very idea. Again, Abbas: “What is a ‘Jewish state?’ We call it the ‘State of Israel.’ You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it. … It’s not my job to … provide a definition for the state and what it contains. You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic] call it whatever you like, I don’t care.”

American politicians, including both George W. Bush and Obama, have since 2008 occasionally referred to Israel as the Jewish state, even as they studiously avoided demanding Palestinians to do likewise. In a typical declaration, Obama in 2011 sketched the ultimate diplomatic goal as “two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people.”

Barack Obama changed U.S. policy in a speech at a convention center in Jerusalem.

Barack Obama changed U.S. policy in a speech at a convention center in Jerusalem.

Then, in his Jerusalem speech last week, Obama suddenly and unexpectedly adopted in full the Israeli demand: “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state.”

That sentence breaks important new ground and cannot readily be undone. It also makes for excellent policy, for without such recognition, Palestinian acceptance of Israel is hollow, indicating only a willingness to call the future state they dominate “Israel” rather than “Palestine.”Then, in his Jerusalem speech last week, Obama suddenly and unexpectedly adopted in full the Israeli demand: “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state.”

While not the only shift in policy announced during Obama’s trip (another: telling the Palestinians not to set preconditions for negotiations), this one looms largest because it starkly contravenes the Palestinian consensus. Bardawil may hyperbolically assert that it “shows that Obama has turned his back to all Arabs” but those ten words in fact establish a readiness to deal with the conflict’s central issue. They likely will be his most important, most lasting, and most constructive contribution to Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

Mr. Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum.

Mar. 26, 2013 update: Other Arab reactions to Obama’s “Jewish state” statement:

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, March 23:

Never in my life have I seen a US President beg for the approval of the Israelis while demeaning himself in the process quite like Barack Obama has done during his current trip. … He has broken our trust and dashed our hopes, reminding us instead of Uncle Tom (from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin) – the black servant whose subservience to his white master overcame his humanity.

Barack Hussein Obama surprised us with his speech in Jerusalem when he demanded the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state and urged the Arab states to recognize Israel. … Obama wants us to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, what about the 25 percent of its population who are not Jewish, in particular the 1.5 million Arabs living inside Israel? America’s long line of caucasian presidents never stooped this low; most of them pressured Israel to some degree to recognise the rights of the Palestinian people.

Obama did not come to the region as a man of peace but as a war monger. … Obama’s revised approach suggests that the Arabs and Muslims are in for four years of misery during Obama’s second term as president. … This is the age of American hypocrisy and Arab humiliation.

Why Israel Is the Victim

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Order your physical copy by clicking here.

Introduction

Israel, the only democracy and tolerant society in the Middle East, is surrounded by Muslim states that have sworn to destroy it and have conducted a genocidal propaganda campaign against the Jews, promising to “finish the job that Hitler started.” A global wave of Jew-hatred, fomented by Muslim propaganda and left-wing anti-Semitism, has spread through Europe and the United Nations and made Israel a pariah nation. David Horowitz’s classic Why Israel Is the Victim, now updated in the pamphlet below, sets the record straight about the Middle East conflict. In addition to restoring the historical record —  a chronicle  of obsessive aggressions first by Arab nationalists and then by Muslim jihadists, this pamphlet brings the story up to date by showing the systematic way in which the fanatical Islamic parties, Hamas and Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran, have subverted peace in the Middle East.

As Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful Foreword, this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel First’ narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood… and it delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this.”  America needs to be Israel’s protector, for as George Gilder has observed, “If the United States cannot defend Israel, it cannot defend itself.”  Instead, under the leadership of Barack Obama, it has become Israel’s prosecutor with ominous portents for the future.

Foreword

In “Why Israel is the Victim” David Horowitz tells the ugly tale of the war against Israel, laying bare the sordid hypocrisies and deceits behind its campaign of violence. No volume can contain the full story of Islamic terrorism or the courageous ways in which the ordinary Israeli confronts it in the streets of his cities. What this essay does tell is the story of the lies behind that terror.

Propaganda precedes war; it digs the graves and waits for them to be filled. The war against the Jews has never been limited to bullets and swords; it has always, first and foremost, been a war of words. When bombs explode on buses and rockets rain down on Israel homes, when mobs chant “Death to the Jews” and Iran races toward the construction of its genocidal bomb; the propaganda lies to cover up these crimes must be bold enough to contain not only the murders of individuals, but the prospective massacre of millions.

The lie big enough to fill a million graves is that Israel has no right to exist, that the Jewish State is an illegitimate entity,  an occupier, a warmonger and a conqueror. The big lie is that Israel has sought out the wars that have given it no peace and that the outcomes of those wars make the atrocities of its enemies understandable and even justifiable. That is the big lie that David Horowitz confronts in “Why Israel is the Victim”.

From the latest outburst of violence to its earliest antecedents under the Palestine Mandate, “Why Israel is the Victim” exposes the true nature of the war and wipes away the lies used by the killers and their collaborators to lend moral authority to their crimes. It shows not only why Israel must exist, but also why its existence has been besieged by war and terror.

“Why Israel is the Victim” tells us why we should reject the “Blame Israel First” narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media. It challenges the false hope of the Two State Solution in sections such as “Self-Determination Is Not the Agenda” and “Refugees: Jewish and Arab”. It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood in “The Policy of Resentment and Hate” and delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this in “The Jewish Problem and Its ‘Solution’”.

Recent history shows us that it was not an Israeli refusal to grant the Palestinian Arabs the right of self-determination that led to their campaigns of terror, but that Palestinian self-determination empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in terrorism.

Continue reading at Front Page where the entire pamphlet has been published

David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”

Also see: Reading Horowitz

 

 

A few notable anniversaries on the Palestinians’ big day

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By Caroline Glick

With the nations of Europe and the rest of the world lining up to support the PLO bid to receive non-member state status at the UN General Assembly, it is worth noting two anniversaries of related but forgotten events.

Of course, everyone knows the obvious anniversary – Nov. 29, 1947 was the day the UN General Assembly passed the plan to recommend the partition the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs — both local and regional – rejected it. The local Arabs who 25 years later became known as “Palestinians,” responded to the passage of UNGA resolution 181 by launching a terror war against the Jews. Their war was commanded by Iraqi and Lebanese terror masters and supported by the British military and its Arab Legion from Transjordan.
On May 15, 1948 five foreign Arab armies invaded the just-declared Jewish state with the declared aim of annihilating all the Jews.
Now for a couple less known anniversaries
On November 28, 1941 the religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs and one of the most influential leaders of the Arab world Haj Amin el Husseini met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Husseini had courted the Nazis since just after the Nazis rose to power in 1933. Husseini was forced to flee the British Mandate in 1937 when he expanded his fourth terror war against the Jews, that he began in 1936 to include the British as well.
He fled to Lebanon, and then in October 1939 he fled to Iraq. In April 1941 he fomented a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. As the British — with massive unheralded assistance from the Jews from the land of Israel — were poised to enter Baghdad and restore the pro-British government, Husseini incited the Farhud, a 3-day pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad that took place over the festival of Shavuot. 150 Jews were murdered. A thousand were wounded and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.
With the coup defeated and the Jews murdered, Husseini escaped to then pro-Nazi Iran and then in October to Germany by way of Italy. (He was flown out of Iran on an Italian Air Force plane, and feted by Mussolini when he landed in Rome).
He arrived in Berlin and two and a half weeks later he had a prolonged private meeting with Hitler. There, on November 28, 1941, two months before the Wannssee Conference, where the German high command received its first orders to annihilate European Jewry, Hitler told Husseini that he intended to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of Europe.
Husseini remained in Berlin through the end of the war and served as a Nazi agent. In Berlin he broadcast daily diatribes to the Arab world on German shortwave radio in Arabic. Specifically Husseini exhorted them to kill the Jews in the name of Allah and make common cause with the Nazis who would deliver them from the Jews, the British and the Americans.
In 1943 Husseini organized the Hazhar SS Division of Bosnian Muslims. His division carried out the massacre of 90 percent of the Bosnian Jewish community of 12,000.
In 1920 Husseini personally invented what later became known as the Palestinian national movement. He shaped its identity around the sole cause of destroying the Jewish presence in the land of Israel.
During the war Husseini used his broadcasts to shape the political and religious  consciousness of the Muslim world by fusing Islamic Jew hatred with annihilationist Nazi anti-Semitism. Whereas much of the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology was discredited in postwar Europe, it has remained the single most resonant theme of Arab politics since World War II.
In 1946, as his fellow Nazi war criminals were being tried in Nuremberg, Husseini made a triumphant return to Egypt where he was welcomed as a war hero by King Farouk, the Muslim Brotherhood and the young officers in the Egyptian army who fused Nazi national socialism with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and took over Egypt after deposing Farouk in 1951.
The founder of Palestinian nationalism’s singleminded dedication to the genocide of Jewry brings us to the second notable but forgotten anniversary we passed over this month.
On Nov. 12 1942 the British led forces  — with the massive and unreported support of Jewish commando and engineering units from the land of Israel — defeated Germany’s Afrika Corps led by Gen. Rommel in the second Battle of Alamein. With the German defeat, the specter of a German occupation of the Middle East was removed. Husseini and Himmler had planned that under German occupation, the Arabs would expand the Holocaust to the 800,000 Jews of the Arab world and the 450,000 Jews in the land of Israel. To this end, the Germans had organized the Einzatzgruppen Afrika unit attached to Rommel’s army. Under the command of SS LTC Walter Rauff, it was tasked with murdering Jews located in the areas that were to come under German occupation.
It is fitting that yesterday, on the anniversary of Hitler’s meeting with Husseini, Germany announced that it would not oppose Husseini’s heirs’ bid to receive UN recognition of a Palestinian state that seeks Israel’s destruction.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The Noose Around Israel’s Neck

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by DANIEL  GREENFIELD

Israel is being hanged on a public gallows erected on the grounds of the  United Nations with yards of rope gleefully supplied by the Muslim world. But  the hangmen are mostly Westerners who still think that the Muslim lynch mob at  their doorstep can be pacified with the death of a single victim.

There are three things you can do when you are about to be hanged. You can  walk proudly, recite a glorious line or two to embed your martyrdom in  historical memory, and then allow yourself to be hanged. Jews have an extensive  body of experience with that brand of martyrdom.

Alternatively you can  plead your case all the way to the gallows, arguing that a mistake has been  made, that your case has been improperly reviewed, begging for someone to listen  and do something. This way also ends in a hanging. But it’s the hanging of a  slave without even a shred of dignity attached to it. A man that dies pleading  with his murderers, and puts his fate in the honesty of the liars and hypocrites  whose own crimes makes the worst of his look like virtues, is a craven fool.
Because there is really only one thing you can do when the noose is being  placed around your neck. Resist. A noose works by tightening around your neck  and cutting off your air or breaking your neck. If you resist the tightening of  the noose, you may actually survive. On the other hand if you follow through all  the procedures, if you allow your hands to be tied behind your back, and the  noose to be fastened around your neck while trusting in the system to do right  by you– your death is inevitable.

For seventeen years Israel has been  walking toward the gallows. Its leaders have led it there by the nose ring of  international assurances. Its people have been led there by refusing to see what  is waiting ahead for them, even while the blood was being cleaned off the  streets. Every attempt to reach a peaceful solution, every concession and show  of good faith, has only tightened the bonds around its hands and the noose  around its neck.

That is because every concession Israel has made, has  further restricted not only its ability to defend itself, but even its ability  to do basic things such as build residential housing in the capital of its own  nation. Every gesture and agreement Israel has signed has bound it to ever more  restrictive terms. And none of them have brought any peace. All they have ever  done is set the bar higher for the next round of concessions demanded by the  enemy and its aiders and abettors in the next phase of negotiations.

This is not a peace process, and it has never been one. It is a public lynching.  It is the lynching of a country whose only real crime is that its existence  offends the religious fanaticism and prejudices of a billion Muslims, who  control much of the world’s oil, and whose followers are willing to riot and  kill in the streets of nearly every major city in the world at the slightest  offense.

Read more: Family Security Matters

 

http://www.wall-of-truth.org/

 

Beware of ‘Pallywood’ Magic

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IPT News:

Fighting between Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and Israeli troops all but guarantees civilian casualties. With the fighting comes heart-wrenching photos of the dead and wounded, along with their grieving loved ones.

Each death represents a human tragedy.

But sometimes, reality is not enough. Some Palestinians have been caught faking images or appropriating them from other conflicts. This form of propaganda has been dubbed ”Pallywood,” and the nascent conflict already has several examples.

Tablet Magazine’s Adam Chandler exposed one, a terrible image of a grieving father holding his dead child as mournful doctors look on helplessly. Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigade, sent the picture out on Twitter. It’s a dead child all right, but it took place in Syria, not Gaza, and had nothing to do with this week’s violence.

It’s powerful to see the wounded being rushed into ambulances, and in the crucial battle for public sympathy, some Palestinians put on a show for international news cameras, as the web site Honest Reporting shows in this video.

The video shows a Palestinian in a beige jacket being hustled away due to an apparent injury following an Israeli airstrike. Moments later, it appears the same Palestinian has miraculously recovered.

These two cases exemplify Hamas’ attempts to exaggerate the number of Palestinian casualties throughout the recent escalation of violence with Israel. But this strategy is nothing new.

When Israeli troops entered the West Bank city of Jenin in 2002 to root out terrorists there, reports of a “massacre” surfaced immediately and were accepted by western media. More than 1,000 people were reported killed. In the end, the death toll was revised to 56.

The ruse went so deep that Palestinians were caught faking funerals with corpses who weren’t dead yet.

During Israel’s 2008-09 incursion into Gaza, reports claimed that a United Nations school building in Jabaliya was bombed, killing more than 40 people.

It just didn’t happen.

In the social media and communications age, the public relations war is a vital component of Israel’s struggle to win the hearts and minds of the international community. Israel Defense Forces are using Twitter and live updates to present its side of the equations. It also is vital to continue exposing Palestinian deception.

Anti-Semitism Virulent in Egypt

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By Adam Kredo:

A rising tide of anti-Semitism in Egypt has stoked concerns among Americans and Israelis that extremism will guide Cairo’s foreign policy under the Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi.

Prominent Egyptian political figures, religious clerics, and even Morsi himself have joined in calling to destroy Israel in recent weeks. Yet President Barack Obama’s administration and other Western nations have remained silent in an effort to avoid friction with Cairo’s new ruling class.

The White House’s repeated failure to condemn this blatant anti-Semitism is causing worry among Jewish leaders and Israeli officials alike.

“It’s very, very troubling that our government has remained silent on the issue as far as I can tell,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Washington Free Beacon. “It’s deeply disturbing and requires pressure and statements from the U.S. government and others.”

Egyptian anti-Semitism is nothing new, others observed.

However, the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power has amplified the hate, leaving many observers concerned that anti-Jewish prejudice will fuel the government’s policies towards Israel and even America.

“The real problem is that a cynical government that used anti-Semitism as a tool may have been replaced by an ideological government in which anti-Semitism is deep and serious,” said Elliott Abrams, a former top National Security Council staffer in the administration of George W. Bush. “The Israelis are right to worry.”

Anti-Semitism is more “visible nowadays” following former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s “replacement by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Abrams explained.

While Mubarak may have “put some limits” on public displays of anti-Semitism, “those limits are now off,” Abrams warned.

And with the U.S. still pumping billions of dollars in aid into Egypt, some are beginning to wonder if the investment is paying off.

Cairo, they say, has become increasingly hostile to the West and has all but abandoned its once-critical role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Read more at Free Beacon

OBAMA AND ISRAEL

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By Discover The Networks:

No previous American president has had so strained a relationship with Israel as Barack Obama. As Israeli Ambassador
Michael Oren said in 2010, “Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975 … a crisis of historic proportions.” Author and scholar Dennis Prager concurred, “Most observers, right or left, pro-Israel or anti-Israel, would agree that Israeli-American relations are the worst they have been in memory.” In the spring of 2011, David Parsons, spokesman for the International Christian Embassy
Jerusalem, said: “There’s a traditional, special relationship between America and Israel that Obama is basically throwing out the window in a sense.” Former New York City mayor Ed Koch lamented, “I believe this is the most dangerous and critical period that Israel has ever faced and regrettably it does not have the support of the President of the United States, which in past difficult situations it could count on.” David Rubin, a U.S.-born Israeli author and expert on the Middle East, put it this way: “President Obama is very harmful for Israel and very dangerous for the future of Judeo-Christian civilization.” The author and economist Thomas Sowellasserts that Obama’s relationship with Israel has been consistent with the president’s pattern of “selling out our allies to curry favor with our adversaries.” Political analyst Charles Krauthammer observes
that Obama has “undermined” Israel as a result of either his “genuine antipathy”
toward the Jewish state or “the arrogance of a blundering amateur.” Meanwhile,
the Israeli populace remains jittery. According to a recent poll
commissioned by The Jerusalem Post, only 9 percent of Jewish Israelis
believe that the Obama administration is more pro-Israel than
pro-Palestinian.

What underlies these deep concerns about President
Obama’s relationship with Israel? What accounts for the widespread perception
that Obama is not seriously committed to protecting Israel’s welfare? These
questions are explored and answered in this report, which lays out Obama’s
words, actions, and key affiliations vis à vis Israel not only during his time
in the White House, but during the two decades preceding his presidency as well.

Read it all here

The war against the Jews

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by Efraim Karsh
Israel Affairs
July 2012, pp. 319-343

The sustained anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign is a corollary of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Since Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, and since Zionism is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, anti-Zionism—as opposed to criticism of specific Israeli policies or actions—means denial of the Jewish right to national self-determination. Such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation (and one of the few that can trace their corporate identity and territorial attachment to antiquity) while allowing it to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and unadulterated anti-Jewish racism, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known.

By any conceivable standard, Israel has been an extraordinary success story: national rebirth in the ancestral homeland after millennia of exile and dispersion; resuscitation of a dormant biblical language; the creation of a modern, highly educated, technologically advanced, and culturally and economically thriving society, as well as a vibrant liberal democracy in one of the world’s least democratic areas. It is a world leader in agricultural, medical, military, and solar energy technologies, among others; a high-tech superpower attracting more venture capital investment per capita than the United States and Europe; home to one of the world’s best health systems and philharmonic orchestras, as well as to ten Nobel Prize laureates. And so on and so forth.

Why then is Israel the only state in the world whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged while far less successful countries, including numerous “failed states,” are considered legitimate and incontestable members of the international community? The answer offered by this article is that this pervasive prejudice against Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical times, is a corollary of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds.

On occasion, notably among devout and/or born again Evangelical Christians, this obsession has manifested itself in admiration and support for the national Jewish resurrection in the Holy Land. In most instances, however, anti-Jewish prejudice and animosity, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known, has served to exacerbate distrust and hatred of Israel. Indeed, the fact that the international coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the libels against Zionism and Israel, such as the despicable comparisons to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, have invariably reflected a degree of intensity and emotional involvement well beyond the normal level to be expected of impartial observers would seem to suggest that, rather than being a response to concrete Israeli activities, it is a manifestation of long-standing prejudice that has been brought out into the open by the vicissitudes of the conflict.

Read the rest at Middle East Forum

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London, principal researcher of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed (Yale University Press, 2010).

Obama’s Spectacular Failure

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By Caroline Glick,

(emphasis added)

Two weeks ago, in an unofficial inauguration ceremony at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi took off his mask of moderation. Before a crowd of scores of thousands, Mursi pledged to work for the release from US federal prison of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

According to The New York Times’ account of his speech, Mursi said, “I see signs [being held by members of the crowd] for Omar Abdel-Rahman and detainees’ pictures. It is my duty and I will make all efforts to have them free, including Omar Abdel-Rahman.”

Otherwise known as the blind sheikh, Abdel Rahman was the mastermind of the jihadist cell in New Jersey that perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His cell also murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990. They plotted the assassination of then-president Hosni Mubarak. They intended to bomb New York landmarks including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the UN headquarters.

Rahman was the leader of Gama’a al-Islamia - the Islamic Group, responsible, among other things for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. A renowned Sunni religious authority, Rahman wrote the fatwa, or Islamic ruling, permitting Sadat’s murder in retribution for his signing the peace treaty with Israel. The Islamic group is listed by the State Department as a specially designated terrorist organization.

After his conviction in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abdel-Rahman issued another fatwa calling for jihad against the US. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden cited Abdel-Rahman’s fatwa as the religious justification for them.

By calling for Abdel-Rahman’s release, Mursi has aligned himself and his government with the US’s worst enemies. By calling for Abdel-Rahman’s release during his unofficial inauguration ceremony, Mursi signaled that he cares more about winning the acclaim of the most violent, America-hating jihadists in the world than with cultivating good relations with America.

And in response to Mursi’s supreme act of unfriendliness, US President Barack Obama invited Mursi to visit him at the White House.

Mursi is not the only Abdel Rahman supporter to enjoy the warm hospitality of the White House.

His personal terror organization has also been the recipient of administration largesse. Despite the fact that federal law makes it a felony to assist members of specially designated terrorist organizations, last month the State Department invited group member Hani Nour Eldin, a newly elected member of the Islamist-dominated Egyptian parliament, to visit the US and meet with senior US officials at the White House and the State Department, as part of a delegation of Egyptian parliamentarians.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland refused to provide any explanation for the administration’s decision to break federal law in order to host Eldin in Washington. Nuland simply claimed, “We have an interest in engaging a broad cross-section of Egyptians who are seeking to peacefully shape Egypt’s future. The goal of this delegation… was to have consultations both with think tanks but also with government folks, with a broad spectrum representing all the colors of Egyptian politics.”

MURSI IS not the only Arab leader who embraces terrorists only to be embraced by the US government. In a seemingly unrelated matter, this week it was reported that in an attempt to satisfy the Obama administration’s urgent desire to renew negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel, and to satisfy the Palestinians’ insatiable desire to celebrate terrorists, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered to release 124 Palestinian terrorist murderers from Israeli prisons in exchange for a meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas.

Alas, Abbas refused. He didn’t think Netanyahu’s offer was generous enough.

And how did the Obama administration respond to Abbas’s demand for the mass release of terrorists and his continued refusal to resume negotiations with Israel?

By attacking Israel.

The proximate cause of the Obama administration’s most recent assault on Israel is the publication of the legal opinion of a panel of expert Israeli jurists regarding the legality of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. Netanyahu commissioned the panel, led by retired Supreme Court justice Edmond Levy, to investigate the international legal status of these towns and villages and to provide the government with guidance relating to future construction of Israeli communities beyond the armistice lines.

The committee’s findings, published this week, concluded that under international law, these communities are completely legal.

There is nothing remotely revolutionary about this finding. This has been Israel’s position since 1967, and arguably since 1922.

The international legal basis for the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 was the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. That document gave the Jewish people the legal right to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, as well as all the land Israel took control over during the 1948- 49 War of Independence.

Not only did the Mandate give the Jewish people the legal right to the areas, it enjoined the British Mandatory authorities to “facilitate… close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.”

So not only was Jewish settlement not prohibited. It was required.

Although this has been Israel’s position all along, Netanyahu apparently felt the need to have its legitimacy renewed in light of the all-out assault against Israel’s legal rights led by the Palestinians, and joined enthusiastically by the Obama administration.

In a previous attempt to appease Obama’s rapacious appetite for Israeli concessions, Netanyahu temporarily abrogated Israel’s legal rights by banning Jews from exercising their property rights in Judea and Samaria for 10 months in 2010. All the legal opinion published this week does is restate what Israel’s position has always been.

Whereas the Obama administration opted to embrace Mursi even as he embraces Abdel-Rahman, the Obama administration vociferously condemned Israel for having the nerve to ask a panel of senior jurists to opine about its rights. In a press briefing, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell banged the rhetorical hammer.

As he put it, “The US position on settlements is clear. Obviously, we’ve seen the reports that an Israeli government-appointed panel has recommended legalizing dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts.”

In short then, for the Obama administration, it is all well and fine for the newly elected president of what was until two years ago the US’s most important Arab ally to embrace a terror mastermind indirectly responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. It is okay to invite members of jihadist terror groups to come to Washington and meet with senior US officials in a US taxpayer- funded trip. It is even okay for the head of a would-be-state that the US is trying to create to embrace every single Palestinian terrorist, including those who have murdered Americans. But for Israel’s elected government to ask an expert panel to determine whether Israel is acting in accordance with international law in permitting Jews to live on land the Palestinians insist must be Jew-free is an affront.

THE DISPARITY between the administration’s treatment of the Mursi government on the one hand and the Netanyahu government on the other places the nature of its Middle East policy in stark relief.

Obama came into office with a theory on which he based his Middle East policy. His theory was that jihadists hate America because the US supports Israel. By placing what Obama referred to as “daylight” between the US and Israel, he believed he would convince the jihadists to put aside their hatred of America.

Obama has implemented this policy for three and a half years. And its record of spectacular failure is unbroken.

Obama’s failure is exposed in all its dangerous consequence by a simple fact. Since he entered office, the Americans have dispensed with far fewer jihadists than they have empowered.

Since January 2009, the Muslim world has become vastly more radicalized. No Islamist government in power in 2009 has been overthrown. But several key states – first and foremost Egypt – that were led by pro-Western, US-allied governments when Obama entered office are now ruled by Islamists.

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