Despite all the archeological/historical evidence of three thousand of years of a flourishing, continuous Jewish presence in their undivided city of Jerusalem, many people are inundated with lies about Arab claims to the city. In reality, the division of Jerusalem began in 1948 when Jordan invaded and physically cut the city into two pieces. In the video shown below by HonestReporting.com, hear living testimony from an eighth generation Jerusalem Jew and from one whose family arrived in the great city in 1835. Then study up on your history and learn the truth that Jerusalem has, shall, and always will be the undivided capital of the Jewish State. Period.
Saudi and Gulf leaders held discussions in Riyadh this week on proposed moves toward greater unity. The meeting, however, revealed little genuine enthusiasm for such a project outside of Saudi Arabia itself and beleaguered Bahrain.
But while it is unlikely that proposals for greater Gulf unity will bear fruit, the very fact that they are being raised at all is significant. It reflects two things: firstly, the overriding concerns felt by Saudi Arabia regarding Iranian ambitions in the Gulf area and beyond; and secondly, the Saudi conviction since the Arab Spring that the West and the US cannot be relied upon and that therefore the Gulf monarchies themselves must organize – in their own neighborhood as well as outside it – to defend their interests.
“All of the world knows what happened here in 1948,’ Daoud Abu Lebdeh says, while leaning against a table in a coffee shop on the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus.
“The Israeli soldiers or the Israeli militias like the Hagana, Kahane, the Irgun and Lehi came here and they [kicked] the people outside from their homes.”
Daoud is a nondescript man of 24 from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A correspondent and blogger with the Palestinian website the Middle East Post, Daoud has come highly recommended as an expert on the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the birth of the State of Israel, and concurrently, the start of the Palestinian refugee problem, by Fatah Youth activist and Jerusalemite Mousa Abassi.
Since the 1990s, Hizballah has defined itself along a number of parallel lines, each of which prior to 2011 appeared to support the other. The movement was simultaneously a sectarian representative of the Lebanese Shi’a, a regional ally of Iran and Syria, a defender of the Lebanese against the supposed aggressive intentions of Israel, and a leader of a more generically defined Arab and Muslim “resistance” against Israel and the West. As a result of the events of 2011, most important the revolt against the Asad regime in Syria, these various lines, which seemed mutually supportive, began to contradict one another. This has diminished Hizballah’s position, though it remains physically unassailable for as long as the Asad regime in Syria survives.
In October 2011 an extraordinary opportunity to apprehend the ill-defined “Middle East” conflict was offered in the form of a play within the play. Discourse was disabled by flesh and blood images acting out the drama with exquisite unity and perfect casting. Playing the role of Israel, Gilad Shalit, courageous survivor of five years of unspeakable deprivation, emerged frail, pale but gloriously resistant. The little that we know of the conditions of his imprisonment is already too much. Kidnapped at the age of 19 near the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel (two IDF soldiers were killed in the cross-border attack), held in some sort of dungeon, starved of human company, starved of daylight, undernourished, not even given eyeglasses with which to see the ugly contours of his constricted world, Gilad stood before us, a miraculous survivor. The celestial light of dignity suffused his flesh and bones with metaphysical force.
What decent human being would not have misgivings about the release, in exchange for Shalit, of 1027 murderers, thieves, and thugs determined to use their liberation as a license to renew the persecution of Israeli Jews? And who could not feel, seeing the first images of Gilad roughly handled by Hamas and Egyptian intermediaries, that no price was too dear for the release of one single human being from the tomb in which he was jailed and left to slowly extinguish like a flame without oxygen.
The Australian: In Egypt, Islamist parties now hold about 80 per cent of the seats in parliament. Given the majority of demonstrators in Tahrir Square were liberal secularists, has Egypt’s Arab Spring been hijacked?
Daniel Pipes: No, because the liberals of Tahrir Square did not force Mubarak from power. The military took advantage of their mass demonstrations to dispatch a president it had had enough of, in large part because of his intent on handing power to his son, Gamal.
Is the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood bad news for Egypt’s Coptic Christians and secularists?
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
– William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”
Whatever side you are, or aren’t, on and whether you never think about these issues or are an impassioned activist, there are three fundamental issues about Israel, its enemies, and the Middle East that tie the narrative into knots.
Each of these wrong ideas, of course, has a basis in fact. The following points might appear counter-intuitive. But I will demonstrate their accuracy. And you can’t understand events without grasping them.
Responsible airlines like Air France, Easyjet, Jet2.com, and Lufthansa have cooperated with Israel to keep “pro-Palestinian” rabble-rousers (hypocrites) from flying into Ben-Gurion airport to cause who-knows-what kind of mayhem in the Jewish state:
More than 60 percent of the 1,500 pro-Palestinian activists due to arrive in Israel on Sunday to take part in a fly-in protest have received notifications from airlines that their flights were canceled, the spokesman for the “Welcome to Palestine” protest told Haaretz on Saturday. …
For the bigoted trash that do make it into Israel, the Jewish state’s government has prepared a reality check to be presented to them upon arrival — a the-truth-hurts message that the haters probably won’t even understand:
In a surprise move, Jordan has decided to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinian Authority and PLO officials, sources in Amman disclosed Wednesday. …
The move coincides with a new electoral law in Jordan that seeks to limit Palestinian representation in parliament. …
In recent years the Jordanians have stripped thousands of Palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship in an apparent response to calls to establish a Palestinian state in Jordan. Nearly half the kingdom’s 6 million people are of Palestinian origin. …
Sounds like Arab-against-Arab apartheid to me, not “Arab Unity” or an “Arab Spring.” Let’s be clear: The Hashemite Bedouin regime ruling Jordan, led by King Abdullah II, is not “Palestinian.” Remember that in 1970, Abdullah’s father:
… King Hussein decided it was time to act. Throughout September the Jordanian military launched attacks to push the PLO [Palestinian Liberation organization] out of Jordan, attacks now called “Black September” by the PLO. Casualty reports are uncertain, but hundreds or perhaps thousands of PLO fadayeen were killed in the fighting and large numbers of Palestinian Arab civilians died as well. Arafat retreated to northern Jordan, close to his Syrian sponsors. Within 10 months the PLO were driven out of Jordan completely, and re-established themselves in Lebanon, a choice that led to eventual disaster for Lebanon.
Last Sunday, many Christians around the world celebrated Easter, taking it for granted that they can congregate and worship in peace. Not so; in the Islamic world, where top religious officials call for the destruction of churches, Christian holidays celebrated in church are increasingly a time of death and destruction, a time of terror.
Nigeria, for example, saw some 50 Christians killed “when explosives concealed in two cars went off near a church during Easter Sunday services in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna…. the casualty figure may go up because some injuries were really critical.” The church targeted was “the Assemblies of God’s Church near the centre of the city with a large Christian population and known as a major cultural and economic centre in Nigeria’s north.” According to the pastor holding Easter services at the time, “We were in the Holy Communion service and I was exhorting my people and all of a sudden, we heard a loud noise that shattered all our windows and doors, destroyed our fans and some of our equipment in the church.”
Iraq is in a mess. Violence continues. Factionalism leads to endless bickering. Corruption is at high levels. Christians live in fear or flee altogether. Islamism is constantly creeping forward. Yet I would suggest that with all these shortcomings the “Iraqi model” is the best that can be expected for the Middle East.
What’s the worst-case scenario? Iran, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, or the permanent civil war situation in Syria, Yemen, and probably Libya.
It isn’t that democracy is theoretically impossible or incompatible in principle with Islam or Arab society. The problem is that it just isn’t going to happen at this particular point in history. What you or I or small groups of moderate democratic Arabs, or naïve Western journalists want isn’t relevant here.
While you probably already know what I’m about to say, it is useful to reinforce and pull together the pieces of reality we face.
It is the year 2012, which seems to be going by very fast and is already one-fourth finished. People are walking around with smart phones and all sorts of electronic devices undreamed of not long ago. There has been what is called an “Arab Spring” stoking fantasies about instant democracy. An African-American was elected president of the United States, and that was after his party’s nomination, and thus probably the White House, almost went to a woman!
A recurring question of the past year has been whether Israel can come out of the unrest of the “Arab Spring” with any new allies. The point is hardly immaterial: The future of Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt hangs in the balance, as Egyptian political parties call for a referendum on the Camp David Accords. Observers also point to the possibility of a revolt against Hashemite rule in Amman instigated by Bedouin tribes and/or Palestinians in Jordan. This too could derail that country’s peace treaty with Israel.
What is the alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria? A simple if indirect way to find out is to consider which groups in Syria are especially for or against Assad—and why.
Christian minorities, who, at 10% of the Syrian population, have the most to gain from a secular government and the most to suffer from a Sharia-state, have no choice but to prefer Assad. They are already seeing aspects of the alternative. A recent Barnabas Fund report titled “Christians in Syria Targeted in Series of Kidnappings and Killings; 100 Dead,” tells of how “children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.” In one instance, kidnappers videotaped a Christian boy as they murdered him in an attempt to frame the government; one man “was cut into pieces and thrown in a river” and another “was found hanged with numerous injuries.”
Half of Iraq’s indigenous Christians are gone due to the unleashed forces of jihad, many of them fleeing to nearby Syria; yet, as the Assad regime comes under attack by al-Qaeda and others, the jihad now seeps into Syria, where Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation’s modern history. Likewise, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their native Egypt since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime; and in northern regions of Nigeria, where the jihadi group Boko Haram has been slaughtering Christians, up to 95 % of the Christian population has fled.
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