… As we look for ways to crack down on terrorism and terrorist activity, looking at UNRWA is a good start. American taxpayer dollars fund approximately one-third of UNRWA’s operating budget. UNRWA provides food, medicine, economic aid, jobs, radical education, political opportunities, and even logistical assistance to Hamas and other extremist groups. UNRWA’s budget, which exceeds $365 million, is funded by many nations, but the United States and other Western nations are the largest contributors. …
If you want to find out even more truth about UNRWA, I suggest you read this very thoughtful, well-documented treatise by three well-recognized experts on Middle East affairs: Barry Rubin, Asaf Romirowsky, and Jonathan Spyer. They eloquently showed that UNRWA:
… actually helps destroy the chance of Arab-Israeli peace, promotes terrorism, and holds Palestinians back from rebuilding their lives.
Unique in history, UNRWA’s job is to keep Palestinian refugees in suspended animation — and at low living standards — until they achieve the goal set for them by the PLO and Hamas: Israel’s extinction. In the meantime, their suffering and anger is maintained as a weapon to encourage them toward violence and intransigence. …
Secretary of State John Kerry has in his head every what-should-be-discredited cliché about the Middle East firmly ensconced in his head. Of course, he is not alone. I just briefed a European diplomat who came up with the exact formulation I’m going to deal with in a moment. What is disconcerting — though long familiar — is that Western policy makers hold so many ideas that are totally out of touch with reality.
They do not allow these assumptions to be questioned. On the contrary, it is astonishing to find how often individuals in elite positions have never heard counter-arguments to these beliefs. It is easy to prove that many of these ideas simply don’t make sense, but it is nearly impossible to get elite intellectuals, officials, and politicians to open their minds to these explanations.
The bad news is clear. Israel’s right to exist is questioned by many, and its ancient and present capital, Jerusalem, is unrecognized by all but a few states. Israeli leaders are sometimes compared to leaders of Nazi Germany, and Israeli actions against the Palestinians are described as Nazi-like policies. Moreover, the Israelis are accused of engaging in South African apartheid policies toward the Palestinians and the country’s Arab minority. Opponents and critics portray the Jewish state as the world’s worst violator of human rights, United Nations resolutions, and international law.[1]
On March 17 of this year, François Hollande — the socialist president of France — attended the ceremonies held in Toulouse marking the first anniversary of what is now commonly referred to as “the Mohamed Merah affair.”
On March 11, 2012, this French citizen of Algerian descent, who had joined an Islamist network and had been trained in Pakistan, killed a French soldier in Toulouse. On March 15, he shot three more soldiers in Montauban: two died on the spot; the third was severely wounded in the head and is now quadriplegic.
Four days later, Merah killed three preteen children and one adult at Ozar Hatorah, a school in Toulouse.
Why exactly is President Obama going to Israel? A variety of theories have been advanced as to why he is making the trip now and what might be accomplished.
Some have suggested that Obama needs to reassure Israel, to hold their hands and tell them that the US-Israeli relationship is special. This suggests that Obama cares about Israeli feelings, at least in the sense that positive sentiments advance policy goals, and that Israelis might be thus comforted by his presence. But the record of bad relations between Obama and Netanyahu is too long, and the fact that Obama is on record saying that Israelis don’t know what is best for them, whereas he does, has mitigated whatever good vibrations he might spread now.
I sometimes think about the problem of anti-Semitism and why this irrational prejudice preoccupies so many people these days — from elites in Europe, to bureaucrats and Islamists in the UN, to churches, unions and Left-leaning academics and politicians.
I believe that in the minds of people like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom are children of Holocaust victims, they blame the ravages of the Holocaust on the group affiliation of the victims rather than on the perpetrators. They use the Holocaust nightmare to apply retroactive retribution to Jews for the existence of the State of Israel via the murderous hands of the Nazis. They apply a similar retribution to Jews in the present using Islamic terrorism as the battering ram of choice. During speaking engagements by these individuals, they reveal a loathing and disdain for Jews/Israel and perhaps they believe that the brutality of the Nazis was somehow a justifiable component and end result of the anger towards Jews by Europeans against the Jewish religion or against other characteristics of their Jewish victims. Do the “intellectuals” of today think that Jews did something wrong or that their beliefs got them into the mess known as the Holocaust and the wars carried out against Israel by its neighbors since the Holocaust? Do they think that Israel is receiving its just deserts today in terms of terror heaped on the country for being a Jewish state?
During his speech at the conference, Moshe Feiglin, head of the Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction of the Likud party, informed delegates that the amount of money Israel has spent on security since the Oslo Accords could pay every Arab family $500,000 to relocate from Jewish land (most of them would have happily moved out for much less). The need for such expenditure is clear evidence that, in spite of all efforts and concessions Israel has made, the walls it has built and advanced weapons it has developed, Arabs will never agree to peaceful co-existence with Jews – and not just Jews, but all “infidels” (non-Muslims).
In the near-century that the United States has been a great power, it has developed some original and sophisticated foreign policy tools. Examples include the Marshall Plan, special forces, and satellite imaging. At the same time, the country’s naiveté remains firmly in place. For example, the notion persists that government staff are “particularly qualified to [handle a problem] because they knew nothing about it.” (For details, see my analysis at “American Know-Nothing Diplomacy.”)
The persistent belief that training and equipping foreign troops imbues them with American political and ethical values, making them allies of the United States, offers another sign of innocence. Some examples of this delusional policy in recent decades:
I’ve just put the full text of 13 books which I’ve written onto the Internet. You can access them all for free with a single click. This project has prompted me to think a lot about what I’ve been trying to do these last forty years.
The main goal has been trying to explain the Middle East as it actually exists, how its politics work, and how its history can be understood. My basic overview is contained in my The Tragedy of the Middle East. In structural terms, the Middle East can be seen as paralleling the history and politics of other regions in the world. But along with that is the all-important factor of its specific development.
Aish.com has produced another outstanding video about the amazing, compassionate, innovative, adaptive, brave, and beautiful Israeli people. The film, entitled “This is Israel: Resilience,” tells the story of how “Critically wounded by Hezbollah terrorists, Asael Lubotzky dramatically transforms from victim to healer.” The presentation gives an overview of the last installment of the war started by Hezbollah against Israel, mainly via indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israeli civilians, but concentrates on a personal experience. This video brings home the human toll that Hezbollah-led terrorist violence took on a single man, and thus stirs empathy from viewers. It’s one thing to measure terrorist violence simply through the numbers of people killed or wounded; it’s an entirely better measure to learn about the effects of that “Palestinian” hate-based violence on a single Israeli citizen. Most importantly, the film teaches us how resilient the Israeli people are, and how throughout their nation’s history, Israelis have bounced back from adversity to continuously build and improve one of the world’s greatest democracies. Watch here:
The recent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) event at Brooklyn College featuring professional Palestinian Omar Barghouti and celebrity anti-Israel academic Judith Butler was true to form. A dual purpose was served. For one, students and staff were treated to calls for the destruction of Israel, conducted in a quasi-academic setting, with the implicit endorsement of the institution. Second, as always, trap was sprung on opponents of such campus abuses. Having successfully planned the event and represented it as an intellectual exploration of the one state solution, in which Israel is made extinct, the inevitable complaints regarding its one-sidedness and borderline antisemitism were met with the usual howls of censorship and demands for academic freedom. Politicians became involved on both sides. City Council members were opposed to the campus and tax dollars supporting an anti-Israel recruitment rally. Mayor Bloomberg then came out in favor, and with characteristic tact and insight, condemned the event’s content and scolded the presumably close-minded opponents, wittily telling them to apply to school in North Korea.
The crowd at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on the upper west side is mainly Jewish and liberal — ultra-liberal. They behave as if they are superior to all “Ostjuden,” the illiterate, superstitious, unwashed Eastern European Jews — and therefore, in their sleek leather boots and fashionable coats they are, surely, finally, safe. At least, safer. After millennia of persecution, here are Jews who are not self-hating, not even opportunist, just Jews who feel secure as long as they feel superior to other Jews. The “Ostjuden” today are the Zionists, the “settlers,” the “right wing.”
Psychologically, this means that they deserve to survive. They are the “good” Jews. Assimilated, exquisitely moral, the first to find imperfections in their co-religionists.
Zead Ramadan, board president of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is eyeing a bigger platform from which to promote his Islamist agenda: a seat on the New York City Council. If he prevails, the city that endured 9/11 will count among its lawmakers a senior official in an organization linked to the financing of terrorists and intent on frustrating law enforcement efforts to foil the next jihad plot.
Were Barack Obama re-elected, I predicted two months before the Nov. 2012 presidential vote, “the coldest treatment of Israel ever by a U.S. president will follow.” Well, election’s over and that cold treatment is firmly in place. Obama has signaled in the past two months what lies ahead by:
Approving a huge gift of advanced weapons – 20 F-16 fighter jets and 200 M1A1 Abrams tanks – to the Islamist government in Egypt despite the fact that its president, Mohamed Morsi, has becoming increasingly despotic and calls Jews “blood-suckers, … warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
Reiterating the patronizing 35-year old tactic relied upon by anti-Israel types to condemn Israeli policies while pretending to be concerned for the country’s welfare: “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.”
Ignoring evidence of Cairo importing Scud missile parts from North Korea.
President Obama’s criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu — on the eve of the January 22, 2013 Israeli election — underlines the secondary role played by the Palestinian issue in shaping US-Israel strategic cooperation.
Since March, 2009, Obama has systematically scorned Netanyahu’s policies on the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and the Palestinian issue, Jerusalem and the construction of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, in particular. However, since March, 2009, irrespective of harsh disagreements over the Palestinian issue, the mutually-beneficial US-Israel strategic cooperation has expanded, especially in areas which feature the distinctive Israeli added-value: intelligence-sharing, counter-terrorism, homeland security, missile defense, training, battle tactics, joint exercises, pre-positioning of military hardware, medical treatment of soldiers and civilians, research and development, space, commercial and defense industries and high tech in general. Neither Israel nor the US intends to subordinate primary interests to secondary issues by cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
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