By Gary Gerofsky

David Bedein has made a convincing and informative plea to pressure governments and the public to remove or replace the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) when its mandate is up for renewal on June 30. He describes UNRWA’s operations in Palestinian territories, their policy of keeping Palestinians in concentration camps when viable alternatives are available in rapidly expanding towns and villages; villages that are growing much more rapidly, in fact, than Jewish settlements. He describes the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that inculcates hate for Jews and instills unrealistic expectations and feelings in Arab youth of entitlement to all of Israel. He suggests that the logical alternative would be United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The logical alternative is a takeover of the education system in Palestinian-held territories and to evict all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN representatives and to restore sanity to the region and sanity to aid organizations. Empathy and understanding for the Jewish narrative must be the pre-requisite for any NGO working in Israel or working with the Palestinian refugees.

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By Gary Gerofsky

September is quickly approaching and the Palestinians are looking forward to being rewarded with state recognition for years of terrorism that has kept them in the news for half a century. In this light, I thought it might be interesting to think of the world in a new way. Instead of legitimate states with representative forms of government, the new paradigm might possibly be a horrifying breakdown of lawful and orderly nations into smaller, lawless territories. The UN will head the initiative to create and recognize these anarchic regions. Instead of being resolved, disputes will be promoted by the UN, now a world agency mandated to play one against another in order to create a sustainable balance of terror. Any group that can assemble the men and arms to produce the necessary violence will find themselves eventually heading up new territories or countries.

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by Steven Shamrak

In a recent major speech at the State Department, President Obama, addressing the “democratic” revolution in the Middle East and North Africa — predictably Israel became the main point of attention again. Obama, like many of his predecessors (Carter, both Bushs, and Clinton) has made another attempt to resurrect the peace process between Israel and so-called Palestinians.

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by Steven J. Rosen*

Having sidelined Barack Obama’s peace initiative by refusing to return to the negotiations table without apriori Israeli concessions, the Palestinian leadership seeks to secure an international declaration of statehood at the next U.N. General Assembly session in September 2011. This “date certain” strategy, whereby its entitlement to a state will be fulfilled by the world powers, has long been preferred by the Palestinian leadership to any arduous, bilateral negotiation with Israel, which would require painful concessions. The Palestinians enjoy wide support in many European capitals, and they know that the Obama administration is close to their positions on many of the core issues. So forcing the statehood demand into a multilateral forum can entice governments into satisfying the Palestinian aspirations by a fixed date.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Hina Jilani is a Pakistani women’s rights activist, an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, a  former U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Human Rights Defenders, and a co-author of the Goldstone Report.

Dear Hina Jilani:

Greetings! I am familiar with and an admirer of your work as a Pakistani feminist and human rights lawyer, one who has gone on record opposing both honor killing and rape and the inadequate legislation against such crimes in Pakistan.

In 1999, you handled one very high profile honor killing case, that of a Pakistani woman, Samia Imran (aka Samia Sarwar), whose physician mother and politically powerful father arranged that she be shot to death in your office because she dared to seek a divorce from a dangerously violent Pakistani husband. I wrote about this case in 2004-2005 and have written about it again any number of times since then.

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by Phyllis Chesler

I have finally lived long enough to see some dreams come true.

A Russian billionaire, Alexander Mashkevich, has just announced that he will fund a pro-Israel, pro-truth television news channel, a “Jewish Al-Jazeera.” God bless him! I have been calling for something like this for seven years. I hope that Mr. Mashkevich and his advisors understand that this new channel must be far better than Al-Jazeera, not only in terms of truth-telling but in other ways as well. Al-Jazeera broadcasts only in Arabic and English, and is only now preparing to broadcast in Turkish and Urdu. The “Jewish Al-Jazeera” must appear in many more languages simultaneously: Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Pashto, the Indonesian and Malaysian languages, as well as in all the European, East European, and former Soviet languages.

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by Steven Shamrak

After many years of advocating for Zionism and the rights of the Jewish people to live on their ancestral land, nobody can say that I am a Qaddafi sympathizer. During decades of his reign in Libya he has proven himself as an egomaniac dictator who has skilfully combined, as all Arab rulers do, brutality with tribal autonomy in order to stay in power. He used terror and Islamic terrorism, as most of the Muslim despots are guilty of this “cultural behaviour” and have been sponsoring Islamic terrorism openly or in stealth, in order to raise his status among Muslim leaders!

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A briefing by Dirk Vandewalle*

On March 11, before the United States and its allies launched attacks against Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, Dirk Vandewalle, a professor in the department of government at Dartmouth College and author of A History of Modern Libya, spoke to the Middle East Forum via conference call, explaining why it is not in U.S. interest to engage Libya militarily.

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By Fern Sidman

“Israel is clearly an island of stability. An outpost of the free world values in tough neighborhood, where there is no mercy for the weak. no second opportunity for those who cannot defend themselves. Thus, we must remain strong,” declared Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, as he delivered the keynote address at the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces 30th annual gala dinner held at the famed Waldorf Astoria hotel on Tuesday evening, March 22nd.

Speaking before a star studded audience of over 1500 people; replete with a plethora of prominent political and religious personalities and celebrities of all stripes, Minister Barak noted the impending September 2011 convocation of the United Nations General Assembly in which the world body will “recognize a Palestinian state along the ‘67 borders, followed by a wide effort at de-legitimization of Israel” and referred to this move and others like as a “diplomatic tsunami” that is rising against the Jewish state.

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By Fern Sidman

Graphic depictions of the most egregious forms of human rights abuses against women in Iran took center stage at a special seminar in New York City on March 3rd. Sponsored by “Iran180″, an organization dedicated to spotlighting the litany of human rights abuses that take place on a daily basis in Iran, the seminar was entitled, “Securing Gender Equality: Iran and the CSW”. Held at 777 UN Plaza, a building directly across the street from the United Nations, the objectives of the gathering included raising awareness of Iran’s violations of women’s rights and the staging of symbolic protests against the welcoming of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the newest member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women at its 56th session.

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President Obama just vetoed an anti-Israeli UN resolution, but screwed Israel anyway. Palestinians, whom sponsored the resolution, have planned a public tantrum in response — not sure why, as they’re always throwing tantrums, and most sane people have become desensitized to such outbursts. Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post summarizes Obama’s continued, idiotic incompetence (and that of many Jewish groups):

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By Fern Sidman

Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, founder and president of Hineni, the internationally renowned Torah outreach organization will be addressing audiences at the United Nations in New York City on Thursday, January 27th on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Remembrance Day. This most special event is being sponsored by the International B’nai Brith organization to commemorate to the legacy of those who perished during the Holocaust and as a forum to address escalating global anti-Semitism and racism.

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by Hilal Khashan*

Recent developments in Lebanon have shown that the preconditions for restoring its sovereignty have not yet materialized. The demise of the “Cedar Revolution” and the fragmentation of the “March 14 Coalition” have set the country back to the era of Syrian domination. The crisis associated with the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and the formation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) afford yet another stark demonstration that the country remains a victim of regional encroachment and that the loyalties of its leaders remain as sectarian as ever.

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by Steven J. Rosen*

President Obama has affirmed repeatedly that, under his leadership, America’s bond with Israel is absolute, unshakeable, and rock solid. But the Israeli public is not convinced. A Jerusalem Post poll in March 2010 found that just 9 percent of Jewish Israelis think his administration is pro-Israel, against 48 percent who think it is pro-Palestinian. J Street’s pollster, Jim Gerstein, looked for a different result, but even his survey found that 55 percent of Israelis do not believe that Obama supports Israel.

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by Bat Ye’or*

In a move that caught the Israeli government and the Jewish world by complete surprise, on October 21, 2010, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the Tomb of the Hebrew Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem “an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories,” admonishing the Israeli decision to add these biblical shrines to the list of Jewish historical and archaeological sites as “a violation of international law.”[1]

What is less known, however, is that the driving force behind “the attempt to detach the Nation of Israel from its heritage” (to use Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s words)[2] was the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which pressured UNESCO to issue the declaration and drafted its initial version.[3] U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has recently described the OIC as “a strategic and important partner of the U.N.”[4] In fact, it has been the OIC that has successfully exploited its marked preponderance at the U.N. — where it constitutes the largest single voting bloc — to turn the world organization and its specialized agencies into effective tools in the attempt to achieve its goals, two of which are to bring about Israel’s eventual demise and to “galvanize the umma [Islamic world] into a unified body.”[5]

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