April 5, 2012, 3:59 PM
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Jewish liberation is far from complete
Hamas terror boss Fathi Hamad is a notable figure. Hamad is both the director of Hamas's al-Aksa television station and the terror group's "minister" of the interior and national security. His double portfolio is a clear expression of the much ignored fact that for terrorists, propaganda is inseparable from violence.
Hamad's key posts make him a man worth listening to. His statements necessarily indicate Hamas's general direction.
On March 23, Hamad was interviewed by Egypt's Al Hekma television station. The interview was translated by MEMRI.
Hamad made two central points. First, he claimed that the Palestinian war against Israel is the keystone of the global jihad. Second, he said the Palestinians are not a distinct people, but transplanted Egyptians and Saudis.
In his words, "At al-Aksa and on the land of Palestine, all the conspiracies, throughout history, have been shattered - the conspiracies of the Crusaders, and the conspiracies of the Tatars. At al- Aksa and on the land of Palestine, the Battle of Hattin was waged. The [West] does not want this noble history to repeat itself, because the Jews and their allies would be annihilated - the Zionists, the Americans and the imperialists.
"Thus, the conspiracy is very clear. Al-Aksa and the land of Palestine represent the spearhead for Islam and for the Muslims. Therefore, when we seek the help of our Arab brothers, we are not seeking their help in order to eat, to live, to drink, to dress, or to live a life of luxury. No. When we seek their help, it is in order to continue to wage Jihad."
Hamad next explained, "Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, [Egyptians] whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians."
What Hamad's interview tells us is that today Hamas - the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood - is more interested in unity with Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt than with Fatah. Whereas in the past it joined Fatah in obscuring the direct link between the jihad against the Jews and the jihad against the non-Muslim world, today it seeks to emphasize the connection. To this end, Hamas is willing to abandon the myth of Palestinian nativism and acknowledge that the Palestinians are an artificial people, invented for the purpose of advancing the global jihad in the key battlefield of Israel.
Hamad's statements underscore a widespread sentiment among Israelis about the revolutions now tearing apart the Arab world. That sentiment is that while the results of these revolutions will be catastrophic in the medium and long term, in the short term they bring respite to Israel. With Arab regimes - new and old - struggling to consolidate power, they have little time or energy to devote to their war against Israel.
In this situation, the thinking goes, Israel should be able to devote its attention to attacking Iran's nuclear facilities.
Unfortunately for Israel, while the Arab world is increasingly uninterested in the Palestinian war against Israel, Europe and the American Left are more than happy to pick up the slack.
Consider two recent events. First, two weeks ago the UN Human Rights Council voted to launch a commission whose goal is to criminalize Israel for the existence of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.
The council's decision to form a new kangaroo court to criminalize Israel was not the result of the Arab diplomatic war against Israel. It is the consequence of the European diplomatic war against Israel. It is Europe, not the Arabs that has barred Israel from caucusing with its UN regional group - the Western European and Others Group. By barring Israel from the caucus, the Europeans have denied Israel the ability to make its case to other UN member nations.
For its part, the Obama administration pays lip service to the need to end the Human Rights Council's obsessive war against Israel. But at the same time, it has effectively joined that war by legitimizing the anti-Israel council both by joining it, and by refusing to use its membership as leverage to coerce the council into abandoning its campaign against Israel.
Following the council's vote to form a new Goldstone-style commission to attack Israel, the State Department issued a statement in which it claimed that due in part to US membership in the council, the council had been spurred to "action on a series of important human rights situations around the world."
Then there was last Friday's Global March to Jerusalem, in which a consortium of protesters organized by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and the international Left intended to storm Israel's borders and fill the state with hostile foreigners.
As Ribhi Halloum, the coordinator of the march said last year, the goal of the GMJ was "to move the right of return possessed by Palestinian refugees from theory to practice."
In a press conference in Amman days ahead of the operation, Halloum said that organizers expected for two million people to mass at Israel's borders and attempt to breach them.
In the end, the GMJ failed to mount its planned invasion. The sum total of the day's events amounted to several violent local demonstrations by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria joined by foreign and Israeli leftists. Israel's borders were not breached.
The GMJ's failure to achieve its aims owed to the same pan-Arab distraction that Hamad tried to address in his interview with Egyptian television.
But while the Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese have more urgent business to attend to, the international Left has intensified its own campaign against Israel.
Leading anti-Israel, (and anti-Jewish) leftists including George Galloway, Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire, Noam Chomsky, Jeremiah Wright, Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin served as members of the GMJ's various organizing committees. These self-proclaimed human rights activists had no problem with the fact that the Iranian regime took a central role in organizing the operation or that the clear goal of the campaign's Muslim organizers is the destruction of Israel.
To the contrary, this goal is now openly shared by growing numbers of Western leftists. In an op-ed on the Guardian's online opinion forum, Sarah Colborne, a member of the GMJ's organizing committees and its national coordinator for the UK as well as the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK wrote, "The struggle for Palestinian rights is at the core of the global movement for social and economic justice."
Judith Butler, one of Colborne's American counterparts, has opined that "understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important."
So just as Hamas's Hamad claims that the jihad on Israel is the key campaign of the global jihad, Hamad's Western partners claim that destroying Israel is the key to the Left's campaign for socialism.
Disturbingly, the international Left is receiving indirect support for its goal of destroying Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem, (and through it, destroying Israel), from the US government. Just days before the GMJ failed to unravel Israel's physical control over Jerusalem, in a jaw-dropping exchange between State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland and AP reporter Matthew Lee, Nuland refused to say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
The US has always been deeply hostile to Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem. Beginning in 1950 the State Department directed US diplomats to discourage other governments from establishing their embassies in Jerusalem. But while the US has always undermined its own alliance with Israel by aligning its policy on Jerusalem with Israel's worst enemies, under President Barack Obama, the US's willingness to express this hostility has been unprecedented.
This hostility has been demonstrated most famously by Obama's demand that the government stop respecting Jewish property rights in the city.
It has also been given graphic expression by the administration's decision to move the Consular Section of the US Consulate in Jerusalem from an Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem to the site that Israel allocated for a new US embassy.
The site is located in the Jewish Arnona neighborhood in western Jerusalem.
Israel allocated the land to a future US Embassy after Congress passed the US Embassy Act in 1995 which obligated the US government to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The site was chosen, among other reasons, because its location in western Jerusalem put it outside the dispute regarding whether or not Israel will retain sovereignty over eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem in a hypothetical peace treaty with the Palestinians. The US government uses the non-resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel as its justification for refusing to accept Jewish property rights in those areas of the city.
The US Consulate in Jerusalem is not subordinate to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. It presents itself as the unofficial US embassy to the non-existent state of Palestine. By utilizing the site in western Jerusalem allocated for a future embassy as an extension office of the consulate, the Obama administration made clear its rejection of Israel's right to sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. And in light of the US law that recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital and orders the government to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem, the Obama administration not only indirectly legitimized the cause of those who seek the destruction of Israel.
It did so in contempt of US law.
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In truth, there is nothing new about the West's rejection of Israel's right to sovereignty or even to its support and sponsorship for the Arab war for the destruction of Israel. Such animosity predates not only the 1967 Six Day War. It predates the establishment of Israel.
British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, who served as an intelligence officer in wartime and post-World War I Mandatory Palestine, made this point clearly in his memoir Middle East Diary.
Meinertzhagen wrote that the first Arab terror assaults on Jews under the British military government were instigated by the British military. Just before Easter in 1920, British military authorities contacted future Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini and encouraged him to attack the Jews of Jerusalem.
They told him, "He had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine... and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, [the British High Commanders] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish home."
Today, the Jewish people begin their week-long celebration of Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom. This evening we will read in the Haggada that our fight for freedom is an eternal struggle.
When we assess the global nature of the current assault on Jewish freedom and sovereignty in our country, we see the truth of that message.
While our present circumstances give us much to celebrate, the work of Jewish liberation is far from over.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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Caroline, excellent post and totally on target. We are the masters of our own destiny. Until we, and especially the Jewish Left understand that we are tolerated at best and hated by most we will never be free. Thanks once again.
Sad but true. Further appeasement will gain nothing for the Jewish state. With strength, courage and resolve, Israel will overcome its adversaries, at home and abroad.
Chag kasher v'sameach!
'Unfortunately for Israel, while the Arab world is increasingly uninterested in the Palestinian war against Israel, Europe and the American Left(and Right)are more than happy to pick up the slack.'
....and two thirds of America's Jews will vote for the god they worship and serve again.
Psalm 83
Do not keep silent, O God!
Do not hold Your peace,
And do not be still, O God!
For behold, Your enemies make a tumult;
And those who hate You have lifted up their head.
They have taken crafty counsel against Your people,
And consulted together against Your sheltered ones.
They have said, "Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation,
That the name of Israel may be remembered no more."
For they have consulted together with one consent;
They form a confederacy against You:"
On this Passover eve when the children of Israel are once again enslaved to the new Pharaoh Obama and his red and green lights and their Quartet gods, there is one stark difference;
Israel today has yet to cry out to God and still looks to themselves and assorted political deviants and liars in the West to rise up come election time rescue them.
"Europe and the American Left are more than happy to pick up the slack." - The Israeli Left is also playing a crucial role. European and American anti-Semites always start by quoting Israelis to show they have nothing against the Jews as such. It's time the taboo against calling a spade a spade were broken. A Jewish self-hater is an anti-Semite. Obamas's American, yet many historians and intellectuals, including Thomas Sowell and John Bolton, consider him anti-American; there's no reason why Jews identifying with the enemies of their people should not be defined as such, i.e. Jew-haters. Historically this phenomenon is hardly new: there've always been Jewish anti-Semites out to destroy the nation. The fact that they've learned to use the Orwellian language to hide behind shouldn't fool anyone.
Caroline:
Must take issue with you when you refer to the "non-existent state of Palestine."
Palestine is a state and was recognized as a state by UNESCO on 31 October 2011 when it became the 195th member state of UNESCO.
The fact is that not one of the 194 member states of UNESCO - including America and Israel- has sought to have this decision reversed on the grounds that Palestine is not a State and therefore its admission to UNESCO is unlawful under Article II(2) of UNESCO's Constitution.
Recognition of the existence of the State of Palestine by its admission to UNESCO has ended the need for any further negotiations to create such a state under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Road Map.
Time to call off those negotiations with the Palestinian Authority right now.They are defunct and have no further objective.
Time to wind up the Palestinian Authority now that it has been left without any mandate to negotiate for the creation of a Palestinian State.
Let the State of Palestine open its doors to those Palestinian Arabs who have been stateless refugees for the last 64 years. They now have a state to come home to.
Let UNWRA be disbanded - because there is no longer any refugee problem that cannot be resolved in the state of Palestine.
Let the Quartet fold up - because it is no longer required to negotiate a two-state solution.
Let Israel act unilaterally free of the constraints imposed by OSLO and the Roadmap to redraw the boundaries of the Jewish National Home as legally sanctioned by the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter.
Exciting new possibilities have opened up because the state of Palestine now exists and will continue to exist whilst it remains a member of UNESCO.
As far as `Judith Butler, one of Colborne's American counterparts, has opined that "understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important."
So just as Hamas's Hamad claims that the jihad on Israel is the key campaign of the global jihad, Hamad's Western partners claim that destroying Israel is the key to the Left's campaign for socialism.`
This is the socialist confusing of the shariah Caliphate and their socialist utopia.
As to `The US has always been deeply hostile to Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem. Beginning in 1950 the State Department directed US diplomats to discourage other governments from establishing their embassies in Jerusalem.`
The Eisenhower fifties and the 500 nazi dr. Mengele's papercliped into Allan Dulles and Sydney Gottlieb's MKULTRA, the indifference of the US towards Israel in the operation Odessa nazi Nasser 1956 war, etc. were before the US race debate started which accumulated in one of the more substantial doctrines of the kenian being the Critical Race Theory .. while anti-Semite hatred is the highest form of racism ... a fiction, a dogma unwavering as South African ANC marxism of a special type or national-socialism or their mutual collaboration with the shariah based social welfare Caliphate.
many thanks, Caroline, for the reminders...much of what you say regarding the US antipathy toward Israel even after the founding of the State itself would seem correct-In "I Am My Brother's Keeper" by Weiss and Weiss, the US embargoed all arms shipments to Israel though the attacking arabs were able to receive arms freely. And it was the same with England. The American State Dept. tried in every way to penalize WWII Vets who volunteered to fight for Israel, even non-Jews. For those American Jews who still think that Obama will protect Israel, give up the phony fantasy. Obama holds no love for Israel.