Author: Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield is a journalist and conservative blogger who is critical of Islam. He was born in Israel and today lives in New York City. Today he posts at his blog Sultan Knish, FrontPage Magazine, Israel National News and is a Shillman Journalist Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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NETANYAHU VS. THE LEFT’S DEEP STATE

The deep state is waging war on Trump and Netanyahu.

In a year and a few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have spent more time at the helm of the Israeli government than any other man. The other man is David Ben-Gurion, the Socialist leader who repressed Zionist nationalist movements in Israel by fiat, by law and, as in the Altalena, by murder.

That factoid may not matter much to most people, even most Israelis, but it matters a great deal to the remnants of Ben-Gurion’s regime, the leftists who don’t win elections, but do control the government. Until ’77, Israel’s Prime Ministers came from the Labor Party. The last Labor Prime Minister left office in 2001. It’s not just that Netanyahu is eclipsing Ben-Gurion, but that Labor has become irrelevant.

But of course the Labor Party isn’t irrelevant. Its candidates may be a joke. Its base of support consists of Tel Aviv hipsters who never actually leave their leftist bubble except to visit Paris, New York or Berlin. Their burning social issue is how much more Daddy has to pay to get them a place in their trendy neighborhood. Not even Obama’s best people could help them get much mileage out of that one.

After the ’15 election, Haaretz, the paper of record for the Israeli anti-Israel left, had wailed, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.” Leftist secular Tel Aviv has been devastated for nearly two decades.

But Labor’s deep state still runs much of Israel the way it did when Ben-Gurion was still alive. It doesn’t just have the media and academia, the non-profits and the elites, the way most national ‘lefts’ do. It also controls the old machinery of government that it spent generations running and robbing.

Ben-Gurion’s tenancy may be a factoid to most, but it’s a sore insult to Labor. And its deep state is working overtime to force Netanyahu out of office using fake scandals, fake news and fake police.

This isn’t a new obsession. If you think CNN’s Trumpmania is bad, the Israeli police and media have spent the better part of a decade trying to invent ridiculous Netanyahu scandals. How ridiculous?

Netanyahu’s wife was accused of stealing bottle deposits. “Attorney general mulls probe into Sara Netanyahu’s bottle deposits” isn’t a gag, it’s an actual headline. The catering budget at the prime minister’s residence has been under investigation for years. But there was no investigation when Shimon Peres, the last rotten remnant of the Ben-Gurion regime, threw a lavish birthday party that cost millions and included Bill Clinton, Robert De Niro and Barbara Streisand. Clinton’s fee of $500K was paid by the JNF, which instead of planting trees, was paying one dirty leftist to lionize another.

Israel’s lefty fake news outfits cheered Peres, but took issue with Netanyahu’s ice cream budget.

Another Netanyahu investigation involved the nursing care provided to his father-in-law before his death, because the Israeli left has no more concept of decency than it does of national security.

None of these scandals ever actually go away. Much like the left’s perjury traps and obstruction of justice campaigns against Trump, discredited scandals are rolled into accusations of a cover-up.

And when that doesn’t work, then there are accusations of a media cover-up.

One of the investigations for which Israel’s lefty deep state cops want to charge Netanyahu involves an accusation that he had traded favors for positive coverage from Yedioth Ahronoth. But, as Caroline Glick points out, it never actually happened. Another accusation claims that Netanyahu provided favors in exchange for positive coverage from the Walla! news site. Both accusations testify to the left’s obsession with sowing fear into any media outlet providing positive media coverage of Netanyahu.

Israel Hayom, a free paper that covered Netanyahu positively, was targeted with a law banning the distribution of successful free papers. This attack on a literal free press was known as, “Law for the Advancement and Protection of Written Journalism in Israel”. Lefty journalism has plenty of ‘protektsia’ in Israel. But who will protect Israelis from the ‘journalists’ and their political bosses?

And who will protect actual journalists who report unfavorable information about the left’s deep state?

The message is that any paper that reports the truth might be accused of conspiring with Prime Minister Netanyahu by the police leadership who have their own incestuous relationship with media outlets.

Israel has a first-world military and a third-world police. Israel’s military is competitive, professional and heroic. Its police force is Middle Eastern. At its best, it’s useless and at its worst, it’s deeply corrupt and abusive. The same holds true for the entire justice system which remains a fossilized remnant of its socialist past that deserves to be classed with those of Russia or Uzbekistan.

The Netanyahu era has seen some limited reforms of the judiciary, but the police haven’t changed.

In the United States, the inciting incident of the Flynn investigation appears to have been his advocacy on behalf of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz who had accused former boss Andrew McCabe and others of sexual discrimination. Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich used the campaign against the Prime Minister to accuse a female police officer who had complained about sexual harassment by a superior back in ’11 of secretly doing Netanyahu’s bidding.

The commander whom she had accused of sexual harassment was in the unit investigating Netanyahu.

Alsheich also suggested that private detectives were investigating his investigators. Both are a convenient way of shifting the blame for his own people’s misconduct to Netanyahu. Covering up sexual harassment and opening up the prime minister’s chair for Labor kills two birds with one stone.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has spent a good deal of his life trying to clean up the corrupt system that Ben-Gurion and his dirty socialists inflicted on Israel. It’s a system where the law is nothing and personal connections are everything. At its worst, party membership was required for government jobs.  The machinery of government did the bidding of insiders and crushed the outsiders who got in their way.

Some things have changed.

Israel has a booming private sector. Its growing population of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees from Muslim countries and the Soviet Union have little love for or allegiance to Labor. Its government bureaucracy is a widely loathed corrupt boil on an incredible nation. (As it always was.)

But Labor’s state within a state still wields a great deal of power. It is no coincidence that in recent years, it locked up a prime minister and president who originated from the conservative Likud while Labor’s corrupt politicians have gotten a pass. Isaac Herzog, Labor’s head of the opposition, served as the errand boy for international criminals like Marc Rich and Octav Botnar. But Arafat will rise from the grave to sign a peace deal before a Labor princeling sees the inside of a prison cell.

Money from the estate of Botnar, a Communist, was funneled through Herzog, his lawyer, to Labor for its anti-Netanyahu ads. Rich was a wanted fugitive who bought a pardon from Bill Clinton.

Herzog was Rich’s lawyer.

But the media would rather talk about Netanyahu’s ice cream budget, Sara Netanyahu’s bottle deposits and how much the electrician got paid. The left always accuses the right of its own sins and crimes.

Some may wonder how a country under threat of terrorism, invasion and nuclear annihilation is wasting time on this nonsense instead of dealing with the real threat. Easy. The leftist deep state isn’t interested in dealing with the real threat. It undermined Netanyahu’s efforts to take out Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel’s retired top security bosses routinely pal around with anti-Israel groups and spread anti-Israel propaganda. Ami Ayalon, Carmi Gillon and Yuval Diskin, the former bosses of Shabak, Israel’s version of the FBI, defended the anti-Israel activists of Breaking the Silence. Ayalon had also served Labor in the Knesset. Breaking the Silence has received money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which was among the most aggressive funders of the campaign for the Iran Deal to protect its nuclear terror program.

The deep state is rotten and disloyal. And it’s launching a coup to put its own Labor man in power.

It’s not just the Ben-Gurion date that symbolizes the transfer of power from the corrupt socialist state of Labor to a cleaner Israel that fulfills the aspirations of those who dreamed and fought to make it real.

President Trump’s victory offers Netanyahu the opportunity to redefine Israel’s relationship with the PLO that was imposed on it by the Clintons and their Labor allies. Instead of leftist apparatchiks like Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller calling the shots, pro-Israel Trump associates like David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are breaking with the old failed ideas and defining a new future for Israel.

That made it more urgent for Labor’s deep state to stop Netanyahu. That’s why the charges are in.

Labor failed to stop Netanyahu at the voting booth despite Obama’s experts working for them. And  Obama isn’t around to restrain Netanyahu. A deep state coup against democracy is its last option.

The doomsday option isn’t just about stopping Netanyahu, it’s about stopping Israel.

The people won in America and Israel. But that just means that the deep state in both countries is becoming more ruthless in its efforts to defeat the voices, hopes and dreams of Americans and Israelis.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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HOW TRUMP CHANGED SAUDI ATTITUDES TO ISRAEL AND THE ISLAMO-FASCISTS

A new diplomacy is already changing the Middle East.

What a difference an administration makes.

Under Bush, Muslim World League secretary-general Abdullah Al-Turki described the Jews as “perfidious” and suggested that “it is the natural disposition of the Jews who inherited this deception from their forefathers.”

Under Obama, the Muslim World League Journal ran an article claiming that “Jews” and “Jewesses” run the media. It was one of many violently anti-Semitic pieces that had appeared in the publication.

Under Trump, the Muslim World League sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum before the commemoration of International Holocaust Memorial Day expressing, “our great sympathy with the victims of the Holocaust”. It goes on to completely disavow any support for the Holocaust or its denial, “This human tragedy perpetrated by evil Nazism won’t be forgotten by history, or meet the approval of anyone, except criminal Nazis or their genre. True Islam is against these crimes. It classifies them in the highest degree of penal sanctions and among the worst human atrocities ever.”

The letter was signed by Dr. Mohammad Al Issa, the new Secretary General of the MWL who had replaced Al-Turki in the summer of ’16. The MWL is under Saudi control and Al Issa, who is loosely associated with the reformers, was appointed as major changes were sweeping the desert kingdom.

The MWL Holocaust letter never mentions the Jews by name. It was sent to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, a United States government institution, rather than a Jewish communal institution. The new alignment between the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia is based on a growing threat from Iran. The letter allows Saudi Arabia to distinguish itself from Iran’s anti-Semitic obsession with the Holocaust.

“One would ask, who in his right mind would accept, sympathize, or even diminish the extent of this brutal crime,” the Muslim World League letter asks. The answer is meant to be quite obvious.

Two years ago, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a Holocaust denial video. Iran’s bizarre obsession with Holocaust denial, convening a conference and hosting Holocaust cartoon events, is extreme even by the standards of a region where Mein Kampf is a bestseller and it’s generally believed that Hitler didn’t go far enough.

After Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left office, he claimed that his Holocaust denial “broke the spine of the Western capitalist regime.” His successor, Hassan Rouhani, tried to put on a moderate façade by being ambiguous about the subject. And that gives the Saudis an easy opening.

But it’s not just the Iranians.

Not all that long ago, the Muslim World League had hosted Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi at its First International Islamic Conference on Dialogue. Also present was William W. Baker, a Neo-Nazi, who found a second career appearing at Islamist events to bash Israel.

Qaradawi would later combine the typical Islamist toxic cocktail of Holocaust fantasies and denial by declaring that Allah had sent Hitler to punish the Jews.  “The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.” The believers are Muslims. The Brotherhood’s icon was fantasizing about a Muslim holocaust of the Jews. It’s a theme to which Brotherhood clerics frequently return to.

The genocidal hadith once featured in the Hamas charter has recently been preached at mosques from California to New Jersey. “Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims will kill the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

In June of last year, the Muslim World League booted Qaradawi from the Islamic Fiqh Academy. The realignment was strategic. The Saudis, UAE and Egypt were fighting the Brotherhood and Qatar. The new regional battle lines put Iran, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood on the same side.

The MWL letter is meant to remind us that the Saudis are different than Iran and the Brotherhood.




The Obama era had broken the old alliance between the Brotherhood and most of their Gulf allies by giving the Islamist group too much and too soon. With political backing from the Obama regime and financial support from Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood had begun seizing entire countries. Qatar was too drunk on the power of being able to conquer countries with its checkbook to stop. Its former allies isolated it and the Sunni terror state in Doha formed an alliance with the Shiite terror state in Tehran.

The Saudis went looking for allies in strange places. One of those places was Israel. They adapted to a radical new environment with major changes at home and abroad. The MWL letter is a product of shifts in an organization associated with support for the ruthless export of Wahhabism. Those same shifts have opened some limited opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia as it questions Wahhabism.

It would be unwise to read too much into the new Saudi attitude. There have been clear political changes in response to military, social and economic threats. If those threats were to go away, if oil were once again a sure thing, if Iran were to fall apart, if the Islamists became more pliable, then reform would likely prove to be another mirage. Like Gorbachev’s Perestroika, the Saudi reforms are necessitated by circumstances rather than sincerity. They might become the real thing in time.

But it would be a mistake to confuse posturing with principle. Or to disregard its significance.

The repercussions of Osama bin Laden’s original campaign against the House of Saud have transformed the region and the world. 9/11, the Iraq War and the Arab Spring have changed everything. Iran has become a regional power. Islamist organizations have been able to seize entire countries. Energy independence for America and Europe is becoming a reality. Qatar controls the foreign media’s narrative of the region through Al Jazeera. And that narrative is very unfriendly to the Saudis.

The House of Saud responded by questioning whether its arrangement with the House of Wahhab, the two swords on the coat of arms of Saudi Arabia, temporal power and religious power, is still relevant. Its reforms negotiate a complex balancing act between modernizing its political system while still holding on to religious power. The Saudis need America more than ever even as we need them less than ever. Its show of social changes, like the abolition of slavery in response to pressure from JFK, are also a message.

Had Hillary won, the Saudis would have been left alone to mastermind a regional struggle from Yemen to Lebanon to Libya. The former Secretary of State had made it clear that she would double down on the Arab Spring. But instead Trump won. And that’s one of the reasons that the MWL letter exists.

The Trump administration is unlike any of its Republican predecessors. It mixes the type of traditional energy diplomats like Tillerson, whom the Saudis have always been very comfortable with, with non-traditional thinkers and a sprinkling of serious pro-Israel people. Unlike the Bush era neo-conservatives who believed in regional democracy, but who have been frozen out of the Trump administration, they have very little interest in the democracy folly that led to the Arab Spring. Instead they are realists who prioritize fighting terrorism and stabilizing the region by throwing out a lot of the discredited old ideas.

That’s why President Trump imposed a travel ban and recognized Jerusalem, among other moves.

The realists reflect Trump’s desire for results over the misguided fantasies that led to the Palestinian Authority and the Arab Spring. And after decades of negotiating ideological delusions from D.C., the Saudis have eagerly embraced that realism. Trump, the Saudis and the Israelis want to stop Iran, stop the destabilizing expansion of Islamist civil wars and restore a measure of stability to the region.

Trump and Netanyahu want stability because they don’t want the region’s problems to be their problems. Trump doesn’t want to have to deploy more soldiers in more wars. And Netanyahu doesn’t want to see more terrorists showing up on Israel’s borders. Neither man wants Iran to have nukes.

The Saudis want to reclaim their central role in the region. They’ve offered Trump a way out of more regional wars that will be unpopular at home and they’ve offered Netanyahu a “Palestine” solution that may appear more feasible than the PLO dead end represented by Abbas. Like the Trojan Horse, it’s best to be wary of such gifts. But for now they’ve cemented a secretive alliance in a complex conflict.

The Middle East is a region of shifting sands and illusory mirages. Like thirsty caravans crossing the bleak desert, even the experts often see what they want to see. But one thing is as clear as water in the oasis.

President Trump has redefined what we expect of the Saudis. We can’t know whether the ripples in the House of Saud extend below the surface, but we do know that America is a moral authority again.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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THE BIG PALESTINIAN LIE

End the “Palestinian” occupation of Israel.

Palestinian boss Mahmoud Abbas recently declared that Israel is “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness.” Moses, King David and thousands of years of Jewish history would disagree. Israel and the Jews are part of the story of human civilization. Over 50% of the human race has a holy book that tells of the Jewish journey to Israel. That includes Mohammed’s own copy of the Koran.

Israel isn’t a “colonial enterprise.” Palestine is.

Anyone who wants to find out where the name Israel comes from can open the Book of Genesis 32:29. The story even appears in Islamic hadiths. But where does “Palestine” really come from?

Palestine isn’t a Hebrew or Arabic word. The Greeks used it to describe the area. And when the Romans and their Arab mercenaries repressed the indigenous Jewish population, they renamed it all Palestine.

Palestine, after the Philistines: but why did the Greeks and Romans name the area after the Philistines?

The Philistines were one of the Greek origin sea peoples who had originally invaded and colonized the area. The Jewish resistance to Philistine colonialism is chronicled in the histories of Samson, King Saul and King David. It was natural for the Greek and Roman colonies that the Jews of the Second Temple era clashed with to use “Palestine”, the name associated with earlier colonies, to refer to their new colonies.

That latest phase of Greek colonialism led to an extended conflict between the Persian Empire and Greco-Roman civilization. The Romans made extended use of Arab mercenaries and rulers to secure their dominions. One such ruler was Herod, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples), who repressed the Jews.

The eventual decline and fall of the Roman and Persian empires made way for the Islamic conquests of the region. But the Islamic bandit hordes had no original ideas. Their religion was a hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, assorted pagan beliefs and Mohammed’s violent fantasies. The rest of their culture they took wholesale from the Greeks. This game of historical Idiocracy ended with a collection of Arab colonists who call themselves “Palestinians” and claim to be descended from… somebody.

In Germany, Abbas declared that, “the nation of Palestine, throughout its long history, has been a beacon of generosity, and our people are an extension of the 3,500-year-old Canaanite civilization.” The Palestinian Authority that the unelected dictator runs was created in 1993. There was never any such independent country before that. And inquiring minds would love to know what an Islamic terrorist group and the Arab clans it oversees have in common with the Canaanite civilization. Fire, the wheel?

But then, Abbas also insisted that, “Mohammed the Prophet was a Palestinian”. According to Islamic tradition, Mohammed was an Adnanite Arab from Arabia. They claim descent from Ishmael and Abraham. That means they aren’t Canaanites. And a number of the Arab clans who make up the “Palestinians” do have their origins in Arabia. For a brief, shining moment, Abbas was telling the truth.

Previously, Abbas had also claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian. If you’re keeping track, that means the Palestinians are Canaanites, Arabs and Jews. That certainly covers a lot of historical bases.

But we’re just getting started.

“The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham,” Abbas also insisted. The Bible doesn’t say anything in “these words”, but people took it to mean that he was claiming that the Palestinians were actually the Philistines. But then he took credit for the invention of the “Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet more than 6,000 years ago.”

There’s no such alphabet. The Palestinian Authority and Muslims in Israel use the Arabic alphabet which does have its extremely distant origins in the Phoenician Proto-Canaanite alphabet. But so does Greek, Latin and the letters you’re reading now. Like most of the “Palestinian” leader’s claims, it’s nonsense.

Within a few years, Abbas claimed that the “Palestinians” are descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jews and the Arabs. Only the last one is true. The “Palestinians” were part of a wave of Arab and Islamic invaders whose incursions continued well into the modern era.

There are some 10,000 “Afro-Palestinians” in Gaza. Some are African settlers who came in the 19th century. The anti-Israel left would have you believe that a Sudanese Muslim who settled in Israel in the late 19th century is an indigenous “Palestinian”, but a Jewish refugee from Egypt is a foreign “settler”.

The Arab Muslims who live in ’48 and ’67 Israel are made up of various clans from around the region.

Abbas has referred to Jordan and Palestine as “one people living in two states.” Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad had once asserted, “Personally, half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri (Egyptian). Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

The most famous Al-Masri is a billionaire who lives in a West Bank reproduction of an Italian villa named “The House of Palestine”, and was recently detained by the Saudis. Munib Masri served as a Palestinian Authority minister, holds a legislative seat and accounts for a quarter of the “Palestinian” economy. The greenhouse in his villa was a gift from Napoleon III to his mistress.

Masri, whose family name originated in Egypt, and claims to be a Palestinian, is actually a Saudi citizen who lives in an imported Italian villa. He made his money supplying the US military during Desert Storm.

That’s what a “Palestinian” looks like.

The “Palestinians” are Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Senegalese, Sudanese and a number of other Muslim invasive colonists. They are not Philistines, Canaanites or Jews.  They’re as indigenous as Al-Masri’s “House of Palestine” made out of imported Italian marble and filled with European art.

The “Palestinians” are what they always were: a foreign Islamic Arab colony inside Israel.

The Big Lie of Palestine is that the Islamic colonists are the indigenous population of Israel and that the Jews are colonizing Palestine. But an indigenous people can never colonize their own country.

“Palestine” is a twisted colonial fiction. The name reflects Greek colonization of the region. And its use by the modern Islamic colonists shows their lack of any actual historical connection to Israel.

After all the agonized wailing about the deeply meaningful “Palestinian” connection to “Palestine”, they still haven’t come up with their own name for the place. One that they can properly pronounce. (There’s no proper “P” in Arabic.) But Abbas keeps coming up with new lies about which ancient people the “Palestinians” are descended from this week.

I can’t wait until he claims to be Cherokee.

The claim of the “Palestinian” colonists to Israel is a lie of Islamic imperialism. The Muslim powers of the region have funded the racist attacks by the PLO, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups on Jews.

The “Palestinians” are not the victims of colonialism. They are its perpetrators.

The fighting between Israel and Islamic terrorists is a struggle between imperialism and colonialism. The imperialists are not the oppressed Jewish minority that has been forced out of nearly everywhere else in the region. It’s the Arab Islamic majority that represses minorities across the region.

“Palestine” is a pathetic attempt to launder one imperial identity with another followed by shameless efforts to appropriate the identities of nearly every ancient people in the region. Including the Jews.

The only way to end the conflict is to end the lies.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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WHAT WE GET FOR THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS WE GIVE TO TERRORISTS

Arts, appeasement and AIDS bombs.

“We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect,” President Trump tweeted. “With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”

The President of the United States has a very good point. But it’s not as if the Islamic terrorists in the West Bank and Gazan territories of Israel have ever been willing to do more than occasionally talk peace before getting bored and stomping away from the table. And then stabbing a few children to death.

The United States has paid the PLO’s Palestinian Authority billions to occasionally pretend to talk about peace. There isn’t a dollar amount high enough to get the terrorists to actually agree to peace.

We know two things about the terrorist leader who will succeed Arafat and Abbas. His name will start with an ‘A’ and like Arafat and Abbas, he’ll wait around for the perfect moment in a peace negotiation with a lefty president before, as Arafat did to Clinton and Abbas did to Obama, breaking it all up.

And that’s one of the priceless things that the fake terror statelet of the Palestinian Authority gives us for our hundreds of millions of dollars. Every decade its leader will lead on a lefty and then leave him at the altar. It may cost us another few billion, but somewhere around 2026, President Cory Booker will be certain that he’s finally solved the Palestinian problem only to sit there confused with egg on his face.

Is that worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year? Maybe not. But it’s also a good lesson to lefties that they don’t understand the Muslim world and that no matter how hard they try, they never will.

But that’s not all that we get for our money.

The peace process with the PLO was the original test case for the Arab Spring and the Iran Deal. All three were founded on the same stupid belief that if you give the terrorists almost everything they want, they won’t kill you. Every year that passes shows that no matter what you give them, the terrorists will kill you. Bribing killers doesn’t work. Meeting their demands is impossible because there are always more.

If we had paid more attention to Arafat’s lying smirk, maybe we wouldn’t have fallen for the Arab Spring or the Iran Deal. And that’s another thing that the terrorists give us in exchange for all our hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Palestinian Authority is a living museum of terrorist treachery. Its peace negotiations are an ongoing demonstration of the folly of appeasing terrorists.

Most small children learn not to put their hands on a hot stove at a very young age. Unfortunately none of them become politicians. And so every time a new president starts thinking about appeasing Islamic terrorists by letting them take over Egypt or develop nuclear weapons, he can test his terrorist appeasement theories in the confines of the smaller sandbox of the West Bank and Gaza.

Decades of testing have thus far produced no peace and no smarter politicians. After a few hundred years of peace negotiations, there still won’t be any peace. But maybe there will be smarter politicians.

Of the two impossible things in this scenario, smarter politicians are more plausible than nicer terrorists.

If we can just keep the peace process going for another few centuries, maybe our distant descendants will finally figure out that appeasing terrorists really doesn’t work. Not even if you offer them parts of Jerusalem, freeze settlements and agree to build a giant statue of Mohammed’s flying demon horse.

But that’s not all that we get from the hundreds of millions of dollars that we lavish on terrorist welfare.

Consider the arts.

The PLO’s takeover of the territories in ’67 Israel unleashed an unprecedented burst of artistic creativity. There’s hardly a gray concrete wall anywhere in Ramallah that isn’t decorated with murals of a smiling Arafat beaming down on the wretched suckers he spent his life ripping off. And then there are the posters of the suicide bombers, the ritual burnings of American flags and the Jihadist poetry readings.

“Our blood is food for the revolution/Yasser Arafat, for you we shall die” and “Sons of Zion, most evil among creation/barbaric apes and wretched ‎pigs” are examples of the arts that we subsidize. And while those poems may sound pretty horrible, they’re still better than what we get for our money at the NEA.

And then there’s the pioneering technological research being carried out by top PLO scientists.

Before the Car Jihad could be efficiently deployed on the streets of New York, Nice, Barcelona and London, it was field tested by expert Palestinian researchers in Jerusalem. Suicide bombings, airline hijackings and many of the other tools of the modern Islamic terrorist were refined in the PLO lab.

The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend each year funding the PLO is an investment in new terror tools and techniques. The terrorists of tomorrow are counting on us to fund their research. And every dollar we give the Palestinian Authority is an investment in helping the terrorists kill us in new and interesting ways. The possibilities are as horrifying as they are endless.

Back in ’04, a member of the PLO’s Fatah faction tried to build an AIDS bomb.

Rami Abdullah, an engineering student, wanted to blow himself up while carrying blood from a donor infected with AIDS. “After a period, it will kill a lot of people,” he explained.

Abdullah has already promised that if he gets out, he’ll try to live the dream of building an AIDS bomb.

An AIDS bomb plot by Tanzim, the most violent terror arm of the Palestinian Authority, was planned over Passover back then. But the lab Jihadis never figured out how to make it work. One day though, if we keep funding them, they might figure it out. And then we too can enjoy AIDS bombs in our cities.

And isn’t that worth a mere few hundred million dollars a year?

We could stop funding terrorists. Also we could stop smoking, running full tilt into glass doors and finally pull off that New Year’s resolution to stop drinking antifreeze. Those would all be good ideas. And they would make us safer and happier. So you can expect Washington D.C. to reject them out of hand.

The experts are convinced that if we don’t fund the terrorists, they’ll behave even worse. So far we haven’t actually tested this theory. No one wants to find out what they can come up with that’s worse than an AIDS bomb.

But if anyone in Washington D.C. can stop doing that stupid thing all the experts insist we need to do, it’s President Trump. And so just maybe this can be the year we stop running into glass doors, drinking antifreeze and funding terrorists. We may lose out on some Arafat murals and AIDS bombs, but the Americans who are regularly killed every year by Palestinian Islamic terrorists will thank him for it.

And if not, we can always look forward to President Elizabeth Warren being humiliated by President Ahmed of the PLO as he walks away from the table despite being offered 99% of Israel and Netanyahu’s first-born son. And then unleashes toddler stone throwers and AIDS suicide bombers across Jerusalem.

Because that’s what we get for our hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s all we’ll ever get from the PLO.

Published in FrontPageMag.

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BERNIE SANDERS GETS ADVISER FROM ANTI-SEMITIC THINK TANK

Support for the terrorists and sanctions on Israel.

Matt Duss had once compared Israel’s blockade of Hamas to “segregation in the American South.”

After the murder of the Henkin family in front of their children, the stabbing of a two-year-old and his mother in Jerusalem, Duss wrote, “it shouldn’t shock anyone that Israel’s harsh occupation and abuse provokes Palestinians.” He blamed the “rising violence” on Israel and not the PLO terrorists.

“Israel does need to start facing some costs and consequences for an occupation,” Matt Duss had told Al Jazeera. “The BDS movement has helped to elevate a debate that was long overdue.”

Matt Duss had traveled to Gaza to meet with Hamas members. He then whitewashed the Islamic terror group as a moderate organization willing to accept a two-state solution and stop killing Jews.

When Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Jewish teens, one of them American, Duss whined that Israel had “turned a police matter into a war” and launched a “crackdown on Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank under the pretext of searching for the missing boys”.

He described the Hamas terrorists as “Palestinian activists” and claimed that despite the brutal murders, “Hamas had largely held to the terms of the cease-fire.”

“A better option for dealing with stone-throwing Palestinian protesters might be to stop stealing their land,” Duss had once tweeted.

“One can recognize that anti-Semitism is a particularly pernicious bigotry among bigotries, however, while still questioning whether holding such views makes any leader ‘irrational'”, Duss wrote when defending the Iran nuke sellout.

Now he’s formulating foreign policy for Senator Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders had previously invited Duss to testify before the Democratic Platform Committee in a push for an anti-Israel platform. Duss had urged the Dems to call for an end to the Hamas blockade.

Before becoming a foreign policy advisor to Senator Sanders, Duss headed up the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Despite its misleading name, FMEP is a fixture of the anti-Israel lobby. It was founded by Merle Thorpe: Jr, a wealthy Washington D.C. lawyer who was the sugar daddy for anti-Israel causes.

The Foundation for Middle East Peace funds anti-Israel groups that directly or indirectly promote BDS.

Before that, Duss was at the center of a major anti-Semitic scandal when he headed up Middle East Progress for the Center for American Progress. CAP bloggers had escalated their attacks on the Jewish State by accusing Jews of “dual loyalty” and of being “Israel Firsters”.

Faiz Shakir, the editor-in-chief at ThinkProgress, had admitted that the hateful attacks by at least one CAP blogger used “terrible anti-Semitic language.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the ADL and even the White House’s Jewish liaison, during the Obama era, all criticized the hatred at the Center for American Progress. The Wiesenthal Center had reportedly described CAP as “infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.” And CAP tried to smear the Wiesenthal Center, an organization founded by a Nazi-hunter, as “the far-right Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The White House’s liaison called the CAP situation “troubling” and emphasized that this attitude did not represent the administration.

But apparently it does represent a prospective Bernie Sanders administration. That’s not surprising.

Senator Bernie Sanders has used his ethnic origins to mask the ugly anti-Semitism of his political allies, including Keith Ellison, the former Nation of Islam member whose virulent bigotry was, according to the Minnesota Daily opinion editor, “a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people.”

When a bigot demanded to know Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the “Jewish community” while claiming that the “Zionist Jews” were “running the Federal Reserve”, “running Wall Street” and “running everything”, the Senator from Vermont responded by disavowing and bashing Israel.

“I may be Jewish, but you’re not going to find any candidate running for president, for example, to talk about Zionism and the Middle East,” Bernie groveled.

Like Ellison, Jesse Jackson and the Sandinistas, whom Sanders had defended despite their ugly anti-Semitism, Duss benefits from the Bernie protection racket for bigots. If you work for a man whose parents were Jewish, then you can’t possibly be accused of anti-Semitism.

What sort of foreign policy could Matt Duss be drawing up for Bernie Sanders?

Two years ago, Duss had called for using “sticks” on Israel and compared Jewish families living in Jerusalem to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He suggested that political pressure could prevent “Israeli voters” from voting in the pro-Israel and anti-terrorist candidates whom he disapproves of.

“Voters currently see no costs or consequences to the occupation,” Matt Duss had complained. “By beginning to make those costs clear, as floating the possibility of sanctions does, the EU could play an important role in sharpening the choice before Israeli voters.”

Duss suggested that pressuring “millions of voters” in Israel was “worth a try.”

And who better to roll out sanctions on Israel than President Bernie Sanders?

When Bernie brought on Cornel West and James Zogby to push for an anti-Israel platform, a message was sent. When you bring in a 9/11 Truther and BDS activist who calls Israel an “apartheid state” and describes efforts to fight Hamas as “Jewish racism”, that says it all.

So does bringing in Matt Duss to work on “foreign policy”.

Bernie’s foreign policy has been very consistent. He supported the anti-Semitic Sandinistas who ethnically cleansed Jews from Nicaragua. He honeymooned in the USSR which persecuted Jews.

“No guns for Israel,” Sanders declared before the Yom Kippur War, which nearly destroyed the Jewish State. In 1990, he said that he “would like to see the US put more pressure on Israel.”

When Bernie Sanders reached out for perspective on the Middle East during his campaign, he contacted James Zogby, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and Lawrence Wilkerson, who had accused Jewish officials of dual loyalty and suggested that Israel was behind Assad’s chemical weapons attacks.

Matt Duss fits perfectly with the rest of the sad, twisted freaks in the anti-Israel lobby.

And he’s valuable because he’s smoother than lunatics like Cornel West, a 9/11 Truther, or Lawrence Wilkerson, who accused Israel of “false flag” WMD attacks in Syria.

Extremists always need someone like Matt Duss to make their ugly views seem palatable.

We already know what Bernie’s real foreign policy on Israel will be.

He wants to end military aid and divert money from Israel to Hamas. He’ll attempt to end the non-profit status of Jewish schools in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists. He’ll demand the ethnic cleansing of parts of Israel. And those demands will be backed by economic and political pressure.

That’s what Bernie wants. It’s what the radical extremists he panders to want him to do.

Duss is on board to make this ugliness presentable. And to help Bernie avoid tactical blunders like his lie that Israel had killed “10,000 innocent people” in Gaza.

When Bernie Sanders starts delivering his incoherent speeches attacking Israel, it will be based on the work of bigots and haters who have found a human shield with a Brooklyn accent for their agenda.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.