Outrage after Arab MKs Equate Chemical Attack in Syria to IDF Operations in Gaza

MK Zoabi: Israel “slaughtered children and babies in Gaza”

MK Haneen Zoabi (Joint List) was booted off a radio program the other day after a stormy interview in which she equated the recent chemical attack in Syria to IDF operations in Gaza.

The heated exchange took place on Israel Radio’s “HaMaznon” program, after host Yoav Krakovsky asked MK Zoabi for her views on the world’s inaction in Syria.

Zoabi responded by asking Krakovsky if his “conscience and professional integrity only exists in a case when discussing children that the IDF didn’t kill,” and proceeded to accuse the IDF of perpetrating war crimes in Gaza.

“Why didn’t you interview me when you slaughtered children and babies in Gaza?,” asked Zoabi. “[Assad] has been a criminal for five years since the start of the revolution in Syria, but there is another criminal – the Israeli army, and their place is in the International Court of Justice in Hague.”

Zoabi’s remarks sparked outrage from one of the show’s guest hosts, who said that he can no longer remain silent when MK Zoabi is lying and turning the Israeli army, which is the most moral army in the world, into the army of Assad’s murderers.

“Don’t you dare preach about morality,” retorted a livid Zoabi, “I don’t want to hear you.” Zoabi was soon kicked off the program after shouting at the hosts to “shut up.”

Zoabi’s remarks came a day after Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh drew sharp condemnation for drawing a parallel between the situation of the murdered children in Syria and the children in Gaza.

“My heart aches for the children murdered in Syria in the same way that it feels shame for the children murdered in Yemen and in Gaza too,” Odeh said yesterday from the Knesset plenum.

Im Tirtzu CEO Matan Peleg responded to the comments and said: “The radical remarks of Joint List MKs Zoabi and Odeh against the State of Israel and IDF soldiers prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is a party that seeks to damage the relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel.”

Peleg added: “These MKs are fueled by hatred and extremism and have no interest in serving the needs of the Arab sector, and this has always been the case.”

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Syria 101: The Simple Version

Syria is now in the news due to the latest atrocity – chemical weapons being used on civilians.

Due to the prevalence of fake news, I’m seeing a lot of confusion regarding the attack: Who did it? Why? Is it real? Many people don’t know what source to trust and/or do not know where to go to get a clear picture of what is happening and why they should care about it.

I hope to be able to present the reality in a way that is easy to understand. Please note that this is a simplified version, there are more ins and outs to this issue than I will cover. My goal is to give the main points and clear away the confusion.

Accurate sources

Question 1: Who can you trust to give you accurate information what is happening in Syria?

Answer:
With the amount of obviously fake news flying around and news slanted for political purposes, I highly recommend being ultra-skeptical. Ask questions: Who is reporting the news? Why are the saying what they are saying? What is their source? Do they actually know what they are talking about?

Israeli news is a good source. We too have bias in our news but, in general, the audience is well aware of the bias and can take the reports with the necessary grain of salt.

Israel’s Middle Eastern Affairs analysts are probably the best in the world. They get information that sometimes never appears on American news. I will never forget hearing one of Israel’s older analysts explain on 9/11, as we were watching the towers burn, that it was probably Al-Qaeda who did it. How long did it take till Americans found out who attacked them?

Amongst all of our experts, I believe Tzvi Yechezkeli is the best. He is the creator of the groundbreaking series Allah Islam and Hijra.

 

Question 2: So, what actually happened?

Answer:
About the latest atrocity in Idlib, Syria, Tzvi Yechezkeli reported that Assad deliberately, with Russian agreement, attacked Syrian civilians first with chemical weapons (Sarin gas) and then bombed the hospital in that area (which is where the wounded were seeking care).

Most of the people killed were women and children. The Syrians are reporting that 70 people died and hundreds were injured.

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Why did this happen?

Question 1:
Why would Assad attack his own people?

Answer:
The purpose of this attack was to signal to all of the “rebels” standing against Assad that there is no way for them to win. The image of the lengths he is willing to go to was intended to be his “victory” image.

But why would a leader of a state bomb his own people? It is hard for people who live in democracies to comprehend what a dictatorship actually means. To the dictator, it is not the people that matter, remaining in power is the only thing that counts. This has been true throughout history, all over the world and is true today as well.

The other piece of this puzzle is the myth of Arab Nationhood. This is a European fantasy, created for the benefit of Europeans (ever heard of Lawrence of Arabia?). In reality, Syria (for example) consists of tribes. Assad’s “people” are the ones that belong to his tribe. Other people can be lived with, as long as they submit to him. If they do not, it is legitimate to fight them.

 

Question 2:
Why would the Russians agree to something so horrible?

Answer:
The Russians gave permission to commit this attack because they are interested in keeping Syria intact as their base in the Middle East. Assad staying in power is the easiest way to do this. If the “rebels” win, Syria disintegrates into a number of tribal areas, not controlled by any one power.

The Russians view the “rebels” as terrorists whom they want to beat. Although not all of the people in the widely-varied group labeled “rebels” are terrorists, many are: there are ISIS fighters, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham a Syrian offshoot of Al-Qaeda in addition to others who simply seized the opportunity to rebel against Assad’s corruption. The Russians believe that in the war against terrorists, the end justifies the means. In other words, if committing an atrocious attack clamps down on terrorism, that’s a good thing.

 

Who are the “good guys”?

Question 1: Who is on Assad’s side?

Answer:
Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.
Support Assad and you get the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world – Iran.

This has led to the slaughter of Syrians who are not the right kind of Muslim, the mass migration to Europe and put the State of Israel in real danger. For us it is not ISIS on the border that is the real problem, it is Iran and their pet terror organization Hezbollah

The Russians are supporting the regime’s story that they bombed a rebel weapons cache that held the gas. In other words, they were trying to rid Syria of chemical weapons and it is the “bad” rebels who caused the horror of women and children gassed to death. This is an obvious lie but if enough people will fall for it or go along for the ride, they will be able to get away with it.

Interestingly, reports from Arab media sources say that the Russians made it clear to Assad that he was not to use chemical weapons on Israeli civilians.

 

Question 2: Who is on the rebels side?

Answer:
ISIS, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and miscellaneous fighters. In the beginning of the Syrian civil war, it was a video of a rebel fighter eating the liver of a Syrian soldier he had just killed that horrified the world. Who remembers that now?

The American government supported the Free Syrian Army, decided to train them and bring them weapons – before realizing that the same anti-Assad, “good guys” fought shoulder to shoulder with ISIS.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

 

Israel

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Israel has been helping wounded Syrians.

There is something about using Sarin gas that makes Jewish skin crawl. It doesn’t matter who is on the receiving end of the attack. Do you have to have had family members who were gassed to death to recognize the horror?

Our enemies are our enemies but they are also people. There are certain things you just don’t do.

Our Prime Minister was the only world leader I heard who immediately, loudly denounced the attack and demanded that the rest of the chemical weapons be removed from Syria.

Red lines need to be embedded in stone, not in the sand. Some things are just not acceptable. Obviously, women and children are not a legitimate target. Gassing anyone is horrifying. Bombing a hospital is wrong in more ways than I have words.

Thanks to Obama, Iran is on my doorstep. Hezbollah is more powerful than before the 2006 war and poses a direct, very serious threat to Israel. ISIS is also on our doorstep.

Thanks to Obama and Kerry’s lauded “diplomatic methods”, Syrians are being massacred, millions have been displaced, Europe is overrun with refugees and there are still chemical weapons in Assad’s hands.

It was American choices that destabilized the region, creating the environment in which Syria fell apart. It was American choices that left a vacuum in the region, making it possible for Russia to step in and open the door wider for Iran.

This is a proxy war.

God help us all.

Originally published in Inspiration from Zion.

Will the Squawkers of ‘Nothing to do with Islam’ Shut Up

In the aftermath of the recent terror attacks in London many people went to great pains to once again claim that a terror attack committed by a Muslim was not a true representation of Islam. This is amusing, as Muslims themselves cannot even agree on what is a correct representation of Islam.

This dangerous and insulting mantra is hollow and false and no matter how many times it is said it does not become true, despite what Gobles said that repeating a lie enough times makes it become true.

Let us say the truth once and for all; these attacks have everything to do with Islam. It may not be a form of Islam that everyone identifies with but it is a form of Islam that many people do identify with.

The reason why this mantra is dangerous is because it absolves the Muslim communities of the much needed soul searching and absolves them from dealing with the issues of extremism that plague their communities. In Britain alone it has been reported that 50,000 people downloaded Inspire, the English Al-Qaeda magazine. Handing the very people who can solve the problem an excuse not to face their problems leaves everyone else to clean up their mess.

This mantra is an insult to our intelligence. Why is it that every intellectually honest person who looks at the whole picture can see almost every country dealing with an Islamic terrorist issue at some level or another? If there was an attack once every 20 years we might agree with these people that this is an aberration and nothing to do with Islam. However, every single day across the world innocent people are killed or maimed and losing loved ones in the name of this religion. This is no longer an aberration that can be swept away. When the same child in school continuously gets into fights with different children, it is undeniably obvious where the problem lies. The same applies here. The fact that most terrorists are Muslim should tell us that there is an internal problem within Islam that needs to be dealt with, and the Muslims are the only ones who can and must deal with this.

Ironically, the majority of the victims are Muslims. This fact is used by some Muslims as an argument that it has nothing to do with Islam. However, the response to this is that these are people who do not allow dissenters within their ranks and it has been declared many times that apostates are the first enemy before infidels.

The reason why this is to do with Islam is because the founders of radical Islam did not start with bin-Laden but much earlier with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahabi Islam. The official religion of Saudi Arabia is Wahabi Islam, an oppressive form of Islam that replaced the traditional version in the Middle East in the 18th century. In the 1960’s, Saudi Arabia allowed and even funded the distribution of the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood thinkers; Hassan al-Bana and Sayyid Qutb. The majority of Sunni preachers, the biggest denomination of Islam, are trained in Saudi Arabia. The waters from which Al-Qaeda, and its spawn ISIS, draw from are the same ones that are preached in Saudi Arabia. This is why it has everything to do with Islam. These people are inspired to commit attacks because of the same people whose works are the basis of the state religion in Saudi Arabia, the widest spread version of Islam in the world. In fact, it was said by a former senior cleric in Saudi Arabia that ISIS is a natural progression from Salafism.

If we are not willing to honestly acknowledge the source of the problem, we certainly will not be able to solve the problem.

It is time that those who squawk that this problem has nothing to do with Islam finally be quiet.

Pray for Sanity

Pray for London, Brussels and Paris. Then pray for Berlin, Nice and London again. And when you’re done, it might be your city’s turn to be on the wrong end of that hashtag.

Pray that on the way to work you don’t get run over, shot or stabbed by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar”.

Pray that your government doesn’t decide to open the borders to as many migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and any other terror state as can make their way over. Pray that the next government doesn’t do it either. And pray that if it does, they don’t move in near you.

Because they can’t run you over, if you don’t let them in. They can’t stab you while shouting, “Allahu Akbar” if they never get a visa. They can’t shove you into the water, if they get deported. They can’t blow you up if they can’t get in.

Pray that the local diplomats actually do some basic checks of the visa application for the next terrorist showing up at the local consulate. Pray that they do a better job than they did before September 11.

Pray that the next Muslim mass murderer comes in at just below the refugee quota. Pray that he doesn’t get in with the 50,000 cap for this year. Or the year after and year after that.

Pray that the local refugee non-profit doesn’t resettle him next door to you. Or the block over. Pray that the angry bearded man living across the street doesn’t decide that today would be a good day to cash in his chips for 72 virgins. Pray that he doesn’t decide that tomorrow. Or the day after.

Pray that he just keeps on collecting welfare without killing anyone. Especially you or anyone you know. Pray really hard.

Pray that when your government comes out with its traditional statement about how the terrorists can’t kill our diversity (though they can kill people of every race, gender, non-Islamic religion and sexual orientation) it comes packaged with some sort of immigration reduction and deportation plan.

Pray that the plan doesn’t get shut down by a judge and a coterie of human rights activists. Pray that the first time the future terrorist gets sent to prison for dealing drugs, he gets deported. Or at least the second or third times. Pray that when he goes off to Syria to visit ISIS, we don’t let him back in.

Pray that we have a government that kicks him out the first time he posts an Anwar Al-Awlaki video. Pray that your government finds some common sense when the terror attack is no longer just targeting random people, but targeting it.

Pray that common sense returns to politics. Pray for border security. Pray for mass deportations.

Pray for sanity.

Originally Published in Sultan Knish.

END OF DAYS: Britain, Israel, and the Unleashing of Radical Islam

With the recent terror attack in Britain directed against the British Parliament and the tepid response by London’s first Muslim mayor, a sort of karmic end to Britain’s one time global rule has come upon it. The British government insists it does not have a problem, but outside observers sense that its capital London, renamed Londinistan by journalist Melanie Phillips in her 2006 book titled by the same name is heading towards two countries, one Muslim and the other British.  There appears no turning back and yet the British government continues to placate Radical Islam by encouraging Muslim immigration into Britain.  It was this immigration policy which fueled Brexit and yet with all of the push to finalize Brexit under the May government, immigration continues.

The problem for Britain did not start in the 21st century. It began 100 years ago, just before the end of World War One. Lord Balfour declared famously:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Not quite a state and yet it was perceived by all as the beginning of nation-state in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, Balfour’s declaration galvanized the Zionist movement like nothing else. Jews who had been streaming back to the Land of Israel since the early 1800’s were ready to back the British war against the Turks in what would become the Palestinian Mandate.

Balfour himself had always been sympathetic to Jewish aspirations in the Land of Israel, but Britain began to back track after Balfour.  Winston Churchill would himself become the leader of the push-back against Balfour’s promise. Although never dismantling the idea of  the Palestinian Mandate being a homeland for Jews, he zeroed in on the word homeland and made it abundantly clear that Arabs should have nothing to worry about since no state would arise. This need to placate the Arabs found its way into Churchill’s 1922 White Paper with these words:

“The tension which has prevailed from time to time in Palestine is mainly due to apprehensions, which are entertained both by sections of the Arab and by sections of the Jewish population. These apprehensions, so far as the Arabs are concerned are partly based upon exaggerated interpretations of the meaning of the [Balfour] Declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, made on behalf of His Majesty’s Government on 2 November 1917.”

“‘Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become “as Jewish as England is English.” His Majesty’s Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded “in Palestine.” In this connection it has been observed with satisfaction that at a meeting of the Zionist Congress, the supreme governing body of the Zionist Organization, held at Carlsbad in September, 1921, a resolution was passed expressing as the official statement of Zionist aims “the determination of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people on terms of unity and mutual respect, and together with them to make the common home into a flourishing community, the upbuilding of which may assure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national development.”‘

Britain’s colonial policies post World War One no matter if it was Africa, India, Afghanistan, or the Middle East sought control through setting up perpetual conflict between inhabitants within a particular boundary. Balfour’s declaration was an anomaly to this policy and although successive British governments tried to push back on the Jewish return to the Land of Israel, the Zonist movement grew and broke through these attempts.

British Arabism Unleashed Today’s Radical Islam

It is no secret that British governments have been inclined to support Arab and Islamic claims to large swaths of the Middle East. This policy directly led to later White Papers which curtailed Jewish movement into the Land of Israel. This in turn led to the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.  If it was just Israel then perhaps, one could simply label Great Britain’s leadership as anti-semitic or anti-Zionist, but the same policy extended and is still active in Nigeria, with the British government overtly supporting the Muslim Hausa against the Judeo-Christian Igbo or in India where the British went out of their way to support Islamic rights in Kashmir or the Duran line, which cut the indigenous Pashtun in half in order to allow them to become engulfed by Pakistani Shiites.

The British seem to be enthralled with the idea of Islamic armies settling an untamed world that was laid to waste by the British imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. By pitting indigenous peoples whom they conquered (yes, Jerusalem had a majority Jewish population by 1863) against Radical Islamic hordes and barbaric Jihadist Arabs they have unleashed the very Radical Islam they claim to be fighting against.

Imagine a world, in which Britain had stood up to the stooges in Mecca and backed Balfour’s declaration to the end or if Britain had refrained from forming Nigeria and allowed the independent Judeo-Christian republic of Biafra to grow. Radical Islam and the supremacist current so prevalent in today’s Arab culture would have been kept caged and contained.

At the End of Days, the Western World stands hollowed out, a rotten corpse consumed by greed and a misplaced moral relativism.  The foot soldiers of Islam whom it has tried to manipulate against others have now turned their heads against the very master which set them free.  Ishmael has become unbound and unleashed against a Western World that appears to desire its own end. The Torah says the following when referring to Ishmael: “He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.”

Great Britain’s treatment of Jewish national aspirations and the placating of the armies of Radical Islam and oppressive Arabist regimes have sown the seeds of its own demise. Ishmael will not stop at London or Paris.  He is following the divine script written for him. This is the final act of the sojourning of Jacob and his return to spiritual and physical leadership. Britain and the West can put aside their animosity for Jacob’s movement towards redemption and thereby salvaging their countries or become consumed by Ishmael’s fury.  Either way, Israel will be redeemed.

 

 

TRUMP’S GREATEST DEAL

The Iran deal Trump needs to make with the Russians is clear.

What can be done about Iran? In Israel, a dispute is reportedly raging between the IDF and the Mossad about the greatest threat facing Israel. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot thinks that Hezbollah is the greatest threat facing Israel. Mossad Director Yossi Cohen thinks Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest danger facing the Jewish state.

While the media highlight the two men’s disagreement, the underlying truth about their concerns has been ignored.

Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program are two aspects of the same threat: the regime in Tehran.

Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the regime. If the regime disappeared, Hezbollah would fall apart. As for the nuclear installations, in the hands of less fanatical leaders, they would represent a far less acute danger to global security.

So if you undermine the Iranian regime, you defeat Hezbollah and defuse the nuclear threat.

If you fail to deal with the regime in Tehran, both threats will continue to grow no matter what you do, until they become all but insurmountable.

So what can be done about Tehran? With each passing day we discover new ways Iran endangers Israel and the rest of the region.

This week we learned Iran has built underground weapons factories in Lebanon. The facilities are reportedly capable of building missiles, drones, small arms and ammunition. Their underground location protects them from aerial bombardment.

Then there is Hezbollah’s relationship to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

For more than a decade, the Americans have been selling themselves the implausible claim that the LAF is a responsible fighting force capable and willing to rein in Hezbollah. Never an easy claim – the LAF provided targeting information to Hezbollah missile crews attacking Israel in 2006 – after Hezbollah domesticated the Lebanese government in 2008, the claim became downright silly. And yet, over the past decade, the US has provided the LAF with weapons worth in excess of $1 billion. In 2016 alone the US gave the LAF jets, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and missiles worth more than $220 million.

In recent months, showing that Iran no longer feels the need to hide its control over Lebanon, the LAF has openly stated that it is working hand in glove with Hezbollah.

Last November, Hezbollah showcased US M113 armored personnel carriers with roof-mounted Russian anti-aircraft guns, at a military parade in Syria. The next month the Americans gave the LAF a Hellfire missile-equipped Cessna aircraft with day and night targeting systems.

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun is a Hezbollah ally. So is Defense Minister Yaacoub Sarraf and LAF commander Gen. Joseph Aoun.

Last month President Aoun told Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that Hezbollah serves “a complementary role to the Lebanese army.”

And yet the Americans insist that it continues to make sense – and to be lawful – to arm the LAF.

You can hardly blame them. Denial is an attractive option, given the alternatives.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration did everything in its power to empower Iran. To make Iran happy, Obama did nothing as hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed and millions more were forced to flee their homes by Iran and its puppet Bashar Assad.

Obama allowed Iran to take over the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military. He sat back as Iran’s Houthi proxy overthrew the pro-US regime in Yemen.

And of course, the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was his nuclear deal with the mullahs. Obama’s deal gives Iran an open path to a nuclear arsenal in a bit more than a decade and enriches the regime beyond Ayatollah Khamenei’s wildest dreams.

Obama empowered Iran at the expense of the US’s Sunni allies and Israel, and indeed, at the expense of the US’s own superpower status in the region, to enable the former president to withdraw the US from the Middle East.

Power of course, doesn’t suffer a vacuum, and the one that Obama created was quickly filled.

For decades, Russia has been Iran’s major arms supplier. It has assisted Iran with its nuclear program and with its ballistic missile program. Russia serves as Iran’s loyal protector at the UN Security Council.

But for all the help it provided Tehran through the years, Moscow never presented itself as Iran’s military defender.

That all changed in September 2015. Two months after Obama cut his nuclear deal with the ayatollahs, Russia deployed its forces to Syria on behalf of Iran and its Syrian and Lebanese proxies.

In so doing, Russia became the leading member and the protector of the Iranian axis.

Russia’s deployment of forces had an immediate impact not only on the war in Syria, but on the regional power balance as a whole. With Russia serving as the air force for Iran and its Syrian and Hezbollah proxies, the Assad regime’s chances of survival increased dramatically. So did Iran’s prospects for regional hegemony.

For Obama, this situation was not without its advantages.

In his final year in office, Obama’s greatest concern was ensuring that his nuclear deal with Iran would outlive his presidency. Russia’s deployment in Syria as the protector of Iran and its proxies was a means of achieving this end.

Russia’s alliance with Iran made attacking Iran’s nuclear program or its Hezbollah proxy a much more dangerous prospect than it had been before.

After all, in 2006, Russia supported Iran and Hezbollah in their war against Israel. But Russia’s support for Iran and its Lebanese legion didn’t diminish Israel’s operational freedom. Israel was able to wage war without any fear that its operations would place it in a direct confrontation with the Russian military.

This changed in September 2015.

The first person to grasp the strategic implications of the Russian move was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu recognized that with Russian forces on the ground in Syria, the only way for Israel to take even remedial measures to protect itself from Iran and its proxies was to drive a wedge between President Vladimir Putin and the ayatollahs wide enough to enable Israel to continue its raids against weapons convoys to Hezbollah and other targets without risking a confrontation with Russia. This is the reason that Netanyahu boarded a flight to Moscow to speak to Putin almost immediately after the Russian leader deployed his forces to Syria.

Israel’s ability to continue to strike targets in Syria, whether along the border on the Golan Heights or deep within Syrian territory, is a function of Netanyahu’s success in convincing Putin to limit his commitment to his Iranian allies.

Since President Donald Trump entered the White House, Iran has been his most urgent foreign policy challenge. Unlike Obama, Trump recognizes that Iran’s nuclear program and its threats to US economic and strategic interests in the Persian Gulf and the Levant cannot be wished away.

And so he has decided to deal with Iran.

The question is, what is he supposed to do? Trump has three basic options.

He can cut a deal with Russia. He can act against Iran without cutting a deal with Russia. And he can do nothing, or anemically maintain Obama’s pro-Iran policies.

The first option has the greatest potential strategic payoff. If Trump can convince Russia to ditch Iran, then he has a chance of dismantling the regime in Tehran and so defusing the Iranian nuclear program and destroying Hezbollah without having to fight a major war.

The payoff to Russia for agreeing to such a deal would be significant. But if Trump were to adopt this policy, the US has a lot of bargaining chips that it can use to convince Putin to walk away from the ayatollahs long enough for the US to defuse the threat they pose to its interests.

The problem with the Russia strategy is that since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, the Democrats, their allied media outlets and powerful forces in the US intelligence community have been beset by a Russia hysteria unseen since the Red scares in the 1920s and 1950s.

The fact that Obama bent over backward to cater to Putin’s interests for eight years has been pushed down the memory hole.

Also ignored is the fact that during her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton approved deals with the Russians that were arguably antithetical to US interests while the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in contributions from Russian businessmen and companies closely allied with Putin.

Since November 8, the Democrats and their clapping seals in the media and allies in the US intelligence community have banged the war drums against Russia, accusing Trump and his advisers of serving as Russian patsies at best, and Russian agents at worst.

In this climate, it would be politically costly for Trump to implement a Russian-based strategy for dismantling the Iranian threat.

This brings us to the second option, which is to confront Iran and Russia. Under this option, US action against Iran could easily cause hostilities to break out between the US and Russia. It goes without saying that the political fallout from making a deal with Russia would be nothing compared to the political consequences if Trump were to take the US down a path that led to war with Russia.

Obviously, the economic and human costs of such a confrontation would be prohibitive regardless of the political consequences.

This leaves us with the final option of doing nothing, or anemically continuing to implement Obama’s policies, as the Americans are doing today.

Although tempting, the hard truth is that this is the most dangerous policy of all.

You need only look to North Korea to understand why this is so.

Seemingly on a daily basis, Pyongyang threatens to nuke America. And the US has no good options for dealing with the threat.

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged during his recent trip to Asia, decades of US diplomacy regarding North Korea’s nuclear program did nothing to diminish or delay the threat.

North Korea has been able to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles while threatening the US with destruction because North Korea enjoys the protection of China. If not for the Chinese, the US would long ago have dealt a death blow to the regime.

Israel has moved Russia as far away from Iran as it can on its own. It is enough to stop convoys of North Korean weapons from crossing into Lebanon.

But it isn’t enough to cause serious harm to Tehran or its clients.

The only government that can do that is the American government.

Trump built his career by mastering the art of deal making. And he recognized that Obama’s deal with Iran is not the masterpiece Obama and his allies claim but a catastrophe.

The Iran deal Trump needs to make with the Russians is clear. The only question is whether he is willing to pay the political price it requires.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

THE REAL FACE OF JORDAN

Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel.

Jordan is the country to Israel’s east with which Israel has had a formal peace for 23 years.

And its people hate Israel, and Jews, even more than the Iranians do.

Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel. It’s ugly.

Twenty years ago, on March 13, 1997, 7th and 8th grade girls from the AMIT Fuerst junior high school for girls in Beit Shemesh packed box lunches and boarded a school bus that was to take them to the Jordan Valley for a class trip. The high point of the day was the scheduled visit to the so-called “Island of Peace.”

The area, adjacent to the Naharayim electricity station, encompasses lands Israel ceded to Jordan in the 1994 peace treaty and Jordan leased back to Israel for continued cultivation by the Jewish farmers from Ashdot Yaakov who had bought the lands and farmed them for decades.

Israel’s formal transfer of sovereignty – and Jordan’s recognition of Jewish land rights to the area – were emblematic of the notion that the peace treaty was more than a piece of paper. Here, officials boasted, at the Island of Peace, we saw on-theground proof that Jordan and Israel were now peaceful neighbors.

Just as Americans in California can spend a night at the bars in Tijuana and then sleep it off in their beds in San Diego, so, the thinking went, after three years of formal peace, Israeli schoolgirls could eat their box lunches in Jordan, at the Island of Peace, and be home in time for dinner in Beit Shemesh.

Shortly after they alighted their buses, that illusion came to a brutal end.

The children were massacred.

A Jordanian policeman named of Ahmad Daqamseh, who was supposed to be protecting them, instead opened fire with his automatic rifle.

He murdered seven girls and wounded six more.

On Jordanian territory, the guests of the kingdom, the girls had no one to protect them. Daqamseh would have kept on killing and wounding, but his weapon jammed.

In the days that followed, Israel saw two faces of Jordan and with them, the true nature of the peace it had achieved.

On the one hand, in an extraordinary act of kindness and humility, King Hussein came to Israel and paid condolence calls at the homes of all seven girls. He bowed before their parents and asked for forgiveness.

On the other hand, Hussein’s subjects celebrated Daqamseh as a hero.

The Jordanian court system went out of its way not to treat him like a murderer. Instead of receiving the death penalty for his crime – as he would have received if his victims hadn’t been Jewish girls – the judges insisted he was crazy and sentenced him instead to life in prison. Under Jordanian law his sentence translated into 20 years in jail. In other words, Daqamseh received less than three years in jail for every little girl he murdered and no time for the six he wounded.

Not satisfied with his sentence, the Jordanian public repeatedly demanded his early release. The public’s adulation of Daqamseh was so widespread and deep-seated that in 2014, the majority of Jordan’s parliament members voted for his immediate release.

Three years earlier, in 2011, Jordan’s then-justice minister Hussein Majali extolled Daqamseh as a hero and called for his release.

Last week, sentence completed, Daqamseh was released. And within moments of his return, in the dead of night to his village, crowds of supporters emerged from their homes and celebrated their hero.

Daqamseh, the supposed madman, never expressed regret for his crime.

And now a free man, he was only too happy last week to use his release as a means of justifying, yet again, his crime.

“Normalization with Zionists is a lie!” he declared in an interview with Al Jazeera. He went on to call for the conquest of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish state.

Jordan owes its existence not to its population nor even to its silver- tongued monarch, Hussein’s son Abdullah. It owes its existence to its location. For Israel and the West the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a critical piece of real estate.

For Israel, the kingdom is a buffer against Iraq and Syria.

For the Americans it is a safe port in the storm in the midst of the Arab world now suffering from convulsions of jihadist revolutions, counterrevolutions, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.

Jordan, which since 2003 has absorbed a million refugees from Iraq and another million from Syria, is viewed by Europeans as a great big refugee camp. It must be kept stable lest the Iraqis and Syrians move on to Europe.

If it weren’t for Israel and the Western powers, the Hashemite Kingdom would have been overthrown long ago.

Today, Jordan is an economic and social tinderbox. Its debt to GDP ratio skyrocketed from 57% to 90% between 2011 and 2016. Youth unemployment, while officially reported at 14%, actually stands at 38%.

Jordan, which is the second-poorest state in terms of its available water sources, relies on Israeli exports of water to survive. Its government is its largest employer. Its largest export is its people, whose remittances to their relatives back home keep 350,000 families afloat. And those remittances have fallen off dramatically in recent years due to the drop in oil prices on the world market.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the second largest political force in the country. Although Jordanians were revolted in 2015 when Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria burned alive a downed Jordanian pilot, ISIS has no shortage of sympathizers in wide swaths of Jordanian society. More than 2,000 Jordanians joined ISIS in Syria and several thousand more ISIS members and sympathizers are at large throughout the kingdom.

Whereas Palestinians used to make up an absolute majority of the population, leading many to observe over the years that the real Palestine is Jordan, since the Iraqi and Syria refugees swelled the ranks of the population, the Palestinian majority has been diminished.

Jordan is a reminder that nation building in the Arab world is a dangerous proposition. With each passing year, the US provides Jordan with more and more military and civilian aid to keep the regime afloat. And with each passing year, voices praising Daqamseh and his ilk continue to expand in numbers and volume.

Jordan shows that the concept of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is of limited value. So long as the hearts and the minds of the people of the Arab world are filled with conspiracy theories about Jews, and inspired by visions of jihad and destruction that render mass murderers of innocent schoolchildren heroes, the notion that genuine peace is possible is both irrational and irresponsible.

Recently it was reported that last October, Israel’s ambassador to Jordan Einat Schlein gave a pessimistic assessment of Jordan’s future prospects to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkott. Eisenkott reportedly reacted to her briefing by suggesting that Israel needs to figure out a way to help the regime to survive.

Eisenkott was correct, of course.

Israel, which now faces a nightmare situation along its border with post-civil war Syria, does not want to face the prospect of a post-Hashemite Jordan, where the people will rule, on its doorstep.

But Israel can ill afford to assume that this will not happen one day, and plan accordingly.

Under the circumstances, the only way to safeguard against the day when Daqasmeh and his supporters rule Jordan is to apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and encourage tens of thousands of Israelis to settle down along the sparsely populated eastern border.

After the massacre, the parents of the dead children and the public as a whole demanded to know why the school hadn’t smuggled armed guards into the Island of Peace to protect them. Their question was a reasonable one.

Daqamseh was able to kill those girls because we let down our guard.

The only way to prevent that from happening again – writ large – is to reinforce that guard by reinforcing our control over eastern Israel.

23 years after the peace was signed, nothing has changed in the Kingdom of Jordan. No hearts and minds have been turned in our favor. The peace treaty has not protected us. The only thing that protects our children is our ability and willingness to use our weapons to protect them from our hate-drenched neighbors with whom we share treaties of peace.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

KNOW THINE ENEMY

Israel gets back on the phony peace process train.

There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him.

This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week we have been beset by the bizarre and sudden appearance of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s negotiations chief.

Greenblatt’s mission is apparently to reinstate the mordant peace process between Israel and the PLO.

The peace process that Greenblatt is here to reincarnate died 17 years ago.

In 2000, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat killed the peace process when he initiated a massive terrorist war against Israel, right after he rejected peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace conference.

In rejecting peace, the architect of modern terrorism made clear that his claim seven years earlier that he was willing to reach a compromise with Israel, based on partition of the Land of Israel between a Jewish and an Arab state, was a lie. As the nationalist camp had warned at the time and since, the PLO was not remotely interested either in statehood or in peace. Arafat’s willingness to engage Israel in negotiations that led to its transfer of security and civil control over Gaza and the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria to the PLO was simply another means to the only end the PLO ever contemplated. It was a means of weakening Israel as a step toward achieving the PLO’s ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish state.

In 1993, when then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to recognize the PLO, his implicit assumption was that if Arafat was lying, Israel would walk away from the peace process. It would retake control over the areas it had ceded to PLO control and things would go back to the way they were before he made the gamble, indeed they would be better. Whereas for years Israel had been under pressure from the Europeans and the Americans to recognize the PLO, if Israel recognized the terrorist group and the PLO responded by showing that it remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction, the world that had been pressuring Israel would end its pressure.

The Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side against the PLO.

In 2000, after Arafat blew up the negotiations table with his suicide bombers, then-prime minister Ehud Barak announced triumphantly that he had ripped the mask off of Arafat’s face.

Now everyone would recognize the truth about the PLO. Now the Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way.

In the seven years between Rabin’s decision to gamble on Arafat, and Barak’s declaration that the truth had finally come out, the Europeans and the Americans and the Israeli Left had become addicted to the notion that the PLO was a peace movement and that Israel and its so-called settlers were the reason that peace hadn’t been reached.

That is, by the time the true nature of Israel’s enemy had become clear, it was too late. It didn’t matter. In recognizing the PLO, Israel had legitimized it. Refusing to recognize the nature of its enemy, Israel had empowered it, at its own expense.

By the time Arafat removed his mask, the legitimacy he had received from Israel seven years earlier had rendered him untouchable.

The West had become so invested in the myth of PLO moderation that rather than punish him for his terrorist war, the Europeans and the Americans punished Israel for complaining about it. Indeed, the more Israelis Arafat’s henchmen murdered, the more committed the Europeans and the American foreign policy establishment and political Left became to the PLO.

Israel, in the meantime, became a diplomatic outcast.

In the 17 years since Arafat showed his true colors, neither he nor his heir Mahmoud Abbas ever did anything to indicate that the PLO has changed its spots. To the contrary. The PLO’s leaders have made clear over and over and over again that Arafat’s decision to reject peace in favor of never-ending war against Israel was no fluke. It was the rule.

The PLO doesn’t want a state. If it did it would have accepted sovereignty in Gaza 12 years ago, when Israel withdrew and took its citizens with it. If it wanted a state, then Arafat and Abbas would have accepted Israel’s repeated offers of statehood over the years.

The PLO that is greeting Greenblatt in March 2017 is the same terrorist organization it was when Arafat announced its formation in December 1964.

Given this unchanging reality, it is deeply destructive for Israel to continue paying lip service to the fake peace process. And yet, that is precisely what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing.

Trump’s election gave Israel an opportunity to finally get the Americans to recognize the reality they have spent the past 17 years refusing to accept. Unlike Barack Obama, Trump was not wedded to the notion that Israel, and its religious Zionist community, is to blame for the absence of peace. He was not obsessed with appeasing the PLO as his predecessors have been for the past generation.

Trump was not interested in getting involved with the Palestinians at all. But rather than seize the opportunity he was handed, Netanyahu seems to have decided to throw it in the trash.

He only agreed to discuss his strategic goal for dealing with the Palestinians after his cabinet forced him to do so on the eve of his trip to Washington last month.

At that meeting, Netanyahu said that he supports establishing a “Palestinian state, minus” that would have formal sovereignty but would be demilitarized. Netanyahu also offered that he envisions Israeli sovereignty being extended to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

There are many problems with Netanyahu’s plan. But its most glaring deficiency is that it continues to treat the PLO as a legitimate organization rather than a terrorist organization.

By doing so, Netanyahu not only throws a lifeline to an organization that uses all the legitimacy Israel confers on it to weaken Israel strategically and diplomatically. He empowers Israel’s detractors in the US and Europe that have spent the past quarter-century blaming Israel for the absence of peace and acclaiming the PLO and its terrorist chiefs as moderates.

It is not surprising that Trump reinstated Obama’s demand that Israel curtail Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria after Netanyahu pronounced his support for Palestinian statehood. If Netanyahu won’t disavow the anti-Israel diplomatic unicorn, then why should Trump? And if Trump is maintaining allegiance to the myth of PLO legitimacy, then it only makes sense for him to also adopt the patently absurd, and virulently anti-Israel, assumption that Jewish home building is the reason there is no peace.

Similarly, with Netanyahu willing to accept the PLO, and the concomitant assumption of Jewish culpability for the absence of peace, why would Trump consider replacing Obama’s anti-Israel advisers with advisers supportive of the US-Israel alliance? After Netanyahu left Washington last month, Trump decided to retain Yael Lempert as the National Security Council’s point person for the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio. According to a report in The Weekly Standard, Democrats in Washington long viewed Lempert as one of the most radical opponents of Israel in the Obama administration.
Trump also decided to keep on Michael Ratney, the former US consul in Jerusalem, as the man in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian desk at the State Department. Ratney’s appointment brought shouts of joy from anti-Israel activists led by John Kerry’s former negotiations chief Martin Indyk.

Perhaps these personnel decisions would have been made even if Netanyahu hadn’t maintained his allegiance to the lie of PLO legitimacy. But Netanyahu’s support for the PLO made it much easier for these opponents of Israel to keep their jobs.

By all accounts, Jason Greenblatt is a friend of Israel and a supporter of the US alliance with the Jewish state. Greenblatt studied at a yeshiva in Gush Etzion many years ago. On Thursday, he took the step that no US envoy has ever taken of meeting with the heads of the local councils in Judea and Samaria.

And yet, whatever his personal views may be, this week he came to Israel to discuss limiting the legal rights of Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

He was accompanied on his trip by Lempert.

Greenblatt visited with Abbas in Ramallah and delivered no ultimatum when he asked the Palestinian Authority “president” (whose term of office ended in 2009) to scale back the murderous anti-Jewish propaganda that permeates all facets of Palestinian society under the PLO.

Greenblatt politely listened as Abbas demanded that Israel agree to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines in a future peace, agree to release terrorist murderers from its prisons and end all construction for Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Greenblatt then discussed continued US economic subsidization of Abbas’s terrorism- steeped kleptocracy, in the name of economic development.

In other words, whatever Greenblatt’s personal views on the issues, as Trump’s envoy, he put us all back on the phony peace train.

Netanyahu argues that Israel has to give legitimacy to the PLO and support Palestinian statehood, because if it doesn’t, then the Sunni Arab states won’t work with Israel in its efforts to stymie Iran’s regional power grab and stall its nuclear weapons program. This claim, however, is untrue.

The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians are working with Israel on countering Iran because they need Israel to help them to weaken Iran.

They need Israel to help them to convince the Americans to abandon Obama’s pro-Iranian Middle East policy.

In other words, Netanyahu is paying for Sunni support that he can get for free.

Rabin believed that Israel would emerge stronger from his decision to recognize the PLO, one way or another. Either Israel would achieve peace. Or Israel would get the Americans and the Europeans off its back once the PLO made clear that it was lying about wanting peace. Rabin was wrong.

Israel paid gravely for Rabin’s error in judgment.

It will pay a similarly high price, if not a higher one, if Netanyahu continues to repeat Rabin’s mistake of failing to know his enemy.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

 

THE RISE OF THE NETWORKED LEFT

The riots against Murray and Yiannopoulos are a familiar sight to the campus Jewish community.

An acrid stench of repression is spreading through America.

Last Thursday, conservative political scientist Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute was attacked by a leftist mob at Middlebury College.

Murry was invited to Middlebury by the college’s AEI club. He was to discuss his new book, Coming Apart, which discusses the plight of white working class Americans. Middlebury’s liberal political science professor Allison Stanger was set to ask him questions about his work.

As has been widely reported, a mob of leftist students prevented Murray from speaking. They shouted him down with a stream of epithets that went on without interruption, until Murray and Stanger were spirited out of the lecture hall.

They were brought to another location where they carried out their conversation in front of a camera that was livestreaming to students blocked by the mob from hearing them in person. The mob followed them to the new location and rioted outside the room as they spoke.

The rioters assaulted them as they made their way from the second location to their car. They hurt Stanger in the neck.

The assault continued after the professors entered their getaway car and at the restaurant where they tried to dine at with students.

In the end Murray and his companions were forced to leave town in order to have dinner away from the rioters. Stanger was later treated for her wounds at a local hospital.

The riot against Murray at Middlebury occurred barely a month after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulis was blocked from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley by a similarly violent mob. The Berkeley rioters caused more than $100,000 in property damage. They beat up students who came to hear Yiannopoulis speak.

The riots against Murray and Yiannopoulis both received wide media coverage. The basic narrative of the stories regarding both is that the shouting down of speakers and mob assaults by leftist students and professors is a new phenomenon.

To Jewish ears, this storyline is deeply unsettling.

Jewish speakers and students have been subjected to identical, and often worse, campaigns of repressions for nearly 20 years at universities and colleges throughout the US.

What is new about the riots against Murray and Yiannopoulis is that they were shouted down despite the fact that they weren’t talking about Israel.

Since the PLO rejected statehood and peace with Israel in 2000 and launched a multipronged political and terrorist war against Israel instead, the climate on US campuses has become progressively worse for pro-Israel students, faculty and visiting speakers.

Perhaps the moment that signaled open season for Jews on campuses occurred on May 7, 2002, at San Francisco State University. That day, Muslim students and their leftist supporters launched a mini-pogrom against pro-Israel Jewish students.

As Laurie Zoloth, who served at the time as the director of SFSU’s Jewish Studies Department, and was present on the scene, wrote in a letter published shortly after the events, that day some 400 Jewish students participated in a pro-Israel, pro-peace rally on the campus’s central thoroughfare.

After the rally ended, several dozen Jewish students remained on hand to clean up the area. As they gathered up their posters, they were beset by an antisemitic mob.

“They screamed at us to ‘go back to Russia,’ and they screamed… ‘Get out or we’ll kill you,’ and ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job,’” Zoloth wrote.

When Zoloth asked the police at the scene to arrest the rioters, they refused, explaining they had been ordered to take no action. Arrests, they explained, “would cause a riot.”

After a week of silence, SFSU’s then-president Robert Corrigan posted a statement condemning the incident and referring it to the district attorney to assign to his hate crimes unit.

The pogrom at SFSU and the administration’s belated condemnation of the crime set in motion what became a pattern of ever-escalating violence and intimidation of pro-Israel voices on college campuses accompanied by half-hearted and short-lived denunciations of the assaults by campus authorities.

Today, the situation is even worse. If SFSU felt the need to condemn the Muslim students who called for their Jewish counterparts to be killed 15 years ago, today they stand openly with those calling for Jews to be killed against those who protest the calls.

In 2014, SFSU signed a memorandum of understanding with An-Najah University in Nablus. The MoU was organized by the leaders of the BDS campaign on campus and the General Union of Palestine Students on campus. An-Najah is a hotbed of terrorism in the PA. Its alumni include terrorism masters and terrorist murderers.

In 2013, then-president of the GUPS Mohammad Hammad posted a video of himself holding a machete and expressing his desire to murder IDF soldiers.

In 2015, SFSU president Leslie Wong praised the GUPS saying, “GUPS is the very purpose of this great university.”

In May 2016, GUPS members led protesters in silencing Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat when he tried to address students during a visit to campus.

When the David Horowitz Freedom Center launched a campaign to expose the Jew-hatred at SFSU which involved putting up posters on campus decrying antisemitism, school authorities and the local media were quick to condemn the Freedom Center and accuse it of repressing free speech and fomenting racism. Wong called the posters an act of “vandalism.”

SFSU is not unique. The often violent repression of pro-Israel voices is now the rule rather than exception at campuses around the US.

Two factors account for the fact that the same means that have been used for years to repress pro-Israel voices on campuses are now being used against non-leftists who speak on subjects unrelated to Israel.

First, the tactics are being used more broadly because they have been successful. Pro-Israel voices have been largely silenced on campus. Indeed, Jews themselves now join those who repress them.

For instance, last year SFSU’s Hillel and its Jewish Studies Department condemned the Horowitz Center’s campaign to highlight the antisemitism and support for terrorism endemic on their campus.

The second reason that the Left has expanded its assault on freedom of speech and inquiry beyond Israel and the Jews is that the Left today is no longer a collection of issue specific organizations and causes. Today the Left is a network of interlinked organizations, largely funded from the same sources and run by the same people.

It might have been hoped that once antisemites merged into a larger network, their voices and power would be diminished. But the opposite has happened. The antisemites who pioneered the intimidation tactics now being employed against non-leftists who speak on issues unrelated to Israel, are now the leaders of the leftist network. The network includes African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQs, feminists and Communists.

The move by antisemitic organizers into the center of the newly networked Left was first exposed with the rise of the Black Lives Matter group. Although BLM arose to protest what its members claim is excessive police violence against African-Americans, from the outset, antisemitic groups pounced on the movement as a means to take over the rising network of leftist groups. In cities across the US, BLM protesters’ signs opposing law enforcement authorities were accompanied by signs calling for Israel to be destroyed.

When BLM published a platform last year, the group explicitly linked the movement with the cause of Israel’s destruction. BLM’s platform accused Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians and claimed that Israel is an “apartheid” state.

In their work with the BLM activists, anti-Jewish operatives exploited a campaign that was launched independently of their anti-Jewish efforts. Today, the anti-Jewish operatives are themselves initiating and organizing the actions of other groups and so directing the course of the political Left in the US in general.

Case in point is the new group organizing women’s marches throughout the US. The “International Women’s Strike” group organized the women’s protests against President Donald Trump on January 21, the day after his inauguration. The group also organized this week’s protests which took place on International Women’s Day. Among the organizers of January’s protests was Linda Sarsour, an anti-Israel, antisemitic operative who has repeatedly praised Hamas terrorists and condemned “Zionism,” in her public statements.

This week, Sarsour was joined by the convicted terrorist Rasmeah Odeh. In 1970, Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, participated in a terrorist attack at a Jerusalem supermarket in which two Israeli college students were murdered.

With Hamas supporting operatives and actual Palestinian terrorist murderers serving as leaders of the organization behind the women’s marches, it is no surprise that the International Women’s Strike group is anti-Israel. The group’s published platform makes destroying Israel, or the “decolonization of Palestine,” its goal no less than free abortions on demand.

In other words, the feminist movement in the US is run by antisemites who use the feminists to advance their anti-Jewish agenda.

The core justification that the networked Left uses to defend its actions – first and foremost its goon squads on campuses – is that its actions are protected speech.

The claim of course, is ridiculous. There is a world of difference between freedom of expression and freedom of action. When students harass and shout down speakers with whom they disagree, they are not exercising freedom of speech. They are denying the freedom of speech of others.

When BDS operatives coerce university administrations and corporations to divest from Israel and ban Israelis from campuses, they are not exercising free speech. They are engaging in economic and cultural warfare against Israel.

Rather than recognize the distinction, major Jewish groups have embraced the antisemites’ false defense, internalizing the notion that opposing the onslaught against the community is tantamount to opposing freedom of speech.

So for instance, two major American Jewish groups harshly criticized the Knesset’s recently passed law banning BDS operatives from entering Israel. The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League issued statements claiming the move is a blow to free speech.

The riots against Murray and Yiannopoulis alerted non-Jewish Americans to the intellectual and moral decay of their campuses. It is possible that in moving beyond the safe confines of antisemitism – now largely accepted on campuses – the Left has gone too far. Perhaps its wings will be clipped.

But given the Jewish community’s inability to understand, let alone defend against, the campaign being waged against it, it is likely that even if the networked Left curbs its assaults on non-Jewish non-leftists, it will continue and escalate its campaign against Jews and the Jewish state.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post