Tag: Yasser Arafat

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ABDULLAH FALLING: Making Jordan a True Ally of the USA and Israel

Today, I spent several minutes reading an article by Caroline Glick, an Israeli writer on Middle Eastern matters. In doing so, I found myself encouraged to write this content. I am not necessarily trying to respond to Caroline, but to try to present an extended argument from a Jordanian Citizen who was forced to leave his country.  I fled because of what I faced as a result of the ruling of the Royal Regime in Jordan that has led Jordan towards backwardness.

First, Caroline thoroughly presented her arguments regarding the actions of Abdullah towards Israel and the US. She succeeded in analyzing the actions of Abdullah and his strategy. I have to admit, I never expected a Jewish writer to present a good level of understanding to the situation as what Caroline did, however, her conclusions about Abdullah seemed to me that she is more inclined to accept the fact that Abdullah is adopting a double-faced policy, that is, to be friendly with the US and Israel in their face then backstabbing them, because he is trying to appease his hostile people who are anti-Israel and America.

As a Jordanian citizen, I find myself in need of elaborating on some facts, for example, Caroline mentioned that the Israeli Government agreed to pay 5 million JDs to Jordan as a compensation of the Embassy Accident. I have read this headline on the Jordanian Media that is controlled by the King, and the media said that they got this news based on a source from the Jordanian Government that indicated that these funds would go for the victims’ families. The Jordanian media also said that the Israeli Diplomat would be legally followed in Israel as part of the agreement of both the Jordanian and Israeli Governments.

This was actually a surprise to me and other Jordanians, because we personally believe that releasing a fund like that in a democratic country like Israel will need the consent of the Israeli Government, also, the Israeli Prime Minister stated clearly that the damage would not go for the families of the victims. Moreover, the Israeli sources said that these funds would go for reparation of the Embassy after the accident. Another fact to note here is that not all the three victims were actually from the Embassy accident, as there is one victim who was a Judge that was killed in a controversial accident few years ago. It is worth mentioning that Abdullah visited the victims’ families of the Israeli Embassy Accident and one of the families was showed on an interview where they cursed Jews clearly after the accident before Abdullah paid them a condolence visit.

I grew up in Jordan, and since we were in schools, our Jordanian curricula indoctrinated us against Israel. At the same time, these curricula built the students on the blind loyalty to the King who rules an absolute undemocratic Monarchy.

The Hashemite Regime has been ruling by fear more than by loyalty because Jordan was under martial laws for a long time before 1989 when the late King Hussein abolished those laws and called for Parliament elections. It is important to understand that the Jordanians have been for long decades indoctrinated by what the Regime wanted them to receive, because democracy does not exist when the people want to disagree with the ruling King.

One aspect of the blind obedience based on fear and a result of indoctrination was clearly shown in the recent unrest that was ignited by the Regime itself after the US President Donald Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. A week later, the unelected Jordanian Government that is assigned completely by the King called the people to protest against Trump’s decision, the demonstrations on the streets were led not only by ministers and MPs, but the King’s daughter Princess Salma herself led one protest.

During those protests, one could have heard slogans calling for armed struggle against Israel, and cheers for Palestinian Militias like Hamas. This did not stop here. In a tweet from his account dated on the 8th December, 2017, the King himself tweeted a cheer for those protests in Jordan that his Regime called for and are still running on daily basis outside the US Embassy. While his Palestinian wife Rania did also cheer for what she called Palestinian Martyrs who were killed by Israel on the 9th December from her twitter account, in a similar language that was used by Yasser Arafat who used to laud what he called “Martyrs” of Israeli attacks.

On the other hand, An example of punishment for disagreeing with the king happens when Jordanians try to adopt a different ideology than what the King wants them to follow, no matter how liberal this ideology can be. I believe even Caroline knows this, if a Jordanian visits Israel he will be demonized severely in the society. If he is a business owner, his business will be targeted. If he is an MP, he would face memos to deselect him by his MP colleges. If he is a normal person from a tribe, he will find his image published on all the Jordanian Media in a bad way so that he can get racked in the society.

The Regime that has signed a peace treaty with Israel, and one of the acts of that treaty calls for ending the hostility not only between governments, but between the people, and to encourage normalization between both nations. However, this Jordanian Regime is not banning or holding responsibility on these media or the organizations that target and terrorize these individuals who normalize with Israel, and not even trying to protect the victims of such hostile actions.

When political analysts look at this strategy, one would find that it is the same strategy that has been deployed by the Jordanian Regime to secure its existence.  The strategy is simply to play the bad alternative game, so that the Hashemites can stay as the only game players in Jordan.  Any dismissal of their Regime could mean a demon in charge. Consequently, the gates of hell would be opened on Israel and the borders would no longer be safe.

Unfortunately, this hype of fear has always got into Israeli and Western decision makers minds, however, the actual facts in Jordan and how the country is ruled could post a definite challenge to this traditional look that the Regime has built over decades.

If you look at Egypt for example, during Mubarak Era, the same hype was sold to the West, that is, if his Regime falls, the Muslims Brotherhood will take charge and will wage Jihad on Israel, during the one-year tenure of the Islamist President Mohammed Morsi the Egyptian/Israeli Peace Treaty was maintained, and the borders were secure, because any Egyptian Politician understands the cost of a war or hostility with Israel on both his country and the Region, when Sisi took over, the situation did not deteriorate, in fact it improved for Israel and the US as he barred the Muslims Brotherhood Party from Egypt, which was a main source of instigation towards hostility against Israel.

In Jordan, the situation is more severe to forbid any Political animosity against Israel than any other country in the Region. Jordan is dependent on Israel for its water resources, as Jordan is classified as the second top poorest country in water resources around the world, no matter how rich the country is, water is priceless. The country receives aid from the US on annual basis because the Jordanian Regime is banning Jordanians from extracting their lands resources like oil, and this in itself is another story because the Regime wants to keep Jordanians economically dependent on the king’s doles so that he can secure another reason for loyalty and obedience, but going to the point, the US aids assist the annual budget and they are vital to Jordan to secure the public funds.

The most important aspect in the American Jordanian Relation is that the US has secured more than close relations with the Jordanian Army and Intelligence.  In fact, the US has influence on both parties. These two institutions are the ones that are keeping the King in power. This King who travels outside the country most of his time during the year, which actually makes him a Part Time Leader in Jordan. Most importantly, it makes him irrelevant in any stability equation in the country.

Does all the preceding mean that overthrowing Abdullah would finally open the gates of heaven for Israel? The answer is not immediately, but it will help improving the situation for Israel and Jordan. The reason is that the Jordanians are fed up with the King and his Regime’s Economic Policy, and in the recent years their fear from criticizing the Regime has started to vanish, because a poor and a hungry man will not have fear anymore. So a new leadership will be welcome not to wage wars, but to help overcoming the Economic struggles that the Jordanians were put through as a result of the corruption of Abdullah and his Regime. Our people want food and want to live better lives, however, under Abdullah, the GDP Per Capita in Jordan has slumped to become less than many regional countries. This is while the unemployment in Jordan has hit unprecedented ranges. Some sad stories about Jordanians looking for food in trash bins are circulated from time to time. Other sorrows of Jordanians setting themselves on fire because of poverty, on the same time, Abdullah and his wife are enjoying a lavishing life and have become multi billionaires according to reports, all of this at the expense of the Jordanian taxpayers. So, a new leadership will be met with optimism to tackle these challenges that are the top priorities of the Jordanians, and definitely not wars against Israel.

Abdullah has always taken Israel as a tool to transfer his problems to, during the past month, his Regime went through a tough time to pass the 2018 Budget that was based on raising the prices of bread and many essential goods. The people were and still frustrated and angry about Abdullah and his Regime, so he took the smart trick to transfer his people anger towards Israel and the US. He benefited from Trump’s Decision on the Embassy to indoctrinate his people against Israel and to forget their economic hardships as part of their Jihad Obligation, Abdullah Regime ordered Imams at Mosques to continue preaching about Israel during the past month. This is based on orders from the Ministry of Religious Affairs that control the topics of Fridays Sermons at Mosques.  All the Mosques are obligated to follow these instructions.

Abdullah also used to turn the compass towards Israel on many occasions when his regime was in trouble. He would order his people who guard Al-Aqsa Mosque (based on his Hashemite guardianship on Holy sites) to let the attendants smuggle some weapons with them inside the mosque under the excuse of defending Al-Aqsa. This is so they can provoke Israeli Soldiers response and create unrest in order to escalate so that his Regime Agents in Jordan can use it to sway the Jordanians towards hostility against Israel The result are protests outside the Israeli Embassy and other places to forget Abdullah ill-administration of their public government and funds.

It is also important to understand that the new generation of Jordanians are not interested in wars anymore, unlike the media that Abdullah is trying to spread, the new generations are becoming more mind liberated from the past heritage, so I just wonder about Pew Research that Caroline referred to that was conducted years ago on Jordanians and showed that 100% of Jordanians hate Jews. As a researcher, I think a 100% is definitely demonizing to any society, and here I am, a Jordanian atheist who has many Jewish friends and I do not hate Jews, many in Jordan whom I know are also liberals and not against Jews or Israel, but their voices cannot be raised because of the lack of protection from the Regime to them.

The question I was asking myself when reading Caroline suggestions about taming Abdullah so that he can lead a social development change among his people to liberate their behavior towards Israel and the US. Does this actually serve him or his Regime Agenda, especially when the Hashemites have always based their existence on the hype of being the best option for Jordan? I believe the answer is clearly no. However, Abdullah would try to manipulate the western world with a different tactic now. This is to create a leftist or semi secular front in Jordan to claim that his Regime is supporting liberals and to market it to the west.  This is actually happening now, as in the last Parliament Elections in Jordan in 2016 when the Abdullah Regime supported a list called ‘Maan’ meaning “Together.” This list raised the slogan of the civilian state, and to confront the people who try to mix religion with politics. So far so good, but the political principles for this list were clearly calling to stand against Israel and the normalization with Israel! This list was supported by the former Advisor of Abdullah Marwan Muasher who was also a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and a VP for Carnegie Endowment of Peace. A few days ago this list has developed into a political party that is called the Civilian Coalition. They conducted their opening conference with the attendance of Muasher and Maan List MP. The Principles of this party that were repeated inside the conference did not only call to work against Israel and normalization with Israel, but some of this party members spoke for liberation of Palestine from the River to the Sea (Meaning to demolish Israel as a whole). Now Abdullah can market this party to the west as an evidence that he is encouraging Anti-Islamic Parties. This is a proof that even the semi secular productions of this Regime are not working either.

A new Jordanian leadership even if it becomes an Islamist in the worst-case scenario like what happened in Egypt, won’t stand for long and will soon find itself with limited options if it tried to escalate the situation with Israel. Moreover, changes scenarios can include even a military based rule for a temporary period where these illegitimate Political Islamist Groups can be barred so that any coming elections would bring moderates into power. This could be similar to Ataturk or Sisi Approaches but with much modern and bespoke application.

As mentioned, recently the frustration has been building up with Jordanians against the king due to many factors, most importantly the poverty, unemployment, and the repression of this regime to speech freedom, any expert on Jordan cannot be optimistic enough to believe that Abdullah will stay in power for long. The question is, will the US and Israel leave this change uncontrolled because they want to keep their bargain on a man who has become a source of frustration to many of his people or will they embrace the reality and try to deal in advance with the inevitable change?

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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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AMERICAN GREATNESS AND THE PLO

The creation of a PLO state will not make the Middle East more stable.

Eight years from now, China will outstrip the US as the world’s largest economy. In three years, Israeli GDP per capita will outstrip Japan’s. These two data points are useful to bear in mind as we consider the Trump administration’s sudden decision to go retro and embrace the Clinton administration’s foreign policy on Israel from the early 1990s.

When then US president Bill Clinton decided to embrace Yasser Arafat, the architect of modern terrorism, it seemed like a safe bet.

The US had just won the Cold War. With the demise of the Soviet Union, US dominance in the Middle East was unquestioned. Even then Syrian president Hafez Assad provided symbolic support for the US-led war against his Baathist counterpart Saddam Hussein.

Assad had no choice. His Soviet protector had just disappeared.

The PLO, for its part, had never been weaker. The Gulf states reacted to Arafat’s support for Saddam in the 1991 war by cutting the PLO off financially. The Palestinian uprising against Israel, which broke out in 1988, sputtered into oblivion in late 1990 because without Arab money, Arafat and his cronies couldn’t pay anyone to attack Israelis.

As for the Arabs, operating under the US’s protective shield, in 1993 the Arab world appeared impermeable to internal pressure. No one imagined that Arab nationalism or the reign of presidents for life, kings and emirs would ever be questioned.

As for Israel, its decision to bow to the US’s demand during the Gulf War to stand down and do nothing in response to Iraq’s unprovoked Scud missile attacks was informed by a sense that Israel could not afford to stand up to America. While many debated the wisdom of this conclusion, the fact was that Israel in 1991 was economically weak. Its per capita income stood at around $15,000. Its economy was entirely dependent on the US and Europe.

With America’s power at an all-time high, Clinton and his people had every reason to believe that with minimal effort, they would be able to reach a peace deal between the Israelis and the PLO.

In the event, the assessment that peace would be an easy effort turned out to be entirely wrong. Arafat and his deputy Mahmoud Abbas played the Americans for fools. Worse, they humiliated Clinton.

In July 2000, when Arafat rejected Israel’s US-supported offer of peace at Camp David, it wasn’t just the notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel that he rejected. He rejected the notion that you cannot stand up to America.

Clinton aggravated the deleterious effect of Arafat’s action when rather than either retaliate against the PLO chieftain or at a minimum cutting his losses and walking away, Clinton spent the last months and weeks of his presidency pursuing Arafat and begging him to agree to a deal. Clinton went so far as to present his own peace offer to the PLO chief with less than a month left in office. And Arafat stomped away.

A lot of people were watching what happened. And a lot of people drew the logical conclusion: the US is a paper tiger. You can humiliate it. You can attack it. And the Americans, secure in their belief that unlike every other world power in history their primacy was permanent, would do nothing to you.

When Clinton left office, it wasn’t just the peace process that lay in shambles. America’s reputation was also massively weakened. In contempt of Washington, North Korea was racing toward the nuclear finish line.

Iran was taking over south Lebanon through Hezbollah and murdering Americans in Saudi Arabia.

India and Pakistan went nuclear.

And al-Qaida bombed two US embassies and one US naval destroyer.

How could Clinton pay attention to these things when he was captivated by the notion that once a peace deal was signed with the PLO, all the problems of the region would disappear?

He couldn’t.

And in time, neither could his successors. George W. Bush and Barack Obama each in time adopted Clinton’s near religious faith in the curative powers of embracing the PLO at Israel’s expense. Why should the world’s sole superpower deal with the difficult and bloody pathologies of the Islamic world? Why should it consider modernizing its alliances with its Asian partners as China rose seemingly inexorably? Why should it consider its inability to expand the US economy by 4% a year as a national security threat when all would be well the minute that the PLO agreed to a deal with a diminished and enfeebled Jewish state?

And so three American presidents have wasted 24 years ignoring serious and growing threats and changing global conditions while embracing the fantasy that the PLO holds the keys to global peace, or the ultimate deal or American exculpation of the sins of its past.

Israel for its part has followed its American friends down the garden path, even as the rationale for doing so has vastly diminished.

While the Americans surrendered their universities to the fantasies of anti-American multiculturalists and grievance mongers, Israel has modernized its markets, strengthened its society and revolutionized its economy.

One of the reasons Israel didn’t dare to question the Americans in the early 1990s was its terrible credit rating. In 1988 Israel’s credit rating was – BBB. And it needed to borrow billions of dollars to pay for the absorption needs of a million Jews from the former Soviet Union who moved to Israel from 1989 through 2006. US loan guarantees were the only way Israel could borrow money at affordable rates.

Over the intervening quarter century, those million Jews were the major driver in developing Israel’s information economy.

The main reason that Israel has maintained its slavish devotion to America’s PLO fetish is that our leftist elites, that dominate the media, share it. Like the American foreign policy discourse, Israel’s elites’ assessment of Israel’s priorities has remained frozen in time for the past 24 years.

The same cannot be said of the public.

The vast majority of Israelis have greeted President Donald Trump’s sudden embrace of his predecessor’s obsession with the PLO with surprise and at best bemusement.

“Well, good luck with that,” is the most polite response.

It isn’t simply that unlike the American foreign policy establishment, the vast majority of Israelis are convinced there is no deal to be had with the PLO. Most Israelis simply don’t care anymore. They view the PLO and the Palestinians as largely irrelevant.

When Israeli leaders outside the leftist elite’s echo chambers prefer to speak with foreign audiences about anything beside the Palestinians, it isn’t because they are trying to avoid an unpleasant conversation. It is because they don’t see the point anymore.

The notion that a PLO state will make the region more stable as far more coherent Arab states collapse is absurd.

The notion that it is necessary to empower the PLO to win Arab allies when the Arabs are beating a path to Israel’s door begging for help in defeating Sunni jihadists and Iran is ridiculous.

The notion that Israel’s ability to expand its markets is contingent on peace with the PLO when every week more world leaders descend on Jerusalem to sign trade deals with Israel is not even worthy of a giggle.

As for demography, the American hysteria is bizarre.

The Palestinians already have passports and vote – when they are allowed to – in their own elections. Why would Israel be expected to let them vote for the Knesset?

Beyond that, Jewish immigration to Israel remains high. Israel’s Jewish birthrates have surpassed its Muslim birthrates both within sovereign Israel and in Judea and Samaria.

So why would Israel give up Jerusalem for demography?

As for Israel’s Arab citizens, the truth it that but for the meddling of foreign governments, Israel’s Arab population would have integrated fully into Israeli society a decade ago.

Next week, President Trump will arrive here. His meeting last week with PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and statements by administration officials since make clear that Trump intends to be the fourth US president to get sucked into the PLO vortex.

Trump will arrive in Israel believing that his campaign pledge to “Make America Great Again,” and his goal of reaching the “ultimate deal” with the PLO are complementary aims.

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains nothing else to Trump when they meet next week, he should explain to him that the two goals are mutually exclusive. And if he has any extra time, Netanyahu should give Trump the details of the massive price America has paid, since 1993, for its three past presidents’ obsession with the PLO.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

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Understanding the Left’s Language Inversion

As noted by many, there is a striking double standard that is applied to the far-Left. The world seems to allow their statements and views to be heard and treated seriously, while the far-Right is correctly shunned and treated as a pariah.

Why is this?

Let’s look at the British Labour party as an example. The far-left ‘Momentum’ movement within the party is the reason why Jeremy Corbyn has once again been elected as its leader. This is a man who called Hamas and Hezbollah “my friends” and had his picture taken with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. This is the man the Momentum movement has kept in leadership and they have basically taken over a centre Left party, not in some third world country, but in the United Kingdom. With such a man at the head of the party they will never win a national election especially when many MP’s from his own party have no confidence in him.   

Another example is the Democrat party in America, where the runner up to the chairman of the party was Keith Ellison, who was a member of the radical Nation of Islam, a virulent racist and anti-Semitic organisation. He has said things himself, even as late as 2010, that are anti-Semitic and he is known to hold far-Left views. As the runner up of the chairman elections he was made Deputy Chair of the Democrat party. This is yet another example of how the far-Left have shockingly managed to become mainstream.

The reason for all this lies in their use of inverted language, which is rooted in relativism, the Lefts’ idol. When they speak of equality, liberation, freedom and other such liberal concepts they do not mean it in the way a normal democratic liberal would. Rather; equality, liberation and freedom in the way they mean often equals the mirror opposite. This inversion of language is used to cover up their radical views and it then gains them access to the mainstream political parties.

This was a gift given by Fidel Castro to the PLO. While it is known that Fidel’s secret police trained hundreds of Palestinian terrorists, it is not so well known that Fidel trained Yassar Arafat in the art of language inversion. Using the language of human rights and liberation as a cover, Fidel trained Arafat how to take the moral high ground away from Israel. He learned to portray Israel as the aggressor, a colonial and imperialistic creation. He depicted that the Palestinians are the victims of many crimes and are justified for their “resistance” against the State of Israel. This tactic seems to have spread to the Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda and to the terror state of Iran who use the same language inversion to attack America and the West for their “imperialism”. This in itself would not be such a problem, because it is unlikely they would be listened to based upon their reputation, but the major problem is when this kind of language is used by the far-Left in Western countries. This provides a cover for the terrorists and makes defeating them significantly and incomparably harder.

It must be emphasised that the real war is a war of concepts, not just words. When concepts lose their meaning and are free for interpretation by anyone it is a very small step away from nihilism, which should never be allowed to take root in any liberal democracy.

In order for the West to survive spiritually it must make a firm commitment to absolutism and a firm rejection of relativism.

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Yasser Arafat, A Fake Hero, A Lord of Corruption

The Palestinian Authority (PA) was once called the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (the PLO). It was chaired by Yasser Arafat, a hero of Palestinian resistance movement, a godfather of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and an ideological figure for almost every young Palestinian. Very few people knew that Yasser Arafat was a fake hero, a lord of corruption and a true godfather of Palestinian terrorism.

Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat received millions and millions of dollars every year from Western countries and the Muslim world. The Muslim world considered Arafat to be a hero of Jerusalem and even they considered him as a second Saladin who would finally liberate their land from the Jewish occupation.  The Muslim world knew very little or nothing about Yasser’s double faced status. Leaders like him have two faces, two languages, and two sets of promises. When they communicate with the international community, they use one set of languages and values, and make statements and commitments relating to a desire for peace and co-existence. When they turn their faces towards their own nations, they show a monstrous face. When they address their people, they never talk about peace, instead inciting their people towards terrorism. And they are even better at enriching themselves at the expense of the well-being of their people.

Yasser Arafat was one of the best of them. He always used his people to conduct terrorist activities and in return he and his organisation received billions of dollars from countries that included Qatar, Iran, Syria, Russia and other Arab countries

Yasser Arafat also never disclosed his actual wealth even to his party and family. He was one of the most greedy and cruel persons of in the short history of the Palestinians. A friend who worked with Israeli intelligence disclosed that Arafat died along with the knowledge regarding 75% of his secret foreign accounts and no one supposedly knows where they are and how to access them.  This is the wealth stolen from Palestinian aid received as donations to change Palestinian lives. The remaining 25% of Arafat’s personal accounts were openly transferred to his family. His wife and his daughter live in a most luxurious palace in the Parisian suburbs. Their wealthy life style can be compared to European royalty.  According to my Israeli friend, together the two of them spend approximately $50,000 daily maintaining this luxurious and fashionable life style. They even do not bother to live among their own people, people this father and husband supposedly fought a war for during much of his adult life. They care nothing about these people who live in intense poverty, they only concern is maintaining their life style.

In 2003, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to carry out an audit and found at least two billion dollars of Palestinian Authority Fund monies that were missing. It is now believed most probably that these funds were transferred to Arafat’s family in Paris. While Yasser Arafat was in a Paris hospital, his wife Soha Arafat agreed to disclose Arafat’s medical record on the condition of stopping the ongoing investigation into the missing funds. The PA was very frustrated not to be able to officially locate and recover the missing money which they were assured to have been transferred to Soha Arafat’s Swiss bank accounts. Finally, they agreed to pay her $2 million dollar a year for the rest of her life. Whether this means she secretly returned the money or not is speculation.

Israel’s Mossad not only believed but provided enough proofs to the government of Israel that Yasser Arafat controlled a personal financial portfolio estimated to be in the region of $6.5 billion.

The Arab media including the Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese newspapers received a top-secret report regarding the financial status of the PLO, disclosing that for years the PLO had a deficit of over $95 million a month. The report became even more explosive in the Arab world when the IMF revealed that Arafat had diverted a billion dollars or more of PLO funds to his and his and Soha’s personal Swiss bank accounts from1995 to 2000. A Palestinian lawyer who has investigated PLO corruption said,

… [I] knew of four Arafat loyalists who held secret Swiss bank accounts

The deals frequently involved the cement and building industries of the Palestinian territories. The corruption ran into millions of dollars, which Arafat covered up in return for the profiteers giving him a portion. It was often said Arafat was the godfather of all the godfathers. The secret investments of Yasser Arafat were disclosed by an American financial investigation team and the report stated that Arafat invested his secret money after it was transferred from PLO funds to his personal Swiss account. Some of those investments included the Coca Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company, and many venture capital funds in the US and the Cayman Islands. The money for a large part of his investments came from public funds like Palestinian taxes. Virtually none of it was used for the welfare of Palestinian people and it was fully controlled by Arafat and his family.  Arafat travelled almost all of the rich Western and Arab countries around the word and crying to everyone that, “We (Palestinians) are devastated and our economy is going to collapse and we cannot pay salaries to Palestinian employees and it is because of Israel’s occupation and blockade”. He convinced those countries and the IMF that the words of his mouth were true and if they were not going to fund PLO, the Palestinian economy would be damaged and would collapse completely. They did not yet suspect that Yasser Arafat was draining a huge amount of that money into his personal bank accounts and his people were really still being deprived through high unemployment and poor economy which those funds were supposed to be relieving.

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Under the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1995, it was agreed that Israel would collect sales tax on goods purchased by Palestinians living in Israel under Green Card status and transfer that money to Palestinian treasury but instead transferred immediately transferred it into his private accounts. From the outset of the Oslo Accords until 2000, Israel put the tax revenue into Arafat’s accounts at Bank Leumi in downtown Tel Aviv. Israel’s intent was that Arafat would use it to clean the area of terrorists and for the Palestinians’ welfare.

According to US officials,

Arafat had nearly $3 billion in his personal financial portfolio of the known 25%

But, again, this part of his portfolio was already known to the Intelligence departments and the Western financial powers. At that time nobody was aware of the absconded 75% of the monies, the part only he-and likely his wife and daughter- knew about.

According to an Israeli official, when Yasser Arafat was alive he paid $100,000 per month out of the Palestinian budget to his wife Soha who remained in Paris where she lived lavishly on this allowance. Arafat had an additional account in the Swiss bank for the PA but the code name of the account was one only he knew. There had to have been more than $300 million in his other Swiss account at Bank Lombard Odier, as this is where all the money was transferred to from the Israel’s Bank Leumi. As was noted earlier, Arafat’s secret Swiss accounts were closed around the time he died and no one will say where that money went.

No one even knows about how high the salary amount was that Arafat collected as a Chairman of PLO when he was in exile. Arafat received hundreds of millions of dollars from the KGB (the USSR’s intelligence agency) and the Saudis.

The now-deceased Saddam Hussein reportedly handed Arafat a $50,000,000 check for supporting him during the first Gulf war.

Where that money gone, I believe Soha Arafat knows. Further scandals where Arafat was directly involved in kickbacks, such as that of the Gas and Petrol’s pipeline in to Palestinian areas and Arafat’s investment in world’s stock markets will be addressed  in other article at some point.

Many Palestinian people had and have little money, adequately paying jobs, and own decent homes and businesses. The Arafats of the Palestinian people have all money to dispense and have everything to fulfill Palestinian dreams. If he could have used that money to push up the Palestinians’ economy instead of diverting this money to pay terrorists’ salaries, those whose only job is to commit terrorism against the state of Israel, think of what might exist today.  He could have built schools and universities that sent Palestinian youngsters, making them an educated people who design new technologies, create medicines, and make the whole world a better place. Instead he sent them in to the training centers in order to create terrorists. Palestinian children should be looking at long, health, prosperous lives in their own country instead of seeing their only purpose in life as being one to die young.

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Yasser Arafat was not a hero of the Palestinians but a mafia lord in a corrupt network. He, his wife and daughter chose to be greedy money mongers who destroyed their people’s chance at a real nation and left a dark and hopeless future for the new generation of Palestinian people. Now, Gaza under Hamas and the PA under Mahmood Abbas continue running under Yasser Arafat’s steps to total corruption. In future articles I shall address their dirty politics of corruption and human rights abuses within the Muslim world.

Originally Published in TOI Blogs.

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Time for Palestinian Sacrifices, Israel Has Made Enough

One of the oft repeated laments from many world leaders when speaking about the long festering Arab-Israeli conflict is regarding sacrifices.

How many times did former US Secretary of State John Kerry, or former President Obama, or other leaders talk about the need for both sides to make sacrifices for peace? We heard it repeatedly. Yet the truth of the matter is only one side has made sacrifices, while the other side has not made any. One side has continuously demonstrated its desire for peace, while the other side has continuously demonstrated it wants the other destroyed.

The Middle East consists of 22 Arab nations with a combined population of almost 400 million, compared to a little over 8 million in Israel (6.5 million Jews, and 1.5 million Arabs). Size wise Israel is roughly 8,000 square miles, compared to over 7 million square miles for the Arab nations. The Arab population makes up over 98% of the Middle East, while geographically covers over 99% of the land compared to the size of Israel. These facts are merely to provide some perspective. Yet in spite of the overwhelming advantage the Arab world enjoys, the tiny Jewish nation of Israel is considered intolerable by many.

Let’s see if criticism of Israel is justified, by providing proof of what sacrifices have already been made.

List of Jewish Sacrifices

  1.   In the 1947 UN partition of the land west of the Jordan River the Jews were to receive roughly 5,500 square miles of land, while the Arabs were to receive roughly 4,500 square miles. This would have created the 23rd Arab nation in the Middle East. Jerusalem, which has been the ancestral capital of Jewish life for well over 3,000 years was designated as an international city and cut off from a contiguous connection with the Jewish state.

In spite of seeing the creation of yet another Arab state, and not having a physical connection to Jerusalem, the Jews, while furious, made the sacrifice and agreed to the partition plan. However, it was the Arab world which rejected the vote of the UN and attacked Israel in May 1948 one day after its independence. After a protracted war which lasted over a year, Israel was able to secure additional land, including Jerusalem, bringing its size to roughly 8,000 square miles. On Dec. 13, 1949 Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announced Jerusalem would be the official capital of the Jewish state of Israel.

  1.   In June 1967 Israel was forced to defend itself against Syria, Jordan and Egypt in the Six Day War. During this decisive Israeli victory the Holy Old City of Jerusalem was captured from the Jordanians, who had been in control of it since the Independence war ended in 1949. The victory reunited the Jewish people with Temple Mount and the Western Wall of the Second Temple compound. Israeli flags flew over their holiest site for the first time in modern history.

At the conclusion of the war Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a highly controversial decision. Against the advice of the religious and conservative Jews, he made a huge sacrifice in the interest of peace by awarding administrative control of Temple Mount to the Jordanian Waqf (Islamic Trust). He ordered Israeli flags removed and he banned Jews from praying on Temple Mount. This remains in effect today.

In the same war Israel captured the Gaza Strip and virtually all of the Sinai Desert.

  1.   On Yom Kippur 1973, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Israel was attacked on two fronts from Egypt and Syria. Caught by surprise many Israeli lives were lost before they were able to turn the tide. After Israel successfully crossed the Suez Canal and had tanks in route to Cairo Egypt summoned the US to broker a cease fire. Six years later in an historic agreement, Israel signed its first formal peace treaty with a sovereign Arab nation. The Camp David Accord was brokered by President Jimmy Carter and signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin on the White House Lawn in March 1979.

In their effort to secure peace Israel gave up the entire Sinai Desert. Later that year Israel also turned over control of the Alma oil field, which had $100 billion in untapped reserves.  Anwar Sadat later lamented “poor Menahcim, I got back the Sinai and the Alma oil fields, and what has Menachim got? A piece of paper.”

  1.   Since Israel’s independence is 1948 ongoing terror attacks had taken hundreds of Israeli lives. In an effort to secure peace with the ‘Palestinians’ in 1993 Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin signed the first of several agreements with Yasser Arafat founder of the PLO terrorist group. This was known as the Oslo Accords. Once again the US played the key role and the formal signing took place at the White House. Just under 1,600 Israeli’s had been murdered between ’48 and ’93. Over this 53 year period that is a sustained average of one murdered every other week.

The accords were designed to provide self-rule for the Palestinians. Israel was willing to give up control over specified areas on the condition the Palestinians stop the terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. This was an effort to build trust between the two sides. The longer the Palestinians refrained from terror, the more land Israel would turn over to them. Ultimately if the Palestinians showed good will and stopped the terror, the end game of the Oslo Accords could have given them much of the land they demanded for statehood. All they were asked to do is stop murdering Jews.

However, they did not stop. In 1994 Palestinian terrorists murdered 65 Israelis and another 29 in 1995. Then tragedy struck in 1995 when Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated .

Subsequent to this the terror continued. Between 1996 and 2000 Palestinians murdered another 165 Israelis. The Oslo Accords had all but collapsed because the Palestinians refused to honor their commitment to cease their terror against the Jews.

The Israeli government went into crisis mode and had to come up with something to protect Jewish civilians from being murdered. A highly controversial decision was made to construct a security barrier. The Palestinians and Israel’s critics called it a land grab. However, this reluctant decision had to be made for one simple reason- to protect Jewish civilians from being murdered. It was never intended to be a land grab.

Throughout the first phase of the barrier’s construction the Palestinians not only did not stop the terror, they increased it significantly. During that four year period they murdered 984 Israelis or an average of just under 5 per week!

The sacrifice Israel made by turning over land to the Palestinians was a total bust. Responsibility for its failure rests with the Palestinians.

  1.   Now we come to one of the most gut wrenching sacrifices Israel made in an effort to secure peace. In 2005 after a 38 year presence in the Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to pull almost 8,000 Jews out of the coast enclave.  Heart breaking images of Israeli soldiers physically dragging screaming families from their homes brought the country to its knees. The tiny Jewish nation came to the brink of civil war. Yet the task was completed and the Gaza Strip was turned over to the Palestinians to establish self- rule.

After Israel vacated the Strip the Palestinian held elections in 2006. They voted the terrorist group Hamas into power. Since then Hamas has fired over 15,000 rockets and mortars into Israel. There havebeen three wars between them. To this day Hamas has been relentless in its effort to deny Israel any peace. It constructs underground tunnels made from supplies designed for humanitarian purposes, while continuing their hateful campaign of Israel’s destruction.

Once again a huge sacrifice by Israel for peace backfired.

Another Sacrifice?

Then there is Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Most world leaders consider Abbas a moderate. Since October 2015 the so-called ‘knife intifada’ has been going on. This has been a series of premeditated attacks by Palestinians who have carried out dozens of stabbings and vehicle ramming’s against Israeli soldiers and civilians. At least 44 Israelis have been brutally murdered. Abbas reacts by praising the murderers, saying “we bless every drop of blood.”  In addition he demonstrates his complete disdain for Jewish lives by meeting with the families of Palestinian terrorists.

He also has said on numerous occasions he will never accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Abbas says Israel is the obstacle to peace because of its ‘settlement’ construction. Sorry Mr. Abbas, if anyone is responsible for lack of progress on the peace front it is you who bless murderers and categorially deny Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state.

Once again world leaders and organizations are pressuring Israel to consider yet another sacrifice for peace by giving up land the Palestinians demand for a state, which Abbas demands must be 100% Jew free. They offer nothing in return, not altering their charters calling for Israel’s destruction, not renouncing terror, not even recognition.

Let There Be No Doubt

It should be exceedingly clear by now who has made the sacrifices for peace. It is Israel. Both land an lives have been sacrificed. What has been asked of the Palestinians? Simple, stop the murder of civilians, and accept Israel as a Jewish state. They offer neither. Yet, in spite of not making a single compromise for peace the Palestinians are not penalized and continue to receive hundreds of millions in aid. Plus, they continue to pay salaries to terrorist who murdered Jews.

How are the Palestinian people ever going to desire peace if not a single one of the leaders speaks about necessary sacrifices it requires? When the Palestinian people hear and see their political and religious leaders is glorify murderers by naming schools and summer camps after them, these become their role models. This makes peace impossible. It’s not to say there aren’t Palestinians who want peace. There are. However, they are in the minority and afraid to speak out because they get threatened by the fundamentalists. I am still waiting to see the first peace demonstration in the streets of any Palestinian city. For peace to have any chance this has to change.

Here’s the list of Palestinian sacrifices: Zero

That says it all.

More of Dan Calic’s articles are on his Facebook Page.

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The Livni-Fayyad two-step

MK Tzipi Livni is apparently well regarded at the UN. According to media reports, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called Livni and offered her the position of under-secretary-general.

Guterres’s offer to Livni is supposed to be a trade-off. Livni will receive the appointment in exchange for the US canceling its veto of his plan to appoint former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salaam Fayyad to serve as his envoy to Libya.

There are three basic problems with this proposed trade. First there is the problem with Fayyad.

Leaving aside the question of the actual duties of a UN envoy to Libya, the question is why would Fayyad be a good candidate for anything?

Before Fayyad joined the PLO-controlled PA in 2002, he served for six years as the International Monetary Fund’s representative to the PA. In that position, Fayyad turned a blind eye to the embezzlement of the donor-financed PA budget to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Year in and year out, Fayyad did nothing to warn donors that the funds that they were providing the PA were being transferred to Swiss bank accounts or otherwise disappearing. In 1997 for instance, Fayyad said nothing as Arafat and his cronies caused $323 million, or 40% of the PA budget, to simply disappear.

Perhaps if he had piped up back then the international community might have rethought its support for PLO chief Yasser Arafat as he built the PA into a terrorism-financing kleptocracy.

Arafat appointed Fayyad to serve as PA finance minister in 2002. In that position, Fayyad went from apologist to enabler. He presided over the PA budget and kept the international donations flowing knowing full well that Arafat and his cronies were embezzling the funds to enrich themselves and finance terrorism while the Palestinian people got record unemployment and were indoctrinated to despise Israel and the West.

Fayyad’s facilitation of the PLO bosses’ grand larceny continued after Arafat’s death in 2004. He happily enabled Mahmoud Abbas’s theft as well.

For instance, in 2004 Fayyad did nothing to stop the theft of revenues from oil products by his bosses as they emptied the coffers of the PA’s Petroleum Authority.

When PA lawmakers asked him that year for an accounting of where revenues from oil products disappeared to, according to Issam Abu Issa, the founder of the Palestinian International Bank, Fayyad declared nonchalantly, “Unfortunately the documents related to the revenues from oil products – or how the money was used – cannot be found. They have disappeared from the ministry.”

According to a 2013 report from the European Court of Auditors, between 2008 and 2012, $2.7 billion in EU aid to the PA disappeared. Fayyad presided over the PA treasury and government as finance minister and prime minister during those years.

Fayyad was also responsible for financing terrorism. As PA prime minister, Fayyad enjoyed the support of both Fatah and Hamas. Hamas supported him, among other things, because he sent monthly payments from the PA budget to the jihadist group in Gaza.

Under Fayyad’s leadership, the PA allocated 31% of its donor-based budget to its security forces. That is more than any government in the world and it raises questions about where all that money is actually going.

As prime minister, in 2011 Fayyad increased the PA’s payments to terrorists jailed in Israeli prison by 300%. More than 6% of the PA’s budget is now spent used to pay salaries to terrorists.

Then there is Fayyad’s role in inciting and leading the international campaign to destroy the Israeli economy and block any chance of friendly relations between Israelis and Palestinians.

As PA prime minister, in 2010, Fayyad promulgated a law criminalizing all Palestinian economic activity with Israelis beyond the 1949 armistice lines. He hired 650 troops and charged them with entering people’s homes and seizing all Israeli products they found there. He ordered the arrest of Palestinians who worked with Israelis.

In 2012 he extended the prohibition on economic cooperation and his boycott of Israeli products and businesses to include all Israeli territory. In so doing, he criminalized all economic cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis and signaled to his supporters in the international Left that they should use political and economic warfare against Israel to delegitimize the country as a whole.

So the statesman of “Palestine” that Guterres wishes to appoint to serve as his envoy to terrorist-controlled Libya is a bagman for terrorists and mafia bosses in the PLO and Hamas. He criminalized peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and spearheaded the Left’s economic and political war against Israel.

Why anyone would think a man with this record would be a good choice for anything but a jail cell is unclear.

This then brings us to Livni.

After changing political parties three times in nine years and building a record of near uninterrupted failure in the cabinet posts she filled, Tzipi Livni has reached the end of her political rope. No one wants her anymore.

Her American supporters are out of power.

Her party, Hatnua, will not win any seats if it runs on its own in the next elections.

She destroyed the Kadima party she formed with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

She is hated in her original political home, Likud.

And activists in the Labor party, with which she merged Hatnua in 2015 to form the joint Zionist Union, have no interest in maintaining the partnership in the next elections.

No matter what happens in the next elections, Livni has burned so many bridges in her self-serving political career that she has no chance of getting elected to Knesset, much less of serving in a future government.

Today, Livni’s career consists of traveling the international conference circuit with her leftist European and American supporters and writing Facebook posts with pictures of her cat on the one hand and threats of pending war crimes tribunals against Israeli nationals on the other.

So it makes sense that she’d be attractive to the UN secretary general.

This brings us to the third problem with Guterres’s reported offer and to the diplomatic realities that made it possible.

The so-called “two-state solution” has placed Israel on the same playing field as a terrorist entity.

Actually, it’s worse than that.

The “two-state solution” which blames Israel for the Palestinian and international war being waged against its right to exist has placed Israel in a subordinate position to Palestinian terrorists.

Whereas Palestinians like Fayyad who play leading roles in the war against Israel are esteemed elder statesmen, Israelis who defend the interests and rights of their country against the likes of Fayyad are viewed as potential defendants at The Hague.

The only Israelis that can be approached to “balance” the UN’s embrace of Palestinian terrorism enablers are the ones who echo their false allegations against the State of Israel.

Livni isn’t being considered for the position because she’s the former foreign minister. She’s being touted as a “balance” to Fayyad because she agrees with him that Israel shouldn’t defend itself against his aggression or that of his cronies in the PA.

Moreover, if Livni receives the UN post, Guterres will expect her to defend the intrinsically anti-Israel organization when it is justifiably attacked by the government of Israel she stands no chance of ever serving in again.

The only way to get the UN to think twice before it attacks Israel is for Israel to stop acting like a chump.

Not only must the government reject Guterres’s offer. The government should take the actions that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to take against the UN following the Security Council’s diplomatic pogrom against the Jewish state on December 23.

The UN should be kicked out of Jerusalem.

International and UN forces deployed in Judea and Samaria should be shown the door.

And Israel should stop transferring taxpayer funds to the corrupt institution that is controlled by an automatic majority of states that believe the chief purpose of the UN is to criminalize Israel while whitewashing terrorists and their supporters like Fayyad.

The purpose of the Livni offer is to distract Israel – and the US – and make us forget the organization’s inherent bigotry against the Jewish state while enabling the UN to maintain and even increase that bigotry. Israel must not be seduced by Guterres’s cheap, insulting, phony peace offering.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

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TRUMP, THE PISTOL AND HOLY BRANCH

Trump will take office on Friday. Since he was elected, he has given every reason to believe that Abbas and his deputies and their European and American enablers will have to either put up or shut up.

With a gun on his hip, on November 13, 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat stood before the UN General Assembly and made the West an offer that it didn’t refuse.

At the end of a long speech in which he rewrote history to erase all connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and criminalized the very notion of Jewish freedom, Arafat declared, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Arafat’s offer has served since that time as the foundation of European relations with the Palestinians and the wider Islamic world. It has also been the basis of US-PLO relations for the better part of the past four decades.

His trade was simple and clear.

If you stand with the PLO in its war to annihilate Israel and deny Jewish freedom, then PLO terrorists and our Arab state supporters will leave you alone.

If you refuse to join our war against the Jewish state, we will kill you.

Today, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is reiterating Arafat’s offer.

Speaking Saturday at the Vatican after the Holy See decided to recognize “Palestine,” Abbas said that if US President-elect Donald Trump goes ahead with his plan to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, it will “fuel extremism in our region, as well as worldwide.”

Abbas’s spokesman was more explicit. Saturday night, Osama Qawasmeh, spokesman for Abbas’s Fatah PLO faction and member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, said that if the US moves its embassy to Israel’s capital city, “The gates of hell will be opened in the region and the world.”

Abbas and Qawasmeh also said that the PLO expects that members of the international community will make Trump see the light and abandon his plan.

French President Francois Hollande’s “peace conference” on Sunday was the international community’s way of fulfilling Abbas’s demand.

As multiple commentators have noted, the conference’s purpose wasn’t to promote the prospects for peace. It was to constrain Trump’s policy options for handling the Palestinian war against Israel.

By bringing together representatives of some 70 countries to insist that Israeli homeowners are the moral equivalent of Palestinian terrorists, Hollande and his comrades hoped to box Trump into their PLO-compliant policy.

Spelling out the demand Trump is required to accept, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc-Ayrault parroted the Palestinian threats.

Asked by the French media Sunday if moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem would provoke the Palestinians, Ayrault said, “Of course.”

He then demeaned Trump’s plan to move the embassy as nothing but the regular bluster of American politicians.

In his words, “I think he [Trump] would not be able to do it. It would have extremely serious consequences and it’s not the first time that it’s on the agenda of a US president, but none has let himself make that decision.”

Ayrault is correct about Trump’s predecessors.

To one degree or another, since the early 1970s, successive US administrations have joined the Europeans in selling Israel down the river to prevent Arafat’s minions from pointing their guns at the American people.

Like the Europeans, the Americans have upheld their side of this bargain even when the PLO failed to uphold its end. For instance, in 1973 Arafat ordered his terrorists to storm the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and take US ambassador Cleo Noel, his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid hostage. Arafat then ordered his henchmen to murder the diplomats after then president Richard Nixon rejected his demand to release Robert F. Kennedy’s Palestinian murderer, Sirhan Sirhan, from prison.

Instead of responding to the execution of US diplomats by siding with Israel against the PLO, the US covered up and denied the PLO’s responsibility for the attack for the next 33 years.

The US is still covering up for the PLO’s murder of US embassy personnel in Gaza in 2003. At the same time, it is providing the PLO with nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in direct and indirect annual aid, including the training and provision of its security forces.

The Europeans for their part have egged the US along throughout the years. France has generally led European efforts to convince the Americans to side with Palestinian as well as Hezbollah terrorists in their war against Israel in the name of “peace.”

Sunday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the Paris conference as a “futile” relic of a period that is about to end.

Netanyahu said that the conference’s goal of boxing Israel into an untenable framework for dealing the Palestinians was nothing more than the “final palpitations of a yesterday’s world.”

“Tomorrow,” he intoned, “will look a lot different. And tomorrow is very close.”

Trump will take office on Friday. Since he was elected, he has given every reason to believe that Abbas and his deputies and their European and American enablers will have to either put up or shut up.

Speaking of the president-elect, Henry Kissinger said that Trump is the first man in recent memory who doesn’t owe anybody anything for his victory.

The only people he is answerable to are the voters who elected him.

Trump’s electoral victory owes to his success in tapping into the deep reservoir of popular disaffection with the elitist culture and policies that have governed post-Cold War West. He has used the mandate he received from American voters to revisit the basic assumptions that have driven US policies for the past generation.

His skepticism at NATO and the EU are examples of his refusal to simply accept the received wisdom of his predecessors. Just this weekend he told Germany’s Bild magazine that he continues to question the purpose of NATO, which is a drag on US taxpayers and doesn’t fight terrorism.

He similarly restated his ambivalence toward the EU and that its open border policy has been a “catastrophic failure,” and he expects more countries to follow Britain’s lead and exit the EU.

Trump’s position on the PLO and the Palestinian war on Israel is of a piece with his wider rejection of the common wisdom of Western elites. Just as he didn’t hesitate to say that the EU mainly serves as an instrument for Germany to dominate the European market, so he has made no mystery of his rejection of the moral equivalence between Israel and Palestinian terrorists which forms the basis of the twostate formula.

Not only won’t Trump join the Obama administration and the French in criminalizing Israeli homeowners, Trump is celebrating them. He has invited the leaders of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria – that is, the so-called “settlements” – to attend his inauguration.

And he appears dead serious about moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.

Under these circumstances, Israel has the opportunity and the obligation to end the PLO’s ability to threaten the US, not to mention itself. It is Israel’s duty to ensure that the next time the PLO tries to exact a price in blood for America’s refusal to abide by the terms of Arafat’s blackmail, his terrorist group is finally destroyed.

Similarly, Israel is now obliged to take the lead and abandon the PLO-friendly two-state policy, which blames Israel for Palestinian terrorism, and adopt a strategy that works in its place.

Netanyahu has refused to consider any alternative until after Barack Obama is out of office.

Consultations must be scheduled for Saturday night.

Originally Published in Jerusalem Post.

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So-called Palestinians have no history in Israel – except as terrorists

Until it is acknowledged by the UN and other bodies that the Jewish people and not the Arabs are the indigenous inhabitants of Eretz Israel, it is going to be difficult to break the impasse of anti-Jewish prejudice that is the real obstacle to peace.

In 1714, Hadriani Relandi, a mapmaker from Utrecht, published Palestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata. The book was a record of Relandi’s trip to Eretz Israel in 1695-96. On his travels he surveyed around 2,500 places that were mentioned in the Tanakh and Mishnah, and he carried out a census of the people who resided in such places. He made some very interesting discoveries. For a start, he discovered that not a single settlement in Eretz Israel had a name that was of Arabic origin. Instead the names derived from Hebrew, Roman and Greek languages.

Another interesting discovery was the conspicuous absence of a sizeable Muslim population. Instead, he found that most of the inhabitants were Jews, along with some Christians and a few Bedouins. Nazareth was home to less than a thousand Christians, while Jerusalem held 5,000 people, mostly Jews. Gaza was home to around 250 Jews and about the same number of Christians.  The only exception was Nablus where around 120 Muslims lived, along with a handful of Samaritans, whose ancestors belonged to the northern tribes of Israel.

Relandi was not alone in discovering the lack of Muslims in the Land of Israel. Drawing on work by statistician and demographer Roberto Bachi, it is estimated that there were only 151,000 non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine in 1540. (Some sources indicate that many of these were descendants of Jews who had remained in Palestine following the failed Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 CE but had been forced to convert to Islam). By 1800, the non-Jewish population had grown to around 268,000, rising to 489,000 by 1890, 589,000 in 1922 and just over 1.3 million in 1948. The vast majority of these non-Jewish migrants were Muslims. All of which suggests that most of the Muslim (and Christian) inhabitants of Palestine were recent immigrants and had not been living there for generations as is sometimes suggested. Moreover, the figures show that Arab immigration was a fast-growing trend, propelled by external circumstances. But what?

Firstly, several thousand peasant farmers had come to Palestine in the first half of the 19th century to escape Egypt’s military draft, forced labor and taxes. Secondly, the Ottoman authorities transferred a great many people from Morocco, Algeria and Egypt to Palestine in the early part of the 20th century, partly in an effort to outflank Jewish immigration. Thirdly, the Zionist project was very attractive to Arabs who were drawn to Palestine by the good wages, healthcare and sanitation offered by the Jews.  Indeed, the Muslim infant mortality rate in Palestine fell from 201 per 1,000 in 1925 to 94 per 1,000 in 1945. Meanwhile, life expectancy rose from 37 to 49 years.

Furthermore, the Arab population of Palestine increased the most in cities where there were large numbers of Jews, which is a strong indication that Arabs were drawn to Palestine because of the Zionists. Between 1922 and 1947, the Arab population grew by 290 per cent in Haifa, 158 per cent in Jaffa and 131 per cent in Jerusalem. Tellingly, the growth in Arab-majority towns was far less dramatic: 37 per cent in Bethlehem, 42 per cent in Nablus and 78 per cent in Jenin.

During the British civil administration in Palestine (1920 to 1948), restrictions were placed on Jewish immigration in order to appease Arab troublemakers. However, the situation regarding Arab settlement was much more lax. Historian and author Freddy Liebreich claims there was significant Arab immigration from the Hauran region of Syria during the Mandate era – and that the British authorities turned a blind eye.

However, some people were taking notice. The Hope Simpson Enquiry (1930) observed  there was significant illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan and Syria, which was negatively affecting prospective Jewish immigrants and contributing to Arab violence against Jews. The British Governor of the Sinai between 1922 and 1936 substantiated the view that unchecked Arab immigration was taking place, with most of the immigrants coming from the Sinai, Transjordan and Syria. And the Peel Commission reported in 1937 that a “shortfall of land” was “due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.”

Immigration continued at a pace until the Jews declared independence in 1948. The fact that Arab (largely Muslim) immigration continued right up until Israeli independence is borne out by the United Nations stipulation that any Arab refugee who had lived in Palestine for a mere two years prior to Jewish independence was entitled to refugee status. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency, Palestine refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

What happened to the Arab invaders of 629 CE?

If there were very few non-Jewish inhabitants in Palestine in the 16th and 17th centuries, what happened to the Arab invaders who arrived in 629 CE? Well, for a start, very few of the invaders actually stayed in Palestine. Many became absentee landlords who used native tenants to cultivate their estates and to pay the dhimmi tax. This is why Palestine, along with Egypt and Syria, remained overwhelmingly Christian for several more centuries. It is possible, however, that following the Muslim reconquest in 1187, many Jewish and Christian inhabitants of Palestine were forced to convert to Islam, thereby pushing up the number of Muslim inhabitants. However, Palestine’s population went into decline from the mid-14th century – in large part due to the Black Death, which swept in from eastern Europe and north Africa, travelling to Gaza, and making its way to Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. With no one to care for the land, many areas became malarial, especially in northern Palestine, which became largely uninhabitable. Depopulation continued as a consequence of the invasion of Palestine in 1831 by Muhammad Ali of Egypt and the ensuing Peasants’ Revolt of 1834, which reduced the male population of Palestine by about twenty per cent, with large numbers of peasants either deported to Egypt or drafted into Egypt’s military. Many others abandoned their farms and villages to join the Bedouin.

Clearly it would be futile to argue that there were no Arabs living in Eretz Israel in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, but the figures do show that the Arab population had been in state of flux for centuries and that the overwhelming majority were migrants from the rest of the Arab world and/or the Ottoman empire. This is important because it tells us that the popular notion of a deep-rooted Palestinian Arab history/culture is bogus. All the evidence points to the conspicuous absence of Arab culture in late 17th century Palestine; and even in the 18th and 19th centuries the Arab inhabitants were not indigenous but were latecomers. This explains why, historically, Arabs never talked about Palestinian identity – because there wasn’t one. They were Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan, Iraqi and Ottoman Arabs, and many of them expressed allegiance to the concept of a Greater Syria.

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s – nearly two decades after Israel declared independence – that a semi-coherent (and terroristic) Palestinian Arab identity came into being. Until then, the Arabs had refused to call themselves Palestinians because it was a name reserved for the Jews. When people today talk of a Arabic Palestinian culture or history, they are being disingenuous: the only Palestinian culture or history of any note is Jewish. Arabic-speaking Palestinianism started as late as the 1960s and was couched in fervently anti-Zionist and Judeophobic terms. Despite their successful efforts in deceiving the world, many Arab Palestinian leaders know the truth about the origins of their people. Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat made this very clear when he said, “The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”

Even as late as the 1970s, the notion of a Palestinian people was still nothing more than a terrorist construct designed to undermine Jewish claims to the land of Israel. In a conversation with Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977, the leader of the pro-Syria as-Sa’iqa faction of the PLO, Zuheir Mohsen, remarked: “It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity […] yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”

Why else do the people who claim to be Palestinians regularly turn down the possibility of an independent state alongside Israel? It is because the Arabs themselves don’t really believe in a State of Palestine. Their only interest is abolishing the Jewish presence between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Jewish self-determination is anathema to many Muslims who, since the time of Muhammed, have tried to keep the Jews in a state of subjugation and dhimmitude. When Arab and/or BDS protestors call for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea,” what they are really calling for is the genocide of the Jews.

Many of the problems experienced by the State of Israel stem from something very simple but profound –  the change of name. While it is totally understandable that the leaders of the Yishuv chose the name Israel for their state (New Judea was another option), it has had unfortunate consequences. By rejecting the labels Palestine and Palestinian, the Jews circumvented their own local history and identity, and bequeathed both the name and heritage of Palestine to the Arabs. What’s worse is the fact that the latter now claim to have been the indigenous people of Palestine all along – and the world (which has always been a sucker for anti-Jewish conspiracy theories) believes it.

It is surely time to remind the Arabs and the international community that Jews are the true Palestinians. Why else would there be a Palestinian Talmud or a Jewish newspaper called The Palestine Post. Why, until the creation of Israel, were the Jews known as Palestinians? Why did philosopher Immanuel Kant refer to Jews in Europe as “the Palestinians among us”? Why did Jewish campaigners in the early 20th century produce posters calling for Jews of America to register as members of the Zionist Organisation of America “for the freedom of Palestine”? Why does the 1939 flag of Palestine have a Star of David on it?

Now some critics might say, “Well, all this may be true, but the people who claim to be Palestinians are indeed Palestinians because they say  they are and they deserve our sympathy.” The trouble is, the so-called Palestinians make no attempt to explain who they really are but continue to perpetuate the antisemitic conspiracy theory that they are the primitive and indigenous people of Palestine who were/are cruelly oppressed by the wicked Zionists. The world believes this because they are told the lie often enough and because the Israeli state has done a poor job of communicating the truth.

And because of the big Palestinian lie, Jew-hatred is now at its highest level since the end of the Second World War and the United Nations has just passed Resolution 2334, one of the most antisemitic rulings in recent years. Until it is acknowledged by the UN and other major organizations that the Jewish people are the indigenous inhabitants of Eretz Israel – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – it is going to be difficult to break the impasse of stubborn anti-Jewish prejudice that is the real obstacle to peace.

Originally Published in Israel News Online.

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Let’s All Go To The Arafat Museum

Originally posted on Sultan Knish.

On the anniversary of his death, it is important that we remember Yasser Arafat (8 or 9 other names, including the ubiquitous Mohammed, may be added as needed) as a murderer, a liar and a thief.

Twelve years ago, Arafat, the Egyptian terrorist leader who founded an imaginary country on mass murder and our foreign aid, died covered in his own vomit and diarrhea. The possible causes of death, in order of probability, were AIDS, according to his private doctor and the head of the PFLP terror group, an Israeli laser, according to the Palestinian ambassador to Sri Lanka, thallium poisoning by Israel, polonium poisoning by his Palestinian rivals and the trained ape from Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue.

The investigation into Arafat’s death went on for over a decade and dragged in the Institut de Radiophysique in Switzerland, Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency and a mysteriously nameless team of French experts. Arafat’s “temporary” mausoleum, a building that looks like a Florida motel outhouse built on a giant scale, was rummaged and his rotting remains were poked over by three international teams who could agree on nothing except that the dead terrorist was probably dead.

Probably. It was hard to tell if Arafat was alive even back when he was still breathing and ranting.

After a decade of the minions of the occupying Muslim terror regime in Ramallah accusing each other, and occasionally the Jews with their lasers, the Arafat Museum has finally debuted the centerpiece of its exhibit, the dead Egyptian terrorist’s bedroom. Last month the museum managed to wrest Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize from Hamas without anyone being dragged behind a motorcycle or thrown off a building. This marked a major improvement in relations between the two aspiring Palestinian terror states. If that doesn’t merit handing out more peace prizes to everyone involved, what would?

When Hamas seized Gaza, they looted Arafat’s headquarters and stole everything. They stole Arafat’s fake military uniforms. They took his wife’s Christian Louboutin shoes which go for $675 at Saks Fifth Avenue. They took all the furniture. They even pried the tiles out of the walls and stole all his pipes.

And they took his Nobel Peace Prize.

According to Arafat’s nephew, some of the loot wound up in the bazaars of Gaza where the cycle of theft inherent in the Palestinian Authority continued.

Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and Arafat was a former Muslim Brotherhood man. And yet his former Brothers sold his pants and schmattas in the streets of Gaza only a few years after he was laid low by a polonium AIDS laser. If you can’t trust a Muslim Brother not to pawn your Nobel Peace Prize in exchange for a lightly stained area rug and an unlocked iPhone, whom can you trust?

The bankrupt Palestinian Authority, which is always begging for foreign aid, will see the opening of the pricey 28,000 square feet Arafat Museum. Visitors will be able to view his gun and what the Associated Press touchingly describes as “the small bedroom where their longtime leader Yasser Arafat spent his final years” with “only a single bed and small closet that barely holds four suits”.

Only four suits. It’s almost enough to make you weep. The other suits must have been stolen by
Hamas.

In real life, Arafat’s wealth was estimated at between $1 and $1.3 billion. At his peak, it might have been as high as $3 billion. His fashionable wife lived in Paris on a $100,000 a month allowance. Her personal refugee camp was located in a 19 room suite at the five-star Bristol Hotel. It’s unknown if UNRWA aid workers brought her caviar and champagne or if that indignity fell to the hotel staff.

Arafat wasn’t just good to his wife. He was also good to Bill Clinton’s wife. Arafat presented Hillary with gold and diamond necklaces, bracelets and earrings. Like the Bristol, Hillary’s diamonds and every act of racist mass murder perpetrated by Arafat’s terrorists was paid for by American taxpayers.

The Muslim settlers occupying ’67 Israel might have enjoyed a tour of the Bristol far more than a shrine that pretends Arafat wasn’t a billionaire who got ridiculously rich off his killing sprees. The “humble” bedroom is part of a museum, which also looks like a Florida motel, whose costs were estimated at $15 million and has been underway in some form or another since 2008.

Back when Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor, broke ground on it, it was supposed to take 18 months. But there’s usually more money to be made in not doing things in the West Bank than in doing them. And no one seems to be able to account for where the money is coming from which makes the project a true tribute to Arafat’s management of the Palestinian Authority.

But maybe it took that long to gather all those “thousands of personal belongings” of the dead mass murderer from the Gaza bazaars to deposit them in a museum dedicated to the Father of Palestine.

The entire thing is only temporary. Arafat is only temporarily resting in pieces, after being poked over by the French, the Russians and the Swiss, until his Jihadists, with some aid from the United Nations, conquer Jerusalem and relocate his remains, which by now can probably fit in a Ziploc bag.

Then Arafat will rise from his grave and demand that Hamas return his stolen pants.

It is important to properly memorialize Arafat. He was a murderer, a liar and a thief. And everyone knew it. The foreign ambassadors and leaders he dealt with knew it. Bill Clinton, who made him a world leader, knew it. You couldn’t spend 5 minutes with him before he tried to steal your wallet. Or, as was the case with Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, grope your leg and then give you a soulful kiss.

Arafat was a con artist who was the son of a failed con artist. He was born in Cairo and died near Paris. His first adult visit to Israel was with a band of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood terrorists who tried to attack Israeli farms, but despite facing only a handful of Jews armed with guns, they lost and had to run back home. Arafat’s military track record didn’t get any better from there.

He didn’t beat Israel on the battlefield. Instead he lied and cried. He played the victim often enough that world leaders decided that the best way to end his terrorism was to give him a terrorist state in Israel. Like the Holocaust, “Palestine” happened because millions followed a psychotic con artist’s murderous fantasies while much of the rest of the world defended him and made excuses for him. The “Palestinian” disaster has cost the lives of thousands, Jews, Christians and Muslims, who do not receive a fraction of the tributes that the architects of that national and international disaster do.

Arafat has a museum. The latest tribute to the Muslim mass murderer is funded by American taxpayers. Meanwhile his victims lie in quiet humble graves. No visitors tour their little bedrooms or note how few suits they had. No experts exhume their remains to determine the causes of their deaths.

But we know what killed them. Palestine did.

Arafat’s Big Lie, a lie so big it would have made Goebbels stand up and cheer, invented an imaginary country. And then it used that country as a call to genocide and an excuse for mass murder.

Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa was a mediocre murderer. He was a talented thief. But he was a truly unequaled liar. His lie still lives on. It has a flag. It receives billions in foreign aid every year. It is moving closer to recognition at the United Nations. Synagogues are bombed and Jewish students are assaulted on college campuses because of that lie.

Why was Arafat’s Palestine lie so successful? He told everyone what they wanted to hear.

The xenophobic Muslim majority in the region wanted to pretend that its efforts to exterminate the Jews were the noble strivings of a minority rather than the abusive atrocities of a racist majority.

The European left wanted to sweep away the Holocaust to legitimize Antisemitism all over again.

Western leaders wanted another Czechoslovakia they could carve up, Munich style, and serve up on a platter to head off the age of international Islamic terror that they could see rising on the horizon.

That collection of lies, shameful treacheries and bigotry is why Palestine exists. It all deserves a proper museum. A museum of lies and massacres that would hold Arafat’s looted Nobel Peace Prize and the names of his victims. That would showcase the mansions of Gaza and the lies of the press. It would remind us that that the Holocaust was built not on mere force, but on liars and their accomplices.

And there could be no better name for such an institution than the Arafat Museum.

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