Leftists Caught Red-Handed: ‘Burning Sheep’ Libel Was Faked

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu.

A Jordan Valley Arab farmer has exposed the tactic of leftists accepting Arab claims and falsely accusing Jews of attacking Arabs. He admitted that the “burning sheep” libel against Jews was meant to disguise his own blunder of losing control of a brush fire.

Last week, left-wing groups in Israel and counterparts in the United States spread a story that that an Arab shepherd “saw settlers light a fire in the field where his herd was grazing, burning to death 12 pregnant ewes, and then drive away."

The story of the sheep burning was so extreme that the police immediately doubted the claim. The supposed burning of the sheep occurred on the Sabbath, when observant Jews, the usual scapegoats, are forbidden to drive.

The Arab farmer, Samir Bani Fadel, claimed that four armed Jews approached him, chased him away, set fire to his field – which also is forbidden on Sabbath – and drove away as the fire spread and burned to death 12 pregnant ewes while injuring others.

Regardless of the doubts, the left-wing B'Tselem and Yesh Din human rights group rushed to allege that the supposed attack was another one of hundreds of supposed acts of vandalism by Jews against Arabs.

New York-based writer Philip Weiss promptly reprinted the libel on his Mondoweiss blog, and the image of sheep being cruelly burned aroused sympathy for Arabs and anger against Jews. “It was an awful sight,” the farmer said. "I've lost at least $12,000."

The Palestinian Authority called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop "settler violence.”

The tale began to unravel when Arabs pointed their fingers at residents of Itamar, an easy target as it is a religious community, but located almost an hour’s drive from the scene of the fire. The story then was changed, with the blame being placed on the closer community of Maaleh Ephraim, most of whose residents are professionals and who almost never have been accused of any activities against Arabs.

Fadel finally admitted to police the whole story was a lie and that he was responsible for the fire, which he set to burn thorns before it spread beyond control. Blaming Jews not only would have saved him from the embarrassment of having burned his own sheep, it also would allow him to claim damages from the government while being hailed as a hero among Palestinian Authority Arabs and left-wing anti-Zionists.

Hundreds of accusations against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria have been leveled in recent years, usually in claims that Jews attack or destroy olive trees, although evidence has been produced that in most cases the Arabs have simply pruned their trees, counted on lack of agricultural knowledge on the part of the media and leftwing groups, and then accused Jews of damaging them. Olive trees look hacked when they are pruned and months later, the supposedly damaged orchards have been seen to be full of fruit.

Another tactic has been to instigate violence, especially on the Shabbat when Jews are forbidden to take pictures, and then accuse Jews of attacking them.

Yossi Dagan, adviser to the Samaria Regional Council, commented, “There is a system among left-wing groups who campaign for financial contributions from foreign countries, many of whom are hostile to Israel. They use European Union money, which has reached billions of dollars the past few years. Many of the workers for left-wing groups enjoy high salaries and use reports from so-called human rights organizations and then travel throughout Judea and Samaria and blow up or change facts to spread libel against Jews.”

Dagan explained that Jews are blamed for burning cars in Arab villages when in fact they are damaged as a result of fights among Arabs.

David Ha’Ivri, who heads the Shomron (Samaria) Liaison Office that handles public relations for the Jewish communities in Samaria, said, "We have a very difficult task up against a bunch of well-funded NGOs like B’Tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights, whose agenda is to hurt the image of the State of Israel and the Jewish residents of Yehuda and Shomron (Judea and Samaria).

“Their slanderous claims are always given the benefit of the doubt by international media agencies who jump at an opportunity to project a Satanic image of the ‘evil Jewish settlers.’ The events reported in this story are a perfect example of blood libel promoted by NGOs who claim to be humanitarian and peace activists.”

From The Heart Of A Muslim

Written by Tawfik Hamid

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was born a Muslim and lived all my life as a follower of Islam.

After the barbaric terrorist attacks done by the hands of my fellow Muslims everywhere on this globe, and after the too many violent acts by Islamists in many parts of the world, I feel responsible as a Muslim and as a human being to speak out and tell the truth to protect the world and Muslims as well from a coming catastrophe and war of civilizations.

I have to admit that our current Islamic teaching creates violence and hatred toward non-Muslims.

We Muslims are the ones who need to change. Until now we have accepted polygamy, the beating of women by men, and killing those who convert from Islam to other religions.

We have never had a clear and strong stand against the concept of slavery or wars, to spread our religion and to subjugate others to Islam and force them to pay a humiliating tax called jizia.

We ask others to respect our religion while all the time we curse non-Muslims loudly (in Arabic) in our Friday prayers in the mosques.

What message do we convey to our children when we call the Jews "descendants of the pigs and monkeys"? [Yet, both Arabs and Jews are descendants of Ibrahim (Abraham)!]

Is this a message of love and peace, or a message of hate?

I have been into [Christian] churches and [Jewish] synagogues where they were praying for Muslims.

While all the time, we curse them, and teach our generations to call them "infidels", and to hate them.

We immediately jump in a 'knee jerk reflex' to defend Prophet Mohammad when someone accuses him of being a pedophile while, at the same time, we are proud with the story in our Islamic books that he married a young girl seven years old [Aisha]when he was above 50 years old.

I am sad to say that many, if not most of us, rejoiced in happiness after September 11th and after many other terror attacks.

Muslims denounce these attacks to look good in front of the media, but we condone the Islamic terrorists and sympathise with their cause. Until now our 'reputable' top religious authorities have never issued a fatwa or religious statement to proclaim Bin Laden as an apostate, while an author, like Rushdie, was declared an apostate who should be killed according to Islamic Shari'a law just for writing a book criticizing Islam.

Muslims demonstrated to get more religious rights as we did in France to stop the ban on the hijab (head scarf), while we did not demonstrate with such passion and in such numbers against the terrorist murders. It is our absolute silence against the terrorists that gives the energy to these terrorists to continue doing their evil acts.

We Muslims need to stop blaming our problems on others or on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

As a matter of honesty, Israel is the only light of democracy, civilization, and human rights in the whole Middle East.

We kicked out the Jews with no compensation or mercy from most of the Arab countries to make them "Jews-free countries" while Israel accepted more than a million Arabs to live there, have their own nationality, and enjoy their rights as human beings. In Israel, women can not be beaten legally by men, and any person can change his/her belief system with no fear of being killed by the Islamic law of 'apostasy,' while in our Islamic world people do not enjoy any of these rights.

I agree that the 'Palestinians' suffer, but they suffer because of their corrupt leaders and not because of Israel.

It is not common to see Arabs who live in Israel leaving to live in the Arab world. On the other hand,

we used to see thousands of Palestinians going to work with happiness in Israel, its 'enemy.'

If Israel treats Arabs badly as some people claim, surely we would have seen the opposite happening.

We Muslims need to admit our problems and face them. Only then we can treat them and start a new era to live in harmony with human mankind. Our religious leaders have to show a clear and very strong stand against polygamy, pedophilia, slavery, killing those who convert from Islam to other religions, beating of women by men, and declaring wars on non-Muslims to spread Islam.


Then, and only then, do we have the right to ask others to respect our religion. The time has come to stop our hypocrisy and say it openly: 'We Muslims have to change.'

"I am a Muslim by faith, a Christian by spirit, a Jew by heart, and above all I am a human being." ~ Dr. Tawfik Hamid.

Canada offers aid to Israel's fires battling

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Friday extended Canada's sympathy and condolences for the loss of life in the fires which hit Israel.

Harper made the remarks during his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who called earlier on the day.

Harper said that Canada would like to do everything possible to help Israel with this emergency and are prepared to offer any assistance required, including firefighting aircraft and personnel.

Lawrence Cannon, Canadian minister of foreign affairs, also offered his condolences to the families and friends of those who lost their lives and wish a quick recovery to those who were injured.

Cannon said that the government of Canada is working rapidly to identify Canadian assistance that could be provided to Israel to ensure the fire is extinguished as soon as possible.

"We stand with the people of Israel in this time of need,"he added."My thoughts are with all those affected by this terrible fire."

As of Friday, the death toll reached 42 during the fires which broke out along the Carmel mountain ridge overlooking northern Israel's Haifa and several small towns nearby, local media reported.

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, however, police on Friday apprehended two 35-year-old men, residents of Daliat al-Carmel, a Druze town near Haifa, who were reportedly being seen throw Molotov cocktails in a forest on a Carmel hilltop.

Canada, which has enjoyed good relations for decades, lost to Portugal in a vote for a seat at the Security Council of the United Nations in past October. Several observers attributed this loss to the pro-Israel policy of Canada at the UN, including Canadian PM Stephen Harper.

Source: Xinhua

What Would Canada Do?

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada at the Ottawa Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism

November 8, 2010
Ottawa, Ontario

Prime Minister Stephen Harper today made the following remarks at the Ottawa Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism:

“Members of the Steering Committee, fellow parliamentarians, Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by saying how delighted I am to see so many of you from around the world, gathered here in Ottawa for the second annual conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism.

“It is a sign, not only of your commitment to our common cause, but also of the momentum established at the London Conference last year. It is, therefore, a great sign of hope.

“History teaches us that anti-Semitism is a tenacious and particularly dangerous form of hatred. And recent events are demonstrating that this hatred is now in resurgence throughout the world. That is why the work of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism has never been so important or timely as it is now.

“On behalf of the Government of Canada and all Canadians, I commend you and support you in the great and important work that you are doing.

“I would like to thank Minister Jason Kenney, for inviting the ICCA to Ottawa, and for his outstanding record of leadership in combating anti-Semitism.

“I would like also to thank my introducer and friend, Scott Reid, Chair of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, and Mario Silva, Vice Chair, for organizing this conference.

“And I would like to thank all my colleagues in the Parliament of Canada here today, including Professor Irwin Cotler, for their dedication to your mission.

“Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, two weeks ago I visited Ukraine for the first time.

“In Kiev I laid a wreath at Babi Yar, the site of one of the numerous atrocities of the Holocaust. I was left there with much the same impression as I had in Auschwitz in 2008 — that such horrors defy all comprehension.

“At the killing grounds of Babyn Yar, I knew I was standing in a place where evil — evil at its most cruel, obscene, and grotesque — had been unleashed. But while evil of this magnitude may be unfathomable, it is nonetheless a fact.

“It is a fact of history. And it is a fact of our nature — that humans can choose to be inhuman. This is the paradox of freedom. That awesome power, that grave responsibility — to choose between good and evil.

“Let us not forget that even in the darkest hours of the Holocaust, men were free to choose good. And some did. That is the eternal witness of the Righteous Among the Nations. And let us not forget that even now, there are those who would choose evil and would launch another Holocaust, if left unchecked. That is the challenge before us today.

“The horror of the Holocaust is unique, but it is just one chapter in the long and unbroken history of anti-Semitism. Yet, in contemporary debates that influence the fate of the Jewish homeland, unfortunately, there are those who reject the language of good and evil. They say that the situation is not black and white, that we mustn’t choose sides.

“In response to this resurgence of moral ambivalence on these issues, we must speak clearly. Remembering the Holocaust is not merely an act of historical recognition.

“It must also be an understanding and an undertaking. An understanding that the same threats exist today. And an undertaking of a solemn responsibility to fight those threats.

“Jews today in many parts of the world and many different settings are increasingly subjected to vandalism, threats, slurs, and just plain, old-fashioned lies.

“Let me draw your attention to some particularly disturbing trends. Anti-Semitism has gained a place at our universities, where at times it is not the mob who are removed, but the Jewish students under attack. And, under the shadow of a hateful ideology with global ambitions, one which targets the Jewish homeland as a scapegoat, Jews are savagely attacked around the world, such as, most appallingly, in Mumbai in 2008.

“One ruthless champion of that ideology brazenly threatens to ‘wipe Israel off the map,’ and time and again flouts the obligations that his country has taken under international treaties. I could go on, but I know that you will agree on one point: that this is all too familiar.

“We have seen all this before. And we have no excuse to be complacent. In fact we have a duty to take action. And for all of us, that starts at home.

“In Canada, we have taken a number of steps to assess and combat anti-Semitism in our own country. You will no doubt hear from my Canadian colleagues about the measures we have taken to date.

“I will mention for the time being that, for the first time, we are dealing with Canada’s own record of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism. We have created a fund for education about our country’s deliberate rejection of Jewish refugees before and during the Second World War.

“But of course we must also combat anti-Semitism beyond our borders, an evolving, global phenomenon. And we must recognize, that while its substance is as crude as ever, its method is now more sophisticated.

“Harnessing disparate anti-Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western ideologies, it targets the Jewish people by targeting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world, and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so.

“We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is. Of course, like any country, Israel may be subjected to fair criticism. And like any free country, Israel subjects itself to such criticism — healthy, necessary, democratic debate. But when Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack — is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand. Demonization, double standards, delegitimization, the three D’s, it is the responsibility of us all to stand up to them.

“And I know, by the way, because I have the bruises to show for it, that whether it is at the United Nations, or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric, to pretend it is just being even-handed, and to excuse oneself with the label of ‘honest broker.’ There are, after all, a lot more votes, a lot more, in being anti-Israeli than in taking a stand. But, as long as I am Prime Minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost. And friends, I say this not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israeli mob tells us all too well if we listen to it, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are a threat to all of us.

“Earlier I noted the paradox of freedom. It is freedom that makes us human. Whether it leads to heroism or depravity depends on how we use it.

“As the spectre of anti-Semitism spreads, our responsibility becomes increasingly clear. We are citizens of free countries. We have the right, and therefore the obligation, to speak out and to act. We are free citizens, but also the elected representatives of free peoples. We have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to challenge the aggressor, to protect and promote human rights, human dignity, at home and abroad. None of us really knows whether we would choose to do good, in the extreme circumstances of the Righteous. But we do know there are those today who would choose to do evil, if they are so permitted. Thus, we must use our freedom now, and confront them and their anti-Semitism at every turn.

“That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the purpose of our intervention today: our shared determination to confront this terrible hatred. The work we have undertaken, in our own countries and in cooperation with one another, is a sign of hope.

“Our work together is a sign of hope, just as the existence and persistence of the Jewish homeland is a sign of hope. And it is here that history serves not to warn but to inspire.

“As I said on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Israel appeared as a light, in a world emerging from deep darkness. Against all odds, that light has not been extinguished. It burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations — freedom, democracy and justice.

“By working together more closely in the family of civilized nations, we affirm and strengthen those principles. And we declare our faith in humanity’s future in the power of good over evil.

“Thank you for all you are doing to spread that faith. And thank you for your kind attention.

“Thank you very much.”
Stephen Harper

Mark Kennedy, Postmedia News · Sunday, Nov. 7, 2010

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that Canada has refused to “pretend” it is being an honest broker on Israel — even though it meant this country lost votes in its recent bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Mr. Harper made the remarks in a speech on Parliament Hill at a gathering of international parliamentarians and experts attending a conference on combating anti-Semitism.

The prime minister delivered a strongly worded warning about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Canada and abroad. He said the persecution of Jews is becoming a global phenomenon in which anti-Semitic ideologies target the Jewish people in their “homeland” of Israel and uses the “language of human rights to do so.”

“When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand,” said Mr. Harper.

“I know, by the way, because I have the bruises to show for it, that whether it is at the United Nations, or any other international forum, the easiest thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric, to pretend it is just about being even-handed, and to excuse oneself with the label of ‘honest broker.’”

“There are, after all, a lot more votes — a lot more — in being anti-Israeli than in taking a stand. But, as long as I am prime minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost. Not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israeli mob tells us all too well, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are a threat to all of us.”

Canada lost its bid for the UN Security Council seat in mid-October. It withdrew from a run-off against Portugal after twice running second to the diminutive European state.

The result meant that Mr. Harper’s government was the first to have failed to maintain Canada’s record of winning a place on the 15-member body — the UN’s most powerful — once per decade since the United Nations’ inception in 1945.

While the vote in the 192-member UN General Assembly is secret, broad opposition from members of the Islamic block appeared to have scuttled Canada’s chances of returning to the council for the 2011-2012 two-year term.

The Harper government’s shift toward support for Israel compared to positions held by previous Liberal governments had not gone down well with members of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Conference, said officials based at the UN.

In his speech on Monday, Mr. Harper delivered a sombre address about the state of humanity.

“It is a fact of history, and it is a fact of our nature, that humans can choose to be inhuman. This is the paradox of freedom. That awesome power, that grave responsibility — to choose between good and evil.”

Mr. Harper said the world must never forget that there are those who would “choose evil” and would launch another Holocaust, if left unchecked.

“In response to this resurgence of moral ambivalence on these issues, we must speak clearly,” said the prime minister.

“Jews today in many parts of the world and many different settings are increasingly subjected to vandalism, threats, slurs, and just plain, old-fashioned lies.”

Mr. Harper said it is particularly disturbing that anti-Semitism has gained a place at “our universities,” where at times, it is not the “mob who are removed, but the Jewish students under attack.”

“And, under the shadow of a hateful ideology with global ambitions, one which targets the Jewish homeland as a scapegoat, Jews are savagely attacked around the world — such as, most appallingly, in Mumbai in 2008.”


Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Harper+says+Canada+will+stand+Israel/3794912/story.html#ixzz14iYelzwJ

The UNs War on Israel—and Canada

By Stephen Brown, Oct 13, 2010 in Frontpagemag.com

Canada paid the price yesterday for its principled foreign policy stance, especially for its support of Israel, when it lost its bid to Portugal for a non-permanent seat on the powerful United Nations Security Council. In an indication as to how much the world has changed, it was the first time since the world body’s inception in 1945 that Canada had not won a Security Council seat after having been elected in every previous decade.

Canada, a founding UN member, withdrew its candidacy for the two seats reserved for “Western European and Other States” after the second ballot when it lost a third of the support it had received on the first ballot. Requiring a two-thirds majority, Canada received only 78 votes while Portugal took 113. Portugal won unopposed in the third round of voting, while Germany claimed outright the other non-permanent seat, valid for a two-year term, on the first ballot with 128 votes. Canada had last served on the council in 2000.

To the chagrin of the UN’s petty tyrants and dictators, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in power since 2006, is a strong, unabashed supporter of Israel. And to his credit, Harper steadfastly refused to “water down” his government’s foreign policy direction to curry their favour during Canada’s campaign to secure a seat. The Conservatives even announced the day before the vote that it was strengthening its trading relationship with Israel, a move that would have displeased the UN’s Arab-Muslim block. For years, these countries have tried to diplomatically isolate Israel, passing numerous motions against the Jewish state.

“The principles that underlie the policy of foreign affairs, freedom, democracy, human rights and common law, are the foundation of each of these decisions. Some would say that because of our attachment to these values, we lost the seat. If that is the case, so be it,” said a defiant Canadian foreign minister, Lawrence Cannon, after yesterday’s defeat.

Canada’s stout refusal to compromise on those values also earned a rebuke recently from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Like a schoolyard bully, the UAE abruptly banned Canada this week from its military base, Camp Mirage, on Emirate territory that the Canadians have been using since 2001 to deploy their soldiers to Afghanistan. The Emirate government even refused to allow the Canadian defence minister and chief of defence staff to fly over its territory when the two high-ranking officials were returning from a three-day tour of Afghanistan.

The alleged reason for the shocking base cancellation was a dispute over valuable landing slots in Canada for the UAE’s state-owned airlines. Despite the fact the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, where over 150 Canadian soldiers have died, will now face increased difficulties, the Harper government, taking its usual ethical stance, has refused to link “air negotiations to geopolitical issues.”

Naturally, Canadian liberal and leftist critics were quick to blame the Conservative government for the recent foreign policy reversals. The tilt towards Israel, they believe, cost Canada votes among the UN’s Arab and Muslim countries and the states they influence, which constitute about a third of the UN’s 192 votes. Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor and friend of the Obama White House, taking advantage of Conservative government’s “embarrassment” and hoping for electoral gains, has called the UN rebuff “a sad day for Canada.

“After more than four years of a Harper Conservative government, the sad reality is that too many countries have lost faith in the way Canada conducts its international relations,” Ignatieff said.

The Conservatives believe, however, that it was Ignatieff himself who helped undermine the Canadian bid and therefore bears a large measure of responsibility for Canada’s historic loss. Recently, the Liberal Party leader questioned whether his country even deserved a seat on the Security Council because of the Conservative record on global warming, foreign aid priorities and its ignoring of the UN since 2006. Cannon said Ignatieff’s comments did not allow Canada to speak with one voice, which was used in the UN against the Canadian election effort.

Iganatieff is in good company when he expressed doubt over Canada’s fitness to serve again on the Security Council. The Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) had called on Arab and Muslim UN delegations to vote against Canada. Among the reasons the CAF lists for a negative vote are that Canada was the first country to withdraw from the racist and anti-semitic UN Durban II conference and its support of Israeli incursions into Gaza and Lebanon. Another transgression, probably the greatest in the CAF’s eyes, is that Prime Minister Harper refuses to deal with the CAF.

But while the left/liberal media and politicians in Canada are calling the UN defeat “an embarrassment” and “a loss of face”, many Canadians are pleased with the vote result. They view the UN as a morally bankrupt organization that manifests its internal corruption by having Libya as head of its human rights panel. Containing tyrants whose only goals are to destroy Israel and to suck as much money out of the West as possible so that they can then steal on a larger scale than they are already doing in their own countries, such Canadians view this week’s rejection by the UN as a badge of honor. They believe it is time for Canada to reduce its economic and political investment and withdraw from this corrupt organization that regards itself as the world’s unelected socialist government and help form a league for democratic countries only.

But until then, unusual for governments in this day and age, Canadians will continue to be served by a foreign policy of unbending moral convictions, as expressed by Lawrence Cannon:

“We will not back down from our principles that form the basis of our great country and we will continue to pursue them on the international stage.”

At The Heart Of The Palestinian Authority - Minister of Religious Affairs threatens war over Jerusalem

TIME Magazine’s Latest Blood Libel About Israel

By Prof. Phyllis Chesler re: TIME's Anti-Israel Blood Libel

Prof. Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. She also is an author and appears often in international media interviews. She lives in New York City.

The September 13, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine arrived yesterday. The cover story is titled “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” and is illustrated by a large Jewish star composed of daisies. Yes, daises—as in “counting daisies, don’t have a care in the world.”

This is precisely the point of Karl Vick’s article. He writes:

Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter [of peace with the Palestinians]. They’re otherwise engaged: They’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of the late summer … they have moved on.

Vick quotes an Israeli real estate agent in Ashdod, one Eli, who tells him:

People are indifferent. They don’t care if there’s going to be war. They don’t care if there’s going to be peace. They don’t care. They live in the day.

According to Vick, Israelis don’t care about peace, peace negotiations, or about the Palestinians because they are simply having too good a time: sunbathing, swimming, café-hopping, profiting from start-up companies, and, according to polls cited by Vick, utterly disconnected from “politics;” indeed Vick suggests that Israelis resemble Californians more than they resemble Egyptians. These are all points which scream: Israel does not fit in; if Israelis were only more impoverished, more indolent, and paradoxically, even more “laid back,” they might be recognizable as indigenous to the region, a true part of the Middle East.

These are Vick’s thoughts, not mine.

Of course, Jews are the original Palestinians and the most indigenous of the region’s inhabitants; yes, there are many impoverished Israelis, both Jews and non-Jews; and, let’s not forget that there are even some Israelis who remain permanently on high alert for the next terrorist attack, permanently scarred by the last ones. For a moment, let’s forget about all that. Allow me to ask: Why doesn’t Vick also point out that Palestinians are leading the high life on the West Bank and in sumptuous villas on both the West Bank and in Gaza; that they, too, are sunbathing, swimming, shopping, dining out, and relaxing at the beach—at least as much as the Islamist thugs who run the lives of Palestinians will allow it?

Vick and his editors at TIME seem to think that showing six photos of Israelis at leisure: blowing smoke on a beach chair, lounging on a beach chair, resting in an army uniform on the beach without a chair, playing with one’s baby in a stroller, sitting at a café—are proof that Israelis are engaging in activities which are not admirable, are, in fact, “proof” that they are not suffering but rather, proof that Israelis simply don’t care about peace with the Palestinians. And Vick brings in polls as well as expert and person-in-the-street opinions to back up this claim.

Vick writes that real estate is booming, as is business in general, Israeli “brainiacs” have helped their nation avoid the economic disasters that have plunged Europe and America into a recession. He literally writes this. “Israel avoided the debt traps that dragged the U.S. and Europe into recession. It is known as a start-up nation—second only to the U.S. companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange.”

Is Vick aware that, consciously or not, intentionally or not, he is counting on the world’s long-held resentment about Jewish creativity, genius, and scientific and economic success—counting on the world’s willingness to scapegoat Israel once again for crimes that it has not committed? Or because Jews seem to “know something,” maybe they are channeling God directly and thus, the deck is stacked against non-Jews. Vick presents Israel’s “success” as somehow unseemly, because it makes other nations look bad. Does he harbor the suspicion that Jewish prosperity has been “stolen” from non-Jews or is he merely advertising that Jewish gold is there, ripe for the taking?

Buried—but really buried-- in Vick’s four page cover piece are snippets of true facts: That the Israelis are weary of peace negotiations which never succeed because the Palestinians do not want peace; that Arabs and Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state and as many Jews as possible.

But Vick fails to convey that negotiations cannot work as long as the ultra-Nazified Arab Islamic propaganda against Jews and Israel continues to turn out children who hate Jews and who become human homicide bombs, snipers, kidnappers, kassam rocket throwers, etc.

Here is what Vick utterly fails to comprehend, namely, that the Israelis are not merely tired, disenchanted, living in la-la land a la southern Californians (hence, the Jewish star made of daisies on the cover). The Israelis are actually showing the entire world how to embrace life, even as they live, trembling, in the shadow of death. They are teaching the world how to “love life more than they fear death.” A new and wonderful book A New Shoah. The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, which is not yet out, makes precisely this point.

Pictured: Prof. Phyllis Chesler The Jewish insistence on life may be the key to our survival as a people despite ceaseless persecution. It might be the lesson, the model, for all humanity in an era of genocides, civil wars, torture chambers, tyrannies, and totalitarian regimes. Why is TIME turning things on their head and refusing to recognize the courage and the heroism of Jewish Israelis who choose to live in the moment when the moment is all they have? Against all odds, the Jews simply refuse to give up. As Meotti writes of the numerous victims of terrorism during the ongoing Intifada of 2000, “Israel teaches the world love of life, not in the sense of a banal joie de vivre, but as a solemn celebration.”

Meotti begins where I began in early 2004, when I wrote about a new Holocaust in the pages of The Jewish Press, a Holocaust which is now based in Israel. At the time, I was not heard beyond a small circle. I did what Meotti now does in his opening pages. Meotti fully understands that Israel is the “first country ever to experience suicide terrorism on a mass scale: that more than 150 suicide attacks have been carried out plus 500 have been prevented." According to Meotti, there have been “1,723 people (murdered) and 10,000 injured” in Israel. Meotti does what I did: He converts these numbers into the demographic equivalent of attacks on Americans. When I did so there were somewhat fewer people in both categories. Thus, Meotti writes that in American population terms, this means that “74,000 Americans” would have been killed and “400,000 injured.”

Vick does not factor this grave reality into his article. Nor does he seem to know how high the Jewish population growth was in the DP camps right after the Holocaust. Can he comprehend that permanently endangered Jews—a people that has survived as a people for nearly six thousand years—the Chosen People—have always chosen life in the moment, have chosen to seize life with both hands, even as they memorialize their dead and make sense of their persecution in a way that illuminates this particular Hell for all humanity?

What Meotti is doing is remembering the lives and the deaths of the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism during the last decade. I have only read the first few chapters but cannot put it down. These are unknown stories, unnamed victims, whose mortal remains have often evaporated, disintegrated as surely as those Jews who literally went up in smoke during the Nazi Holocaust. His stories are mainly of victims who were unarmed and helpless and who, it turns out, were actually exceptionally kind to others, often to the very Arab Palestinians who shot them down, bludgeoned them to death, or blew them up into unrecognizable bone fragments, drops of blood, perhaps a few teeth.

I look forward to completing Meotti’s book. I hope that people more fully understand that TIME Magazine as well as countless other media in the Western world, can no longer be trusted to tell the truth.

Bret Stephens on Shalom TV: The Liberal Case For Israel

US President Barack Obama’s warm endorsement of the plan to build a mosque by the ruins of the World Trade Center tells Israel – and its enemies – eve

Our World: Standing on a landmine
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
17/08/2010

Speaking during a Ramadan fast breaking meal at the White House to an audience of people affiliated with various Muslim Brotherhood- related groups in the US, Obama couched his support for the mosque at Ground Zero in constitutional terms.

In his words, “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.”

Of course, none of those who have voiced opposition to the mosque project at Ground Zero have claimed that the Islamic group behind the mosque project is acting unlawfully in seeking to construct a mosque. The nearly 70 percent of Americans who oppose building a mosque at Ground Zero oppose the mosque because they believe it is wrong to build a mosque at the site where less than a decade ago Muslims acting in the name of Islam murdered nearly 3,000 people in an act of war against the US and an act of terror against the American people.

Obama has been pilloried by his opponents for his position. And his fellow Democrats, facing the likelihood of massive defeats in the Congressional elections in three months, are reportedly deeply frustrated by his statements. Indeed, the uproar Obama’s pro-mosque remarks has unleashed has been so harsh it raises the question of why he made it.

THERE ARE two possible explanations for Obama’s move. Either he was motivated by politics or he was motivated by ideology. The view that Obama was motivated by politics is easily dismissed. With more than two-thirds of Americans telling pollsters they oppose the Ground Zero mosque project, it makes no political sense for a politician to strike out a position in favor of the mosque. Indeed, major Democrats have either refused to state a position on the issue or, like New York Governor David Paterson, they have recommended that the mosque builders construct their mosque elsewhere.

Perhaps Obama thought he could he could get away with making his statement. However, with his polling numbers consistently eroding, it is hard to imagine Obama’s advisers would have told him that was a realistic view.

This leaves ideology. But what ideology motivates Obama to embrace such an unpopular initiative at such an explosive political juncture? Obama and his supporters would like us to believe this is a civil rights issue. In his defense of the Ground Zero mosque, Obama claimed his position was based on the American values such as, “The laws that we apply without regard to race, or religion, or wealth, or status. Our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect towards those who are different from us.”

But if Obama is motivated by a belief in civil rights that is so strong it propels him to take on deeply unpopular causes in an election season, then one could reasonably expect that his support for civil rights would be absolute. That is, one could expect him to use the same yardstick for all groups, in all places and at all times.

But for Obama, there are some groups who must be denied the same civil rights he upholds as absolute in his defense of the plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero. As Obama has made clear since his first days in office, he believes that Jews should be denied the right to their property in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria simply because they are Jews.

OBAMA IS so firm in his belief that Jews should be denied civil rights in Israel’s capital and in the heartland of Jewish history that he has provoked multiple crises in his relations with Israel to advance this bigoted view. Almost from his first day in office Obama has struck out a radical position in which he has insisted that Jews must be prohibited from building anything – synagogues, homes, nurseries, schools – in Judea, Jerusalem and Samaria on land they own. Jews – Israeli and non-Israeli – should be barred from exercising their property rights even if their construction plans have already been approved “in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

At the same time, Obama has insisted that Israel take no action to enforce its “local laws and ordinances” against illegal structures built by Arabs in Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria.

Next month the deeply discriminatory and legally dubious 10-month moratorium on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria that Obama coerced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into instituting is set to end. So now Obama is putting the full weight of the White House on Israel to again coerce Netanyahu into prolonging the discriminatory ban that denies the civil rights and property rights of Jews simply because they are Jewish.

Obama claims to be embracing the nullification of Jewish civil right in the interests of peace. In his stated view, to forge peace in the Middle East it is necessary for the Palestinians to achieve statehood. But it hard to see how the establishment of a Palestinian state squares with Obama’s purported dedication to civil rights.

In a briefing with the Egyptian media last week Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told reporters that no Jews will be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. He also said that while he would agree to allow NATO forces to deploy in the future Palestinian state, he would not permit any Jewish soldiers to serve in the NATO units stationed on the territory of such a state. As he put it, “I will not agree that there will be Jews among NATO forces and I will not allow even one Israeli to live amongst us on the Palestinian soil.”

The notion that an inherently anti-Semitic Palestinian state, predicated on Jew hatred that strong, could possibly live at peace with Israel is simply ridiculous. But tellingly, in all the American pressure that has been placed on Abbas to begin direct negotiations with Israel, at no time has the administration been reported to have insisted that Abbas abandon his anti-Semitism. Obama has made no statement addressing the fact that the Palestinians demand that Jews be barred from living in the future Palestinian state. He has certainly not objected to this position although it squares with none of the American values of tolerance and property rights he upheld so strongly in his remarks on the Ground Zero mosque.

SO THE ideology Obama holds so strongly that it provokes him to take positions antithetical to the political interests of his party during an election season is not civil rights. Rather it has to do with his commitment to advancing the interests of a specific group or groups over the interests of other specific groups. In the case of the Ground Zero mosque he prefers the rights of Muslims over the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. In the case of the Palestinians, he prefers their anti-Semitic nationalism over the civil rights of Jews.

Obama’s behavior tells Israel’s leaders something very important about how they should think about their relations with the Obama administration. It tells them that Obama is so wed to his ideology that he will push it regardless of political conditions. This means that for Israel, dealing with Obama is like standing on a landmine. Just as a landmine can explode at any minute, Obama can attack Israel at any moment. He is so ideologically bound to the Palestinian cause against Israel that he is liable to provoke a crisis when it is least politically advantageous – from his perspective – for him to do so.

This lesson is particularly urgent on the eve of yet another round of direct negotiations with the Palestinians and as the freeze on Jewish property rights is about to expire. Obama’s ideological fanaticism means that nothing Israel does in the upcoming talks will help us.



As Obama’s media surrogates like Tony Karon at Time magazine have made clear in recent weeks, the anti-Israel narrative has already coalesced. Everything that happens regarding those negotiations is Israel’s fault. It is Israel’s fault that they haven’t begun. It will be Israel’s fault when they falter. It will be Israel’s fault when they fail. And if they succeed, Israel will still be blameworthy.

Facing this US President and his radical ideology, Netanyahu and his deputies must understand that they cannot appease him. They cannot convince him of Israel’s good intentions.

The US leader who has rejected the expressed views of 68 percent of his fellow citizens in favor of the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero is not going to be moved by reason. The American president who defends the Ground Zero mosque builders even though their leader refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization and has claimed that the US had the Sept. 11 attacks coming to it; and the American president who upholds the Palestinian cause even though it is virulently, and often genocidally anti-Semitic is not going to be appeased by Israeli building freezes and other confidence building gestures.

What this means is that Netanyahu and his deputies must concentrate on defending Israel and advancing its national interests. It is in Israel’s national interests to guarantee the civil rights and property rights of Jews. It is in Israel’s national interests to forthrightly set out and defend Israel’s legal rights in Judea and Samaria and its sovereignty in united Jerusalem. It is in Israel’s national interest to enforce its laws without prejudice towards all its citizens and expect all its citizens to respect its laws.

We are dealing with a self-consciously radical President who intends to remake the US relationship with the Muslim world. We will find no understanding from him.

The Four-fold Threat

By LESLIE SUSSER, in The Jerusalem Report 07/27/2010 16:21

Presenting a harrowing report on Tehran’s crimes at home and abroad, Irwin Cotler presses for effective sanctions to bring Ahmadinejad’s Iran to its knees.


FOR THE PAST SEVERAL years Irwin Cotler has been going around the world single-mindedly making the case against “Ahmadinejad’s Iran,” a term he uses to distinguish Iran’s regime from its people.

In recent weeks, Cotler, a Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament and a former attorney general and minister of justice, met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, as well as with government leaders and parliamentarians in the US, Germany, Austria, Israel and several other countries, to advocate stronger action against the Iranian regime’s continuing violations of international law and human rights in four key areas: its nuclear weapons program, its links to international terror, its incitement to genocide and its violent domestic repression.

Last year, in the Canadian Parliament, Cotler initiated detailed parliamentary hearings on the Iranian violations. In parallel, he organized “The Responsibility to Prevent Coalition,” a group of like-minded academics, politicians and freedom activists. The result, a 134-page document entitled “The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition,” which is largely based on the parliamentary hearings and is endorsed by some 100 international law scholars, human rights advocates, former government leaders, parliamentarians and Iranian freedom activists.

This is probably the most up-to-date and comprehensive public report on Iranian violations in all four areas. Presented by Cotler at a news conference in Jerusalem in mid-July, the 134-page report contains new and disturbing witness testimony, and calls on states and international bodies to heed their legal obligations to hold Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account.

In Cotler’s view, time is fast running out and things are not getting any better. On the contrary, he says, since Ahmadinejad’s return to power after the rigged June 2009 presidential election, there has been a dramatic deterioration, especially in two of the four areas of concern: Iran’s nuclear weapons drive has been accelerated, and the post-election crackdown on domestic dissent increased the rate and the scope of beatings, incarcerations, tortures and executions.

IN PRESENTING THE REPORT, Cotler argues that one of the cardinal mistakes the international community is making is to focus exclusively on Iran’s illicit nuclear program. This deflects attention from and “sanitizes” the other major Iranian violations, and ignores the link between the various threats, for example, between Iran’s potential possession of a nuclear bomb and its incitement to genocide against Israel.

“We need a comprehensive set of remedies and sanctions to combat the four-fold critical mass of threat,” he declares.

Another major problem, in Cotler’s view, is that so far sanctions “have been honored more in the breach than in the observance.”

For example, between 1999 and 2009, the US awarded $107 billion in contracts to firms trading with Iran while sanctions were in place, $15 billion of which went to firms in the oil industry. The aim, therefore, is to get much stiffer sanctions in place, strictly enforced by all participating countries, and directed specifically at each of the four threats. If all these conditions pertain, Cotler believes Ahmadinejad’s Iran can be stopped without the West having to resort to force.

But will sanctions be enough to prevent a determined fundamentalist Iranian regime bent on regional hegemony from producing a nuclear bomb? What more can the international community do short of force against the fourfold Iranian threat? And, given the ruthless, repressive nature of the regime, what chance does the opposition Green Movement, spawned by last year’s vote rigging, have of effecting regime change from below? The “Responsibility to Prevent” report catalogues a long list of Iranian abuses in all four areas. On the nuclear threat, it argues that Iran is well on the way to producing a bomb which would further its hegemonic ambitions and destabilize the region. With a bomb, even if it didn’t use it, Iran would be able to extend its influence, engage in political blackmail, interfere in the internal affairs of neighboring oil countries and prevent the resolution of conflicts.

According to Bassem Eid, founder and executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, the Iranians are already playing a major spoiler role on the Israeli-Palestinian front through their Hamas proxies in Gaza. For example, he maintains that when Israel and Hamas were just a hairsbreadth away from a deal to free captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Iran stepped in to torpedo it.

Moreover, he says, Iran is preventing Egypt from achieving reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that could pave the way for more meaningful peace talks with Israel. “Iran will never ever allow anyone from the Hamas government – not [Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled] Mashal, [Hamas Gaza leader Ismail] Haniyeh or [senior Hamas official Mahmoud] A-Zahar – to reach any kind of reconciliation with Fatah,” Eid, a signatory to the Responsibility to Prevent report, asserts at the Jerusalem news conference. If Iran were to have a bomb, that kind of subversive influence would be even more difficult to counter.

On the terror front, the report highlights the fact that the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind the bombing of the Jewish AMIA Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed and 300 wounded, and cites this as another reason for international sanctions against the IRGC and its leaders. The report also notes that Ahmad Vahidi, then head of the IRGC, is now Iran’s defense minister, and in charge of its nuclear weapons program. This raises a chilling question: If Iran were to develop nuclear weaponry, would Vahidi keep terrorists from acquiring a “dirty bomb?”
ACCORDING TO COTLER, WHO as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada prosecuted Rwandans for genocidal incitement, the state-sanctioned incitement to genocide against Israel in Ahmadinejad’s Iran is stronger. Moreover, he says, it comes not “just from a bunch of extremists, it comes from the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it comes from Ahmadinejad, and it comes from the Revolutionary Guards.” In his view, the international community has singularly failed to address the problem, with potentially horrific consequences. “The enduring lesson of the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur is that these genocides occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide… The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. And we are not paying attention to this state-sanctioned incitement to genocide and to these words,” he insists.

In its incitement to genocide, the Iranian regime has gone through the full gamut of impugning Israel’s legitimacy as a state and that of the Jews as a nation. Ahmadinejad has denigrated Israel as “a false regime,” and Israelis as “an invented people.” Israel has been disparaged by Iranian leaders as “a cancerous tumor” and Jews as “a filthy germ.” In other words, Israel has been delegitimized and Jews dehumanized to justify their destruction.

Ever since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, Iranian leaders have kept up a persistent barrage of threatening, genocidal language. Two striking examples: “There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state,” Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Khamenei declared in January 2001, and at the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in October 2005, Ahmadinejad insisted that “the occupying [Israeli] regime must be wiped off the map.”

The leadership’s aggressive tone is often echoed in the Iranian press: “The nation of Muslims must prepare for the great war, so as to completely wipe out the Zionist regime and remove this cancerous growth. As the Imam Khomeini said, Israel must collapse,” the pro-regime Resalat newspaper wrote in an editorial in October 2006. And in February of this year, Khamenei warned that Israel’s “obliteration is certain,” and Ahmadinejad threatened that Israel will be “finished off… once and for all.” In Cotler’s mind, there is no doubt that Iran has already committed the crime of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Moreover, he points out that state parties to the 1948 convention are obligated to take action against Iran for doing so. “It is not optional,” he says at the news conference.

“Yet not one state party to the genocide convention, not the US, not my country Canada, not any EU country, has undertaken any of the mandated legal remedies under the convention to combat or prevent this threat,” he complains.

The closest anyone came to taking legal action was through an initiative launched in 2006 by Israel’s former UN ambassador, Dore Gold, and a group of retired diplomats.

They prepared a detailed indictment against Ahmadinejad on charges of incitement to genocide and set about getting state support for its submission to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Significantly, a February 2007 conference they organized in the British House of Commons was attended by then-Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and in its wake 67 members of Parliament supported an early day motion calling on the British government to press through the UN Security Council for Ahmadinejad’s indictment for incitement to commit genocide. A similar event at the New York Bar Association received the endorsement of then-senator Hillary Clinton. There was also some sporadic support from Australia and Canada. But in late 2007, a resolution passed earlier by the US House of Representatives urging Ahmadinejad’s indictment by the Security Council got stuck in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, and the initiative seemed to peter out. “Still, if the Israeli government were to take up the matter today, there are a number of islands of support in the West it could build on,” Gold tells The Report.

Only a country or group of countries can initiate a prosecution at the International Court of Justice, and some argue Israel would be ill advised to do so because it would open itself to similar treatment by its enemies. Gold disagrees. “The forces of delegitimization are out there anyway, looking for every opportunity to go after the State of Israel. It can’t get worse,” he argues.

In Gold’s view, the effort against Iran has to be multidimensional. That means pressing hard on every possible pressure point.

Sanctions are not enough. Legal and diplomatic moves have to be included in the mix.

“You have got to convince the Iranians that they have indeed put themselves in the position of a pariah state. You have to create a calculus in the minds of the Iranian elite where someone goes to the supreme leader and says, ‘We are in deep trouble,’” he concludes.

THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PREVENT report paints a horrific picture of systematic and widespread human rights violations in Iran, especially after last year’s rigged presidential election.

According to the report, Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old woman seen all around the world on YouTube shot dead by a member of the Basij militia during a demonstration, was not the only such random victim. Others were even more cruelly murdered. For example, in testimony to the Canadian Parliament, Payan Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill University, claimed that: “Amir Javadifar, a 24-year-old youth who was arrested for being in the protests, had his corpse delivered to his mother with a fractured skull and a crushed eyeball, while all his fingernails and toenails had been extracted.” Since the 1979 revolution, there have been an estimated 120,000 political executions. In the eight weeks following the June 12th election in 2009, there were 115 executions. The regime reports that 6,000 dissidents are currently under arrest; dissidents say the figure is much higher.

According to Cotler, Iran has executed more people in recent times than any other country in the world, except China, and it has executed more juveniles than any other country, including China. Between 2005 and 2009, 29 minors were executed; and, according to Stop Child Executions, an NGO that monitors the situation in Iran, there are currently over 140 minors on death row.

Iran has also imprisoned more journalists than any other country, blocks the signals of Persian language broadcasts from abroad, does not allow foreign NGOs or journalists to enter Iran and cracks down on local NGO activists. In addition, students, academics, human rights lawyers, women’s rights activists, labor leaders and cyber dissidents are all systematically targeted and intimidated.

After his arrest at a student demonstration in July 1999, Ahmad Batebi, a human rights activist, says he was kept in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for 17 months. On one occasion, he recalls being blindfolded and led away with two other prisoners for what he thought would be his execution.

“They blindfolded us and forced us to stand on top of a chair, as if to hang us. They pulled my blindfold aside a bit so I could see what was happening to the other two. These were people who were imprisoned next to me in small cells. I saw their execution,” he testified to the Canadian Parliament.

In addition to political dissidents, the fundamentalist Shi’ite Iranian regime persecutes religious and ethnic minorities. In May this year, five Kurds were executed after trials that lasted around seven minutes and in which the defendants and their lawyers were not allowed to speak. Hundreds of Baluchis are on death row and dozens of Azeris have been arrested for promoting their language.

The Bahai, the largest religious minority in Iran with some 300,000 members, is not recognized as a legitimate religious group and its members are systematically persecuted as “unprotected infidels.” Seven Bahai leaders have been incarcerated in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran since early 2008, charged with insulting Islam. Rank and file Bahais are regularly harassed and imprisoned, and sometimes released in return for surrendering their business licenses.

Bahais are often prevented from working for a living and are barred from higher education.

In late June, houses belonging to 50 Bahai families in the remote northern village of Ivel were destroyed.

CLEARLY, THE RUTHLESS, REPRESSIVE nature of the regime will make it extremely difficult for the large dissident Green Movement to topple it. “After the election, three million people took to the streets and demonstrated. Soon the three million became a hundred thousand, and then ten thousand, and lately not even one thousand,” Menashe Amir, former head of Israel Radio’s Farsi service and a leading Israeli expert on Iranian internal affairs, tells The Report. “The regime not only controls all the centers of power, but they are people imbued with a sense of divine mission.

There are also major economic interests at stake. Today the Revolutionary Guards are the economic giant of Iran, controlling all the most lucrative economic sectors. All this makes them ruthless in their determination to hold onto power and makes it very difficult for their opponents to bring them down.”

Another factor militating against a major uprising is the moderate nature of the Green Movement’s leaders, presidential candidate Ali Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.

Indeed, Amir maintains that one of the main reasons the regime has not targeted them is because they serve as a kind of safety valve for much deeper Iranian grievances.

Nevertheless, despite all the seemingly insurmountable difficulties, Amir is convinced that conditions for a major uprising are ripening. He points to the internal struggle within the regime over presidential powers, the widespread popular opposition seething under the surface, and the growing international pressure on the Iranian economy.

But for an uprising to occur, he says sanctions will have to be much stiffer. They would have to cripple the Iranian economy and paralyze the country, by targeting the Iranian oil industry, stopping all shipping and flights to and from Iran, banning imports and exports, encouraging Iranian workers to strike and finding ways to fund them and their families when they do. “In the late 1970s, when Khomeini gave the order to the oil, electricity and water workers to go on strike, he saw to it that the strikers got money to support their families.

The West should do the same,” he exhorts.

Cotler compares the Green Movement in Iran to the Prague Spring in 1968, the precursor of the democratizing Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic 20 years later. He points out that 70 percent of Iranians are under the age of 30, influenced by what they read on the Internet and emboldened by the solidarity on their behalf. “I just hope it won’t take 20 years,” he says.

COTLER AGREES WITH AMIR that the current sanctions against Iran do not go far enough.

Although the latest, fourth round of UN backed sanctions adopted by the Security Council on June 9 are significantly stiffer than before, they still leave many loopholes.

For example, according to Cotler, they blacklist three elements of Iran’s national shipping line, but stop short of blacklisting it altogether; they deny Iran key financial services, but do not ban its Central Bank or bond market; they ban the sale of conventional weapons to Iran, but do not order suspension of its ballistic missiles program.

Although the US, with its Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009 signed into law by President Barak Obama on July 1, and the EU, with its specific targeting of the Iranian energy industry, go further, Cotler insists that still more can and must be done.

The Responsibility to Prevent report’s 18- point “Road Map for Action” spells out a broader, multidimensional approach. On the legal front, it proposes taking Iran to court for state-sponsored incitement to genocide; and on the diplomatic front, to put Iranian human rights violations on every relevant agenda and to impose personal travel bans and asset freezes on Iranian leaders responsible for nuclear terror, genocidal incitement or human rights violations. It also suggests using the UN General Assembly Resolution of March 26, calling for an end to Iran’s domestic repression, as a lever for sanctions, for example, against corporations that provide the Iranian regime with the surveillance equipment it uses against the dissidents.

As for economic sanctions, the road map makes several far-reaching proposals, including:
● Targeting imports of gasoline and other refined petroleum imports
● Imposing sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank
● Banning the export to Iran of dual-use technologies
● Blocking the inflow of sensitive materials
● Targeting the Revolutionary Guard, which controls an estimated 80 percent of Iran’s foreign commerce, as well as its construction, banking and communications sectors, and which Cotler describes as “the epicenter of all four threats”
● Imposing a broad arms embargo on Iran and ordering a complete suspension of its ballistic missile program * Denying landing permission to Iranian ships and planes
● Requiring disclosure of all business dealings with Iran Even the more limited sanctions now in place are starting to bite, says Cotler. Iran is facing serious capitalization problems and dozens of leading firms have been pulling out of the country after being given a choice between trading with Washington or Tehran, not both. “There was even a report a few days ago that the Iranian banks are losing their capacity to finance the nuclear program. So sanctions are hurting, but we still need to do much more to bring Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account,” Cotler concludes.

Politics of resentment live in West Bank

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/08/06/14944096.html

SALIM MANSUR – Sun Media Saturday, August 7, 2010



RAMALLAH — I am struck by the construction boom across the city as I visit Ramallah, the legislative and political centre of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Just about everywhere, high towers of office and apartment complexes rise above the squalor of old houses, refugee camps, crowded markets and narrow streets of what was once a small town some 10 km north of Jerusalem.

I spent the better part of a day walking the streets of Ramallah; had a surprising encounter with the mayor, a Palestinian-Christian woman of much dignity and warmth; made the required visit to Yasser Arafat’s tomb; and enjoyed the hospitality of simple folks.

There is money here, plenty of it, and those who have it are not hesitant to flaunt it.

New cars, beautiful residences, fancy stores and restaurants will startle any outsider arriving here with his head filled by the mainstream media in the West about the misery of the West Bank occupation by Israelis.

There is also poverty, Israeli checkpoints, the fence or wall separating Palestinian territories from Israel and the Israeli settlements.

And there’s the politics of resentment that spill over any conversation with ordinary Palestinians fed on a diet of half-truths and endless lies by their leaders.

But visiting with Palestinians is also an invitation to hear their bitterness about Arab leaders, and of their experience with discrimination and violence in places such as Lebanon and Kuwait.They speak of how the Palestinian leadership resembles Ali Baba and his 40 thieves robbing the people of the money that has poured in as aid from the West. The term limit of the president and the legislative assembly has expired, and no new elections are scheduled to provide Palestinians with any say on how they are being governed.

In effect those in authority have no mandate, and their fear that Hamas will likely win an election whenever held underscores the contempt of ordinary Palestinians for Mahmoud Abbas — the president of the Palestinian Authority – and the men around him.
There is irony in the fact that there are two Palestinian entities between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. If it were not for Israel in the middle, the war of words between these two Palestinian entities, or putative states, would become a ghastly shootout between the Iranian proxy in Gaza and mafia dons receiving protection money from the West and its Arab allies in the West Bank.

I have lived among, travelled and spoken with countless number of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and have learned to be cautious about the disconnect between their words, their thinking, the reality around them and the record of their history.

As I sit among Palestinians in Ramallah, or visit with them in Bethlehem or Hebron, I listen to them patiently while avoiding disagreements by not offering my thoughts.
But when they insist on hearing my views I remind them gently of the verse from the Qur’an that God does not change the condition of people unless they change what is in their hearts.

Then there is silence and the distress of not knowing how to unpack half-truths and lies — in part of their own making — to become a responsible, free and independent nation.

A New Excuse For Killing Jews

National Post editorial board August 4, 2010 – 2:17 pm

Now that Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and Lebanon, and taken down many of the roadblocks in the economically booming West Bank, its Arab enemies are running out of pretexts for attacking the Jewish state. Tuesday brought a particularly absurd episode: A Lebanese sniper shot and killed an Israeli officer for the crime of … pruning bushes on the Israeli side of the border.

At first, details of the event were sketchy, with both sides claiming that the other had initiated the hostilities. But on Wednesday, the United Nations peacekeeping force in South Lebanon, Unifil, confirmed that the Israeli workers and the foliage they were pruning were on their own side of the UN-recognized Blue Line, separating the two countries. Only after the Lebanese sniper had killed his victim did Israel return fire, killing four.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story is the fact that uniformed Arab troops now seem to be openly copying the cowardly terroristic tactics of Hezbollah and other “militant” groups. At one point during Tuesday’s fighting, the Lebanese side asked the Israelis to hold their fire so that the Lebanese troops could be evacuated. Shortly after the Israelis complied with this request, the Lebanese fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli tank.

Not surprisingly, the event is being used as a rallying point to try to unite Lebanese disparate factions against Israel. Even in the West, many of the usual suspects are simply ignoring the UN-stipulated facts and blaming Israel for what we now know was a Lebanese act of murder. From Jenin to Gaza to Lebanon, this pattern is always the same: Never let the truth get in the way of stirring up hate against the Jewish state.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/08/04/national-post-editorial-board-a-new-excuse-for-killing-jews/#ixzz0vrC4odsZ

Israel threatens to destroy hostile Lebanese border positions

Israel has handed Lebanon an ultimatum. Before a line can be drawn on the Lebanese-Israeli clash which flared Tuesday, Aug. 3, the Lebanese Army 9th Brigade commander responsible for sending snipers to shoot at Israeli troops clearing brush on their side of the border and killing Lt. Col. (Res.) Dov Harari, must be dismissed or court-martialed, debkafile's military sources report.
This burst of Lebanese sniper fire triggered the clash.
The ultimatum was delivered at a three-way meeting at UNIFIL headquarters in Naqura on Wednesday night, August 4, attended by UN, IDF and Lebanese Army officers, after Israel learned that the guilty Lebanese officer is a Shiite who hangs out with Hizballah commanders in South Lebanon. The possibility is not precluded that his Hizballah friends tipped him off to the presence of high Israeli officers within firing distance from the Lebanese border.
This information runs contrary to the IDF's official line on the incident, which absolved Hizballah of involvement in the clash and claimed the Shiite terrorists were taken by surprise no less than the Israeli military
UNIFIL carried a warning to Beirut that if the Lebanese army failed to punish the officer, Israel would deem it an enemy force and feel free to destroy its military positions along their border.

Our military sources reveal that the Naqura conference was also attended unofficially by the American, French and German military attachés stationed at their embassies in Beirut. They were sent to apply the brakes on any further escalation of the Israeli-Lebanese military showdown.
A UNIFIL spokesman announced early Thursday morning, August 5 that Israel and Lebanon had both pledged to work with the UN to avoid violent incidents in the future. However, on the quiet, our sources report the UN peacekeepers agreed to convey the Israeli ultimatum and warning to Beirut with their own recommendation to remove the Lebanese officer responsible for the outbreak from the South in the interests of restoring calm.
The ultimatum did not give the Lebanese army a deadline for punishing the officer or say what action Israel would take if it was not met, but the Israeli officers at Naqura presented a tough and unyielding front. Jerusalem will not let the death of a high officer go unpunished.

The Lebanese high command and Hizballah were reminded of Israel's reprisal Saturday Aug. 1 against Hamas, for firing a Grad missile at Ashkelon on July 30: Israeli Air Force bombers struck a number of targets across the Gaza Strip, one of which killed the high-ranking Hamas commander, Issa Batran, commander of the organization's missile batteries.
It was to avenge his death that Hamas' military wing, Izzedin al-Qassam, launched half a dozen Grad missiles from Sinai against Eilat on Monday, August 2. (In the event, they missed their aim and hit Aqaba, killing one Jordanian.)

Far from winding down the Lebanese-Israel border crisis, the Israeli ultimatum looks more like the opening move for the next round. The Beirut government is not expected in Jerusalem, Washington or Naqura to punish the Shiite 9th Brigade officer lest Hizballah throw its weight behind him and canonize him as a national Shiite hero. Israel will then feel free to exercise its options for the Lebanese act of aggression.

The state of play between Israel and Lebanon was described by high Israeli military sources Thursday, Aug. 5, as fluid and incendiary. A single tree or rocket could blow up into a major conflagration and spread across the Middle East.
Time is rushing toward another flashpoint: Hizballah's secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, has threatened to pass the buck for the five-year old assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to Israel to ease the pressure of guilt preying on his own organization. He promises to present "proof" of Israeli secret service complicity at a press conference on Monday, August 9.

Western military and intelligence circles in the Middle East agreed Thursday that Israel cannot afford to let a second casus belli from Lebanon go unanswered after the unprovoked death of its officer.
A tense Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the scene Thursday night with his first ever videotaped speech that was broadcast on three Israeli TV channels.
He held Hamas and the Lebanese government responsible for three cross-border attacks in as many days. While the third was staged by Lebanon, Netanyahu placed the Grad attacks on Ashkelon and Eilat squarely at the door of the Palestinian Hamas.
He made it clear that Israel would make both answerable when he said: "Don’t test our resolve to defend our citizens."

-Debka File

Boat trip is exercise in Israel bashing

Article via The Calgary Herald - July 19, 2010

Charity is supposed to be fuelled by a selfless desire to help others, but it's hard to see any such motivation in the plans advanced by members of Gaza Freedom March (GFM) to charter a boat and sail to the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the idea reeks of self-aggrandizement and narcissism, along with the usual helping of contempt for Israel.

Canadian activists belonging to the group launched fund-raising efforts last week with the aim of mustering $300,000 to hire and staff a vessel in an all-Canadian effort to sail to Gaza despite the Israeli blockade. The trek's primary aim is "to bring attention to the suffering of the people of Gaza," presumably without going into much detail as to why Israel believes its security requires it to take a stand against Gaza's Hamasrun government, which still refuses to accept the Jewish state's right to exist.

Whether the boat will actually carry any goods on its supposed mission of mercy or sail empty has yet to be decided. This might reflect the fact that Israel has largely lifted the blockade, allowing in most consumer goods, or it might be a tacit admission that the trip is more about egoism than compassion. Why spend money on supplies when the goal is swift, efficient martyrdom? What these activists seek is a self-serving stint in Israeli custody, which amounts to both a badge of honour and a battle scar.

The GFM has talked vaguely of using an empty vessel to transport Palestinian goods abroad for export, but they are undoubtedly aware that regardless of whether they arrive with their holds bulging or yawning, Israel will not permit them to make landfall. The fate of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was halted in May and resulted in the deaths of nine activists aboard a Turkish vessel during a struggle with Israel special forces, is surely very much on the Canadians' minds.

The GFM has been quick to proclaim that its mission will be peaceful, and doubtless the Israeli response will be similar after the fiasco in May, but all this careful talk on the activists' part fails to mask their other goal, shared by the earlier convoy: putting on a show meant to prompt the rest of the world to heap obloquy on Israel.

As a liberal democracy in the Middle East in a region awash in authoritarian regimes and militant puritanism, Israel has had to fight for its survival right from its inception.

Despite being a beneficiary of the very same freedoms Israel is defending, the GFM is anxious to lend its support to the other side in a struggle half a world away. These activists could do with a little less selfishness and a lot more self-reflection.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Boat+trip+exercise+Israel+bashing/3294452/story.html#ixzz0vr8ELQTd

We Owe The Jews

Written By Andrew Roberts, National Post · Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2010

What follows is an edited version of a speech delivered by historian Andrew Roberts to the Friends of Israel Initiative in the British House of Commons on July 19, 2010.

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From Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25 million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers only 8,000 square miles, and is home to seven million citizens, one-fifth of whom are Arabs. The Jews of the Holy Land are thus surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and 60 times their population; yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution -- the State of Israel -- has somehow survived. When during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery. Today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted 20 times as long.

Jerusalem is the site of the Temple of Solomon and Herod. The stones of a palace erected by King David himself are even now being unearthed just outside the walls of Jerusalem. Everything that makes a nation state legitimate -- blood shed, soil tilled, international agreements -- argues for Israel's right to exist, yet that is still denied by the Arab League. For many of their governments, which are rich enough to have economically solved the Palestinian refugee problem decades ago, it is useful to have Israel as a scapegoat to divert attention from the tyranny, failure and corruption of their own regimes.

The tragic truth is that it suits Arab states very well to have the Palestinians endure permanent refugee status; whenever Israel puts forward workable solutions they are stymied by those whose interests put the destruction of Israel before the genuine well-being of the Palestinians. Both King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt were assassinated when they attempted to come to some kind of accommodation with a country that most sane people now accept is not going away.

"We owe to the Jews," wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, "a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together." Although they make up less than half of 1% of the world's population, between 1901 and 1950 Jews won 14% of all the Nobel Prizes awarded for literature and science, and between 1951 and 2000 Jews won 32% of the Nobel Prizes for medicine, 32% for physics, 39% for economics and 29% for science. This, despite so many of their greatest intellects dying in the gas chambers. Yet we tend to treat Israel like a leper on the international scene, threatening her with academic boycotts if she builds a separation wall that has so far reduced suicide bombings by 95% over three years.

Her Majesty the Queen has been on the throne for 57 years and in that time has undertaken 250 official visits to 129 countries, yet has not yet set foot in Israel. She has visited 14 Arab countries, so it cannot have been that she wasn't in the region.

After the Holocaust, the Jewish people recognized that they must have their own state, a homeland where they could forever be safe from a repetition of such horrors. Since then, Israel has had to fight five major wars for her existence. Radical Islam is never going to accept the concept of an Israeli State, so the struggle is likely to continue for another 60 years, but the Jews know that that is less dangerous than entrusting their security to anyone else.

I recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Walking along a line of huts and the railway siding, where their forebears had been worked and starved and beaten and frozen and gassed to death, were a group of Jewish schoolchildren, one of whom was carrying over his shoulder the Israeli flag. It was a moving sight, for it was the sovereign independence represented by that flag which guarantees that the obscenity of genocide will never again befall the Jewish people.

No people in history have needed the right to self-defence and legitimacy more than the Jews of Israel, and that is what we in the Friends of Israel Initiative demand here today.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/Jews/3352058/story.html#ixzz0vkn7RQzP

Time To Wake Up

This is in New York City on Madison Avenue, not in
France or the Middle East or Yemen or Kenya.

This is an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several
locations throughout NYC where there are mosques with a large
number of Muslims that cannot fit into the mosque - They fill the
surrounding streets, facing east for a couple of hours between
about 2 & 4 p.m. - Besides this one at 42nd St & Madison Ave,
there is another, even larger group, at 94th St & 3rd Ave, etc.,
etc. - Also, I presume, you are aware of the dispute over building
another "high rise" Mosque a few blocks from "ground zero" -
With regard to that one, the "Imam" refuses to disclose where the
$110 million dollars to build it is coming from and there is a lawsuit
filed to force disclosure of that information.

Is there a message here???? Yes, there is: Muslims are
claiming North America for Allah.
If we don't wake up soon, we are going to "politically correct"
ourselves right out of our own country!

Former Muslim Speaks Truth On Israel - Islam

SUPPORT ISRAEL : IF IT GOES DOWN, WE ALL GO DOWN - By José María Aznar, ex Prime Minister of Spain

The Times June 17, 2010

Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region

For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel . In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean , it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion.

In an ideal world, the assault by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara would not have ended up with nine dead and a score wounded. In an ideal world, the soldiers would have been peacefully welcomed on to the ship. In an ideal world, no state, let alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey , would have sponsored and organised a flotilla whose sole purpose was to create an impossible situation for Israel : making it choose between giving up its security policy and the naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.

In our dealings with Israel , we must blow away the red mists of anger that too often cloud our judgment. A reasonable and balanced approach should encapsulate the following realities: first, the state of Israel was created by a decision of the UN. Its legitimacy, therefore, should not be in question. Israel is a nation with deeply rooted democratic institutions. It is a dynamic and open society that has repeatedly excelled in culture, science and technology.

Second, owing to its roots, history, and values, Israel is a fully fledged Western nation. Indeed, it is a normal Western nation, but one confronted by abnormal circumstances.

Uniquely in the West, it is the only democracy whose very existence has been questioned since its inception. In the first instance, it was attacked by its neighbours using the conventional weapons of war. Then it faced terrorism culminating in wave after wave of suicide attacks. Now, at the behest of radical Islamists and their sympathisers, it faces a campaign of delegitimisation through international law and diplomacy.

Sixty-two years after its creation, Israel is still fighting for its very survival. Punished with missiles raining from north and south, threatened with destruction by an Iran aiming to acquire nuclear weapons and pressed upon by friend and foe, Israel , it seems, is never to have a moment’s peace.

For years, the focus of Western attention has understandably been on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Israel is in danger today and the whole region is slipping towards a worryingly problematic future, it is not due to the lack of understanding between the parties on how to solve this conflict. The parameters of any prospective peace agreement are clear, however difficult it may seem for the two sides to make the final push for a settlement.

The real threats to regional stability, however, are to be found in the rise of a radical Islamism which sees Israel ’s destruction as the fulfilment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran , as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony. Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel , but also the wider West and the world at large.The core of the problem lies in the ambiguous and often erroneous manner in which too many Western countries are now reacting to this situation.

It is easy to blame Israel for all the evils in the Middle East . Some even act and talk as if a new understanding with the Muslim world could be achieved if only we were prepared to sacrifice the Jewish state on the altar. This would be folly.

Israel is our first line of defence in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos; a region vital to our energy security owing to our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil; a region that forms the front line in the fight against extremism. If Israel goes down, we all go down.

To defend Israel ’s right to exist in peace, within secure borders, requires a degree of moral and strategic clarity that too often seems to have disappeared in Europe . The United States shows worrying signs of heading in the same direction.

The West is going through a period of confusion over the shape of the world’s future. To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the most fanatical incarnation of their faith.

To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears.

This cannot be allowed to happen. Motivated by the need to rebuild our own Western values, expressing deep concern about the wave of aggression against Israel, and mindful that Israel’s strength is our strength and Israel’s weakness is our weakness, I have decided to promote a new Friends of Israel initiative with the help of some prominent people, including David Trimble, Andrew Roberts, John Bolton, Alejandro Toledo (the former President of Peru), Marcello Pera (philosopher and former President of the Italian Senate), Fiamma Nirenstein (the Italian author and politician), the financier Robert Agostinelli and the Catholic intellectual George Weigel.

It is not our intention to defend any specific policy or any particular Israeli government. The sponsors of this initiative are certain to disagree at times with decisions taken by Jerusalem . We are democrats, and we believe in diversity.

What binds us, however, is our unyielding support for Israel ’s right to exist and to defend itself. For Western countries to side with those who question Israel’s legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel’s vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude.

Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too.

Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.