Israel and the Trojan Horse. An allegorical tale.

Israel and the Trojan Horse.
An allegorical tale.

A small and ancient people rebuild their land, beautify it, modernize it, makes it plentiful and prosperous.
Then arises an enemy, envious of its shining success, determined to conquer this land, destroy its people and its heritage, and fly the banner of their victory.
They fail, and fail again. So they plot to eradicate this wondrous land with false pleas to outsiders to turn this land and people into a pariah, to weaken it until it is persuaded to open its gates.
When the hammering on its doors becomes deafening, and the nation unbolts the padlocks, the enemy leaders harden their hearts and tell their masses that victory is in sight.
The outsiders demand the fortified nation to fling open their gates, remove their barricades, or face the dangerous consequences of their refusal.
But the people remain resolute. They know what will be the end should they allow the Trojan Horse to enter their land and into their cities.
Should that fate be sealed, the enemy will dance and kill in victory, and the outsiders will silently steal away into the night, as they always have.
Yet another shame to be etched in their thousand year old history of hateful wrongs.

The path of good intentions is paved with distortions.

The path of good intentions is paved with distortions.

Original thinking from Barry Shaw.

Netanya Academic College hosted a conference titled ‘The Challenges of Jerusalem” on March 18.

Organized by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Dialogue, for whom I am the Special Consultant on Delegitimization Issues, and the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung, this important event reviewed the current and future face of Israel’s capital.

I was struck by one invited speaker, Dr. Rami Nasrallah, Chair of the International Peace & Cooperation Center in Jerusalem, who claimed that all Jerusalem Arabs are Palestinian.

He was followed by Professor Menachem Klein of Bar Ilan University who, surprisingly, told us that Jerusalem is made up off 40% Palestinians, a third are Haredi Jews, and about another third are either Orthodox or secular Jews. “Palestinians,” Professor Klein! Where are the Arabs? 

Like Dr. Nasrallah, Klein made them disappear into a conglomerate block known to them as Palestinian. Nice trick, except that the professor opened his remarks by informing us that he would not go into the rhetoric that, according to him, colors much of the narrative of Jerusalem. But his Arab disappearing trick caught him out of doing precisely that – spouting rhetoric.  The vast majority of Jerusalem Arabs are not, nor do they want to be, Palestinian.

Both Nasrallah and Klein are aware of the Pechter Middle East poll released in January 2011 that clearly showed that only 30% of Jerusalem Arabs would choose Palestinian citizenship, and that 35% would relocate into Israel if east Jerusalem became part of a future Palestinian state. This survey was conducted by Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, in partnership with Princeton-based Pechter Middle East Polls.

 Riman Barakat, the Co-Director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, noted in an article in the +972 blog that, “many of my friends and acquaintances are quietly applying for and obtaining Israeli passports.” He went on, “residents of East Jerusalem, numbering over 350,000, or 38% of the city’s total population , already go about their daily lives, shop at Israeli malls, use Israeli services, frequent Israeli restaurants and bars, send their children to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and receive Israeli social and health benefits.”

The majority of Jerusalem Arabs were born after 1967 in the State of Israeli. Many of them migrated of their own free will into Jerusalem.

Those that dubiously claim to be ethnically Palestinian, like Saeb Erekat, for example. He also claims to be a Canaanite, even though the Erekat tribe drifted into the Jordan Valley from Saudi Arabia.  Many Jews were born or arrived into Mandated Palestine. If asked is they see themselves as ethnically Palestinian or Jewish all would dismiss a Palestinian ethnicity in favor of a Jewish ethnicity.

Nasrallah and Klein are aware of these facts. They are aware of them, and are in denial. This is disingenuous, but it is part of the atmosphere and rhetoric they engender in order to impose their type of solution on the conflict, a solution that goes against the trend and preferences of the Jerusalem Arab citizens of Israel.

There is little doubt that Nasrallah and Klein are people of good intentions, but you know where that road leads when paved with distortions?

I am certain that John Kerry is also a person of good intentions, and that he is a more creative thinker than me. Or, is he?

Kerry said that it was a “mistake” for Israel to demand that Abbas acknowledge the existence of the Jewish State. If that’s the case, why didn’t he come up with a creative alternative proposal, as I have done?

Surely, if Abbas chokes on the word “Jewish,” he could be persuaded to agree a formula that a  Palestinian state will have no future claim on Israel being part of Palestine once a two-state solution in reached? This claim should be guaranteed by the United Nations.   If it’s end of conflict you want, Mr. Kerry, wouldn’t this do the trick?

If Abbas fails this test he would be exposed for what most Israelis accuse him of, which is the gradual carve-up of the Jewish state, salami-style, until there is nothing left.

Since Arafat, the Palestinians have grandiosely seen themselves as spearheading the Arab and Muslim ambitions against Israel. It is this that prevents Abbas from recognizing the Jewish State. He cannot portray himself as a traitor to this cause. This overrides the desire for Palestinian independence. 

If Kerry will not protect the notion of Israel as the Jewish State, he, and President Obama, had better construct the condition that would protect whatever is left of Israel when their path of good intentions reaches its destination.

Barry Shaw is the author of the common-sense book ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com

America in decline.

AMERICA IN DECLINE.

Original Thinking by Barry Shaw.

When Obama was running for president he promised, some say threatened, to fundamentally change America. The doubters now say he has fundamentally ruined America. Whichever way one views it, America is in serious decline.

For a president that promised to reduce the national debt Obama has added a massive seven trillion dollars to that debt. Under his presidency, America has accumulated as much new debt as it did in its first 227 years.

He heads an Administration that produces food stamps, legalizes marijuana, pries into people’s private lives, and sets government agencies against political opponents. Obama is following the guide book of Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” and putting Alinsky’s primer into practice from the White House. The results of his experiment are devastating.

Under Obama, prices and taxes rose while take home pay fell 7%. Government hand-outs increased dramatically as the national debt has exploded. Recent estimates put 50 million Americans on food stamps, and millions without healthcare.

Obama, the community organizer, preferred social justice over a robust market place, but, under his presidency, people are worse off today than they were back in 2009 when he promised them change. By the end of the first quarter of 2014 America had six million people not only unemployed but also not on the labor list, the vast majority under the age of 55. This implies they had given up all hope of finding work. More than forty million Americans lived below the poverty line.

Increasingly, America is becoming a nation of dysfunctional families. 41% of babies are born out of wedlock. Under America’s first black president, American blacks are increasingly unemployed, and 72% of black kids are born out of wedlock, a terrible indictment on American society. The corrosive results of government hand-outs are now rampant in America. A nanny-state produces a population of dependency, not independence or an entrepreneurial spirit.

Obama has ratings in the 30s and falling on issues such as security, healthcare, economy, jobs, transparency in government, and the US image abroad. It seems that Obama doesn’t care. Deep into a second term, this lame duck president is determined to press on with his failed agenda, even if it takes executive powers to do it. American democracy is in jeopardy as Obama takes steps that are clearly unconstitutional.

The president’s credibility is trashed, and a major part of that is his failure to launch the unpopular healthcare policy that carries his name, “Obamacare.”  March 2014, saw the thirty first delay in a public display of total inefficiency.

Scandals follow in the wake of Obama appointees to key governmental jobs. Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, apologized, last October, for the abject failure of the computer system that was supposed to deliver the Obamacare plan to the American public. The planning team had been working on the computer system for years. On the nationally popular “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart accused Sebelius of lying about parts of Obamacare. When that happens, you know you’re in trouble.

There is an ongoing investigation into wrongdoings by America’s tax authority, the IRS. They are accused of targeting opposition groups. In a TV interview with Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, President Obama claimed there was “not a smidgeon of evidence” about tax attacks on conservative and libertine groups. However, Obama appointee, Lois Lerner, head of the IRS Exempt Organization division, twice took the Fifth while refusing to divulge information to the Congressional Oversight Committee. Chairman Darrell Issa complained, “In the wake of Ms. Lerner's refusal to testify and answer questions, this report offers detailed evidence about steps she took to crack down on organizations that exercised their constitutional rights to free political speech.”

Obama’s nomination of Demo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division sent shockwaves through the American political system. Adebile represented an unrepentant cop-killer in 1981. This brought vocal opposition from national law-enforcement officials. The president’s judgment was badly flawed in selecting this poor choice of candidate. It was based more on Adegbile’s far left political activism rather than someone steeped in legal experience.

Obama followed up with yet another dubious choice of Vivek Murthy to be the next US Surgeon-General. Murthy, yet another political activist and the founder of “Doctors for Obama,” repeatedly described gun ownership as “a public health issue.” He is opposed by the National Rifle Association, a powerful lobbying force in America. He is also facing strong opposition by many Democrats. The right to bear arms is an integral part of the US Constitution.  The job of Surgeon-General is not gun control. It is about disease and disease prevention. The usual criterion for Surgeon-General is someone who has run a major hospital or headed a state healthcare system. Murthy has only been an attending doctor for eight years. His political activism far outweighs his public health experience.

Obama’s record of nominating radical politocos, rather than efficient and successful technocrats, particularly at the expense of the US Constitution, is a symptom of the demise of America.

It goes on. Recently, Obama nominated several of his campaign donors to ambassadorships. The problem was that they had never visited their nominated countries, Iceland, Norway, and Argentina. The nominee for Norway, George Tsunis, didn’t even know that country had a king, and not a president. Such is the level of presidential incompetence in Obama’s personal nominees to major positions of government.

Revelations concerning widespread governmental electronic surveillance of law-abiding citizens set alarm bells ringing when whistleblower, Edward Snowden, divulged that the National Security Agency had been snooping on 340 million cell phones in the United States.  A Federal judge described it as “almost Orwellian.”  It is, in fact, a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.  

A Guardian newspaper report on March 5, 2014, divulged that President Obama knew the CIA had spied on the Senate intelligence committee using agency computers.  “I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Democratic Congressman Mark Udall wrote to Obama.

President Obama lied to the people. The mid-term elections in November will hinge on which Democratic candidates echoed the Obama mantra “under Obamacare you can keep your health plan and you can keep your doctor.” Neither of these claims is true.

When you have a foreign policy of “leading from behind” you lose the political momentum to advance values.

With Obama, it began with his apology tour to Muslim nations which included his bowing to the Saudi Arabian king, a gesture interpreted in the Islamic world as submission. From that point it spiraled downward.

On his watch, and that of his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, an American ambassador and three CIA operatives were murdered in Benghazi, Libya. They claimed, for weeks, that their deaths were caused by a mob angry at an amateur video, when, in fact, it was an organized terror attack that killed them. It was revealed that repeated calls for help were ignored by both the White House and the State Department. Knowing the truth, according to recent evidence, both Obama and Clinton lied to the nation, and worse, to the families of the dead Americans.

Since Benghazi, Obama touted Al-Qaida’s demise thirty two times, according to White House transcripts. “Decimated” is a word that Obama likes to use to describe Al-Qaida. However, on January 29, 2014, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, testified on Capitol Hill that the threat from Al-Qaida is not less than it was a decade ago and that it is "much more globally dispersed.”  The question arises, how is it that the president is out of touch with his national security advisors?  Al-Qaida is on the rise because of a feckless American leadership.

Back in September, John Kerry told Democrats that America faced “its Munich moment” over the Syrian use of chemical weapons. Considering that, six months later, Assad still possesses the vast majority of his stockpile it appears that this has been a failure of American leadership. Another “Munich moment” is taking place with the smiley, touchy, talks that are taking place with the Iranians over their nuclear ambitions. Neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia is convinced that the softly-softly approach with Tehran is the way to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. A third “Munich moment” is taking place over the Russian domination of the Ukraine. This also looks doomed to failure in light of a massive vote in the Crimea for Russian patronage. With the Israeli-Palestinian talks about to crash into the buffers of failure, the Kerry-initiative looks impressive in its impotence to persuade Mahmoud Abbas to recognize the Jewish State. Kerry even called it a “mistake” for Israel even to make this elementary condition a demand, thereby showing his total lack of understanding of what lies as the root cause of this conflict.

We know what happened post-Munich. We are witnessing American Munich moments on a global scale. We dread for the future.

The Wall Street Journal printed an article written by Mitt Romney. Although he can be seen as a biased observer, he stated something that is patently obvious.

“President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled the world in pursuit of their promise to reset relations and to build friendships across the globe. Their failure has been painfully evident. It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office, and now Russia is in Ukraine. Part of their failure is due to their failure to act when action was possible and needed.”

When American power draws back it leaves a dangerous vacuum.  With the US withdrawing from Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s Karsei will pivot to whoever keeps him in power. US out. Taliban in!

This vacuum allowed Russia to become high profile and active in the Middle East.  In August, 2013, the White House cut off military aid to Egypt. This was a misreading of the political map in Egypt. Egypt refused to take phone calls from Defense Secretary Hagel and turned to Russia for aid. Al Tahrir newspaper ran the headline, “Let the US aid go to hell!”  So much for the Obama apology tour, that began in Cairo.

Russia is emboldened to assert itself in Europe. Crimea is a Russian test of the extent of American weakness. The White House sanctioned seven Russian businessmen. They shrugged off that threat causing Putin’s deputy Prime Minister to tweet that he thought some joker wrote the US Presidential order.

With Saudi Arabia and Egypt turning to Russia, with major oil-trading nations negotiating to deal in a currency other than the US dollar, with the contempt felt for America’s weakness in foreign policy, with Iran, Al-Qaida, and the Taliban resurgent in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, can anyone doubt that America is in decline?

There is no reason to assume that a Hillary Clinton presidency will improve America’s foreign strength. She flunked the 3 a.m. phone call test as Secretary of State when Benghazi called. She simply turned over and went back to sleep. Her tour of duty did nothing to affirm US values. It is doubtful she will move away from Obama’s bad habits of upsetting allies and cuddling up to their enemies.

Political bungling at home and abroad is appalling. When his record is etched, Obama will go down as the worst, most damaging president, in American history until, perhaps, the next one.

Jesus at the Check Post.

Recently, we have been hearing repeated messages that Jesus was a Palestinian.

It is bad enough when devious Arab Islamic leaders, including Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, quoted Jesus at Christmas time as “a Palestinian messenger,” but it is something completely different when churches leaders call Jesus a Palestinian.

They know its lie, and yet they subscribe to this mantra. It leads one to question why they do it. Why do they go out of their way to deny the undeniable Jewishness of Jesus according to their own biblical commentaries? There can only be one inevitable conclusion. It’s anti-Semitism.

It was anti-Semitism that fed the brutal dogma that expelled and killed millions of Jews as European Christianity pursued Jews around the globe. It was anti-Semitism at the heart of replacement theology that positioned God as having abandoned His Covenant to the Jewish people in favor of Christians. It is anti-Semitism that drives Christian leaders to abandon the Old Testament narration of a return to Zion of the Jewish people in favor of promoting the notorious Kairos Palestine Document. This document positions Palestinian Arabs as Jesus-figures deprived of their land, and Israelis as the Christ-killers. This blood libel is alive and well. It has shaken off the Christian shame of the Shoah, and found its voice in anti-Zionism.

Deconstructing the history of the Land of Israel in order to deny Jewish sovereignty is central to Palestinian policy. This narrative has been adopted by many Christians who have found a moral hook on which to hang their anti-Semitism, namely the transfiguration of who are the violent and devious actors and who are the victims. Clearly, they have repositioned Israelis and Jews as the oppressors, and a Palestinian society, despite it being one that has been incited and bent on racial hatred, violence, and terror, as the innocent victims.

It is truly appalling how cynically deceptive some Christian leaders can be. They come up with causes that elicit emotional, but false, messages. Take “Jesus at the Check Post,” for example. This is the name of a conference taking place in Bethlehem this month. Christians will try to portray Jesus as a Palestinian suffering at an Israeli check post.  The poster of the event, from March 10-14, is headed by a drawing depicting an Arab farmer and a church locked behind a huge grey concrete wall. In support of the Palestinian narrative it carried the message “Your Kingdom Come!”

 It is easy to flippantly answer the posed question of a Jesus at a check post by reminding them that Israeli soldiers would remind him, as a Jew, that no Jew is allowed to live in a Bethlehem under Palestinian control, and his life would be in grave danger in a place that has become so radically Islamic that even the Christians have fled this once Christian town. Elias Freij, the Christian mayor of Bethlehem at the time of the town’s handover by Israel to Arafat’s PLO, correctly prophesized that Bethlehem would be a town of churches but no Christians.

Participants that this event should be reminded that Israeli security forces arrested fourteen members of Islamic Jihad based in Bethlehem last Christmas. During their search, they found weapons and explosives in the houses of the Bethlehem terrorists. At precisely the same time, the rector of London’s St. James’s Church, was organizing, at her church, a propaganda event called “Bethlehem Unwrapped.”  In a Guardian newspaper article, said she was supporting a “beautiful resistance.”  There was nothing “beautiful” in the blowing up of the bus near Tel Aviv that these Bethlelem-based Islamic terrorists attacked. Neither should churches be supporting such “resistance,” known to Israelis as terror attacks. This though is the campaign and cause that people like Rector Lucy Winkett, the British Methodists, and “Jesus at the Check Point” Christians promote, while hiding the truth of what is actually going on here.

What is going on is that Israelis are being targeted for slaughter, as are Christians in the Muslim world including within the Palestinian-controlled areas. In Bethlehem, they are being persecuted and oppressed, not by Israel but by Palestinians, including the leadership.

Prior to Israel’s surrender of Bethlehem to Yasser Arafat’s PLO in 1995, the Christian population was actually growing. But today, the town of Bethlehem’s Christians have been reduced to a mere five percent. This can hardly be blamed on Israel, considering that the Christian population in the Jewish state continues to flourish. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, its Christian community has expanded more than a thousand percent.

 “Christ at the Check Point” is primarily a public relations plot to dissuade Evangelicals worldwide from their pro-Israel views. They state this openly in their mission statement. They wish “to create a platform for serious engagement with Christian Zionism” in order to pull them away from their support for Israel.

Mark Tooley of Front Page magazine wrote, “To succeed, they will have to put blinders on cooperatively gullible evangelicals, guiding their eyes towards disruptive Israeli checkpoints, while hiding the rest of the surrounding reality.”  How right he is. It is in the hiding that the dishonesty of these Christians can be seen. It is this dishonest act that reveals their Anti-Semitism. It is not performed out of ignorance. It is done knowingly, as an act of deception of yet another Christian libel performed against the Jew, this time the nation Jew, Israel.

Participants at this event call themselves “peace activists.” They liberally cloak themselves with a moral message of peace but their actions concentrate on dumping down on Israel while ignoring Palestinian, official and unofficial, oppression and threats against the remaining Christians under their control, let alone the Jews of Israel. The aim of this event is not peace, but division and bias against the Jewish state.

Stephen Sizer, a British Anglican priest and a constant Israeli delegitimizer, will be a keynote speaker. He argues that Christian Zionism has no biblical foundation. In 2004, he adapted his PhD thesis into a book, “Christian Zionism - Road Map to Armageddon?” He suggests that "it is irresponsible to believe that God will bless Christians materially if they support the largely secular State of Israel."

Some of Sizer's writings have been commended by Christians who embrace replacement and liberation theology. A prominent Christian opponent of Sizer, renowned Bible teacher, David Pawson, however, wrote a book called “Defending Christian Zionism.” Having a dig at Sizer, Pawson said, "I am grateful to Stephen Sizer for drawing attention to the legitimate criticisms of dispensational Zionism. He has rendered a service to the cause of Zionism which was needed." 

If truth were told they would produce a local Christian to report on Christian suffering under a Palestinian regime, or an IDF officer to report why there are security check posts, or an Israeli to explain  the violently anti-Semitic denial of Jewish rights that this the root of the Israeli-Arab, Islamic-Jewish, conflict, and the reason why check posts are there.

There is no room for truth at “Christ at the Check Post.”  It is an exercise in trickery, deception, and replacement theology.

http://nebula.wsimg.com/152ade637d14e265c24991e36fb8f180?AccessKeyId=87CC33514E883A55A586&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

Barry Shaw is the author of “Israel Reclaiming the Narrative” which includes a chapter on Replacement Theology. www.israelnarrative.com  He is also the Special Consultant on Delegitimization Issues at Netanya Academic College.

Punishing Israel is no remedy for Western guilt.

Repeating a fallacy does not make it kosher no matter how many times the international community tells the lie.

When the Arab-Israeli conflict involved five Arab armies attacking a tiny nascent socialist state, it was bon ton for leftists and liberals to support Israel. The Jewish State was “flavor of the month” and roundly applauded for its spectacular military victories. 

 

It was, I believe, the confluence of two significant factors that drove the Western elites, particularly the left-wing section of that constituency, to abandon the Jewish state and dump their post-colonialism, post-Holocaust guilty conscience onto Israel. 

 

After repeated and embarrassing military defeats the Arabs began to promote Yasser Arafat as the leader of a new Palestinian movement. Adopting the name of Palestine as his cause, they allowed Arafat, the first modern-day Islamic arch-terrorist, to spearhead a Pan-Arabism targeting Israel as the epitome of the West that they hated. He was their terror proxy where conventional warfare had failed them.

 

Initially, Arafat saw himself as the champion of Pan-Arabism. He even went so far as to deny a Palestinian aim in his fight against Israel. In a 1970 interview with Italian journalist, Arianna Palazzi, he said, “The question of borders doesn't interest us. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation. The PLO is fighting Israel in the name of Pan- Arabism. What you call Jordan is nothing more than Palestine.”
 

What Arafat said was, and still is, factually, legally, and demographically true with the vast majority of people living in Jordan calling themselves “Palestinian”. The “Palestinian people” is an anthropological fabrication. This was admitted by Feisal Hussein after the Oslo Accords when he said that this cause was a “Trojan Horse” to conquer Israel. 

 

Palestinism became the hook on which the Arabs, the Muslims, the radical left, and the European intellectual elite, hung their animus of anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, all the “anti’s” that fed off European guilt for their past history. One “anti” was anti-Semitism. The guilt attached to this was their anti-Semitism had been exposed by the atrocities that are an end product of this type of hatred. As such, it went dormant for decades, waiting to re-emerge as criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinian cause. It merged with the noisy actions of a well-funded, well-organized radical campaign. Triumphant from tactics employed to overthrow  the white regime in South Africa, they adopted more of the same in their next experiment, namely the elimination of Israel.

 

At the same time, Israel turned away from the socialism of the Labor Party. It was a time to liberate and capitalize their economy, the success of which can be seen in the emergence of Israel as “The Start Up Nation.” But the rejection of socialism was an anathema to the Western left, especially the more aggressive and radical wings who are tireless in plotting and planning a world in their image. They had by now added a “human rights” element to their argument. By craftily airbrushing out deeply felt Arab hatred of Jews, backed by Palestinian violence and terror that targeted citizens of the Jewish state, they sold a fraudulent picture of oppression when facts on the ground showed that Israel was acting in defense of its people against the assaults of a hateful enemy positioned just minutes away. Their arguments, however, were a soft sell to a shallow thinking public opinion whose knee jerk reaction is to support the perceived underdog. 

 

Undoubtedly, Europe can boast peaceful open borders but, for all their enlightenment and intellectual superiority, they still suffer from a collective guilt conscience. Europe is still shackled to Nazi crimes. In a post-Holocaust era, they fashioned a doctrine designed to prevent further genocides. They failed in this noble mission. Massacres occur with alarming regularity. Not only have been unable to prevent them from happening, they have failed to stop them once they begin. 

 

Decades later they misinterpret and misapply Geneva conventions to conflicts unrelated to the intentions of the original Geneva drafters. One prime example is the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Some use Geneva-talk. They finesse expressions such as “occupation” and “illegal settlements” when there is equal, perhaps better, legitimacy for a different Israeli opinion. “Transfer of population into occupied territory” is applied to Israel, but not to Turkey in Cyprus. “International law” is quoted where none exists.

 

Repeating a fallacy does not make it kosher no matter how many times the international community tells the lie. When Europeans construct false claims into an automatic denunciation of Israel they should remember that this is an artificial machination. No matter how hard they try to push it up the hill it will not fly. It is not built on fact or truth. 

 

European guilt goes way beyond Auschwitz regrets. They have a stained history of colonization, exploitation, and oppression of foreign lands to live down. Third World poverty and starvation, past and present, can be laid at their, and America’s, door. Their shame will not be redeemed by imposing their guilt factors into resolutions and sanctions that victimize Israel. Instead, they should stop their Utopian altruism and false morality, or at least tether it to a realistic political policy that takes into account decades of Palestinian violence, terror, and incitement for a world without the Jewish state.  It may take two to tango, but Israel and Palestinian Arabs may dance more harmoniously if the band leader played an honest tune. 

 

Rushing a Palestinian state will not guarantee it to be the new democracy in the Middle East, no matter how hard they wish it to be true. On the contrary, steamrolling Israel underfoot will produce a rogue regime bent on its declared ambitions to eliminate the Jewish state. 

 

Middle East countries do not share the European mindset, not in morality, and not in democracy. The West must understand the mindset of the Arab and Muslim world before they impose their liberal, democratic, values on a region that has zero tolerance for such niceties. Forcing Israel, the only liberal democracy in the area, to behave European, while giving a free pass to a rejectionist, rigid, and intolerant adversary, is not the path to peace.  It will be as useless and immoral as it has been with all the other genocides and massacres that have been perpetrated since the last Holocaust of the Jewish people. 

Such a disaster will not swathe a Western guilt complex. On the contrary, such a mistake could lead the Jewish people into yet another ghetto from which they will be unable to effectively defend themselves. 

 

This historic fate would have echoes of the past and only increase the guilt of a world that has always failed its Jews.

 

Barry Shaw is the author of Israel Reclaiming the Narrative. www.israelnarrative.com He is also the Special Consultant on Delegitimization Issues to the Strategic Dialogue Center at Netanya Academic College.

Lessons for Israel from the Ukraine.

Lessons for Israel from the Ukraine.

It is interesting to remember that, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, much of Russia's nuclear missile facilities were located within the Ukraine. 

In return for the Ukraine disarming it's nuclear weapons, America and Britain guaranteed its national integrity and security.

It is clear that the US and UK will not send troops to counter any Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Israel is watching this and questioning the value of any international guarantees linked to its security considerations in any peace deal with the Palestinian Arabs.

Israel is also dubious about the effectiveness of any American guarantee to Israel in their dealings with Iran over Iran's nuclear ambitions.