Sharpe
A Frightening And Harrowing World
Jun 1st
by Victor Sharpe
Barack Hussein Obama, the President of our United States of America, hates Israel and always has. He also hates America as it is presently constituted and he will work to bring down both the reconstituted Jewish state in its ancient and biblical homeland along with this glorious republic that is America.
Before and since coming to power, this president has surrounded himself with people like Rashid Khalidi, a one-time spokesman for the Islamist Hamas terror organization and offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood: In other words, those who are Islamic haters of Jews and Christians and whose followers have committed persecutions and slaughters down the ages – and still do.
As a mirror image to the Muslim haters of the Jewish people, Obama also has surrounded himself with people like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright whose perverted form of Christianity, along with elements of Replacement Theology, has also been responsible for anti-Jewish persecutions and slaughters down the ages.
As Mark Levin inferred in his Talk Radio program the other day, this Obama regime, the Democrat Party, and the grotesquely compliant Congress has made this world a much more dangerous place.
What are we to make, for instance, of our president calling the Turkish Prime Minister and expressing his condolences for the deaths of jihadist and Islamist thugs masquerading as “peace-activists” on board what I describe as “The Flotilla of Lies and Violence?” One word to describe Obama’s obeisance to the Turkish prime minister is: “shameful.”
But no outrage came from this president towards the activities of the Turkish leader who deliberately and cynically connived in sending a convoy of ships full of jihadists and their misguided supporters to aid and abet the murderous Hamas regime; a regime which calls for the genocide of the Jews in Israel and the destruction of the tiny and embattled Jewish state. For those “peace-loving activists” who were on board some of the ships, Lenin had a phrase for them: He called them, “useful idiots.”
Obama’s earlier outreach at Cairo to the Muslim world – a world of some 57 regimes, dictatorships, kingdoms, emirates and tyrannies, all stuck in the 7th century – was warning enough for those of us who still cherish the fundamental freedoms of expression, of the press, of free assembly, of religion and of the rights of women and minorities, that the United States of America has given us and the world.
These essential and divinely inspired freedoms do not exist in the Muslim world. Is it any wonder then that they hate us for not submitting to their rigid Islamic and Koranic strictures?
Let’s look at the Islamic, anti-Western IHH – the chief supporter of the flotilla to Gaza – which poses as a humanitarian relief fund (Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation), while supporting Hamas and several Jihadist organizations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
IHH was involved with Ahmed Ressam, an Islamic terrorist, who attempted to smuggle 1,320 pounds of explosives and plant them at the Los Angeles International Airport. According to French intelligence, Bulent Yildirim, the president of IHH, recruited “Jihadi warriors” and transferred money, firearms and explosives to Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists in various countries.
He also ran “peace convoys” from Syria into the Fallujah Triangle in Iraq; convoys which carried IEDs and weapons used to kill American soldiers. It would seem inconceivable for President Obama or his State Department not to know this.
So now we have the Muslim world predictably calling for Israel to be isolated, to be made into a pariah state for the crime of trying to defend itself. Add to it the nations of that charnel house called Europe, which has spewed upon the world stage Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and before them an endless parade of monsters and despots. Most alarmingly of all, we now have the Obama regime and much of the western media siding more and more with the thugdoms and rogue regimes in this benighted, early 21st century world.
So inevitably Israel is being portrayed as brutal and unconcerned for the human rights of the militants on board the flotilla. Hamas and the many other Islamic terror organizations, who relentlessly commit unspeakable atrocities against the human rights of women and non-Muslims, are adept at masterfully playing the Western world, its press and governments, for the suckers they truly are.
The pro-Hamas flotilla of lies and violence was concerned not with genuine human rights but with providing the trigger and excuse for a future Arab and Muslim war of genocide against Israel. Just as Hitler’s Nazi regime systematically demonized the stateless and defenseless Jews as a precursor to the Holocaust, so the Muslim world and the immoral Europeans, and too many in America, repeat the storyline.
The end result is that Israel, as so often, is caught in a “No-Win” situation and must ultimately use force to stop the aggression and depredations of the Hamas terror organization. Whether Hamas and the Islamists unleash incessant rocket fire into Israeli towns and villages, kidnap Israelis, inflict terror attacks, or bring a flotilla of so-called “peace activists” to Gaza, Israel is brought to a position that it must act; to not do so is ultimately to commit national suicide.
It is worth repeating: Much of the mainstream press consistently refuses to accept or understand how they are being relentlessly manipulated by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamists and Jihadists.
We are witness today to the radical Left joining in an unholy alliance with the Islamic world and supporting the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria – all Muslim groups and states that will crush the Left if the worldwide Islamic Caliphate ever comes to power: And all joining gleefully in the anti-Israel hate-fest.
If any advice can be given to Jewish Americans and others it is to jettison ties with a Democrat party that has lurched so far to the left that it is unrecognizable as the Democrat party of their parents and grandparents time. The same goes for those Catholic and Protestant Americans whose values also are now being betrayed by both this president and the Democrats in the House and Senate.
The only hope is for citizens to realize that in America this November the election for House and Senate members is the most crucial that America has perhaps ever faced. Without a massive brake on the power of Obama’s agenda – and on those who surround him – we truly face a frightening and harrowing world.
Victor Sharpe is the author of the two volume book, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Gaza Flotilla Action
May 31st
By Victor Sharpe
Here is more information about the so-called humanitarian flotilla, which like so many groups who hide behind titles such as, “humanitarian” and “peace and justice,” are violent and hateful in their premeditated acts.
The pictures are hard to watch, the emotions they create are understandable BUT let us realize this is exactly what the Turkish Humanitarian organization wanted to create with this flotilla. This was NOT a peaceful humanitarian group, they came armed and ready for violence, even with children as human shields. Please use the facts below whenever you talk or are engaged on this subject.
1. A state of armed conflict exists between Israel and the Hamas regime controlling Gaza. The Hamas terrorists have launched over 12,000 rockets against Israeli civilians, and are presently smuggling in Iranian arms and military supplies into Gaza, by land and sea, in order to fortify its positions and continue its attacks.
2. Under international law, Israel has the right to protect the lives of its civilians from Hamas attacks, and, consequently, has undertaken measures to defend itself, including the imposition of a maritime blockade to curb Hamas rearmament. Under international maritime law, when a maritime blockade is in effect, no vessels can enter the blockaded area.
3. In line with Israel’s obligations under international law, the ships participating in the protest flotilla were warned repeatedly that a maritime blockade is in effect off the coast of Gaza and were given due notice of its exact coordinates.
4. Israel repeatedly offered the flotilla organizers permission to land in the port of Ashdod, and to transfer their aid to Gaza through the existing overland crossings, in accordance with established procedures. Thousands of tons of humanitarian supplies are regularly allowed in by Israel through the land crossings. The flotilla organizers rejected this offer, stating clearly that “this mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege.” (Greta Berlin, AFP, 27May10).
5. While the organizers claim to have humanitarian concern for the residents of Gaza they did not have similar concerns for the fate of the abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and when asked, refused to even make a public call to allow him to be visited by the Red Cross. Shalit has languished in a Gazan dungeon for over three years.
6. When it became clear that the protest flotilla intended to violate the blockade despite repeated warnings, Israeli Naval personnel boarded the vessels of the flotilla, and redirected them to Ashdod.
7. Given the large number of vessels participating in the flotilla, there was an operational need to undertake measures to enforce the blockade a certain distance from the area of the blockade.
8. The intention of the flotilla participants to resist Israeli Naval personnel was made clear in numerous television interviews on 30 May given by the head of the IHH, Bulent Yildirim on board the Mavi Marmara (as he held a year-old infant in his arms, in what he called a “message” to any Israelis planning to act against the flotilla).
9. The Israeli Navy was met with violent opposition, two pistols were found in the hands of protesters, and over a dozen Israeli personnel were hospitalized, some in critical condition. One militant snatched a gun from an Israeli commando and opened fire. The Navy described being met by a “lynching” party.
10. In Ashdod, the flotilla’s cargo will be off-loaded and the humanitarian items will be transferred overland to Gaza in accordance with standard operating procedures. The participants of the flotilla will be subjected to immigration procedures applicable in cases of attempted illegal entry.
Summing up: Inevitably Israel will be portrayed as brutal and unconcerned for the human rights of the victims of the conflict. Hamas and the many other Islamic terror organizations play the Western world, its press and governments, masterfully. The end result is that Israel, as so often, is caught in a “No-Win” situation and must ultimately use force to stop the aggression and depredations of the Hamas terror organization. Whether Hamas and the Islamists unleash incessant rocket fire into Israeli civilian towns, kidnap Israeli soldiers, inflict terror attacks, or bring a flotilla of so-called “peace activists” to Gaza, Israel is brought to a position that it must act. Not to do so is ultimately to commit national suicide. Sadly, the mainstream press consistently refuses to accept or understand how they are being relentlessly manipulated by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamists and Jihadists.
The many fables of Saeb Erakat
May 23rd
I once wrote an earlier article, which was titled: Lies, damned lies, and Palestinian propaganda in descending order. That title paraphrased British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli’s, 19th century aphorism: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Few have mastered the art of dissimilitude more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat, who continues to be taken seriously by the ever gullible western media. Now in his late middle age, Erakat continues to spew howlers as he has been doing for several decades, yet he still retains the confidence of mainstream western journalists and reporters.
This is the man who bamboozled the world on CNN in April 2002 by baldly stating that Israel had, “massacred at least 500 people in Jenin and women and children were missing.”
This outrageous lie was effectively dismissed by Colin Powell himself and its falsehood subsequently confirmed by the UN, which went on to report that 56 Arabs were killed (34 of them armed combatants) in fighting by the IDF against Palestinian Arab terror squads infesting the Arab city. This is the city from which some 28 suicide bombers had infiltrated the Jewish state, perpetrating atrocities against hundreds of Israeli civilians during the previous 18 months. Erakat knew his words were false but he also knew the effectiveness of the “big lie.”
No Arab civilians were missing. However, many of the 22 civilians killed were used as human shields by the Arab terrorists – in itself an Arab war crime that remains unpunished.
Erakat’s outright lie was hardly challenged, nor his credibility dented. After all, he has made a perverse career of half-truths, mistruths and spectacular falsehoods over several decades while acting as a Palestinian spokesman and negotiator in what is called the, “peace process.” In the latest round of indirect talks between the Israelis and the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, brokered by George Mitchell at the behest of his master in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, Erakat is again front and center obfuscating and manipulating the clueless media in the way he knows best.
In an article by Bret Stephens titled Liar, liar in December 2002, published in the Jerusalem Post, it was pointed out that up to that date, “Erakat has had no less than 11,382 citations in the English language press since 1988” – a veritable Niagra Falls of falsehoods that have done so much to poison the minds of countless readers against Israel. Since then the torrent of Erakat whoppers has washed away any sense of historical accuracy.
Here are a few of the many deliberate lies Mr. Erakat has uttered:
In the International Herald Tribune (11/26/05) , Saeb Erekat wrote “Israel is a nuclear power boasting the fifth-largest military in the world.” Correction (1/3/06): “While there are various ways to measure military strength, in terms of manpower alone and counting both active service members and reservists, Israel’s military ranks 18th globally, according to data in the latest edition of “The Military Balance,” a reference by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.”
Erakat has often claimed to the Western world and through its media that, “Palestinians are committed to two equal states for two peoples.” Sounds nice to western ears, but facts tell a very different story. Well over 60% of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians reject outright such an Erakat claim. And Mahmoud Abbas himself, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, rejects utterly any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state. Erakat can provide no evidence that he or his cronies seek peace, while Israel can show three peace offers in the past decade. But according to the current Palestinian narrative, effectively conveyed by Erakat, the fault for the absence of negotiations or peace lies with Israel.
Erakat claims repeatedly that Israeli villages in Judea and Samaria, which Erakat describes in the anti-Israel nomenclature as “settlements in the West Bank,” cover 42% of the disputed territory when in fact they control barely 5% of the ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland. Bret Stephens pointed out in his December, 2002 article that, Erakat says “settlers” are stealing Palestinian water resources. Yet almost all “settlers” are linked to the central Israeli water grid and do not use local wells.” What is fact is that the Arabs pollute the scant water resources and aquifer within Judea and Samaria and the very term, Palestinian water resources, is to implicitly pre-judge whose land it truly is.
He also mentioned that, “Erekat says Israel plans to deprive Palestinians of everything but “an insignificant presence in Jerusalem.” Yet at Camp David, much of east Jerusalem was theirs for the taking. They refused it.”
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, proved that telling a big lie over and over again assured that most people would come to believe it. However, Saeb Erakat also proves that if you tell a multitude of small lies over and over again, a multitude of people will believe them without question.
Erakat’s career has been just such a monument to dissimilitude. Sadly, there are many people anxious and willing to accept any nonsense uttered by such a master of deceits – which brings me to his latest outrage.
According to Israel National News, Saeb Erakat has criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for mentioning the Jewish people’s historic ties to Jerusalem as described in the Bible. He accused the prime minister of, “using religion to incite hatred and fear.” Biblical references it seems are now considered hate mongering by the Islamic world. The Holy Jewish Bible refers to Jerusalem and Zion, which are synonymous, 850 times.
The Holy Christian Bible refers to them some 154 times. The Holy Koran does not refer to Jerusalem at all. Instead the Koran commands Muslims to: “ … fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” Koran 9:5. Propaganda is a stratagem of war and Mr. Erakat knows all too well how to wage it.
Erakat has often sought to dismiss the inextricable 3,000 year old Jewish ties to Jerusalem and has claimed that Jewish heritage on the Temple Mount, the site of the two ancient Jewish Temples, are a threat to Islam.
The neighborhoods illegally occupied by the Jordanian regime from 1948 to 1967 are now claimed by the Palestinian Authority as the future capital of a PA state. They include the Old City, the City of David and the Temple Mount. But Jewish residents of these very neighborhoods were expelled from them by the British officered Jordanian Arab Legion in 1948.
Erakat warned just this last week that, “East Jerusalem cannot continue to be occupied if there is to be peace.” This too will be believed by many in the international corridors of power and the media even as they know in their heart of hearts that if Jerusalem was again divided – like Berlin once was – there still will never be peace from the Arabs.
Saeb Erakat will continue to obfuscate and dissemble in his inimitable fashion, ever hiding the empirical fact that the Muslim world will never accept a Jewish state however much of its biblical and ancestral patrimony it gives away in pursuit of peace. Mr. Erakat well knows that even if Israel shrank to one downtown square in Tel Aviv its existence would still be a provocation to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
The one truth that Erakat will never reveal is that the Palestinian Arab leadership will never accept a “two state solution.” They want no Jewish state side by side with their Arab and Muslim state.
Indeed, they ultimately want one state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Iraq – that is an Islamic state, including the present day Kingdom of Jordan, in which neither Jews nor Hashemites will be permitted to remain. It will inevitably become a Hamas controlled state willingly tied to the baleful influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran – an extension of Islamist and jihadist influence on the very doorstep of Europe and a bridgehead for the dreamed of worldwide Islamic Caliphate.
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Glory or Weakness?
Apr 13th
By Victor Sharpe
The obscene Goldstone Report unleashed all that we already knew of the world; that it hates the Jew and hates the reconstituted Jewish state. The report’s bigotry, its lies of commission and omission, were made even more unbearable by the fact that a South African Jew foolishly gave his name to it. Such Jews have often wittingly or unwittingly stabbed the very heart of the Jewish People.
I am reminded of some of the words of Menachem Begin when he stood before the graves of three young Jewish patriots, members of Irgun Zvai Leumi, hung by the British Mandatory authorities for merely possessing one unused pistol between them. Begin said the following:
“We believe with perfect faith that the Jewish People is indestructible. A people who suffered the cruelty, the oppression, and the holocausts of the long night of exile, which descended for so many centuries upon it and which, nevertheless, survived each and every one of its more powerful enemies, cannot be destroyed …
“It is this firm belief that is echoed every year at the Passover Seder table: In every generation they rise up to destroy us but the Holy One, Blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.
“And as one marvels at the incredible history of the frailest of peoples and beholds them marching past the graves of the mightiest empires, of kingdoms, that dreamed of Jewish destruction; when one gazes upon the glory of Egypt, a Babylon, a Greece, a Rome, a Spain – all glories of generations past – surely the power of that Heavenly promise becomes felt in the very fiber of his being.
“In the end, at times of crisis, there are no allies for the Jew. At best, nations are motivated by self-interest, and we, the smallest of peoples, offer little to the practitioners of real Politik.
“At worst, there is a deep and abiding antipathy to the Jew, his cause, his land. Who can the Jew trust? None but himself. To whom can he look for assurance and guarantees? Only to himself and his Divine Protector. This is enough to assure Jewish survival. That is enough to swell our hearts with Hadar.”
Menachem Begin’s eulogy contained words of great wisdom and prescience, including the Hebrew word hadar, meaning glory. Indeed, the nations of the world are almost as one now in chastising the Jewish state for daring to defend itself against Arab aggression.
Since the heartrending time in which Menachem Begin saw a world, so shortly after the Holocaust, indifferent and even hostile to the endless and relentless suffering of the Jewish people, there have arisen Christians spanning many nations, who rejected Replacement Theology and have followed a different light. These principled and highly moral folk have found so much in the inextricable Jewish roots of their Christianity that they have come forward as the only friends of an otherwise hated peoplehood: the Jews.
Twelve thousand Hamas missiles streaking into Israeli villages and towns from Gaza during eight long years barely raised a collective eyebrow in Europe. But when Jews – finally defending their long suffering citizens – it becomes a different matter.
Even if the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is the most moral army in the world – which it is – and goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian Arab casualties – most often needlessly endangering the lives of its own soldiers – the international chorus can barely conceal its vile charge that Israel acts the way the Nazis did. This in itself is an attempt to free its own crushing guilt at conspiring with, or ignoring, the German Nazi extermination of European Jewry.
Here are the words of British Commander (ret.) Richard Kemp, who told the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that the IDF made a strong effort last winter to safeguard the lives of Gaza’s Arab civilians during its counterterrorist operation.
“During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare …”Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
Needless to say, the U.N. Human Rights Council, infested as it is with many of the world’s rogue states, was not moved by his testimony.
Britain and France could not bring themselves to vote in the U.N. against the odious and monumental hypocrisy that is the Goldstone Report. No doubt Arab oil, economic pressure and lucrative trade advantages were more important to the British Foreign Office and the Quai d’Orsay than morality. In the international corridors of power, it has ever been so.
Debka Intelligence report suggested that the Israeli government could have acted much sooner by informing the world of the numerous functionaries still acting in the Palestinian Authority who committed acts of brutality and terror against Jewish civilians.
“Israel,” it said, “could have catalogued for the UNHRC the relentless crimes and atrocities against humanity perpetrated by the Hamas, Islamic jihad, Fatah, and other Palestinian Arab terror gangs. They delayed doing so for far too long and allowed the anti-Israel coalition to box Israel into a dire corner by delegitimizing the IDF with the Goldstone Report.” Maybe so, but there is still very little Israel can do against such worldwide hatred.
As mentioned earlier, there are those standing with Israel in its lonely passion. Millions of Evangelical Christians, mostly in America, are supporting the embattled Jewish state and providing practical assistance in selfless and loving ways.
But an infernal mechanism is at work. It is unmistakable. The State of Israel is under an existential threat the likes of which, perhaps, it has not seen before. Nuclear war is fast becoming a reality unless the Iranian threat is neutralized or at least set back.
The world, including Obama’s America, may not use force against the madness oozing from Teheran. It is increasingly apparent that only Israel will be left with increasing difficulty to overcome the threat from Ahmadinijad and the mullahs. The immoral world will remain unmoved by Ahmadinijad’s threats to destroy Israel, “the Zionist entity” as he calls it, and will wait instead for Israel to do what is necessary to protect herself and, by extension, the world itself.
Then they will shriek as one in condemnation, while secretly breathing a collective sigh of relief. They did this when Menachem Begin authorized the IDF to destroy Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi nuclear threat at Osiraq. The little men and women in the international Chancelleries cannot tolerate a nation that defies hypocrisy and acts out of a deep sense of morality.
The same little men and women who are the world’s prime ministers and presidents inwardly hate themselves and their inherent weakness. In so doing they project that self-hatred against the very nation, Israel, that exemplifies all that they secretly wish they were. The result is a corrosive envy and an assault upon the victim, the lonely Jewish state; not the Iranian or Arab Muslim victimizers.
Now streak forward in time from Menachem Begin’s eulogy to the betrayal of America and its allies as exemplified at the Nuclear Disarmament conference called by Barack Hussein Obama in Washington, DC. Some fifty heads of state gathering to produce nothing but faithless blather while the Islamic Republic of Iran, which calls for the nuclear destruction of the Jewish state, is not mentioned once. Nothing has changed.
Remember again the Passover, the festival of freedom from tyranny, and the eternal words: In every generation they rise up to destroy us but the Holy One, Blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”
Only a return to and rediscovery of the faith that has sustained both Jews and Christians over the millennia can vindicate the clarion call heard after the Shoah: “Never again.”
And then the choice must be made: Glory or Weakness?
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Abdullah in Wonderland
Apr 12th
By Victor Sharpe, American Thinker
When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, encountering situations that defied logic and characters who acted in bizarre ways, she was fortunate not to meet Jordan’s kinglet, Abdullah II. Kinglet is an apt description for this monarch, first coined by columnist Ruth King.
Jordan’s king, a member of the Hashemite tribe, is named after Emir Abdullah, who was assassinated on July 20, 1951 after leaving Friday evening prayers at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque. Abdullah was in favor of making peace with Israel but, like Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, he was murdered by Islamic extremists for his moderation. The assassinated emir was accompanied at the mosque by his grandson, King Hussein, also the present Jordanian monarch’s father.
In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, King Abdullah II announced that at his forthcoming meeting with America’s president, Barack Hussein Obama, he will ask the president to pile on yet more pressure upon embattled Israel over Arab territorial demands on Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.
The kinglet stated in his WSJ interview that “Jerusalem specifically engages Jordan because we are the custodians of the Muslim and Christian holy places and this is a flashpoint that goes beyond Jordanian-Israel relations.”
And here we descend the rabbit hole. Abdullah II chose to hide the unpleasant facts that under his father, King Hussein, not only did Jordan refuse to allow Jews access to their holy sites during Jordan’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967 (including the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount), but it desecrated the ancient Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, ran a road through the cemetery, used many of the gravestones as latrines for the Arab Legion, deliberately destroyed and desecrated scores of ancient synagogues throughout the Old City, and used the Tomb of Simon the Just as a stable. The Jewish inhabitants of the Old City and areas of east Jerusalem, meanwhile, had been driven from their homes and forced to flee to safety in West Jerusalem.
During the nineteen years of illegal Jordanian Arab occupation of the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem (an occupation recognized by only Pakistan and Britain), the United Nations not once protested against the rampant and systematic destruction of the ancient Jewish quarter. Only after the reunification of the city in 1967 and the removal by Israel of the Jordanian pillboxes, barbed wire, and sniper sites was the filth that had piled up over the years along the Via Delarosa (with Christian pilgrims being forced to wade through it) removed and the area cleansed. And only after reunification did the morally challenged United Nations begin its long and hypocritical series of anti-Israel resolutions over Jerusalem.
It is only since Israel was forced by Arab aggression to fight the June 1967 Six Day War and liberate Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation that all religions and faiths are treated with respect and provided free access to their holy places. On June 4, 1967, former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol pleaded with the late King Hussein, via the United Nations, not to follow the genocidal boastings of Egypt’s President Nasser and attack the Jewish state. Eshkol stated that “[w]e shall not initiate any action whatsoever against Jordan. However, should Jordan open hostilities, we shall react with all our might and he (the King) will have to bear the full responsibility for all the consequences.”
The impressionable king, succumbing to Nasser’s boast of Egyptian forces already inside Israel, ordered his artillery to open fire along the entire border between west and east Jerusalem. The Egyptians and elements of the Arab Legion had penetrated the southernmost Jewish suburb of Jerusalem, Ramat Rahel, founded in 1926 upon the same site of a Jewish village from biblical times.
It is instructive to note that King Hussein visited East Jerusalem only once during Jordan’s occupation and chose to keep Amman the capital of Jordan. Indeed, no Muslim holy place is today the capital city of an Arab and Muslim state. In Iran, the capital is Teheran; it is not Qum or Meshed. In Saudi Arabia, neither Mecca nor Medina is the capital city; it is Riyadh.
Only the Jews regard Jerusalem as both their spiritual and temporal capital city, and they have done so for three thousand years. For Christians, Jerusalem is a spiritual, not a temporal, site. Muslims, even while praying in their mosque on the Temple Mount, face Mecca with their backs to Jerusalem.
The Two State Solution, 87 years old, is an ideal explanation of the history of betrayal by Great Britain toward its obligation to create a Jewish National Home in geographical Palestine and how the entire territory east of the River Jordan (present-day Jordan) was torn away, leaving only the narrow sliver of land west of the Jordan River for the reconstituted Jewish state. This tiny piece of land, which includes the very biblical and ancestral heartland of the Jews, is now threatened by yet another Two State Solution, reducing Israel to only nine miles wide at its most populous region. The present Kingdom of Jordan, over which Abdullah II reigns, is the much larger territory east of the River Jordan stretching east to Iraq, south to Saudi Arabia, and north to Syria.
In 1994, Yasser Arafat’s PLO demanded East Jerusalem as the capital city of a new Arab state. All Jews living in such a capital, it declared, will be driven out — or worse. Sound familiar? This demand was first articulated only after the 1967 War and Jerusalem’s reunification. Since then, it has become a staple of Palestinian Arab and all other Arab and Muslim rhetoric.
Now Abdullah II impudently claims that the Israeli Prime Minister’s actions have brought their two nation’s relations to a new low. Again the Alice in Wonderland syndrome is clear for all to see. For Netanyahu has made yet more concessions to bring about peace in the region by agreeing to a freeze on housing for Jews throughout Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). No concessions have been demanded of the Palestinian Arabs, who continue terrorism against Israeli civilians and indoctrinate their children with vile anti-Jewish hatred — all banned under the Oslo Peace Accords. The Jordanian king even stretches credulity by claiming that Jordanian officials call their relations with Israel a cold peace. He went on to say, “People to people exchanges between our two countries are virtually non-existent and cross border business has largely dried up.”
Though Jordan has resisted the Palestinians’ attempt to undermine the peace treaty obligations made earlier between Jordan and Israel in 1994, it has nevertheless been Jordan that is the cause of the cold peace with the Jewish state. Animosity toward Israel and the lack of peaceful interchange between the two peoples has been led by Jordan’s professional and intellectual organizations. These have included journalists, doctors, dentists, business leaders, artists, and musicians. These groups have opposed all and every form of normalization with Israel.
Any Jordanian Arab who reaches out to Israelis is immediately threatened and blacklisted. It is ironic that Jordan’s kinglet allows such a situation to exist while choosing to falsely blame Israel. Could it be that he is afraid of alienating these organizations for fear that the Hashemite control over his kingdom would falter? After all, Jordan’s population is three-fourths Palestinian, and the kinglet’s greatest fear is a Palestinian Arab coup.
In September 1970, the kinglet’s father, King Hussein, fought off a PLO coup d’état led by the arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, who had created a state within a state inside Jordan. Hussein’s Arab Legion killed thousands of PLO terrorists, along with their families, and many fled to Israel for safety — the very same terrorists who had been conducting grisly cross-border raids into Israel. Since then, Israel has several times warned Jordan of attempts to destroy it from the neighboring Syrian regime in Damascus, which considers Jordan as part of southern Syria. Indeed, Israel even intervened once to forestall an imminent Syrian invasion.
In his meeting with President Barack Hussein Obama, the kinglet will take the predictable anti-Israeli line in order to keep his Arab credentials intact and his Hashemite minority from being overthrown. The kinglet’s throne is an uneasy one at best. But what better way to deflect his subjects’ growing Islamic radicalization than to heap blame upon Israel for every problem in the Middle East? And this while secretly relying upon Israel to protect his throne.
According to an earlier Pew Global Attitude Project finding,
A majority of Jordanians now say suicide bombings and other violent actions are justifiable in defense of Islam. According to the Jordan Times’ correspondent, Omar Karmi, because of close geopolitical and familial ties, Hamas has a close relationship with Jordan’s Islamists, and the Jordanian Islamists’ increasing popularity has been given a big boost by Hamas’ victory. Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood is and always has been implacably opposed to the 1994 [Jordan-Israel] peace treaty. Despite the remarkable durability of the Hashemite Kingdom, Jordan’s strategic position and its vulnerability remain a given that cannot be ignored in any Israeli security assessment.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II dares not buck the growing Arab, Muslim, and worldwide pressure piling on Israel, vastly encouraged as it is by the mendacious and unprincipled anti-Israel bias emanating from the White House and State Department. He will no doubt echo the tired old mantra that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict will miraculously solve all world problems and usher in “peace in our time.”
It is no surprise, therefore, that the kinglet and the American president will have a great time together at their upcoming Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. And no doubt U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, and American General James Jones will all join together in the “let’s bash Israel” festivity while the malevolent Cheshire cat, Ahmadinejad, looks on with an ever-widening grin.
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Next Year in West Jerusalem
Mar 31st
By Victor Sharpe
It has thus come to this. Jerusalem may well be on the way to being re-divided. History will not look kindly upon those in this generation who have fallen into the trap of media distortion, Arab untruths, peace at any price and sheer apathy.
The Jewish Talmud and Midrash tell us from where the message of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is to be broadcast to the world and from where its radiance is to shine forth. The name Zion is synonymous with Jerusalem and every time the Torah is taken from the Ark, during the synagogue service, Jerusalem and Zion are invoked. “For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2).
The word Jerusalem and Zion are mentioned 821 times in the entire Jewish Bible (the Tanach) sometimes also referring to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). Jerusalem is mentioned 154 times in the Christian Bible and Zion seven. Jerusalem is not mentioned by name once in the Moslem Koran. Only well after the Arab invasion of Eretz Yisrael in 638 AD did the Arabs begin to refer to the city by name and then only from the tenth century with names of Jewish origin, e.g. Al Kuds, Arabic for the Hebrew Ir Hakodesh (City of Holiness) and Siyyun, Arabic for the Hebrew, Tsiyon, Zion.
The betrayal of Jewish and biblical history, which began at the Madrid Conference, led remorselessly to the Oslo Accords and to the nonsense called the “peace process” whereby Israel gives away land for peace but in return never receives peace. First Jericho, which Joshua bin-Nun liberated when the Jews entered the Promised Land, went to the Arab arch terrorist Yasser Arafat, then Hebron (the first capital of the Jewish King David), and then in rapid succession Nablus, (Biblical Shechem), and relentlessly the hills, mountains, fields and terraces of biblical Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).
All were given away to those who hate the Jews and who endlessly plot the total destruction of the Jewish State. Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denying acolyte of Arafat, is presented to the world as a peace partner for Israel. What monumental sham is this? There are those within the present U.S. Administration who work to uproot perhaps as many as 300,000 Jewish residents from their homes in the outlying communities of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and a further 200,000 living in neighborhoods of north and northwestern Jerusalem. They seem intent upon forcing Israel to give away most of what’s left of the ancestral Jewish heartland to the Palestinian Arabs – in return for nothing.
Those within the Left and within the international corridors of power have learned nothing from Israel’s arbitrary withdrawal from southern Lebanon or from Gaza. As a result of those Israeli peace overtures to the Arabs, Hezbollah inflicted upon Israel the Second Lebanon War and from Gaza a relentless barrage of missiles upon Israeli towns and villages. On and on has continued the insane juggernaut of concession and abandonment of Israel’s biblical and ancestral homeland to the Arabs; urged on at every instance by American Administrations, the European Union, the so-called Quartet and the United Nations until the very gates of Jerusalem may now soon be breached.
Talk of dividing Jerusalem is uttered relentlessly. For the first time in recorded history, large areas of Judaism’s capital city would become the capital of a new, hostile and fraudulent Arab state called Palestine. The Temple Mount, the holiest of all Jewish holy sites, is now all but lost, and the prayers and anguished longing by generations of suffering Jews is being dismissed by those who have no love for the Jewish state. The previous Israeli government allowed the Moslem Waqf to blatantly destroy Jewish and Christian antiquities on the Temple Mount and to build a new giant mosque underneath it. Israeli archaeologists pleaded in vain to stop the Moslem bulldozers and desecration. Now ordinary Israelis have to sift through enormous piles of dirt that Muslim Palestinians dumped unceremoniously in the valley below the Holy City. Israelis and visitors from overseas now painstakingly search to see if they can find what remains of Jewish and Christian antiquities. Who knows what priceless archaeological evidence was destroyed by the Waqf. What humiliation is this?
We must not at our peril fool ourselves that the appetite of the Palestinian Arabs and the entire Moslem world will be satisfied by the abandonment of the Temple Mount and the eastern half of Jerusalem. We may be doomed to be the generation that will see before our very eyes the destruction of the Jewish State itself, for even if Israel shrinks to a small city block in Tel Aviv, its presence will still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world.
Is there an answer? Yes, but many will find it unpalatable. Most have been brainwashed into thinking that the giving away of ancestral Jewish land and the showering of billions of dollars of aid to the Palestinian Authority will bring “peace in our time.” It will not. The growing weakness and crumbling resolve of too many Jews in Israel and the Diaspora only serves to whet the appetite of the Arab world. The Arabs have boasted that they will wipe out what they consider the “insufferable Zionist entity” just as they finally destroyed the Crusader Kingdom.
It does not matter that, unlike the Jews who have returned to their ancient homeland, the Crusaders were foreign adventurers on land that they had no historical ties to. For Muslims, no non-Muslim state or nation that is on land once conquered by Muslim armies in the name of Allah will ever be tolerated.
This is the fatal flaw in the entire concept of the “peace process.” For the Muslim Arabs, peace is merely a means to an end – an armistice in place for only as long as the “infidel” is perceived to be strong. Once that perception has vanished, all promises, agreements and undertakings made with the “infidel” are to be ignored and abrogated. This has been the pattern for all the agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and every single undertaking and promise by them has been broken.
Unpalatable as it must be, the only solution for Israel is to make not one additional concession but resolve to face the entire world if need be rather than deny Jewish history, Jewish faith, and the Zionist cause. It is time to give victory a chance, not the endless and self-defeating concessions that have marred so many Israeli governments in the past. It is time – as it always has been – to look for support from the One source of ultimate strength above all: Almighty God.
In biblical times the Jewish people withstood for long periods the attacks of their neighbors, whoever they were. Today Israel faces a new U.S. Administration, which displays a growing hostility and coldness towards Israel. The deplorable manner in which visiting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was treated at the recent meeting in the White House is unprecedented and marks a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival. Add to that the antipathy of the Moslem world, a hostile and deceitful media, the insidious influence of Arab oil power and, alas, latent anti-Semitism that lingers in international chancelleries, and you have a perfect storm of infernal pressure growing upon the tiny, embattled Jewish state. Satan has much to smile about.
There is still a faint glimmer of hope, but the candle’s flame is growing dimmer by the hour. Israel still has the precious few supporters who expose the cumulative deceits, the distortions, and the outrageous moral equivalence that is made between the Israeli victims of Arab terror and the Arab perpetrators of terror; so lamentably displayed by many of the media mavens who preside over how the news is presented. And the reconstituted State of Israel has the steadfast support of millions of Christians who have found and rediscovered the inextricable roots of their faith within Judaism. They, along with the many Jews who have not yet succumbed to liberal novelties present a resolute defense of an increasingly isolated and vulnerable Israel.
But if the siren calls of a fraudulent, beguiling and deceptive peace cannot be rejected out of hand then I fear a terrible betrayal of undivided Jerusalem, Jewish history and faith will occur. It will not be long before the time immemorial prayer uttered at the conclusion of the Passover meal, which tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the Covenant with God and the creation of the Jewish nation, will become a bitter joke. Instead of “Next Year in Jerusalem,” it will be, “Next Year in West Jerusalem.”
Copyright © Victor Sharpe 2010
Victor Sharpe is a featured writer with several websites and writes about Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict. He is also the author of Volumes One & Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Land for Peace or Oblivion?
Mar 21st
by Victor Sharpe
Immediately after the June 1967 Six Day War, a secret memorandum was issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Their conclusions were that any peace settlement between Israel and the Arab belligerents would only succeed if Israel retained certain territories vital for its continued existence and survival.
The areas the Joint Chiefs declared as the minimum defensible borders for the Jewish state included the Golan Heights, the western half of Samaria (the northwestern part of the West Bank), all of Judea (the southern part of the West Bank), the Gaza Strip and several portions of the eastern Sinai Peninsula.
This, of course, occurred before the world became obsessed with the creation of an Arab terror state within Israel’s narrow territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
Since that report in 1967, the Begin government gave away all of the Sinai. The first city that Joshua liberated during the Israelites entry into the Promised Land, Jericho, was given away by Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term as Prime Minister, followed by most of Hebron, King David’s first Jewish capital and one of Judaism’s four holy cities. Both cities are practically lost to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, Israel gave away the entire Gaza Strip in 2005, with catastrophic consequences for the Jewish state. These breathtaking concessions to the Arabs have all been made under the hope that it will bring peace with the Arab enemies. But it has not. “Peace, peace, but there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14.)
Ehud Barak, Israel’s present Defense Minister, had years earlier withdrawn from the southern Lebanon security strip, thus allowing the Islamist Hezbollah to fill the vacuum with dire consequences for northern Israel. A conflict broke out – the Second Lebanon War – disastrously mismanaged by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was launched too late and ended too soon.
After Israel endured over 12,000 incoming missiles from Hamas-occupied Gaza, Operation Cast Lead was finally launched by Israel. It ended too soon, and the Islamist Hamas continues to pursue its ambition of finally destroying Israel. Just this last week after the visit by Vice President Biden, who attacked Israel for planning to build apartments in a north Jerusalem suburb followed by a vituperative call from Secretary of State Clinton making yet more demands upon Israel, the Palestinian Authority gave the green light to launch riots by Arab mobs in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank). Suspicions that President Obama used an application for zoning approval for future housing in Jerusalem as the excuse to ratchet up unbearable pressure upon the Jewish state are more than persuasive. It may be that if the rioting continues, it will be henceforward known as the Obama intifada.
Israel is now under the greatest pressure in years from an American administration to give away the ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. President Barack Obama is perceived by many to be a clear and present danger to the very survival of the reconstituted Jewish state. His deafening silence, along with that of his lieutenants, Biden, Clinton, Mitchell and his army of anti-Israel advisors, at the disgusting ceremony held in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority honoring a female terrorist and her grisly accomplices who murdered 38 Israeli civilians in 1978, speaks volumes about the towering anti-Israel bias of this president: Barack Hussein Obama.
In the aftermath of the Six Day War, the US Joint Chiefs were not interested in Jewish patrimony or Biblical history. They were solely concerned with the strategic necessities for Israel’s survival in a very bad neighborhood. That is why they set out what the bare minimum retention of territory for Israel should be.
Col. Irving Kett (USA, ret.) also prepared an Army War College study on Israel’s security needs in 1974. His study was called, “A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict”. In it, he strongly suggested that, from a military point of view, Israel’s borders should be constituted to make it a compact state with natural boundaries on all sides – the Jordan River to the east, Golan Heights to the northeast, the Litani River in the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the historic boundary with the Sinai Peninsula to the south. As a direct result and consequence of Arab aggression, most of those borders had been attained by Israel at one time or another.
Colonel Kett pointed out what the IDF has always known, but what too many Israeli politicians preferred to ignore; namely, that there is vital strategic value in the mountain range which forms the spine running through Judea and Samaria. The highlands run some 54 miles from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south and dominate Israel’s coastline. The spine is 12 miles wide and Israel simply cannot afford to vacate it.
It was assumed for years by both the Israeli military and politicians that if a Palestinian Arab state came into existence it would have to permit an Israeli defense line on the Jordan River (the Allon Plan), and that such a state would have to be demilitarized.
The answer, of course, would be to have made permanent the suggested boundaries proposed in both Kett’s memorandum and the earlier JCS report of some 40 years ago. Events have moved on since then. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would never agree to this and Hamas in Gaza would scornfully dismiss it out of hand. The Arabs have become even more vicious in their anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior, and a jihadist Iran has all but encircled the Jewish state through its Islamist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.
The Arab-Israel conflict is not, and never has been, merely a war over territory. It is, and always has been, a religious war. Islam will never accept a non-Muslim state, whatever size or shape it may be, within lands previously conquered by Muslims in the name of Allah. Even if Israel shrank to just one down town square in Tel Aviv it would still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. “Land for Peace” and a “Two State Solution” are euphemisms that are no different to the dread slogan, which greeted the hapless Jews arriving at the Auschwitz death camp: “Arbeit macht frei – Work makes Free.”
The “Two-State Solution”, so beloved of President Obama, requires Judea and Samaria to be given away to the Palestinian Arabs. Obama has upped the ante. Now he wants those Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem built on land liberated from the Jordanian occupiers to also be given to the Palestinian Arabs. We are now talking about a potential plan to expel some 700,000 Jews from their biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria along with many suburbs of the Jewish capital city: Jerusalem.
But the Arabs have no intention of making peace whatever territorial concessions Israel makes. That should be enough for an Israeli government and Prime Minister with intestinal fortitude to defy the world’s pressure for the Jewish state to slowly and surely disappear. After all, Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir all said “no” to American presidents in the past and prevailed.
Interestingly, Colonel Kett had also suggested that the Palestinian Arabs be resettled in a state in the Sinai. The other famous suggestion is that Jordan is Palestine, which is based upon the historical fact of the first “Two-State Solution” enacted in infamy by Great Britain some 87 years ago.
Even President George W. Bush, when visiting Israel as Governor of Texas, was moved to utter, “The whole of Israel is only about six times the size of the King Ranch near Corpus Christie.” Yet even he, after becoming president, called for a “Two-State Solution” west of the Jordan River.
Pushing Israel back to the “Auschwitz borders”, as Abba Eban called them, where the Jewish state is only nine miles wide at its most populous region, is what the “Two-State Solution” is all about. That other dread euphemism “The Final Solution” then comes to mind.
Hopefully Binyamin Netanyahu will stress the territorial insanity of that fact during his visit to Washington, DC. Perhaps he will have the opportunity to do so with President Obama; provided the president does not give the Israeli head of state the cold shoulder.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. Copyright ©Victor Sharpe 2010.
If Obama abandons Israel, what then?
Mar 19th
By Victor Sharpe
August 15, 2005, began as a day of infamy. It ushered in a great tribulation for the Jewish state, but one forced upon it by its very own Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.
It began one day after the annual commemoration of the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’ Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av when, according to tradition, both Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed; the first one by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the second by the Romans in 70 AD.
On that August day, the Jews of Gaza began to be driven from their homes by Israeli soldiers and police acting on the orders of their Prime Minister. The tragedy ended one week later, known now by its euphemism — disengagement. Its self-imposed execution ushered in a needless catastrophe for Israel and eventually led to the occupation of Gaza by Hamas through an election engineered by Condoleezza Rice.
Hamas thus came to power using a democratic tool and subsequently destroyed its rival, Fatah, in a bloody massacre; the same Hamas, which proclaims its Constitution is the Koran and implacably calls for the destruction of Israel.
Israel woke up to relentless daily barrages of sometimes scores of missiles deliberately aimed at its civilian populations in villages and towns. The little town of Sderot, in particular, became Israel’s Stalingrad. Finally, after years of astonishing forbearance and thousands of incoming rockets from Gaza, Israel struck back against a cruel Islamic enemy, which gloried in using its own civilians as human shields. In the years during this Palestinian Arab aggression there were hardly any street protests anywhere.
The 2009 Gaza War, however, allowed pent up hatred of the Jewish state to be used as an excuse for vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations exploding throughout Europe and the world. The snake pit for much of this venom originates now on College campuses.
After enduring hundreds of years of Christian and Moslem discrimination in exile, Jews felt that with the re-birth of their ancestral homeland, Jewish communities would no longer face the horrors of being dragged from their homes.
Ariel Sharon dealt a blow of seismic proportions to that belief. His rationale was that by disengaging from the Palestinians in Gaza it would grant Israel peace from Arab terror and end the genocidal ambitions of Palestinian Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, created a roadmap leading to yet more worldwide pressure.
U.S. Ambassador George Mitchell is planning to remain in Jerusalem to do one thing only. By entrapping Netanyahu and Israeli leaders, in order to coerce Israel into giving away its ancestral and biblical lands in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), he works to create for the first time in history an independent Arab state called Palestine.
Jews will not be permitted to remain in their Judean and Samarian (West Bank) homes and will be expelled. Arabs may live in Israel but Jews are forbidden to live in Palestinian Arab territories. They are to be victims of ethnic cleansing. Apartheid! Arab style.
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with her so-called dream team, is preparing to do the same as Ambassador Mitchell. Meanwhile, President Obama is reaching out to the terrorist enabling states of Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is promising nearly one billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority – three hundred million for Gaza – U.S. taxpayer money that will inevitably all end up in the coffers of Hamas.
And at the Sharm el Sheikh donor conference, 70 countries will reportedly pledge 2.8 billion dollars to Gaza reconstruction even as Hamas missiles continue their renewed daily barrage on Sderot using fresh Iranian missiles supplied through Egypt.
Palestinian Arabs will never accept the existence of a Jewish state on any of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Nor are they willing to abandon their belief, indoctrinated for decades, that all of Israel is “occupied territory.” Simply put, if Israel shrinks to one downtown square in Tel Aviv the Palestinian Arabs will still not be satisfied.
Imagine the unthinkable, that Israel ceases to exist; a desire that galvanizes Jew bashers everywhere into orgasmic delight. Or imagine that Israeli leaders continue to engage in further disengagements under the rubric of land for peace; a recipe for slow but certain Israeli extinction.
So what would a world without Israel be like?
For starters, the only true functioning democracy in the region will have vanished. Since there will still be autocratic Arab dictators, kings, emirs and sheikhs, corruption, over-population, and socio-economic dislocation, the unelected Arab despots will have to find a new scapegoat towards whom to deflect their population’s endemic anger and despair.
Palestine, the fraudulent state that Israel haters finally foisted upon the world, will remain as underdeveloped as most other Arab states despite enormous donor sums forever falling like manna into a black hole. Saddled with the highest birthrate in the world, most Palestinian Arabs will remain unemployed because of the inability of their terrorist government to create viable institutions and infrastructures and because there will no longer be an Israel for the Palestinian Arabs to work in.
Both Jordan and Egypt will be terrified of the fatal exposure on their borders of this new Iranian and Al Qaida backed Palestinian base for worldwide terror. Not a prospect the U.S. should be happy about either.
Syria will still menace and subvert the once predominately Christian state of Lebanon and still make territorial demands upon Jordan and Palestine, which it always considered historically part of southern Syria.
Those Arab states without oil will still envy those Arab states awash with the commodity, and water, always in short supply in the Middle East, will become the most precious liquid to wage war over.
The intra-Islamic animosity between the Sunnis and the Shia will not abate but become ever more violent in civil wars, especially after the U.S. finally withdraws all its forces from Iraq, now slated by Obama for 2011. No doubt Al Qaeda and Iran will have taken note and are plotting accordingly.
Egypt will still be discriminating against its Christian Coptic minority despite endless denials. Christians will continue to endure persecution in an increasingly Arab and Moslem dominated world from Africa to Indonesia.
Hindus will still be victims of Moslem terror and the Kashmir issue will remain a flashpoint between Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan — both nuclear powers. Buddhists in Thailand will still be battling Moslem insurgents in the south of that country as will the Christians in the south of the Philippines.
Cairo, the capital of the largest and most powerful Arab state, will continue vying with Damascus and Riyadh for leadership of the Arab world’s own version of the 19th century’s Great Game. And all the while the menace of non-Arab Iran will loom over them all.
The ever suffering Kurds, who truly deserve an independent state of their own, will still be pressing Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran for such a state and those countries will still be violently denying them their national aspirations.
Iran’s mullahs will still be hell-bent on developing even more Islamic nuclear bombs. Such weapons atop ever more powerful ICBMs and perhaps now located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean will inevitably threaten the West — and Israel will not be there to be blamed.
Al-Qaeda, even without Osama bin Laden, will still receive enormous funds from Islamic and Arab states and continue its campaign against the “infidels.” Even without the excuse of U.S. troops any longer in Iraq, the Islamists will target Europe and America with suicide killers, just as they perpetrated their grisly work among hapless Israeli civilians.
All this will be the reality in a world that can no longer have Israel to blame for its ills.
The world hated the stateless Jews and now it hates the State of the Jews. But Israel may yet survive and find leaders who present a strong, resolute defiance to the world’s siren calls for it to commit national suicide, all for the sake of an illusory peace.
From Madrid to Oslo to Camp David great demands were made upon Israel to take risks for peace, the majority of which Israel met. Far lesser demands were made upon the Palestinian Arabs, which they have hardly ever met.
President Obama, nevertheless, plans on perpetuating the discredited two-state solution and will press Israel to give away its biblical heartland to create the 23rd Arab state. That is the goal of Hillary Clinton and her so-called dream team. But dreams often become nightmares.
President Reagan at first believed the received wisdom that all problems in the Middle East stemmed from the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It was Israel’s Menachem Begin who disabused him of that fallacy and educated him on biblical and post biblical Jewish history in its ancestral homeland.
Prime Minister Begin and President Reagan, though from very different backgrounds, were both conservatives. Binyamin Netanyahu is a fiscal conservative while President Obama is anything but, and the President’s foreign policy as it relates to the Israel-Arab conflict is jarringly in opposition to that of Netanyahu and Israel’s conservative parties.
Netanyahu may yet educate the new American President to the ties that bind Israel to its land and to the immense dangers to all from Iran. Perhaps he will be the man to save both Israel and the United States from irreparable harm.
If not, all the democracies of the world will stumble before Iran’s ascendant theocracy and Israel will not be there for them to blame.
Victor Sharpe writes on Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict. He is the author of volumes One and Two of: Politicide – The attempted murder of the Jewish state. Both books are available at Amazon.com
Educating Biden?
Mar 18th
By Victor Sharpe, Family Security Matters
Vice President Joseph Biden was apoplectic in Jerusalem. Was it because of another Palestinian suicide atrocity against Israeli civilians, or that Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, had yet again announced that he would never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state?
No, it was because those wicked Israelis announced preliminary tenders for planning and zoning permission to the Jerusalem Municipality for the construction of apartments in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo (Solomon’s Heights).
Building houses for young Jewish couples and families? Terrible! Shocking! How can such aggression be allowed to continue? Biden’s angst exposed the Kafkaesque and groveling acceptance by the Obama administration of Arab and Muslim demands that Jews not be permitted to live in the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem or, for that matter, anywhere in land once conquered by Muslim armies in the name of Allah – and for the Palestinian Arabs that ultimately includes every square inch of Israel.
No matter that Jewish patrimony precedes Islam itself and Muslim occupation by millennia. The Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, demand that the world, and the United States in particular, ignore history. For them, as always, myths matter more than facts.
Obama’s Vice President, Joseph Biden, came to sweet talk Israeli leaders into thinking that President Obama would not countenance Iranian nuclear threats against the Jewish state. But the Biden visit to Israel, far from meeting its avowed goal of smoothing over the differences between the Obama administration and the Jewish state, left Jerusalem and Israelis more distrustful than ever of Obama’s intentions.
Of course, the same Obama administration has done little or nothing to stop the relentless drive by the mad mullahs of Iran to build nuclear bombs or the missiles to deliver them. Nor, in all reality, does this administration ever intend to use truly effective means to stop Ahmadinejad in his quest to unleash nuclear hell upon everyone in order to usher in the perceived Islamic messiah, the twelfth imam.
So now Israel, for daring to add one brick upon another, is excoriated in the national, international and state run medias as endangering the so-called “peace process.”
There was no mention by Biden of the ceaseless Arab aggression against the very existence of Israel or of the terror and destruction Israel has been forced to endure from the Palestinian Arabs. Instead, Biden tells Abbas, while embracing this unrepentant Holocaust denier, that these same Palestinian Arabs, despite all their violence “deserve a state.” Nor did he mention that it would be carved out of tiny Israel and created in the very biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland: Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). No mention either that Jews would be forbidden to reside in the new Arab state. Apartheid-Arab style.
Of course, Biden, clueless as ever, expressed displeasure at the decision by Israel to build houses in the East Jerusalem suburb, while failing to disclose that the land, as with other suburbs in “disputed” parts of East Jerusalem, was originally home to many Jews who were driven out in 1948 by the British-officered Jordanian Arab Legion.
This territory was finally liberated by Israel from its Jordanian Arab occupiers during the defensive June, 1967 Six Day War Israel was forced to fight, 19 years after the Jordanians had illegally annexed it.
In those 19 years from 1948, during which the Jordanians occupied the region, they never remotely considered it as anything but Jordanian. Certainly they never thought it belonged to another Arab people who later called themselves Palestinians. As it was, Jordan’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, as well as of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), was recognized by only two countries: Britain and Pakistan.
But nevertheless, the Obama White House and the relentlessly anti-Israel State Department decided that they will echo the demands of the Palestinian Authority and call for Israel to stop building homes – not only in Judea and Samaria, but even within the very suburbs of Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to the Obama enforced freeze on home building for a 10 month period throughout biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria – but not in Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Arab settlement building has continued unchecked and at a feverish pace without a murmur from President Obama. Double standards? To quote Sarah Palin: You betcha! It matters not to Obama or Biden that Jerusalem – east, west, north and south – has been described as the eternal city of the eternal people.
Rabbi J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who spoke in 1918 at the thanksgiving service for the British liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks, referred to the nearly 4,000 years of history that bound the Jews to every part of their spiritual and physical capital city and of their fate in defending it against its many would-be conquerors. He said:
- “Like the Jew, this Holy City of Israel is deathless; fire and sword and all the engines of destruction have been hurled against it in vain. The Babylonians burnt it and deported its population; the Romans slew a million of its inhabitants, razed it to the ground, passed the ploughshare over it and strewed its furors with salt; Hadrian banished its very name from the lips of men, changed it to Aelia Capitolina and forbade any Jew from entering it on pain of death. Persians and Arabs, Barbarians and Crusaders and Turks took it and re-took it, ravaged it and burnt it; and yet, marvelous to relate, it ever rises from its ashes to renewed life and glory.”
Rabbi Hertz was talking on the very day on which, 2,080 years earlier, Judah Maccabee, the legendary Jewish hero, led his warriors against the Greek-Syrians to liberate the Holy City from its heathen occupiers, whereupon he entered the Temple and re-dedicated it to the glory of the One and Only God. Rabbi Hertz ended his speech by proclaiming the prophetic teaching of the Maccabean Festival, which we know as Hanukkah, in Zechariah, 4:6: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
Now the Palestinian Arab mufti in Jerusalem denies that there ever were Jewish Temples in the Holy City or that Judah, Israel and Judea ever existed or that Jews even lived throughout the Land for millennia. In doing so, he also denies Christianity’s early history and theology. But, sadly, such fantasies are all too common for most members of the “religion of peace.” Even Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who is rapidly Islamizing once secular Turkey, has denied that the Tomb of the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in Hebron and the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem, are Jewish. Erdogan parrots the Islamic myths by calling them Muslim.
Now there is a government and a Prime Minister in Israel under assault by President Obama, who demands that Israel abandon parts of eternal Jerusalem and give it away to those who hate the Jewish people and who have set their face against accepting any Jewish independence or sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
It is instructive to dwell on what has been said by both Jews and non-Jews in the past about Jerusalem, for Jerusalem and Zion are interchangeable. Perhaps, Vice President Biden will come to understand that one can go back for such affirmation through the mists of time to the towering words in Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2: “For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem.”
These are just two of the 821 times that Jerusalem and Zion appear in the Jewish Bible: Jerusalem 667 times, and Zion 154 times. The words also appear in the Christian bible, though fewer times. They do not appear at all in Islam’s Koran.
According to the much-loved correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the late Moshe Kohn: “Jewish sources speak of the seventy names by which Jerusalem is referred to in the classical Jewish sources. These include Ariel/lion of God (Isaiah 29:1); Kirya Neemana/Faithful City (Isaiah 1:25); Ir Ha’emet/City of Truth (Zechariah 8:3); Klilat Yofi/Paragon of Beauty (Lamentations 2:15); Yefay Nof/ Beautiful Panorama (Psalms 48:3); and the ancient commentary of Rabbi Akiva in Sanhedrin 58a on 1 Chronicles 29:11 Hanetza/Eternity.”
But what of now? The modern State of Israel endures a world willing, even anxious, to divide Jerusalem again – even as it still celebrates the reunification of Berlin – and force it to give away ancestral and biblical Jewish lands to an enemy led by a Holocaust-denier, Mahmoud Abbas, whose own Fatah organization, alongside Hamas, continues to gleefully take credit for murdering Jews.
Israeli leaders may yet, foolishly and tragically, permit Jerusalem to again be divided with barbed wire and pill boxes marking a new and hateful border, just as it was before 1967 when Jordanian Arab snipers made life a living hell for the Jewish residents, with ancient synagogues destroyed and Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives desecrated and used as latrines for the Arab Legion.
If Barack Hussein Obama has his way, and his Vice President continues to do his bidding, the ancestral Jewish homeland in Judea and Samaria will also be lost – not by the ravages of an enemy host, but, to its eternal shame, by an Israeli government acquiescing in its own national suicide; its borders reduced to a mere nine miles wide at its most populous region from the Mediterranean Sea to the foothills of the Judean mountain range – a border, which the late Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the “Auschwitz borders.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. This article originally appeared in Family Security Matters (www.FamilySecurityMatters.org).
An open letter to the world from Jerusalem
Mar 18th
By Victor Sharpe
The despicable insults heaped upon the State of Israel by members of President Obama’s Administration, namely his Vice President James Biden, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and by David Axelrod, all presumably orchestrated by the president himself, have emboldened the real enemies of peace in the Middle East: Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It has also encouraged the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to add more and more preconditions to the so-called peace process talks with Israel; this itself a flagrant breach of the Oslo “peace” accords. Already Hamas has again begun firing multiple missile barrages into Israel, killing a civilian working in a kibbutz greenhouse. It is only a matter of time before Hezbollah decides to get into the act. After all, it now has nearly 100,000 thousand Iranian supplied deadly rockets aimed at northern and central Israel.
It was not long, therefore, before the PA’s Prime Minister, Fayyad, called out his Arab street thugs to riot in east Jerusalem. Clinton and Biden thus gave a green light for the Arabs to commit acts that are the very opposite of peace. Then there was the appalling double standard employed by Messrs. Clinton and Biden for even during the Vice President’s visit the Palestinian Authority began the process of renaming a city square in Ramallah in honor of a vicious, blood stained female PLO terrorist who, with her accomplices, committed one of the worst massacres of Israeli civilians.
Thirty two years ago, in 1978, Dalal Moghrabi and her PLO gang landed on the Israeli shore just south of kibbutz Maagen Michael. They had come from Lebanon armed with automatic rifles and grenades. They immediately murdered the highly acclaimed American photographer, Gail Rubin, who was filming nature scenes and wildlife, before ambushing a bus on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway.
The PLO terrorists then began shooting at the thirty seven passengers on the hi-jacked bus while also firing at passing traffic from the bus as it headed south. Finally the bus was stopped by the Israeli police just north of Tel Aviv but the Arabs set fire to the bus, burning 37 men, women and children alive. The terrorists were filmed tossing babies into the fire. This was one of the worst Palestinian Arab atrocities committed against Israeli civilians.
Even as Biden was chastising Israel for its housing ministry going through the formalities of seeking zonal authority for eventual construction of apartments in a north-west Jerusalem suburb, the Palestinian Authority, so beloved of Vice President Biden, et al, was naming the square in Ramallah in Dalal Moghrabi’s honor. To date, there has been deafening silence form Biden and Clinton. Not one word of disapproval has been uttered by this administration or the State Department at the PA’s honoring of a woman terrorist who perpetrated such an appalling atrocity. I leave you to your individual thoughts about the future of the “peace process” with such Arab savages.
So an American Administration, which reaches out to the nastiest and most evil regimes in the world, which ignores the honoring of a vile terrorist by the Palestinian Authority (the so-called moderate Palestinians), which has allowed the Iranian monster, Ahmadinejad, to continue for over a year under Obama’s watch to rush ahead in building nuclear bombs and the missiles to carry them, screams at its most loyal ally, Israel, because it wants to provide homes for its people in its ancient and united capital: Jerusalem.
Perhaps the most passionate words about the inextricable, historical and spiritual attachment of the Jewish people to their 3,500 year old capital city were expressed by a man whose name was Stanley Goldfoot. He changed it to the Hebrew name, Eliezer ben Yisrael. He was a member of the Jewish underground that fought for independence from the British occupiers of Mandatory Palestine. His letter may appear intemperate and undiplomatic to some. But remember, his soul had been seared with the knowledge that Britain, who had been given the Palestine Mandate with the requirement that it establish a Jewish National Home, had torn away four fifths of the land in 1921/22 and given it to the Hashemite Bedouin tribe. Immediately, Jews were barred from living in the enormous territory.
All that remained for a Jewish homeland was the tiny sliver of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan – a mere fifty miles at its widest and now under immense pressure to be further divided again so that Israel is reduced to nine miles wide at its most populous region. In 1939, bowing to Arab pressure and fearing the loss of oil, Britain had imposed the notorious White Paper severely limiting Jewish immigration at the very outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Thus millions of Jews perished who were prevented from escaping to the geographical territory known as Palestine.
In 1969, two years after Israel was forced to fight the June 1967, Six Day War against Egypt, Syria, Jordan and several other Arab states, he wrote this impassioned open letter to the world. He had seen at first hand the liberation of the eastern half of Jerusalem, which had endured for nineteen long years the terrible occupation by the Jordanian Arab Legion.
The city had been divided by barbed wire, pill boxes and walls. Jordanian snipers had made life a living hell for the Jewish residents and the Arab Legion had systematically destroyed some 57 synagogues and had uprooted and desecrated the ancient Jewish grave stones on the Mount of Olives, using them as latrines for the Arab Legion.
One synagogue in particular, the Hurva synagogue, which was originally built 300 years ago, was one of the Jewish holy places the Jordanian Arabs destroyed. It is significant to know that just this last month of March, 2010, it was rededicated after being lovingly rebuilt. It stands again, magnificent in the Jewish Quarter as a reminder of the eternal links of the Jewish people to their eternal city. But, all a spokesman of the so-called partner in peace – the Palestinian Authority – could utter was that the synagogue was a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. So let the late Stanley Goldfoot’s Letter to the World from Jerusalem be a fitting reply to the Bidens, the Clintons and the Obamas of this world:
- I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to believe. I am a Jerusalemite – like yourselves, a man of flesh and blood. A citizen of my city, an integral part of my people.
I have a few things to get off my chest. Because I am not a diplomat, I do not have to mince words. I do not have to please you or even persuade you. I owe you nothing. You did not build this city, you did not live in it, you did not defend it when they came to destroy it.
And we will be damned if we will let you take it away. There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin, Moscow, London, and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was a thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves – a humane moral code.
Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightning. Here a people who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen would-be conquerors, bled and died on the battlements, hurled themselves into the flames of their burning Temple rather than surrender, and when finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they forgot Jerusalem, they would see their tongues cleave to their palates, their right arms wither.
For two pain-filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome guests, we prayed daily to return to this city. Three times a day we petitioned the Almighty: “Gather us from the four corners of the world, bring us upright to our land, return in mercy to Jerusalem, Thy city, and swell in it as Thou promised.” On every Yom Kippur and Passover, we fervently voiced the hope that next year would find us in Jerusalem.
Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos into which you jammed us, your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel anti-Semitism, and the final unspeakable horror, the holocaust (and worse, your terrifying disinterest in it) – all these have not broken us. They may have sapped what little moral strength you still possessed, but they forged us into steel. Do you think that you can break us now after all we have been through? Do you really believe that after Dachau and Auschwitz we are frightened by your threats of blockades and sanctions?
We have been to Hell and back- a Hell of your making. What more could you possibly have in your arsenal that could scare us?
I have watched this city bombarded twice by nations calling themselves civilized. In 1948, while you looked on apathetically, I saw women and children blown to smithereens after we agreed to your request to internationalize the city. It was a deadly combination that did the job – British officers, Arab gunners, and American-made cannon. And then the savage sacking of the Old City – the willful slaughter, the wanton destruction of every synagogue and religious school, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, the use by a ghoulish government of tombstones for building materials, for poultry runs, army camps, even latrines.
And you never said a word. You never breathed the slightest protest when the Jordanians shut off the holiest of our places, the Western Wall, in violation of the pledges they had made after the war – a war they waged, incidentally, against the decision of the UN. Not a murmur came from you whenever the legionnaires in their spiked helmets casually opened fire upon our citizens from behind the walls. Your hearts bled when Berlin came under siege. You rushed your airlift “to save the gallant Berliners”. But you did not send one ounce of food when Jews starved in besieged Jerusalem. You thundered against the wall which the East Germans ran through the middle of the German capital – but not one peep out of you about that other wall, the one that tore through the heart of Jerusalem.
And when that same thing happened 20 years later, and the Arabs unleashed a savage, unprovoked bombardment of the Holy City again, did any of you do anything? The only time you came to life was when the city was at last reunited. Then you wrung your hands and spoke loftily of “justice” and need for the “Christian” quality of turning the other cheek. The truth – and you know it deep inside your gut – you would prefer the city to be destroyed rather than have it governed by Jews. No matter how diplomatically you phrase it, the age old prejudices seep out of every word. If our return to the city has tied your theology in knots, perhaps you had better reexamine your catechisms. After what we have been through, we are not passively going to accommodate ourselves to the twisted idea that we are to suffer eternal homelessness until we accept your savior. For the first time since the year 70, there is now complete religious freedom for all in Jerusalem. For the first time since the Romans put a torch to the Temple, everyone has equal rights (You prefer to have some more equal than others.) We loathe the sword – but it was you who forced us to take it up. We crave peace, but we are not going back to the peace of 1948 as you would like us to. We are home. It has a lovely sound for a nation you have willed to wander over the face of the globe. We are not leaving. We are redeeming the pledge made by our forefathers: Jerusalem is being rebuilt. “Next year” and the year after, and after, and after, until the end of time – “in Jerusalem.”
Stanley Goldfoot was the founding Editor of The Times of Israel. He wrote this open letter from Jerusalem in August, 1969.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. An extract from Stanley Goldfoot’s open letter appears in Volume Two of Politicide: The book, along with Volume One, may be purchased on line from Amazon.com Permission to reproduce the letter was given by Mr. Goldfoot’s cousin, Ms. Nadene Goldfoot.