Report: U.S. threatens to pull aid if Palestinian Authority goes to U.N. for statehood

The “Palestine” to be voted on at the U.N. does not meet the criteria for statehood under international law. Abbas wants the U.N. to rip the proverbial training wheels off of the Palestinian entity when it has never even been able to function like a state with them. If its past few years of governing Palestinian territories have been a trial run, the Palestinian Authority has failed miserably.

Even the Obama administration appears to recognize a disaster waiting to happen. “Report: US threatened to halt aid if PA goes to UN,” by Eilor Levy for the Associated Press, August 21:

Associated of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad say that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened in a phone conversation to halt the American aid to the Palestinians if they ask the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state in September.

The sources noted that Clinton told Fayyad that this would happen if the Palestinians fail to give the American administration a chance to resume peace negotiations with Israel. The sources added that Fayyad relayed the message to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

For any peace negotiations, there is also the matter of the PA’s reconciliation with Hamas. The PA cannot simultaneously be for peace with Israel and cooperating with a group that is actively and openly out to destroy the Jewish state.

Posted by Marisol (jihadwaych.org) on August 21, 2011

NORWAY MASSACRE: Biblical Prophecy?

Posted: July 25, 2011 | Author: barenakedislam | Filed under: Islamization of the West | 33 Comments »

Genesis 12:2-3: [The LORD speaking to Abraham, said] “I will make unto you a great nation and I will bless you…. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse….”

FRONT PAGE MAGZINE (Joseph Klein) ‘The Quislings of Norway,’ posted a few days before the terrorist massacre. The infamous Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, who assisted Nazi Germany as it conquered his own country, must be applauding in his grave. In the latest example of Norwegian collaboration with the enemies of the Jews, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere declared during a press conference this week, alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that “Norway believes it is perfectly legitimate for the Palestinian president to turn to the United Nations” to seek recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

Despite Abbas’s decision to throw his lot in with the Hamas terrorists as part of some sort of “unity” government, Stoere signed an agreement with Abbas on upgrading Palestinian representation in Norway. Under the agreement, which effectively rewards Abbas for joining forces with Hamas, the Palestinian representative will have the full diplomatic rank of ambassador.

The foreign minister of Norway, which chairs a group of Palestinian donor nations, also used the occasion to hold the tin cup out for Abbas. Foreign Minister Stoere chided those who have decided to hold back on their contributions. “All donors should make an extra effort to support the Palestinians this summer and autumn,” he said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (L) and Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere attend a news conference in Oslo July 18, 2011

None of this should come as a surprise. Let’s not forget, for example, that Foreign Minister Stoere is in charge of the same Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which Socialist Ingrid Fiskaa — who said in April 2008 that she sometimes wished the United Nations would send “precision-guided missiles against selected Israeli targets” — so proudly serves as a state secretary.

During the Nazi occupation of Norway, nearly all Jews were either deported to death camps or fled to Sweden and beyond. Today, Norway is effectively under the occupation of anti-Semitic leftists and radical Muslims, and appears willing to help enable the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.

For example, one of Norway’s leading intellectuals, Jostein Gaarder, published an op-ed article in a major Norwegian daily newspaper in 2006 arguing against recognizing the state of Israel in its current form and claiming that Judaism is “an archaic national and warlike religion.”

Gaarder equated the Jewish state of Israel’s attempts to defend itself against Islamic terrorists with apartheid and ethnic cleansing:

We no longer recognize the State of Israel. We could not recognize the apartheid regime of South Africa, nor did we recognize the Afghani Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We need to get used to the idea: The State of Israel, in its current form, is history.

The State of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Norway’s Labor Party lawmaker Anders Mathisen has gone even further and publicly denied the Holocaust. He said that Jews “exaggerated their stories” and “there is no evidence the gas chambers and or mass graves existed.” While the Norwegian political establishment and opinion-maker elite may not have reached that point of lunacy just yet, they do tend to treat Muslims as the victims of Israeli oppression – as if today’s Muslims are filling the shoes of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and today’s Nazis are the Israelis.

Thorbjørn Jagland, former prime minister of Norway, the president of the Norwegian Parliament, and the head of the Nobel Prize committee that gave President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, sided with Turkey and condemned Israel for the defensive actions it took last year against the so-called Free Gaza flotilla.

Socialist leader Kristin Halvorsen has been leading the boycott Israel campaign. While serving as Norway’s finance minister, she was amongst the demonstrators at an anti-Israel protest, in which a poster read (translated): “The greatest axis of evil: USA and Israel.” Among the slogans repeatedly shouted at the demonstration was (as translated) “Death to the Jews!”

Halvorsen has recently supported a measure calling for military action against Israel if it decides to act against Hamas in Gaza, based on the reasoning that the world community’s credibility in confronting the Qaddafi regime would be undermined if it does nothing to help Hamas repel Israeli air attacks in Gaza.

Last year, the Norwegian government decided to divest from two Israeli entities working in the West Bank. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund divested from the Israeli company Elbit, because it has worked on the Israeli security fence that keeps out Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel has also been blocked from bidding for Norwegian defense contracts.

The state-owned TV NRK aired the one-sided movie “Tears over Gaza,” photographed by several Palestinian cameramen during and after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Its film director Vibeke Løkkeberg had the gall to compare Israel’s defensive military actions in Gaza, which protect Israeli civilians from Hamas bombs, to “the massacres Qaddafi is conducting against Libyan insurgents.”

Pro-Hezbollah demonstration in Oslo 2009

As explained by Bruce Bawer, an American literary critic, writer and poet who lives in Norway and has criticized European anti-Semitism and radical Islam, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, contemporary Norwegian anti-Semitism is alive and well in Norway especially amongst “the cultural elite – the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats.”

It is such anti-Semitic tripe and moral equivalency that embolden the Muslims living in Norway to legitimize their own anti-Semitic conduct, which Norwegian officials have been tolerating in the name of multiculturalism.

As Bawer explained:

Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.

In 2009, when Muslims rioted violently in downtown Oslo to protest Israel’s actions against Hamas, resulting in extensive damage, there were few consequences for those responsible.

Anti-Israel rally at Norway’s version of a Hitler Youth camp the day before the massacre

Teachers at schools with large shares of Muslims reported that Muslim students often “praise or admire Adolf Hitler for his killing of Jews,” that “Jew-hate is legitimate within vast groups of Muslim students” and that “Muslims laugh or command [teachers] to stop when trying to educate about the Holocaust.”

Norway is repeating its Quisling treachery of the Nazi era, this time in league with a growing radical Muslim population. And once again the Jews are the victims.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.

Posted in:  Bare Naked Islam

Not Stealing Palestine but Purchasing Israel

by Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
June 21, 2011

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Zionists stole Palestinian land: that’s the mantra both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas teach their children and propagate in their media. This claim has vast importance, as Palestinian Media Watch explains: “Presenting the creation of the [Israeli] state as an act of theft and its continued existence as a historical injustice serves as the basis for the PA’s non-recognition of Israel’s right to exist.” The accusation of theft also undermines Israel’s position internationally.

Palestinian imagery: A Star-of-David-shark devours Palestine.

But is this accusation true?

No, it is not. Ironically, the building of Israel represents about the most peaceable in-migration and state creation in history. To understand why requires seeing Zionism in context. Simply put, conquest is the historic norm; governments everywhere were established through invasion, nearly all states came into being at someone else’s expense. No one is permanently in charge, everyone’s roots trace back to somewhere else.

Germanic tribes, Central Asian hordes, Russian tsars, and Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors remade the map. Modern Greeks have only a tenuous connection to the Greeks of antiquity. Who can count the number of times Belgium was overrun? The United States came into existence by defeating Native Americans. Kings marauded in Africa, Aryans invaded India. In Japan, Yamato-speakers eliminated all but tiny groups such as the Ainu.

The Middle East, due to its centrality and geography, has experienced more than its share of invasions, including the Greek, Roman, Arabian, Crusader, Seljuk, Timurid, Mongolian, and modern European. Within the region, dynastic froth caused the same territory – Egypt for example – to be conquered and re-conquered.

Many wars over Jerusalem: Emperor Titus celebrated his victory over the Jews in 70 A.D. with an arch showing Roman soldiers carrying off a menorah from the Temple.

The land that now makes up Israel was no exception. In Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel, Eric H. Cline writes of Jerusalem: “No other city has been more bitterly fought over throughout its history.” He backs up that claim, counting “at least 118 separate conflicts in and for Jerusalem during the past four millennia.” He calculates Jerusalem to have been destroyed completely at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured 44 times, and attacked 52 times. The PA fantasizes that today’s Palestinians are descended from a tribe of ancient Canaan, the Jebusites; in fact, but they are overwhelmingly the off-spring of invaders and immigrants seeking economic opportunities.

Against this tableau of unceasing conquest, violence, and overthrow, Zionist efforts to build a presence in the Holy Land until 1948 stand out as astonishingly mild, as mercantile rather than military. Two great empires, the Ottomans and the British, ruled Eretz Yisrael; in contrast, Zionists lacked military power. They could not possibly achieve statehood through conquest.

Instead, they purchased land. Acquiring property dunam by dunam, farm by farm, house by house, lay at the heart of the Zionist enterprise until 1948. The Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901 to buy land in Palestine “to assist in the foundation of a new community of free Jews engaged in active and peaceable industry,” was the key institution – and not the Haganah, the clandestine defense organization founded in 1920.

Zionists also focused on the rehabilitation of what was barren and considered unusable. They not only made the desert bloom but drained swamps, cleared water channels, reclaimed wasteland, forested bare hills, cleared rocks, and removed salt from the soil. Jewish reclamation and sanitation work precipitously reduced the number of disease-related deaths.

Only when the British mandatory power gave up on Palestine in 1948, followed immediately by an all-out attempt by Arab states to crush and expel the Zionists, did the latter take up the sword in self defense and go on to win land through military conquest. Even then, as the historian Efraim Karsh demonstrates in Palestine Betrayed, most Arabs fled their lands; exceedingly few were forced off.

This history contradicts the Palestinian account that “Zionist gangs stole Palestine and expelled its people” which led to a catastrophe “unprecedented in history” (according to a PA 12^th-grade textbook) or that Zionists “plundered the Palestinian land and national interests, and established their state upon the ruins of the Palestinian Arab people” (writes a columnist in the PA’s daily). International organizations, newspaper editorials, and faculty petitions reiterate this falsehood worldwide.

Israelis should hold their heads high and point out that the building of their country was based on the least violent and most civilized movement of any people in history. Gangs did not steal Palestine; merchants purchased Israel.

Mr. Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

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June 21, 2011 update: For additional points that did not fit this column, see the weblog entry, “Extras about Zionists Purchasing Israel, Not Stealing Palestine.”

Posted in:  Daniel Pipe’s