David Singer: Israel, Trump and United Nations Should Boycott Abbas and PLO

This is the blog's second post today.

The first (click back to previous post, don't miss it!) foreshadows anti-Israel activist Stephen Sizer's (he's the clean-shaven one, at left) imminent visit Down Under, which I'll be following with interest, and of course concern.

And here's the second, the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

David writes:

Click HERE for details

Israel’s Prime Minister – Benjamin Netanyahu – has used his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – to savage the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) policy that rewards Palestinian murderers of Israelis and other innocent civilians with lifetime payments.


Netanyahu’s PLO-onslaught in front of 18000 people attending the annual AIPAC Conference in Washington was unequivocal and unrelenting:

“But to get peace, to get peace President Abbas has to embrace peace and to stop supporting terror. Raise your hands high if you agree with me that President Abbas should stop paying terrorists who murder Jews. You know how much he pays? He pays about $350 million dollars a year to terrorists and their families, each year. That’s about a little less than 10% of the total Palestinian budget. That’s an incredible number. He pays Hakim Awad. Hakim Awad is the terrorist who murdered this beautiful family of Ehud and Ruth Fogel and their three children, including a 3 month-old baby girl, Hadas. So he pays Hakim Awad, this murderer, and over the lifetime of this killer, he will be receiving two million dollars.”

Hakim Awad, aged 18 – and his 19-years-old cousin and accomplice Amjad Awad – each received five consecutive life sentences for murdering the five sleeping Fogel family members in March 2011.


Netanyahu’s attack on Abbas comes at a particularly sensitive time politically as:

· President Trump mulls over the final details of his “ultimate deal” to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict 

· PLO chief – Mahmoud Abbas – has already signaled he will not enter into negotiations with Israel mediated by Trump 

· Abbas has called on the United Nations to convene an international peace conference by mid-2018 to accept the non-existent “State of Palestine” as a full UN member

 · The US Senate is currently considering the Taylor Force Act – overwhelmingly passed by the House in December 2017  – suspending US financial assistance to the PLO, and any successor or affiliated organizations until these payments are terminated. Taylor Force – a US citizen – was murdered on 8 March 2016 by a Palestinian Arab during a stabbing spree in Tel Aviv that also injured ten other people. 

· Israel’s Knesset has passed the first reading of a bill requiring such blood-money presently being paid to 35000 Palestinian families to be deducted from the US$2.1 billion in taxes and tariffs Israel presently collects for the PLO.

· Abbas - 83 and in poor health – faces challengers to his leadership

Palestinian prisoners serving 20-30 year sentences for these murderous attacks reportedly receive a monthly US$3400 stipend for life.Those receiving a three-to-five-year sentence get a monthly wage of US$570. Palestinian prisoners who are married, have children, live in Jerusalem, or hold Israeli citizenship receive additional payments.

Trump called on Abbas to abandon this immoral and heinous policy during a joint press conference in Bethlehem in May 2017:

“Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded”

Just one month later Jared Kushner – Trump’s son-in-law and chief Middle East adviser – and Trump’s international negotiator Jason Greenblatt – met with Abbas in Ramallah.

According to reports in Arabic media, the Americans then allegedly watered down Trump’s demands – only wanting these payments stopped to some 600 prisoners serving life sentences in Israeli prisons.

Abbas defiantly rejected that proposal.


Abbas seems to believe he can publicly humiliate Trump and escape the consequences.

Monetary retaliation is a totally inadequate response to the indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians.


Israel, Trump and the United Nations should boycott Abbas and the PLO by terminating all diplomatic contact until their vile and repulsive “murder for money” policy is ended.

David Singer: Deceiving Trump and Tillerson has consequences for Abbas

From this site

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson are quickly learning that tough talk is needed to rein in Mahmoud Abbas – who has deceived Trump and Tillerson twice in the last month.

1. Abbas sweet-talked Trump at the White House on 3 May claiming:

“we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace.” 

          Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly responded on 4 May:

“I heard President Abbas yesterday say that Palestinians teach their children peace. That’s unfortunately not true. They name their schools after mass murders of Israelis and they pay terrorists”  

         Trump blasted Abbas in Bethlehem on 23 May:

“You tricked me in D.C.! You talked there about your commitment to peace, but the Israelis showed me your involvement in incitement”

 2. Tillerson too was made to look stupid after he had told a Senate hearing on 13 June that he had been informed that Abbas intended ceasing the policy of payments to terrorists. 

Tillerson’s claim was immediately repudiated by Issa Qaraqe, the head of the PA prisoners affairs department:

“This is not true and this statement is an aggression against the Palestinian people”

Such duplicity does not augur well for creating an environment hoping to end the Jewish-Arab conflict.

Straight talking from Trump is needed to:

1. Bury the negotiating process between Abbas and Netanyahu that torpedoed the attempts by President Obama and Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry to end the conflict between 2009 and 2016.

2. Terminate the artificially contrived framework misnamed “the two-state solution” within which previous negotiations have been conducted between Abbas and Netanyahu with total disregard for the origins of the conflict between Jews and Arabs.

That conflict began with the creation by the League of Nations of the Mandate for Palestine on 24 July 1922 following decisions taken by the Principal Allied Powers at the San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1.

The League of Nations by unanimous resolution of all member States – including Iran – laid down a formula that would see the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home being restricted to an area comprising no more than 23 per cent of the territory covered by the Mandate

In 1946 an Arab State was created in the remaining 77 per cent of Mandatory Palestine and was renamed “the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan”.

In 1948 Israel was created in 17per cent of the territory of the Mandate whilst the remaining 6 percent – Judea and Samaria, Gaza – was conquered and occupied by Transjordan (renamed Jordan in 1950) and Egypt respectively until their loss to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

Arab propaganda has repeatedly and misleadingly claimed that the conflict only began in 1948.
Abbas is but the latest in a long line of failed leaders of the Palestinian Arabs who have rejected all attempts to resolve the conflict based on what was internationally agreed 95 years ago.

Jordan has been exculpated from playing any role in resolving this conflict it was part of from the very inception of the Mandate and which it substantially aggravated between 1948 and 1967.

Trump and Tillerson belong to the old school that uses language whose meaning cannot be misinterpreted.

slideplayer.com

Trifling with the truth in conversations with Trump and Tillerson must have political consequences for Abbas.

Hopefully the days of diplomatic doublespeak and ambiguous language are nearing their end.

Bringing Jordan into any new negotiations to finally determine the allocation of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) – an area smaller than Delaware  – is the key to Trump pulling off the deal of the century.

David Singer: Trump Signals Abbas Must End Indiscriminate Slaughter of Jews

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

The horrific carnage perpetrated in Manchester on 22 May presented an emotion-charged backdrop to two meetings the next day between President Trump and President Abbas in Bethlehem and President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
Trump pointedly told Abbas:

“Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded. We must be resolute in condemning such acts in a single, unified voice. Peace is a choice we must make each day – and the United States is here to help make that dream possible for young Jewish, Christian and Muslim children all across the region.” 

Netanyahu did not mince his words, telling Trump:

“Terrorism, the deliberate slaughter of innocents, must be equally condemned and equally fought, whether it strikes in Europe, in America or in Israel – or for that matter, anywhere else. And as you said this morning, Mr. President, funding and rewarding terrorism must end.

Standing next to you, President Abbas condemned the horrific attack in Manchester. Well, I hope this heralds a real change, because if the attacker had been Palestinian and the victims had been Israeli children, the suicide bomber’s family would have received a stipend from the Palestinian Authority. That’s Palestinian law. That law must be changed.” 

Abbas presides over the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) whose Charter openly promotes a culture of violence and incitement urging Palestinian Arabs to kill Jews.

Article 7 of the Charter provides: 

“It is a national duty to bring up individual Palestinians in an Arab revolutionary manner … He must be prepared for the armed struggle and ready to sacrifice his wealth and his life in order to win back his homeland and bring about its liberation.” 

Article 9 prescribes: 

“Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it”

Article 10 declares: 

“Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution.” 

Every time a Jew is stabbed, run over, murdered in his bed or whilst praying in a Synagogue, blown up dining in a restaurant or attending a nightclub, killed by stones thrown at his car or targeted in drive by shootings, Palestinian Arabs – radicalised and encouraged by the PLO Charter to perpetrate such heinous crimes – are treated as heroes, many having schools named after them. Their families are rewarded by Abbas paying them monthly pensions which totalled $300 million in 2016.

Abbas declared on 16 September 2015: 

"We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every Martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah."  

Trump told the Arab-Islamic-American Summit in Riyadh on 21 May: 

“A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out. DRIVE THEM OUT of your places of worship. DRIVE THEM OUT of your communities. DRIVE THEM OUT of your holy land, and DRIVE THEM OUT OF THIS EARTH.” 

Trashing the hate-filled PLO Charter and ending incitement to indiscriminately slaughter Jews are necessary steps in this process.

Abbas will end up in the diplomatic wilderness if he ignores the messages delivered by both Trump and Netanyahu. 

Egg on Their Faces

Whatever Palestinian  murderous terrorist Marwan Barghouti (Al Beeb's sanitised "profile" of him here) is eating in his Israeli prison cell, he's certainly got egg on his face with this candid camera gone-viral footage, since he's the purported leader of a hunger strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli gaols.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TknOt_GSkQ

And that egg is now on the faces of all hoodwinked by him.

People like these, who in support of the hunger strikers (hardly the innocents they are represented to be) made the video below of a display of Palestinian art projected onto the outside of the Tate Modern art gallery in London (yes, Barghouti's image is there somewhere) in which at the outset the dirge-like tones of  the narrator talks of "Israeli occupation dungeons"!

 Does murderer Barghouti's cell look like a dungeon to you?

 More footage, by our old friend Alex Seymour/Seymour Alexander:

 Following the revelation that convicted terrorist and supposed strike-leader Barghouti has been caught secretly eating, Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan stated: 

"As I said from the very beginning, this hunger strike was never about the conditions of the convicted terrorists, which meet international standards. It is about advancing Marwan Barghouti's political ambitions to replace Abu Mazen. Barghouti is a murderer and hypocrite who urged his fellow prisoners to strike and suffer while he ate behind their back. Just like he lied to the world when he wrote in the New York Times that he decided to strike in order to protest ill-treatment, he lied to the Palestinian public when he claimed to be striking. Israel will not give in to extortion and pressure from terrorists."

"What is Really Going on in the West Bank?" (video)

In the aftermath of John Kerry's infamous speech, Ami Horowitz on Fox News investigates:

 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-QvvXpVmGs)

Typically good Gatestone Institute article here

Lital's Litany (video)

Lives cut brutally short:

Meanwhile, good piece from Jonathan S. Tobin:

A Prominent Arab Journalist On Arab Support For Israel Against Hezbollah & Iran (post includes video)

Dubai-based Mr Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, and a leading Arabic weekly magazine, as well as a well-known columnist on two Arabic dailies, has written the following article in Asarq al-Awsat entitled "How Did We End Up Cheering For Israel?":

Many have welcomed with cheers the sudden Israeli strike on Sunday that killed six Hezbollah members and a general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who, for some reason, were secretly present in Syria’s Quneitra region.

The cheering for this act on social networking platforms is an expression of anger and indignation, and we’ve even sensed these feelings expressed by sympathizers with Islamist groups.

This represents a huge change of feelings about Hezbollah, due to its heinous actions in targeting its rivals in Lebanon and its involvement in the killing of thousands in Syria. Many of those who have shifted from admiring Hezbollah to hating the group did so in less than a decade.

These people used to support Hezbollah in Lebanon in the past and they used to adopt the Shi’ite group’s political and military agenda. Anger began to surface when Hezbollah’s militias occupied west Beirut during the events of May 7, 2008, three years after the party’s involvement in the assassination of Sunni leader Rafik Hariri.

Hezbollah, and also Iran, have lost the respect and status they’ve always enjoyed in the name of Islam, Lebanon and Palestine. Hezbollah’s biggest fall came after its clear sectarian bias in Syria emerged when its members joined the terrible war there, which has killed more than 250,000 people in what is surely the most shameful crime in the history of the region. Iranian involvement in Syria will also have further repercussions.

In my opinion there’s no doubt that if a confrontation occurs between Israel and Hezbollah, or between Israel and Iran, many Arabs will pray for the defeat of Hezbollah’s militias and the generals of its Iranian ally. This strange feeling, even if temporary, reflects the change in the region’s alliances and political stances.

The hatred held by many Arabs towards Iran and Hezbollah does not necessarily mean they have suddenly developed affection for Israel—that’s another story. Perhaps this would happen in the event of the brokering of a Palestinian–Israeli peace accord that garners more popular acceptance than before.

In case a regional struggle happens, like an Arab struggle with Iran, and Israel is an apparent party in the Arab camp, people will, I believe, turn a blind eye to a temporary alliance under the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Once again, this does not mean that Israel will be accepted by Arabs on the popular level—unless there is a peace deal with the Palestinians.

We are in a now in a phase where the map and alliances drawn of after 1948 are in transition, and the struggles and hostilities in the region may be shifted in a totally different direction. Iran and Hezbollah may be on the side of the Jewish state if a nuclear agreement is signed with the West that satisfies Israel, which is now considered an obstacle due to its strict stance against American concessions to the Iranians.

In case of a US insistence on reaching an agreement with Iran that angers Israel, the latter could realign itself towards Arab countries to achieve the necessary regional balance. Israel is currently participating, from a distance, alongside an alliance that’s publicly pressuring the administration of Barack Obama against offering any concessions in negotiations with Tehran; however, we can’t count on the formation of an Israeli–Gulf alliance because Israeli disputes with the Arabs of the Gulf regarding Palestine and Syria are not only serious and numerous, but will also be difficult to overcome.

For current developments regarding Israel, Hezbollah and Iran see here

Somewhat off-topic: I admit I haven't had time to look at all of this video regarding Palestinian terror and American campus hate against Israel.  But in view of yesterday's outrage in Tel Aviv I've decided to put it on:

Online Petition To Prevent The Release of One of The Terrorists Due For Release In the Shalit Exchange

The petition (in which time is of the essence) concerns Ahlam Tamimi, whose victims (15 killed and 130 wounded) include the fifteen-year-old Malki Roth.

Explains Malki's father, Arnold Roth:

'Ahlam Tamimi was not the driver of the Sbarro restaurant suicide bomber. On the day of the massacre (9th August 2001), she personally transported the bomb (10 kg) from a West Bank town into Jerusalem, concealed inside a guitar case. Taxi cabs brought her and an accomplice by the name of Al Masri, a young, newly-religious fanatic, to an Israeli security checkpoint and from there into Jerusalem. To reduce suspicion, they dressed as Israelis and the bomb was not detected. Tamimi, who inspired, planned and engineered the Sbarro attack, personally led her "weapon" - Al Masri - to the target she had carefully selected at Jerusalem's busiest intersection.

The target was a pizza restaurant, selected because it was located in the heart of Jerusalem and on a hot summer vacation afternoon it would be teeming with women and children. Tamimi instructed Al Masri to wait fifteen minutes before detonating the explosives to give her sufficient time to flee the scene safely. He followed her orders. As to this being (as some journalists have implied) an act of momentary madness or lack of sound thinking, take into account that a short time prior to Sbarro attack, Tamimi carried out a 'dry run', placing an explosive inside a downtown Jerusalem supermarket (Hamashbir Lazarchan) which exploded causing damage but resulting in no injuries.

According to a journalist I met who had interviewed her some years ago, she is a charismatic and influential woman who played a central role in Neve Tirza, until now the prison for Palestinian Arab female security prisoners. And, he told me, a monster.'

The logic behind the petition is that if one specific terrorist is removed from the list of those due for release, namely Ahlam Tamimi, it may prompt a much more thorough thinking process about the real damage that will flow from this agreement. The official Israeli version of the to-be-freed list goes out some time tomorrow (perhaps after Shabbat) via the Israeli Prison Service website. If the petition sponsors can obtain a substantial number of supporters by then, they may be able to have some influence over what ensues.

The petition is online here

Giulio Meotti has an article on the prisoner exchange here, entitled "Why Did Israel Betray Its Victims".

Children of the Martyr Race

Harrowing photographs of the Fogel Family following their cold-blooded slaughter – reportedly at the hands of members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a wing of the supposedly moderate Fatah, Israel’s “partner for peace” – were made available by the victims’ relatives and have been widely reproduced.

I chose not to use these photographs, believing that to do so was disrespectful to the victims, preferring to show the family members as they were in life – and unwilling to give satisfaction to any sick individuals who might gloat at the sight of dead Jews.

In common with many other bloggers, David Hallam, a philosemitic Methodist preacher in the UK, has reproduced two of the pictures on his website, in a post calling for his church – which is nowadays in the forefront of the BDS movement – to condemn their killings. One shows the three-year-old boy, Elad, stabbed through the heart, lying on the floor in a pool of blood; the other shows his eleven-year-old brother, Yoav, who had been reading in bed when the demons struck and slashed his throat, slumped diagonally across the blood-stained sheets, one of his bare feet on the blood-soaked carpet. http://methodistpreacher.blogspot.com/2011/03/church-must-condemn-itamar-killings.html

Richard Hall, another Methodist minister – one who is continuously critical of Israel and who certainly supports the Boycott – soon posted a thinly veiled response on his own blog:

“Their [the Fogels’] murders are being put to most cynical use. Photographs of the Fogels’ bloody bodies lying where they died have been released to the internet, provoking outrage and revulsion, as any such act should. Unfortunately, much of the reaction has gone beyond revulsion at the killings and has become an outpouring of hatred not merely towards the individuals who carried out this dreadful crime but also towards the community from which they are presumed to have come. Israeli Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein said on Sunday, “Only these ghastly images can show the world what and who the State of Israel has to deal with,” and many bloggers have been even more strident. This message is reprehensible and dishonouring to the Fogels, feeding as it does the racist lie of uniquely Arab savagery.

Sadly, the bitter truth is that these deaths do not change anything. If the settlements were illegal before , they remain so now. And while this killing is shocking, it is not unique. It stands as one more link in a chain of violence and injustice which has been forged in this conflict for generations.”  Read more: http://theconnexion.net/wp/#ixzz1Ghaqcp8B

A like-minded colleague of Hall was soon fulminating about “Hallam’s despicable use of them [the pictures]” and before long that well-known defamer of Israel, young Ben White (you can read about him here http://cifwatch.com/2010/07/02/ben-whites-latest-anti-israel-analysis/ and here http://richardmillett.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/there-is-no-such-thing-as-anti-semitism/ ) was putting the boot into the Jewish State – cynically using the murders to make squalid political points, in fact.

To the blogger himself I commented:

‘I think the best response from you to the cold-bloodied murder of the Fogel Family would be silence, Richard, in view of the fact that you have cynically used their butchery to inveigh against Israel yet again.

That the settlements are illegal is, in fact, a matter of dispute.

But what should not be in dispute is the fact that babies and children of “settler” parents cannot be held accountable for the “illegal” choice of their parents.

There have been 123 deliberate murders of Israeli children by Palestinian terrorists since the First Intifada commenced in 2000.

By contrast, Israelis do not kill children in cold blood, nor do they rejoice when children are murdered.

Please do not demonise the mourners and the bereaved; it ill becomes a Christian minister.’

Commented an indignant Israeli from Jerusalem:

‘The photographs were published after great public discussion, which I have been following for 2 days on Israel radio; they were published with the consent of the nearest relatives of the massacred family.

They were published exactly because of people like you: people who can still write “This message is reprehensible and dishonouring to the Fogels, feeding as it does the racist lie of uniquely Arab savagery”, and can find it in their hearts and minds to turn the event into yet another attack on Israel, meaning JEWS.’

Another outraged commenter noted:

“The pictures were released at the express wish of the children’s grandparents. For years Israel has refrained from using such emotive and distressing pictures, such as the 12 month old baby killed by a sniper, the two children murdered in their beds as their mother read them a story, or the two boys bludgeoned to death when they were out on a hike.

Did I hear any objection from you when the notorious man in a green helmet carried round the same allegedly-killed Palestinian children to different sites where they could be photographed and then went around strategically placing toys among rubble to set a false picture [?].”

And another pointed out:

“... it is chuffing rich of your to suddenly develop a sense of propriety over the use of images of dead children when these are de rigeur on anti-Israel rallies/riots - sometimes even the same child used on multiple occasions.”

The above is an excellent point.

Here, for example, is the singer-cum-activist Annie Lennox at an anti-Israel rally in London, showing child casualties of Operation Cast Lead, for which, although obviously tragic and regrettable, there is of course no moral equivalence with cold-bloodied acts of terror:

And here, courtesy of Richard Millett’s trusty camera, is “Michael,” a bloke who regularly pickets the Ahava shop in London, always carrying this photo montage, apparently:

This list of atrocities by Palestinian terrorists before the Six Day War, some of them involving the deaths of children, gives the lie to the oft-heard claim of Israel’s detractors that Palestinian terrorism came in response to “Occupation”:

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+before+2000/Which+Came+First-+Terrorism+or+Occupation+-+Major.htm


It was with the Ma’alot massacre of 1974 – in which 22 children were killed and 68 injured – that the deliberate murders of Jewish children by Palestinian terrorists reached its nadir.

And as Daled Amos (from whose blog I've copied these two composite photos, directly above and below, of child victims) explains in detail, since the start of the First Intifada 123 Israeli children have lost their lives at the hands of terrorists. http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2006/08/123-israeli-children-killed-by.html

Things really have got to a shameful state when posting photographs of dead Israeli children provokes more condemnation than do the monstrous acts of evil men that caused those children to lose their lives.

Update: Another must-read from the great Melanie Phillips: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6786364/a-terrible-resonance.thtml

On the Murders of Babies – and Double Standards

Many people have noticed the underwhelming media reaction to the cold-blooded murders of the Fogel Family.  The BBC, for example, in a less than robust, and in some respects propagandistic report,  tagged Al Beeb's usual mantra about "settlements" onto the end:

"US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stalled last year over the issue of Israeli settlement building.

Palestinians have refused all direct contact with Israel until construction is frozen.

Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this."

(Can't Al Beeb let go of the demonisation politics for one second?!)

In choosing the wording that the lives of two children of the family had been "spared" the report implied that the terrorists (of course, Al Beeb didn't use the T-word) had shown those two mercy when in fact the sole reason the children had escaped butchery was due to their own extraordinary luck in evading the terrorists.

One of the most incisive analyses of media reaction to the murders of the Fogel Family in much of the mainstream media comes from the always interesting Professor Phyllis Chesler.
'
She points out, inter alia:

‘From the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, they have killed at least 123 Israeli children http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/13/sleeping-in-samaria-on-shabbat/—on purpose, not accidentally. They have shot up teenagers while studying, have tried to kill children in nursery schools and child care centers. Palestinian terrorists have even killed children at Itamar. In 2002, Habash Hanani did so, and he is currently being glorified by the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian terrorists are Baby Killers and yet Arab, Islamist, and liberal fascist propaganda have managed to convince the world that Israelis and Jews are Baby Killers—Israel, a country whose military never uses civilians as hostages and which, contrary to Big Lie myth, is exquisitely restrained when it comes to avoiding civilian casualties during urban battle.

Arab and Muslim terrorists are Baby Killers. They kill their own in order to kill the babies of their enemies. The Taliban in Pakistan specialize in grooming 5-10 year old orphan boys to blow themselves up. Muslims, Arabs, Islamist terrorists in general, and Palestinians and Iranians in particular, brainwash, exploit, mere children and teenagers as jihadists and as suicide killers.

Today, sickeningly, the western mainstream media, and some Jewish and Israeli anti-Zionists as well, are implicitly, essentially, blaming the settlers for their own murders! They are “settlers,” “radical settlers,” “living beyond the green line,” not human beings, not Jews, not Israelis, not even real victims. Real victims should not have been living there, their geographical presence comprises an (understandable) “provocation.” Similarly, women’s uncovered faces, infidel women especially, constitute a “provocation” too so that they have only themselves to blame when Allah-fearing Muslim men rape, gang-rape, and assault them.

Real victims are the Palestinian terrorists who are forced to murder babies in response to being “illegally,” and immorally Occupied.

....

Demonize settlers, isolate Israelis, insist that “Islamophobia,” not Islamic terrorism, is the problem, (do so in the American Congress), refuse to stop the wholesale slaughter of Muslims by Muslims (think Libya, think Darfur), instead, blame Israel because the Palestinians do not want a Palestinian state, lean on Israel to negotiate harder, give up even more, give up every city, including Jerusalem and then simply wait for the law-of-returning Palestinians to overcome the last “settlement” standing: Tel Aviv—do so, even as the entire Arab Muslim Middle East is exploding over non-Israel specific problems--and inevitably, the Palestinian fiends will be emboldened to act and will slaughter an innocent, peaceful Jewish family in their beds and of course, on the Jewish Sabbath.’

Read Phyllis Chesler's entire piece here: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/03/13/natural-disasters-palestinian-barbarism/
And see also Melanie Phillips's characteristically wise and wonderful piece: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6779100/armchair-barbarism.thtml

Candy for the Carnage

Above are five members of the Israeli Fogel Family, a mother and father in their thirties, and three young children – the youngest a baby aged three months old.  They were, of course, the family murdered the other night in their own home by Palestinian terrorists – all but the mother, who was leaving the bathroom when confronted by the men responsible and evidently fought for her life – were killed in their beds.  The three year old boy had been stabbed through the heart.  His father and siblings – the eleven-year-old boy and the tiny baby girl – had had their throats cut.

Below are scenes from Hamas-controlled Gaza, where news of the atrocity was greeted with rejoicing.  The young man in the pictures below is expressing his approval of the cold-blooded massacre by handing out sweets, or, as Americans would say, candy.

In Rafah two Hamas policemen accept the proferred sweets:

A motorist does likewise:

And so does an elderly woman:

Hamas has reportedly also foreshadowed kidnapping and killing Israelis and ransoming their bodies back to their families. (http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/03/hamas-plans-to-abduct-and-murder.html)

Look again at the photos of the Fogel Family.  Their smiles, and their hope for the future symbolised by the children whom Mr and Mrs Fogel brought into this world, celebrate life.

In contrast, Hamas is a dark Islamic force that celebrates death – and such is its depravity that it celebrates even the cold-blooded slaughter of babies.

Yet I guess the usual suspects in the Western world are still "All Hamas Now".

But imagine the furore – the publicity in the leftwing press and on the BBC News website – if Israeli settlers had treated a Palestinian family the way brutes in human form have treated the Fogels. 

See also http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142846

A London Professor Defends Palestinian Terror

London’s University College (UCL), was founded in the 1820s in order to provide non-Anglicans with the university degrees denied to them by Oxford and Cambridge at that time. Prominent among its founders was a celebrated Jewish philanthropist and civil rights promoter, Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid. Alas, today University College is one of the cesspools of anti-Israel activism that are such a feature of England’s once so green and pleasant land, especially in that “mecca of delegitimisation,” Londonistan.

Edgar (“Ted”) Honderich (born 30 January 1933), formerly Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at UCL – no folks, he’s not Jewish – is the author of two post 9/11 books in which he assails Israel. He’s an arch-opponent of what he calls “neo-Zionism” – to describe Israel’s “expansionist” actions from 1967, it would seem – as witness an interview he gave to that anti-Zionist and increasingly antisemitic rag the Guardian (which needless to say lapped that word up) a few years ago http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/mar/22/academicexperts.highereducationprofile – and is on record as saying:

“You could define 'terrorism' to pick out only and exactly Palestinian self-defence – which of course it also is – and hence use 'non-terrorism' to cover neo-Zionism. That would not commit you to condemning the first and justifying the second. My further and connected aspiration or hope is to contribute to the struggle against neo-Zionism, a struggle I regard as in a sense sacred....

I know full well, and have never doubted, the resolute rapacity of at least many leaders of the Jewish people from before 1948 to 1967 and of course after. That does not affect what is to me the fact that a certain project, a certain possible line of action, Zionism in my definition, was right in 1948, for certain reasons which include the Holocaust, and is right now, partly for the reason of the Jewish homeland that has come into existence. Maybe there are general questions in moral philosophy here, but I don't quite see what they are. I am of course a consequentialist. That is, I judge the rightness of actions by their probable consequences. Maybe things become clearer when I allow that I think that I would in 1947 have supported actions of Ben Gurion, taking them as likely to forward Zionism in my sense, as distinct from neo-Zionism, even if I know his own intentions were otherwise, in fact rapacious....

My concern for and empathy with the Palestinians, as you will guess, is not small. My feeling for the Palestinians of 1948 is not slight. But the Jews in 1948 also existed. They could weep too. The plain necessity, more often admitted than stuck to, is to keep two sets of human facts in view. Certainly an injustice of terrible proportions -- an inhumanity – was done to the Palestinians. Certainly Israel has not come within sight of compensating them. It has not done anything like what has been done by the Germans for the Jews for a related reason – the Holocaust.” http://www.stateofnature.org/tedHonderich.html

Emeritus Professor Honderich has written a letter to the Guardian (26 January) in the light of its publication of “The Palestine Papers”. Pontificates Honderich:

“The revelations in detail (Report, 25 January) of the intransigent greed, the escape from decency, of Israeli governments in negotiation with our selected leaders of the Palestinians, serve one purpose among others. They provide a further part of what is now an overwhelming argument for a certain proposition. It is that the Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism within historic Palestine against neo-Zionism. The latter, neither Zionism nor of course Jewishness, is the taking from the Palestinians of at least their autonomy in the last one-fifth of their historic homeland. Terrorism, as in this case, can as exactly be self-defence, a freedom struggle, martyrdom, the conclusion of an argument based on true humanity, etc.”

Some mind. Some logic.

Read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/26/critics-should-respect-my-decision?INTCMP=SRCH
http://justjournalism.com/the-wire/palestine-papers-ucl-professor-declares-support-for-palestinian-terrorism/