An ex-Vicar & a Rabbi Make an Iftar Meal of It

No matter that its leader, Marwan Bargouthi, was caught on candid camera munching away while supposedly leading a hunger strike of fellow jailbirds and is in jail because he's a cold-blooded murderer, our old friend the ex-vicar of Virginia Water has used the recent "hunger strike" of Palestinian prisoners as a stick with which to beat Israel. Now based in Southampton, and reinvented by himself as CEO of Peacemaker Mediators, he did so at a Ramadan event in London ostensibly intended as a warm and cosy interfaith event promoting understanding between Judaism, Christianity and Islam (though I'm sure the organisers wouldn't list the three so-called Abrahamic faiths in the order I have).

Like lots of other Israel-bashers, including the "Intifada" T-shirt sellers who feature in my previous post, the ex-vicar has a soft spot these Neturei Karta nuts, because the Neturei Karta nuts, of course, disavow Israel and as we know only too well Jews who show hostility towards Israel are the only "good Jews" in Muslim and far leftist eyes:

Predictably, then, we find, participating in the Ramadan event (which presumably was never intended to be other than an anti-Israel fest) not a mainstream rabbi but a certain Rabbi Jacob Weisz of the whacko Neturei Karta movement, a man who like Sizer himself is no stranger to appearing on the Iranian propaganda satellite channel to whack the Zionist entity:

Orthodox Jew Rabbi Jacob Weisz says Israel isn't Jewish – Press TV UK  May 27, 2016 - Press TV UK – Rabbi Jacob Weisz slams Israel during an appearance on Press   TV's The Sun Will Rise show.

The pair deserve each other. 

Now, Sizer is rather partial to sticking up for Muslims.

And for victims of racism, including leftwing Labour MP Diane Abbott, who's black.

However, staunch Corbynista Sizer (his Facebook posts frequently extol the Trotskyite Labour leader) is less inclined to acknowledge and deplore antisemitic racism such as these examples given by Labour MP Luciana Berger.

Nor, as I've pointed out many times, does he seem eager to banish antisemites from the ranks of his own followers.

Recent Sizerisms (like the less recent) leave us in no doubt as to how partisan he is and where in consequence he'll be heading with his Peacemaker Mediators: 

 
And consequently how duplicitous the name Peacemaker Mediators is.

"Intifada": All the Incitement of the Fayre

How swiftly it seems to have rolled around again,the annual summer fair on Ham Common in the leafy affluent London borough of Richmond on Thames.

Summer stalls, fun in the sun ... a pleasant day out, following so swiftly on from the Richmond May fair where a keffiyeh-draped Baroness Tonge strutted her stuff on behalf of the local Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch.

Yep. Super pleasant if you happen to be one of the silver-haired middle-class Corbynistas whose "naughties" in their declining years seem to consist of dressing up in keffiyehs and spewing propaganda that demonises the only Jewish State in a world with many Islamic ones.

At this year's "Ham Fair" on 10 June (misdated 19 June in Alex Seymour's video below) the Kingston and Richmond branch (to accord it the dignity of its full name) were spruiking garments such as these along with the usual range of duplicitous PSC propaganda that leaves little room for doubt that the impression conveyed by that organisation's logo (see below) is correct:

There was also this T-shirt, in essence an incitement to violence against Israeli civilians:

As the Middle East scholar Bassam Tawil has pointed out [emphasis added]:

'A recent poll found that 48% of Palestinians interviewed believe that the real goal of the "intifada" is to "liberate all of Palestine." In other words, approximately half of Palestinians believe that the "intifada" should lead to the destruction of Israel, which would be replaced with a Palestinian state -- one that now would be ruled by Hamas and jihadi organizations such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.

It is notable that only 11% of respondents said the goal of the "intifada" should be to "liberate" only those territories captured by Israel in 1967.

The Palestinians do not, according to the poll, have a problem with "settlements" or "poor living conditions." They have a problem with Israel's existence. Palestinians do not see a difference between a West Bank "settlement" and cities inside Israel -- or differentiate between Jews living there. They are all depicted as "settlers" and "colonialists."

This contradicts Abbas's claim that the Palestinians want a "peaceful and popular" uprising. The Palestinians are not, as their leaders claim, seeking a two-state solution.'

The PSC's logo eloquently indicates that the organisation's aim is the entire eradication of the state of Israel.

How thoroughly and shockingly obscene that these bourgeois warriors should promote intifada, the killing of unarmed civilians by evil terrorists who target their victims merely because those victims are Jews.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u85NEt5iTM

And who teach their children to commit murder. 

For accompanying articles see here and here

David Singer: Abbas Concessions Kick-Start Trump Attempt to Resolve Israel-Arab Conflict

Getty Images

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

He writes:

Three concessions made by Mahmoud Abbas – following pressure placed on him by President Trump – open the way to possible negotiations between Israel, the Palestinian Arabs, Egypt and Jordan to resolve the 100-years-old Israel-Arab conflict.

Abbas has agreed to:

1. Withdraw his 2014 demand that Israel first agree to freeze building within Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) as a pre-condition to resuming negotiations with Israel.

2. Tone down his campaign to prosecute Israel for alleged war crimes and rallying condemnation of the Jewish state at the United Nations.

3. Cease paying salaries to 277 released Hamas prisoners including Director of Hamas’s Political Bureau in the Gaza Strip – Yahya Al-Sinwar.

Israel sentenced Al-Sinwar to four life terms in the late 1980s but released him after 23 years imprisonment in a swap of 1,047 Palestinian prisoners for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006.

Al-Sinwar headed Hamas’s first security unit responsible for tracking and killing Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel.

Abbas’s spectacular capitulation comes just two weeks after his reportedly fiery meeting with President Trump in Bethlehem on 23 May – when Trump had stressed:

“.. the importance of creating an environment consistent with the desire for peace” 

Trump had then warned Abbas at their subsequent media conference:

“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.”

These three Abbas concessions may sufficiently satisfy Trump to pressure Netanyahu to resume negotiations.

However such negotiations – if conducted only between Abbas and Netanyahu – will assuredly fail and end up in the garbage bin of history – joining other unsuccessful negotiations conducted between them over the last ten years – for the following reasons:

1. Whilst Hamas and Fatah continue their internecine struggle for political control of the Gazan and West Bank Arab populations and refuse to countenance the holding of elections for the first time since 2006 – no permanent peace agreement can emerge from such resumed negotiations.

2. Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organisation will not abandon their campaigns to wipe Israel off the face of the map – as clearly stated in their respective Charters.

3. Trump will need to unscramble the following seemingly intractable demands being made by Netanyahu and Abbas if he wants to succeed where so many before him have abjectly failed:

 · Israel being recognised as the national home of the Jewish people

· Israel retaining military and security control in and over Judea and Samaria (West Bank)

· any Palestinian State being demilitarised

· Jerusalem remaining united as the capital of Israel

· A second Arab State – in addition to Jordan – being created in the territory of the Mandate for Palestine and the capital of that State being located in Jerusalem

· Israel withdrawing totally from the territories lost by Jordan to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War

· Palestinian Arabs retaining their claimed right of return to Israel.

Trump may well intend trying to resolve these demands by including other Arab States in any new round of negotiations – as this White House Press Office Readout of Trump’s 23rd May meeting with Abbas tantalisingly suggests:

“The two leaders discussed ways to advance negotiations and considered how Arab states might support those negotiations.”

Egypt and Jordan – enjoying signed peace treaties with Israel since 1979 and 1994 respectively  could be just those States.

Such four-party negotiations – conducted under Trump’s oversight and using his proven skills in successfully negotiating and concluding deals – could be the key to ending the logjam of failed negotiations since 1993.

Hope springs eternal.

Safe Spaces and Sharia (videos)

Talk about taking the biscuit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRq5FhWH0R0

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9KwCwEfsA0

More here

Very interesting interview by Andrew Bolt with a reformist Shi'ite leader in Adelaide,
Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igwaOrv7WGs

See also the sheikh's views regarding the problem of Islamic polygamy and child brides in Australia below, and the silence on this issue of the Grand Mufti:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZbCe4hFhGI

A Wee Dropping from the Foreign Office Camel Corps

From 1969 until his death in April 1974 at the age of 61, Welsh-born Trefor Ellis Evans held the
prestigious Woodrow Wilson Professorship of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now known as the University of Aberystwyth).

Previous to taking up that post Evans had been a career diplomat.  To quote his obituary in The Times of 19 April 1974, he was

"one of the most accomplished Arabists in the Foreign Service, and by virtue of his understanding of and sympathy with the Arabs, had been able to fill with distinction a number of different posts in Arab countries.  Born in 1913, he was educated at Cowbridge and Balliol, where he graduated in 1934, later taking a doctorate of philosophy at Hamburg.  In 1937 he entered the Levant consular service, and after two years learning Arabic at Beirut, and a spell at Alexandria,he spent from 1941 to 1945 at the Embassy in Cairo. For much of this time he was private secretary to Lord Killearn, for whose forcefulness he conceived a strong admiration, and whose wartime diaries he was, 30 years later, to edit for publication. In 1945 he became British consul at Damascus ... and later served successively at Aleppo, Beirut, and the Foreign Office.

In 1952 he returned as oriental counsellor to Cairo, where the Nasserite revolution had just ousted King Farouk; four taxing years of servicethere were ended by the Suez adventure of 1956.  After two years at Berne, he became in 1959 consul-general at Algiers...and in 1962 ... he was appointed the first British ambassador to the new [Algerian] state. In 1964 he was transferred as ambassador to Damascus, and in 1967 to Baghdad...  In 1969, after some soul-searching, he resigned from the Foreign Service to fill the chair of international politics at the University of Wales."

This series of tweets, by a current academic at the same department at Aberystwyth, is interesting.

Fossilised it may be, but that wee dropping of Evans's is oh so typical of the Foreign Office "Camel Corps" mindset that continues to infest the FCO to the present day.

And what effect and legacy had Evans, one feels entitled to ask, over the young minds he encountered at a department generally conceded to be the top one of its kind in the United Kingdom, and who may have become diplomats, journalists, or academics in their turn?

Leftwing Fascists on the March

In New York City a few days ago, the annual joyous march celebrating Israel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONzk_V2Zru):

                                        
 For more coverage like that below, please visit NYCParadelife.com

But as seen on the Facebook page of the New York coven (I use that word advisedly) of the anti-Israel so-called "Jewish Voice for Peace" the fascist left was also out and about, proving once again its intolerance for democractic values and free expression:

 More of JVP's antics here

Of course, we're becoming used used to the totalitarian left's crazy hypocrisy. 

Last night in Australia, for instance, the popular conservative columnist Andrew Bolt was physically assaulted shortly after he launched a book about Donald Trump.

(The urbane Mr Bolt,naturally unhappy about having dye sprayed in his face, apparently attacked the bastards back, giving one a well-aimed kick in the unmentionables.)

He is an enfant terrible as far as the left is concerned, because he's not afraid to speak his mind with such robust pieces as this, ("Britain has imported the start of a civil war") written this week in the wake of the recent Islamic atrocities in the United Kingdom (in the latest of which, incidentally, two young Australian women have been confirmed dead):

Image from Vlad Tepes Blog

'The latest terrorist attacks in London show Britain has imported the start of a civil war.

Few police and journalists have wanted to admit this truth for fears of seeming racist. We have the same denialists ourselves.

But how can it be denied now? In March, a British-born Islamist killed five people with his car and his knife outside the British parliament.

Two weeks ago, the Islamist son of Libyan refugees murdered 22 people, many of them teenage girls, at a pop concert in Manchester.

Now at least three men have run down and stabbed people on and near London Bridge. One woman had her throat cut, and a witness reported one of the attackers, described as looking Mediterranean, shouted: “This is for Allah.”

Six people were murdered.

To say this looks like the start of a civil war will be denounced by apologists as hyperbole.

But does anyone seriously think the Islamist attacks will finally stop with yesterday’s murders?

The UK government last month admitted Britain now had an estimated 23,000 jihadists on its streets — about the size of the army reserve.

Then there are the supporters, active or passive.

A face-to-face survey of British Muslims for the BBC last year found 4 per cent openly backed suicide attacks and other acts of Islamist political violence — which amounts to 100,000 Muslims in Britain today.

To deal with the threat, Prime Minister Therese May last month raised the terrorism threat level to extreme and deployed the army on the streets. Yet she still got this London Bridge massacre.

Looks like the start of a civil war to me.

Think what may now follow. Could some non-Muslims, enraged by the attacks and the refusal of the political class to properly protect them, one day respond with violence of their own?

God knows where it all will end.

But we do know where it started — with Britain opening the gates to mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa, while the political class screamed down anyone who dared object....'

For glimpses of more dodgy happenings on the streets of London see Edgar Davidson's scoops here and here

David Singer: Trump Should Move Pollard to Jerusalem

Close on the heels of retired British academic Brian Goldfarb's guest blog yesterday about the Six Day War comes the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer, regarding Jonathan Pollard.  The image at left shows street artist Solomon Souza's portrait of Pollard spray-painted at the Mahane Yehuda Market, Jerusalem.

Writes David Singer:

President Trump's delay in moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem presents the President with a wonderful opportunity to commute Jonathan Pollard's sentence – freeing Pollard to move from New York to Jerusalem.

Trump made his unequivocal Embassy pledge on 22 March 2016:

"We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem."

A White House statement on 1 June put this brave face on Trump 's decision delaying the Embassy move:

"While President Donald J. Trump signed the waiver under the Jerusalem Embassy Act and delayed moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, no one should consider this step to be in any way a retreat from the President's strong support for Israel and for the United States-Israel alliance. President Trump made this decision to maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, fulfilling his solemn obligation to defend America's national security interests. But, as he has repeatedly stated his intention to move the embassy, the question is not if that move happens, but only when."

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs have so far extended over a period of 23 years without any real success - so one can only wonder when the Embassy move is likely to occur.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's response was quite philosophical:

"Though Israel is disappointed that the embassy will not move at this time, we appreciate today's expression of President Trump's friendship to Israel and his commitment to moving the embassy in the future"

Trump's friendship would be confirmed were he to commute Pollard's life sentence and harsh parole conditions to enable Pollard's move to Jerusalem,

Pollard – an intelligence analyst with the US Government – received his life sentence for passing classified information to an American ally – Israel. No other American has received such a crushing sentence.

Pollard – released in 2015 after serving 30 years penal servitude – was placed on harsh parole conditions requiring him to wear an electronic tracking device, obey a curfew and allow his computers to be monitored. He must remain in the United States until November 2020.

Pollard's appeal to relax his parole conditions was recently rejected.

Pollard's treatment can be contrasted to that meted out to Bradley (now known as Chelsea) Manning  – who leaked more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 whilst serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq,

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in January – three days before vacating the White House – from 35 years to just over 7 years, the majority of which Manning had already served. Trump said Manning should never have been released from prison.

Manning was freed from federal custody on May 17th.

Israeli Prime Ministers from Yitzchak Rabin to Netanyahu had unsuccessfully lobbied successive Republican and Democratic Presidents for Pollard's release and permission to resettle in Israel.
Pollard is recently reported to have remarked:

“As much as Trump needs to be held to his promise to move the embassy, it is just as important that the prime minister keep his promise to bring an agent home"

President Obama's precedent in freeing Manning whilst resisting similar overtures for Pollard's release was reprehensible.

Commuting Pollard's sentence at this particular moment in Trump's presidency will help cement the blossoming post-Obama relationship between the United States and one of its staunchest allies – Israel.

Pollard's move to Jerusalem as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of its liberation from 19 years of illegal occupation by Jordan would alleviate the disappointment of the Embassy not moving there.

That is what Trump-style deal-making is all about.