According to the IDF caption beneath the above video:
Published on Mar 24, 2014 — Yesterday the Prime Minister of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, gave a feverish speech in front of thousands of supporters at Saraya Square in the Gaza Strip. The message: Palestinians should not and will not stop fighting through terrorist acts against the State of Israel. Haniyeh encourages Palestinians to attack innocent Israelis and he explicitly outlines a new plan to use tunnels on an offensive against Israel. His speech also refers to striking Tel Aviv as thousands of supporters cheer him on.
Never mind that.
Take another look at the crowd and the lime-vested crowd controllers.
Listen again to the voice of the “Great Leader” Ismail Haniyeh.
Attend also the beating of the drum.
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Behind the scenes:
“Of course, the developments in the region have accelerated the return of relations between Hamas and Iran,” the source added. “Perhaps the most important [of those developments] is Hamas’ harsh break with Egypt after the coup and the tension between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The [tension] has helped warm the relationship between Doha and Tehran, and that has cast a shadow over Hamas in a positive way.”
You heard him, but just in case you prefer reading (0:00 –> 0:16):
This is only the first step, but it is a first step that guarantees that while you take the second step, and move towards a comprehensive agreement, Iran’s fundamentals of its program are not able to progress.”
Up top: Palestinian Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh rouses his controlled crowd to a murderous pitch. “Hamas is the canon and we are the ammunition!”
Down below in the blue sport coat and the pink tie, Mr. Kerry on the deal with Iran, which statement his mouth turns out in gobbledygook: ” . . . while you take the second step . . . Iran’s fundamentals of its program are not able to progress.”
The Israeli military said a total of four rockets were fired Thursday from Gaza. Israeli officials previously refused to confirm any cease-fire deal was in place.
“Our mujahedeen responded to the Zionist aggression by firing tens of rockets,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement to the BBC.
“The rockets fired today came in response to the occupation aggression against us and does not mean the collapse of the ceasefire agreement [with Israel],” it said.
End the brutal and senseless preoccupation with the Jews!
Because impotence and obsession are what Hamas and companies are all about: if only Israel didn’t exist; if only the Jews disappeared (after being plundered — let’s not be in too much of a hurry about this); if only the “occupation aggression” did not include trade throughput, medical assistance, basic utilities deliveries, employment, and so on, then the Arab mind (of the Islamic Jihad) might find itself at peace.
If as much was true then, it’s certainly true now. Hamas may value its post-Cast Lead (2009) truce with Israel, but it evidently cannot contain either itself or less encumbered — for being less governmental — Islamic Jihad movements on its own block.
Last night, Israel returned like fire in response to yesterday’s rocket and mortar barrage (the latest news reports four more rockets fired from Gaza today). That tit-for-tat is an old show: curtain up, please, on the mindlessness, the essential empty thoughtlessness, of Islamic Jihad and the whole bogus mission that has proved convenient for shielding the destruction of other cultures and the theft of wealth (for Gaza, start with the UNRWA annual contribution intended to secure some benefits in qualities of living, and then move swiftly on to Arafat and funds never accounted).
Because of what it really represents, because of what it does to its own constituents and others, because of its self-serving and grandiose delusions, Hamas finds itself in trouble today.
An Egyptian court ruled on March 4 to forbid all activities in Egypt by Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas. The court ruling cuts off all official Hamas-Egyptian ties and closes all Hamas offices and infrastructure within Egypt.
It would appear that when it comes to attacks against Israel, which it falls to Hamas to police, Hamas has found itself between a fiercely active and impossibly passive place: it either can’t or won’t stand up to or stall “Gaza’s secretive jihadist groups”; it won’t itself step out from beneath the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella; it won’t step forward to make peace with the Jewish State of Israel but it will allow itself to be cajoled and dragged into fairly begging Israel for incursion and real occupation on the turf it was supposed to govern (x suspect election followed by civil war with Fatah) independently.
In fact, Hamas has gotten itself so into trouble, so isolated between worlds, so caught between al-Qaeda, the Ayatollah, Egypt, and Israel, that I would not be surprised were it to look to the IDF to defend its interests from the local competitors that have infiltrated its writ and compromised whatever integrity and self-possession it once may have had.
Salafi groups have been suspected in the bombings of Internet cafes and music stores, intimidation of Gaza’s small Christian community, the kidnapping of a BBC journalist in 2007 and more recently, the death of an Italian activist in 2011. Salafi groups are also believed to cooperate with militants in the neighboring Sinai Peninsula in Egypt to attack Egyptian and Israeli targets.
Gaza’s Salafis support al-Qaida’s campaign of global jihad, but are not believed to have direct links with the global terror network. In contrast, Hamas says its struggle is solely against Israel.
Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, terrorists have fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel. Over 3.5 million Israelis are currently living under threat of rocket attacks.
More than half a million Israelis have less than 60 seconds to find shelter after a rocket is launched from Gaza into Israel. Most rockets launched from Gaza into Israel are capable of reaching Israel’s biggest southern cities.
Israel’s military said more than 20 rockets were fired. Israeli media reported more than 50 rockets were fired.
The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks over the years. Israel’s military said they had targeted the militants on Tuesday after they fired at Israel.
If the weapons stored in Gaza allow it, this can only escalate unless or until the IDF steps in with boots to stop it.
The news also tells the effect of having intercepted a major arms shipment last week: is the one shipment caught, however substantial it may be, the only shipment that needed to be caught?
A top Hamas official publicly boasted this week that the Iran-backed terror group intends to blanket Israel with missiles and rockets during any future conflagration. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had warned as far back as last fall that Hamas was arming itself in anticipation of “a renewal of violence,” an assessment that came amid increasingly specific intelligence indicating that the organization was looking to provoke a conflict with Israel in order to reverse what had become a precipitous decline in its domestic and international positions.
Competing to hate, to express more hate than someone else’s hate, to do more with hate and thereby garner “prestige” . . . .
What’s garnered universally by such a philosophy: contempt.
On one hand, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani continues to engage the international community in a diplomatic process over Tehran’s nuclear program. He has achieved many successes in a charm offensive designed to rebrand his country as a reasonable and more moderate international player.
Simultaneously, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and its overseas special operation unit, the Quds Force, are strengthening, financing, and arming terrorist organizations all over the Middle East.
Iran, at a glance, has been sewing conflict around the middle east, building its own energy industry, establishing itself as a nuclear power — well, no one has yet stalled that ambition or dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for achieving it — and it illustrates its efforts in blood, or else why release Hezbollah to defend and sustain the brutality of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad? Against that sweeping influence in regional payola and arms shipments, Israel’s recent interdiction of arms intended for Gaza provides but a glimpse of Ayatollah Khamenei’s greater ambitions as the middle east’s greatest Lord of War.
At 21:15 local time Iraq, on December 26, 2013, Camp Liberty was targeted by dozens of missiles of different types. In the early hours 3 members of the Iranian resistance were slain and more than 50 were reported injured, some in critical condition.
This is the fourth missile attack on Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty (Iraq) in 2013, while the Iraqi government has not yet delivered the bodies of those massacred during the September 1, 2013 attack on Camp Ashraf, to Liberty residents for burial.
While American President Barrak Obama gives diplomacy and peace a chance over Iran’s developing nuclear weapons building potential, Ayatollah Khamenei’s efforts to produce influence and obtain it throughout the region has been also developing unobstructed. With that in mind, Israel’s interception of a lone arms shipment doubtless intended to arm Hamas for the destruction of the Jewish-majority state represents but a small interruption in the Ayatollah’s efforts to turn a large wheel, a wheel that, in fact, has turned.
“Arabs were made to pay for the crimes of the Europeans by the creation of Israel.”
I know that is what has been heard and the fiction constructed around it total, but Zionism predates WWII, and thousands of Arabs were drawn before it to the agricultural fields of the nascent Jewish state.
If you believe statehood in the name of religion must go, then Rome must go, as must Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — well, actually all Islamic kingdoms and dictatorships — as the same have become “real headaches for the entire civilized world, completely engulfed in injustice and violence.”
The only “inescapable issue” in the reconstruction that is the modern State of Israel is the 5,000+ year existence of Jews and Jewish culture — beliefs, calendar, customs, language, religion — on the land and continuously. Ancient Israel, the Roman “Palestine”, and modern Israel have never been “Judenrein” (as some might wish).
Jews don’t “deserve a homeland” — Jews have a homeland.
Regarding terrorism, have a look independently into war and low-intensity conflict across 2,000 years.
Also, you may want to look into how Ben Gurion crushed the terrorist Irgun at the earliest opportunity.
Your emphasis tells where you want to go (anti-Semitic / anti- Ziionist, actually, anti-justice) but the deeply poisonous programming and scripting that got you there has to this hour stayed out of the picture.
I beg you for patient new introspection and scholarship, for fresh ears and eyes, for skepticism in regard to a destructive loyalty.
I ask no less of myself and do read, say, Ma’an and look into issues having to do with the refugees of 1948 and their humanity, which one may believe better than that of their leaders who build and disseminate libels for a living.
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The response was to a writer in India who ran through the common anti-Semites screen, from declaring the State of Israel a colonial project directly and only corresponding to the destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust of World War II to suggesting the entire state should have been constructed elsewhere.
What a load of fictional crapola one wakes to if participating the “middle east conflict”, which has weirdly become the signifier for Israel’s conflict with the Arab world while the same Arab world melts down in conflicts within its portion of the Islamic Small Wars (e.g., signaled by political violence in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria).
Nowhere is the “Religion of Peace”, nor the states founded on it, at peace, and not even within themselves, the Muslim Brotherhood gangs ever threatening established state power, the same state power incompletely in control of powerful families willing to back al-Qaeda and its affiliates and likenesses.
First of all let me point out, and I’m fuly aware of the deliberate digression on my part here, that I’m the first to say that Israel and its people, like any other nation, has and deserves every right to live in peace and harmony and to benefit from the years of hardships it has been through as well as hard work to bring about the actual benefits that it is receiving now. As a matter of fact, I consider Israel and its people a great role model for other nations in terms of what it takes for a people to take such huge steps in all fields of life. I also believe that the entire world deserves the same and had it not been for various disasters, among them wars, and had they been left in peace so that they can deal with their own domestic problems effectively, we would have had a much better world. I think Israel can use its incredible experience, wisdom, technological advances, also its incredible human resources in order to help its immediate neighbours to see the light rather than continuing with a conflict that is taking innocent lives on both sides to no positive end!I beliebve that not a single Israeli child nor Palestinian, nor anyone else for that matter, should be a victim of this useless conflict that has been going on for so long! Israel definitely has as much right to water as anyone else and it is also great that it is sensitive enough to let others to benefit from it generously. My ultimate wish is to see all nations living in peace and harmony, using their various resources in order to improve their lives for there is enough for us all on this planet of ours to share.
The author, Tanit Nima Tinat, holds a degree in Stage Acting and Dramatic Art from Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, United Kingdom as well as a Master of Arts in Comparative Literature: Ancient Greek, Latin, English from the University of California at Berkeley.
My Comments
As my father may have said, “We had some words.”
However, we may have landed on the same page, a liberal one, defined by urges toward magnanimity and righteousness.
The laboratory that is the middle east conflict affords plenty of opportunity for viewing how expectations nulling the intent to destroy Israel and the Jews and preserving the opportunity for the resident refugees of 1948 actually contributes to the promise of a real, a reliable, autonomy, dignity, and prosperity. As others govern themselves, they may too, and they may expect to do that to standards to which others adhere in mutual regard.
End the preoccupation, says I.
Real Israeli suzerainty is not and has never been an option.
That theme on which I hammer, “malignant narcissism”, gets in there in the patterns of dependence, skimming, and taxation deployed by Fatah and Hamas governing elements, each in their own way.
The best countermeasure: widespread external comprehension of a whole accurate, clear, and complete cultural, geographical, historical, and psychological story.
We don’t make it up.
We don’t deny shameful passages.
We don’t deny creditable passages either.
We look at it together, finally, or look at them together, so many conflicts extant, and that spells the beginning of the end of those artificially provoked and sustained for the ends cherished by the most narcissistic and venal of persons.
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Research analysts may drown in human richness and wealth of information attending any conflict, and when one has done that get a book out of it; however, as I began my journey through the English-language editions of foreign press, I hadn’t interest in Israel and the middle east conflict. In fact, egregiously naive at the dawn in 2006-2007 (new home built computer; high bandwidth Internet; time on my hands — that’s important — curiosity intact, and blogging software made ready) I was indignant about dumping off the coast of Somalia and had wanted Greenpeace to do something about it!
So fate has provided me with other contributing paths to this point, and this point, so far, is very good: the world in social media has produced a new global political intelligentsia, and we’re here chatyping with one another, and, separately, taking stock of older histories, accessing every avenue of knowledge available to redetermine and re-frame our various cultural, ethnic, and even linguistic locations in the world.
The nascent international system its many versions of Grinch: Ayatollah Khamenei, for example, has racked up serious money beneath this position and moves it around worldwide (e.g., reference: Iran: The leading state sponsor of int’l terrorism | JPost | Israel News – 3/18/2012); Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that while Internet penetration has been pretty good in Russia, less than seven percent of the population speaks English (Wikipedia suggests 5.84 percent), and that leaves him in good shape to frame the news through state-controlled Russian media. But in the global schemes in which technology abets trade and moves money, the same technology-enabled intelligentsia, albeit with struggle against repression, may own itself most of all.
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(In its own way in politics, broadly dispersed national languages form the last broad rivers and impassable mountains defending cultural isolation, and so lend themselves to the totalitarian ends of dictators who really can and do close off the world around their constituents by shutting down external channels and nodes).
Carter taught Christian students in Plains Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.
The history of Palestinians was something I was familiar with as well, only because in high school, my friend’s parents were Moroccan Jews with staunch right-wing Zionist views. They’d go on about how Palestinians were worth shit and how they were sucking off the land they stole, and how they were not from Palestine, but Jordan. Truth be told, my friend’s parents’ passion about their ‘homeland’ made me sick. As a black person living in the United States, I could not relate to their love for their proclaimed homeland because I never had one. My ancestors were captured from various regions of Africa and forced onto ships bound for the Americas. Therefore, when questioned about the geographic origins of my ancestors, my answers were as vague as Africa is big.
It appears the young celebrity creating his celebrity flew to Israel on The Carter Center’s dime (“In the weeks preceding my departure from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Tel Aviv, I received travel warnings from The Carter Center, the organization responsible for sponsoring my trip”) with a reactive and retributive attitude forged in self-righteous alienation, never mind that, for example, about 1.7 million Israelis live in the same funky poverty for which he would claim to stand in the interest of social justice.
Our worlds are as small or as large as the information we acquire about them, and they are also as false or honest as the methods we use to comprehend whole issues and the integrity and curiosity with which we pursue them.
I get a little “Jewed out” myself, sometimes, and somewhere between the ever present clouds of the Holocaust and constant distributed cheerleading (deserved) and defense (also deserved) of Israel. Nonetheless, riding beside my own brand of international humanism (thanks, Felix Adler and Abraham Maslow — two more Jews), Judaism itself and its call to conscience (yo, Jimmuh: Jesus was Jewish!) remains for me an integral part of seeking social justice and what is good in living individually and communally.
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Despite months of lobbying by anti-Israel activists and a desperate last minute petition drive, the 141st APHA annual meeting and exposition held in Boston. defeated an anti-Israel resolution by 74 to 36 votes. The resolution was discussed by the association’s Joint Policy Committee. The anti-Israel campaign was led by activists of BDS, the global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, which was initiated by Palestinians in 2005 and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee established two years later.
The forces of Jew Hate, a term earthier and less sanitized than “anti-Semitism”, have created on-campus and political bubble environments sufficient to enclose the “open-minded”, who may not be as much so as presumed, nor more cagey than vulnerable.
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As I stood in line at JFK waiting to be interrogated by security agents prior to boarding a flight to Tel Aviv last January, I thought of all the reasons why I didn’t belong there. I’m only half Jewish, for starters – and it’s the wrong half. I only know a couple of Hebrew words. I have a lot of what an Un-Jewish Activities Committee might call “Palestinian sympathies.”
Jewish ethnicity and the embrace and expression of faith may vary quite within the Jewish community, but it may not be possible these days to escape the influence of the wisdom of Hillel the Elder, himself quite possibly the elder contemporary of Jesus, from any contemporary stance. One might also go back a little farther in time to “The Akedah” and the undefined test given Abraham, a test either of obedience, which children believe without question, or of conscience, which adults may perceive with penetration – and perceive as Abraham failing (God never speaks to him again; an emissary in the form of an angel has to intercede in the murder; a substitute ram is made to appear for the knife Abraham would have too willingly used on Isaac: had he only spoken up, or, in the modern vernacular, spoken truth to power on behalf of Isaac and Sarah).
Israel provides a broad suite of basic services, including the training of Abbas’s police force, to the generations of refugees who remained on the land after the Arab war of annihilation in 1948. When the hate recedes, when the threat of violence against Jews fades on to the pages of history, the Jews and other Israelis — Christians, Muslims, and others — will prove as helpful as can be, but those days seem always set farther away by smears.
Mr. Carter’s underdog obsession is what motivated him to legitimize Fidel Castro and take his side in a bio-weapons dispute with the United States and to praise North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with the words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent,…and in charge of the decisions about this country.” This is the Korean dictator who, together with the tyrannical son who succeeded him, starved to death about 3 million of their own people. Carter added absurdly, “I don’t see that they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” He also hailed Marshal Joseph Tito as “a man who believes in human rights,” and said of murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.” Carter told Haitian dictator Raul Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country,” which made most Americans ashamed of Jimmy Carter.
In some parts of the world, it rises for the first time.
With time, and with the efforts of a courageous independent few, the hateful games played by spoilers against the Jewish people become more clear as to their true intents, and not only as regards Jews but as regards all others in their path.
Around 11:15:
This is all anti-Semitism 2.0 . . . the problem for me as a leader of my people is we’re going to suffer because of this . . . as long as they push us into fighting against Israel and make the point that Israel is demonized and bad while we get killed and kill Israelis in the process . . . . this is awful, and this is exactly what Mr. Kerry’s peace plan, actually King Abdullah’s peace plan, this is exactly what it’s going to bring . . . .
“I’ve had a few instances even in Halifax when Muslims will say, look I may not agree with everything but its given me things to think about. That’s the start you know; its’ creating cracks in the lies they may have accepted as truth. So that’s one of the best feelings, when I do have Muslims and it’s made them think, challenged what they believe and their ready to take it further.”
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