For the first time ever, the New York Times had a front page story about how Hamas is brainwashing its high school students into hating Israel by having them read textbooks with false, defamatory, and one-sided narratives.
According to Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren, “The books used by 55,000 (Palestinian) children in eighth to tenth grade do not recognize modern Israel or mention the Oslo Peace Accords.”
Asked the lesson of the uprising, one of the 40 boys in class promptly answered, “Al Buraq Wall is an Islamic property,” using the Muslim name for the site, one of the holiest in Judaism. Pleased, the teacher then inquired whether the students would boycott Israeli products, as Arabs had boycotted Jewish businesses in 1929. A resounding chorus of “Yes!” came back from the class.
I am telling you the truth: unless they are my targets, those I quote here as authorities tell the truth.
As regards the Palestinian students involved, if they’re in high school, they’re not children: they’re tall and strong enough to kill and dumb enough to swallow the bait fed them by their elders.
Of all the crimes possible against humanity, the misdirecting of the young — let me be clear: the theft of a real education from the very young — would rank highest among them.
“The problem is not technical — the problems is about fear, mistrust, hatred and pain and dealing with past memories . . . .” Webcast, live at posting – 10/10/2013/1305EDT.
Under Abbas, the PA has been waging a war of words against the Jewish state, engaging in anti-Semitic incitement of the vilest kind and using Holocaust denial, racial slurs, and Judeophobic epithets. It is a stream of hostility cultivated and implemented over the past decade under the Abbas leadership. A stream which is competing with “Der Ewige Jude”, the Eternal Jew, favored by Joseph Goebbels, in which Jews are compared to rats.
A comment in The New York Times on the funding and training of Palestinian Authority Security Forces:
Much of the training supported by the United States and the European Union was conducted in Jordan, away from traditional Palestinian bases, in hopes that months away from home would cement a new professional ethos. Yet old neighborhood and clan ties continued to be used in recruitment and some of the most powerful Palestinian security organizations remained outside the reform regimen.
We write today because we are deeply disturbed by recent reports of large-scale political arrests being carried out by the Palestinian Authority inside the occupied West Bank. These arrests have targeted critics of the Palestinian Authority, including youth activists, human rights defenders, prisoners’ rights organizers and scholars, and journalists, including former political prisoners held by Israel and released in the October 2011 prisoner exchange agreement and subsequently.
*
This operation is currently under the command of Rear Admiral Paul Bushong.9 We are deeply disturbed by the security coordination regime and the role of the United States, highly committed to supporting the Israeli military diplomatically, economically and militarily, in maintaining this regime to the detriment of Palestinians’ freedom of association and expression.
The oddness of the fracturing of the flow down from duel authoritarian modes and the simplistic ways of understanding them seems to me ever striking. Plainly through its behavior and language over time, the Palestinian Authority remains bent on Israel’s destruction and the theft outright of the Jewish state, and in that it has no place to go, and yet it seems to cull or silence competitors either worse than itself or better.
**
Perhaps it would be well to mention here that the American freedom of speech concept was and remains intended to protect discomforting or unpopular speech — not conspiracy or incitement to commit crimes, but politically distasteful speech, and that on the basis that protecting legitimate criticism is a necessary facet of a living and progressing democracy.
As regards then the constituents governed by the Palestinian Authority, one might then take an interest in whose voices have been intimidated, restrained, or silenced by it.
It appears one state cannot bribe another — that is what western assistance seems made to look like — off its language-conveyed-and-sustained program, however destructive, evil, and deeply misguided and suffocating to its own people that program may be.
I had the opportunity to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who expressed grave concern both for Israel’s security as well as for the prospects for peace. “How,” he asked us, “could the Palestinian leadership be a serious partner for peace if it welcomed into its ranks vicious terrorists who continue to deny the very right of the state of Israel to exist?” His concern is more than justified.
Gross corruption charges have for a long time been directed at the PLO, which already by 1993 was the richest terrorist organization in the world, according to the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, having assets of ten billion dollars and an annual income of approximately two billion dollars. The Daily Telegraph reported in 1999 that the PLO had secretly invested over 50 billion dollars around the world. Still, Norway has continuously broken bread with these people.
Arguably, the use of propaganda by Palestinians to gain compassion and political support has been their one great success. The Palestinian narrative of victimhood, with its falsifications of history and politics, its portrayal of themselves as not only innocent but the most compelling victims in the world, its staging of events to blame Israel for atrocities they themselves have committed, its deliberate concentration on alleged injuries or deaths of children, and its achievement in persuading much of the media to accept and advance its manipulation of language and action, have all been part of its success in the propaganda war.
The loosely compiled list that follows may be offered more for impression than information.
As with the above material, it’s indicative of the official continuance of a surreal state of affairs, one in which Israel and the west put up effort in funding, labor, and services to bring the refugees of 1948 into a modern state and state of being while the graying post-Soviet remnant of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) continues to promote an anti-Semitic, genocidal, and totalitarian engine suited to its own combined tribal and mafioso needs.
The real story hasn’t to do with murder per se but with the complete and final enslavement and subjugation of the refugees generations by way of the control of what they may read and speak and think.
Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed over $4 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid.
Successive Administrations have requested aid for the Palestinians to support at least three major U.S. policy priorities of interest to Congress:
• Preventing terrorism against Israel from Hamas and other militant organizations.
• Fostering stability, prosperity, and self-governance in the West Bank that inclines Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence with Israel and a “two-state solution”.
Those who follow the middle east conflict more closely know that beneath the sawing of vocal interlocutors in the Preoccupied Territories, legitimate economic development, and utility and trade throughput plus access to higher education and sophisticated medical services have formed arrangements that the well known vanguard of the vain may feel beneath their own considerations.
______
First, as I just said, I profoundly believe that it is in the national security interest of the United States to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Second, I am one of those who firmly believes in a two-state solution: a Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside the state of Israel is the only solution that will meet the long-term needs of Israel and the aspirations of the Palestinian people. This has long been the policy of our national leadership, and I share it.
Third, let me state very clearly my deep conviction—and I tell this to my Israeli friends all the time—that as President Obama said last year, the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, it is unbreakable tomorrow, and it is unbreakable forever. [Applause.]
Before I get into the details of the program, I would like to remind you that the Government of Israel has 100% ransparency into all aspects of US support to the PA Security Forces (PASF) and that the USSC will never advocate or sponsor activities that could threaten Israeli security.
Convincing Washington to support the security mission remains a tall order even today. Despite the undisputed progress the Palestinian security force has shown on the ground, Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have recently put yet another hold on funds for maintaining and developing the force, as a demonstration of their displeasure with policies adopted by the Palestinian Authority.
These days, the term “middle east conflict” would seem to refer to conflict and unrest in every state in the region but Israel.
Nonetheless, while Egypt roils and Syria burns and the King of Jordan fends off the seeding of perhaps a new class of secular Palestinian politico*, Qatar’s new head of state, Sheikh Tamim has this to say of the refugees of numerous Arab-led wars since 1948:
One day when our “Blue Dot” of a planet is a little more gathered together — that as opposed to riven with war — we may find common ground in five language principles:
Compassion
Humility
Integrity
Justice
Security
Of the four, the most difficult term and the one most relevant to autocracies seems to me to be “integrity” — just the power to be honest about ourselves and with others.
This is not as easy as it may sound. If it were, we would not have the fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, which is in essence and for the ages a story about lying and power.
You know the rest of the story: Eve eats the apple, becomes conscious or comprehending, also self-conscious, and, with Adam joining her, possessed of conscience, out of which reaction, perhaps, come the fig leaves, a courtesy, each to the other, and practical too (God, a few sentences later, provides clothing made of skins — one imagines chamois — lending perhaps dignity and protection to their introduction to life as men and women would experience it forever after).
The “Middle East Conflict” — which is never about conflicts in the middle east but only about the creation of the Jews and Israel (or, lost in the Pharaohnic dawn, the gathering together beneath the unrestrained ego and violence of a tyrant)l — seems to me to be always about two things not at ease with one another: 1) the possession of good conscience in light of the knowledge of good and evil; 2) the testing of God for favor when the relationship needs to be the other way around.
*****
Where kings are concerned, I suspect there may be more to the story than meets either eyes or ears.
When God, being God, and with Torah received as divine message, hides the second tree — the Tree of Life that we are told is there but when it counts is not mentioned by the snake and, later, will be barred from access (by cherubim and an eternally revolving sword guarding the Garden left behind) — the sin of omission becomes a virtue: to have eaten of the Tree of Life also would have been too much, for God forbids it, and so protects His children.
*****
To be as gods, lower case that term, with nuclear capabilities, among other extraordinary but still human capacities, one might counsel also a prudent humility.
Carl Sagan’s clip about the “Pale Blue Dot” that is our planet viewed from space, has many renditions on the web — and there’s an entire film available too (somewhere — I’m going to be lazy here) — but this may do for essence.
That a Nazi flag would be flying over a Palestinian village near a Mosque should actually be less shocking than the fact that so many are shocked by it.
This story has actually had about half a day, twelve hours, to get around the web, but it looks pretty stupid by every public relations and rhetorical guidance possible. As with Syria calling up the ghosts of the Soviet Era, stringing up a Nazi flag on a power line in a refugee-controlled area of the West Bank (where the heck was “the occupation” when that obscenity unfurled?) awakens the racist ghosts of Germany’s woeful Nazi Era.
Some people cannot but help fight old battles in their heads until they erupt in a reality that has only to teach them all over again why those old battles have indeed grown old and irrelevant.
Yesterday, Mohammed Salayma, 16 or 17 years old and in the vicinity of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, took the pistol pictured to the left and raised it to the face of an Israeli border guard. A fellow officer drew her service weapon and shot Salayma three times, killing him.
Salayma’s gun turned out a replica.
Out in the wild, the sale and manufacture of replica guns serve interests from children’s toys to theatrical productions. In the post-Stalinist, post-Soviet drama in which “actions” are planned for effect — or perhaps they just happen that way (sure they do) — perhaps someone had written the headline before arming or criminally failing to educate the victim. As much seems suggested by the above gun replica.
Do your own Googling if the subject interests you.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police define a replica as “a device that is not a real firearm, but that was designed to look exactly or almost exactly like a real firearm.”
Look again at that photograph of the pistol that was raised to a guard’s face in the middle east conflict zone.
Suicide-by-cop or just plain awesome stupidity (or communal or lonesome but in any case vicious and unscrupulous political ambition), the story will come out as to what directly motivated Mohammed Salayma, an older teenager, to walk up to to a military guard, stick a fake gun in his face, and thereby draw fire.
Salayma’s death alone would be a tragedy, albeit not one unfamiliar to armed conflicts, but in the middle east conflict, riots and worse come from such sparks.
Ma’an News Agency, ever reluctant to put a whole truth (remember: clear, accurate, complete) up top in its articles (here’s the prosaic lead: “An Israeli border guard officer on Wednesday shot dead a Palestinian teenager in Hebron’s Old City in the southern West Bank”), nonetheless winds around to quoting Israel police: “Initial findings are that he had a fake pistol that he pointed at the officers at the time of the incident.” I’ll call that middle-of-the-clip effort a kind of balanced reporting. (Ma’an News Agency. “Israeli forces shoot, kill Hebron teenager”).
Every conflict — and now every battle — is a little different. About an hour ago, a CNN clip shows a conversation between two citizen-reporter residents, one in Gaza, the other in Israel, both in the combat area and both reporting and addressing the conflict: “Let’s agree on one thing. Let’s get this game of who is the victim and victimizer out of the way, so we can talk about more substantial issues,” says Mohammed Sulaiman, a resident of Gaza.
Also, much in reference comes from bookmarks, not today’s news, much less “breaking news”; however, being so, it too tells a story within today’s story. Incidental rocket fire from Gaza never stopped after “Cast Lead” (2009); the Hamas government itself has been in the proverbial doghouse with the human rights groups for some time (and reports of “confessions” obtained through torture seem common); the use of civilian centers for arms caches and even children’s playgrounds for launch sites seems to have been and to have remained a part of Hamas doctrine, essentially calling in return fire on, across, or through innocents.
CBN News. “Palestinians Escalate Rocket Attacks on Israel.” November 12, 2012: “JERUSALEM, Israel — Palestinians in the Gaza Strip bombarded southern Israel with more than 75 rockets and mortar shells in a 24-hour period. At least eight of them were longer-range missiles . . . The latest escalation came after terrorists fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli army jeep patrolling near the Karni border crossing early Saturday evening, injuring four soldiers, two seriously and two moderately.”
BackChannels 