Tianenmen and the Iran deal

Sar Shalom

In 1989, the Chinese Communist Party responded to a student demonstration in Tianenmen Square by massacring the students occupying Tiananmen Square. In the wake of that massacre, both houses of Congress unanimously passed sanctions against China. President George H. W. Bush vetoed the bill and during the override attempt, 37 Republicans in the Senate changed their positions to sustain the president's veto. Since then, candidate Bill Clinton promised that he would not renew China's Most Favored Nation status the next time the issue came. The next time China's MFN status came up for renewal, Clinton was president, and he did not oppose. Same thing the following time China's MFN status came up. After that, Clinton made China's MFN status permanent, eliminating any future automatic review of that status.

The fate of MFN status for China in the years after Tiananmen provides a model for what would likely happen with the Iran nuclear deal if Obama's veto is sustained. Among President Obama's constant refrains supporting his deal is the claim that if Iran violates the terms of the agreement, we can always "snap back" the sanctions. The problem is that "snapping back" the sanctions after the deal is put into place will create the same disaster scenario that Obama claims would result now if the deal is rejected. The only difference is that rejecting the deal now would leave an outside chance to renegotiate a better deal while "snapping back" the sanctions would open no such opportunity. The result is that any argument used today to support the president's deal could be used to oppose "snapping back" the sanctions under any conceivable violation by Iran. In other words, any violation by Iran would give a choice of "let them get away with it" or war. If those are the choices the future will present to us, "snap back" will be as much of a paper tiger as the renewal process of China's MFN status.

US may support the PLO over its American victims

Michael L.

In a Reuters report from July 28, Nate Raymond tells us:

The U.S. government may weigh in on whether the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority must post a multimillion-dollar bond, which they have resisted doing, while the groups appeal a jury's finding that they supported terrorist attacks in Israel.

The U.S. Department of Justice disclosed its potential interest in the case in a letter filed Monday in Manhattan federal court, six months after 10 American families won a $655 million verdict against the PLO and Palestinian Authority.

If the Justice Department filed a so-called statement of interest, it would mark the U.S. government's first formal role in the diplomatically sensitive lawsuit, which was filed in 2004.

The Justice Department said it would decide by Aug. 10. A spokeswoman declined to comment.

I am not a lawyer, but you cannot swing a dead cat in my family without hitting one in the head.

Essentially what is going on here is that the Palestinian Authority and the PLO got smacked by a Manhattan federal court for a lot of money.  655 million dollars.  This would represent a major blow to the anti-Israel / anti-Jewish movement as it is represented by these two violently racist organizations.

The court is requiring that the defendant deposit several hundred million dollars into a bond pending appeal.  If they lose the appeal then the money automatically goes to the American victims.

The PA and PLO are resisting posting that bond for reasons that could not be more obvious.

The Obama Department of Justice is considering intervening in the matter and we will find if they do so on August 10.

If the Obama administration does intervene it will likely to do so in order to maintain and stabilize the PA and the PLO at the expense of their American victims.

From an Obama administration perspective the "peace process" must go on and that means that the Palestinian Authority must be defended against its American claimants because to do otherwise might, in some measure, inconvenience the ability of the PA and PLO to function.

If the Obama administration does weigh-in on the side of the PA and the PLO - which would not surprise me in the least - the court still has the option to deny the request.  This is why federal judges are given lifetime appointments, precisely so that they have no existential need to cave to executive demands.

Not surprisingly the main attorney for these enemies of the Jewish people is a guy named Mitchell Berger.

{Shocking, I know.}

I have no doubt that Mister Berger views his defense of his clients within the Western legal tradition which states that all defendants, however heinous, deserve a vigorous defense, and I would not argue against that.  But surely Berger understands that at least part of the reason that he was chosen to stand for that defense is because he has a Jewish name.

Were there no non-Jewish attorneys qualified to defend the PLO and the PA?

People make their own choices.  All I can tell you is that Mitchell Berger is not going to be invited to any of my Passover seders anytime soon.

Say hello to Lawrence

Michael L.

Every now and again I front page a commenter's thoughts at Israel Thrives.

I only do this rarely, but I think that Lawrence's perspective is an important one... I know because I share it!

In reference to the Dawabsha family firebombing, Lawrence writes.

Let's assume that it was Jews who are responsible, although there are suspicions it may have been Arabs; even if the former, the response from Israeli Jews has been pathetic and wincingly masochistic. Yes condemn it but get a proper perspective on the wider situation, a bird's eye view. Such murderous violence against Israelis, including our children is promoted weekly by the PA, its mosques, media, schools, never mind Hamas. There are daily attacks against Jews, or at least Jewish motorists, the Jerusalem light rail etc. Every day. Every day Muslims in the Middle-East slaughter, rape, torture and abduct their fellow Muslims and Christians on a terrible scale, look at Syria and Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. There are full-scale atrocities there. Every day.

The response from the Israeli media and govt is nothing less than pathetic self-loathing, as if we are all responsible (all mainstream Israeli institutions condemn it, unlike all Palestinian institutions which celebrate Palestinian terror against Jews) and ignoring the daily genocidal Jew-hatred from Palestinian and Muslim institutions. And that's assuming Jews are to blame, and we just don't know as of yet. I would go as far as calling our president Rivlin a self-hating Jew (and not just because of his reaction this time around. Ask yourselves why he got the Guardian man of the year award. The Guardian is a left-wing fascist hardcore Jew-hate rag). Israelis are almost as pathetic as American Jews, not quite but not far off.

I found it a little disconcerting, and a little sad, at how eagerly so many Israelis put on the "hair shirt" in order to make penance for their alleged sins.

If whoever killed that baby is Jewish then he or she (or they) is Jewish.

But we must not allow people to use such a crime to demean and attack the Jewish people in Israel, as a whole.  Nor should we allow people to use crimes like this to smear Israeli politicians.  To do so would be something akin to blaming Barack Obama for this or that murder in the United States.  It is simply not just.  And to use the murder of an innocent child to attack one's political enemies is a disgrace.

I am sure that Jewish people in the US also sometimes commit heinous political crimes, but when they do so you can be sure that I do not walk around, with my head bowed in shame, earnestly searching my soul for moral transgressions.

And that, ultimately, is my real concern at the moment.  The Arabs of Israel, in collusion with the Soviets, conjured the "Palestinian narrative" of perfect victim-hood and exported it to the West where it found a sympathetic audience.  Now this same false and malicious narrative of perfect victim-hood is encroaching not only onto the diasporic Jewish head, but looks to be riddling the Israeli Jewish head, as well.

It represents what I once referred to as the Palestinian Colonization of the Jewish Mind.

Of the various aspects of the long Arab war against the Jews in the Middle East, the least appreciated is what we might call "cognitive warfare."  Via the use of propaganda and toxic journalism the "pro-Palestinian" movement seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel.

Jews, sadly, are not immune, but I very much hope that Israeli Jews do not lose sight of the fact that their actual moral well-being, compared to the rest of the world, is doing just fine.

{Thanks.}

When Arabs frame Jews in Israel

Michael L.

There are two recent stories in the news, both of which are concerned with Arab attempts to blame Jews for crimes that those Jews did not commit.

There was the story of Imad Abu Sharikh who came to the hospital all bloodied up claiming that Jewish thugs had attacked him on his way to the mosque, yelling "Arabs out of Israel!"  The police investigated and it turned out that Sharikh was lying.  He did get beaten, but not by Jews, but by fellow Arabs.  His inclination to blame his attack on Jews may have something to do with rising tensions within Israel due to the recent Dawabsha family firebombing.

The second story is directly concerned with that firebombing.

Ari Yashar, writing in Arutz Sheva, tells us:

An announcement has been spreading around influential Palestinian Arab Facebook pages claiming that Yehuda Landsberg of Gilad Farm in Samaria committed the arson that killed an Arab infant and wounded four family members, reports Channel 10 on Monday.

The announcement includes a poster image with Landsberg's picture, and the word "wanted" in English, Arabic, and Hebrew - with a clear Google Translate-inducted mistake in the Hebrew reading ratziti, meaning "I wanted," instead of the correct mevukash.

There's just one problem: Landsberg has been in jail since last December serving a two-and-a-half year sentence, on charges of having committed "Price Tag" vandalism on the Arab village of Far'ata.

When you read enough stories like the two above, as I have, and if you are aware of the phenomenon of "Pallywood" in which Palestinian-Arabs seek to set Jews up before the cameras for defamation - as a form of cognitive warfare against Jewish Israelis, as a whole - then it becomes exceedingly difficult to trust any information that come from Palestinian-Arab sources when they make claims against Jews.

Dr. Richard Landes of Boston University defines "Pallywood" as follows:

The term “Pallywood” refers to the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression. They are able to succeed in this endeavor in large part due to the credulity and eagerness of the Western press to present these images, which reinforce the image of the Palestinian David struggling valiantly against the overpowering Israeli Goliath. Pallywood has led to astonishing lapses in Western journalistic standards in which badly staged scenes regularly appear on the news as “real events.” 

The fact that such tactics are used constantly by the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel means that we cannot trust their claims when they denounce Jews.

This raises the question of what to make of the Dawabsha family firebombing?  It may very well have been a "price-tag" attack committed by "Jewish extremists" or it might have been something else entirely.  It is very possible, perhaps even likely, that this crime was the handiwork of Jews.  However, it could also quite easily be a frame job.  It might be that the house caught fire for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with malice toward the Dawabsha family or toward Arabs as a group.  It might be that after the house burned down and little Ali Dawabsha was killed that someone came long and scrawled "revenge" in Hebrew on the side of the house.

The point is that we do not really know what happened and we certainly do not, at least not yet, know who did it.

What I do not understand is why so many people, including the great majority of Jews, leap to the assumption that this was a Jewish crime on such flimsy evidence?

And now, of course, Israel is subject to even more denunciations in which people actually blame the government of Israel for this crime or they blame Israeli Jewish culture in its entirety.  And we have all these Jews now seemingly involved in soul searching to determine just what the hell is wrong with themselves.

I find it shabby.

Tibetans aside, there are very few peoples on the planet less in need of soul-searching than the Jewish people, despite all the toxic accusations against Israel.  People are using the Dawabsha family firebombing as a club against Jewish-Israelis.  I would hate to see Jewish-Israelis use it as an emotional club against themselves.

Progressive-Left and Daily Kos Jew Hatred

Michael L.

In a piece published yesterday entitled, You aren't "shocked" Jewish settlers burned a Palestinian baby alive, Netanyahu. You're complicit., Jewish anti-Zionist Israel-Hater, David Harris-Gershon, indicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as largely responsible for the murder of Ali Dawabsha.

In the spirit of Mr. Harris-Gershon, I have therefore concluded that any time someone gets murdered in the United States, Barack Obama is complicit for helping to foster a atmosphere of violence and distrust among Americans.

In truth, it is hard for me to grasp the sheer malice and hypocrisy of someone who would use the murder of a toddler in order to smear a political enemy as willingly complicit in such an act.  In this piece, however, I am less interested in Harris-Gershon than I am in those who lap up his material and spread hatred toward Israel and, thus, inevitably toward Jews.

Let us see what some of the Kossacks have to say:

Must not have been clear. (3+ / 0-)

I meant those 500 children (couldn't remember the number) that were killed by uniformed Israelis while the citizens sat on the hillside and cheered. I'm far from anti semitic, but  killing isn't made "pure and righteous" just because it's approved of.

by Nannyberry on Sun Aug 02, 2015 at 08:23:07 AM PDT

One of the favorite games of racist anti-Jewish Leftists is pretending that they inhabit some high moral ground compared to the Jews who they are setting up for violence.  Ultimately when some makes the kind of claim above - that Jewish people are both violent and immoral -  they are setting us up first for condemnation and then for violence against us.

The people that she is talking about sitting on that hill during last year's Gaza fight are people who endured years of constant rocket fire into southern Israel.  Their children were given post-traumatic stress disorder, their economy suffered greatly, and they were constantly running into bomb shelters in the middle of the night.

No wonder some cheered.  I would have cheered also, because from their point of view the government was finally doing something to protect themselves and their families from Jihadi aggression from Hamas.

This goes back a long way. Tossing grenades (6+ / 0-)

into the windows of homes was a tactic commonly used by Jewish Militia/Terror groups during the Mandate period.

by JesseCW on Sun Aug 02, 2015 at 02:09:03 AM PDT

What a terrible thing to say about the Jewish people without giving the slightest bit of evidence.  Accusing the Jews of gratuitous murder is nothing less than the Christians did in the Medieval era during the Passion Plays before Easter and then, of course, filled with moral superiority and self-righteous indignation, they marched directly into the ghettos and started killing people.

JesseCW is making a brutally unjust claim against the Jews of the Mandate and also helping to whip up hatred toward our families and friends in that part of the world, if not toward Jews, more generally.

Know the worst part? (5+ / 0-)

They did it to everyone there, even Jews who were originally from there, rather than from Europe.

As is usual in human history, the oppressed turn into oppressors. The only difference is Israel hasn't built any ovens - white phosphorus is the replacement.

There's a wise old saying, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon we'll all be blind and toothless".  Even the Goyim understand that.

by Wzrd1 on Sun Aug 02, 2015 at 06:09:03 AM PDT

No, Wzrd1, what is the worst part?

So, we threw grenades into the windows of everyone there, including our fellow Jews.  Boy these Jews are pretty vile according to so many of "progressives" on Daily Kos.  One might even think that they dislike these immoral Jews.

By the way, notice the use of the word Goyim in the last sentence.  There are two ways to interpret that usage.  Wzrd1 is either anti-Jewish Jew or he's using the term in a sarcastic manner to highlight ways in which Jews reference non-Jews in order to suggest that it represents a type of insult or put-down.  It's just a little flourish of odium to put people in the proper mood.

They casually blow them to bits, casually dump (13+ / 0-)

incendiaries on them.

And the vast - overwhelming - majority of Jewish Israelis are cool with it.

JesseCW on Sun Aug 02, 2015 at 02:16:30 AM PDT

The good old days when a Muslim or a Christian could beat the holy crap out of the Jews are over and Jesse is not happy about it.  I understand that people are used to centuries of Jewish submission and the illegitimacy of Jewish self-defense.  And it is true that the vast majority of Israelis are very cool with protecting their children from the hostile Arab-Muslim majority around them.

I am sick of Settler Terrorism (79+ / 0-)

I have long thought the racism practiced by many Israelis against the Palestinians as a result of the occupation is destroying the soul of Israel.. and this latest terror attack is part of the pattern.

tsackton on Sat Aug 01, 2015 at 06:47:00 PM PDT

Yes.  All those Jews running around, chopping off heads and destroying antiquities and raping young women in the name of Jewish Supremacism... oh, wait, that's some other group of people, isn't it?

Also, of course, the term "settler" is meant to suggest that these Jews have no rights to inhabit the very land of their ancestors.

Furthermore, this guy's sense of moral proportionality is twisted.  He's sick of "Settler Terrorism"?  How much Islamic terrorism is their compared to Jewish Terrorism?  The ratio has got be somewhere around 1,000 to 1, yet its the virtually non-existent Jewish variety that these people are "sick of."

The much more bloody and brutal other kind is not of interest to these people.  But, then, they do not care about Muslim-on-Muslim violence and casually approve of Muslim-on-Jewish violence, no matter how much they may deny it, because they justify that violence as a righteous punch-back against Jewish land theft and alleged oppresssion.  It is only violence perpetrated by Jews, or any type of white western violence against anyone of another color, that fills their hearts with meaning.

This is what you might call "racism."

An Arab Baby Murdered in Israel

Michael L.

Israel Thrives unequivocally condemns the arson attack that resulted in the death of 18-month old Ali Dawabsha and concurs with editor David Horovitz of the Times of Israel that mere regret is not sufficient.

The government of Israel has a moral obligation to do whatever it can do to prevent this kind of activity.  If this was, indeed, a "price tag" attack the individual, or individuals, who conducted the attack should spend the rest of their lives in prison.