Lies, Stoners, and bombshells

The President for Life, Liar-in-Chief of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas addressed the United Nations today.  All week it was rumoured to be a ‘bombshell’ of a speech.  I was kind of holding out something like this -

"We, the Palestinian people living between the Mediterranian Sea and the Jordan River acknowledge the existence of a Jewish State and its historic right to live in peace on all of the land defined by the Palestinian Mandate. We abandon all claims to statehood, relinquish all rights of return, and join the ranks of our fellow Arabs who are already citizens of Israel and living under the full and equal protections of Israel's 1948 Declaration of Establishment.".

Instead, it went on like this and I quote just a small  part so you can get the flavour of it.

We do not respond to the Israeli occupation’s hatred and brutality with the same. Instead, we are working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence between our people and in our region, and we are anxious to realize it and to witness the day when all of the people in our region will enjoy peace, security, stability and prosperity. This cannot be achieved with the continuation of the occupation, settlement colonization, the wall, the burning of people, places of worship and homes, the killing youth, children and infants, the burning of crops, and the arrest and detention of people without charge or trial.

So I, the Filthy Footed Jew, would just like to point out in the last week.

Rocket attacks over Ashdod.

A Christian church is set on fire in Bethlehem, and the Palestinian Authority yawns as no Jews could be blamed. 

A Japanese tourist gets stoned by Palestinians in Hebron.

A taxi carrying tourists  to the Mount of Olives comes under rock attack by 11 year old Palestinian.  Police are apparently looking for his parents.

A 40 year old Polish tourist is raped  by six 12-14 year olds Palestinians.  The ‘youths’ kept pictures of her on their phones.  Who knows where their parents were...Now those were just the tourists.Death by stoning, and kicking Jewish babies in strollers is the latest past time for Palestinian ‘youths’...

  

And then then there are more traditional Palestinian pursuits.   The little boy is absolutely terrified and is screaming ‘Abba’...it’s probably just me, but I am taking a pass on the Palestinian version of the piece-ful co-existence thingy. 

The Facebook State Or why there will not be a Palestinian state no matter how many votes the PLO/Palestinian Authority can marshal in any UN vote.

I seriously doubt there is any geographical area denser with NGO's than the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. One of the largest of these aid organization is reporting extreme budget shortfalls.Arutz Sheva report:  

 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday raised alarm over a $100 million shortfall in funding for the UN aid agency for “Palestinian refugees”, UNRWA, and called for urgent donations, AFP reported.

Ban said in a statement quoted by the news agency that UNRWA was "a pillar of stability" for five million Palestinian “refugees” at a time when the Middle East is in the throes of crises and suffering.

He called "on all donors to urgently ensure that the $100 million required be contributed to UNRWA at the earliest possible date so that the children of Palestine can begin their 2015-2016 school year without delay."  Ban has personally spoken to several world leaders in the past weeks about the unprecedented funding crisis at UNRWA, his spokesman said, according to AFP. UNRWA has previously warned that it may have to close its schools due to its large debts and fear of going bankrupt.

Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA media adviser, said in July that the financial deficit may cause the body to close 700 schools in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan at the start of the next school year.

I have no doubt that the UNRWA is facing a very dire financial shortfall, but not a single penny should go to either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.  Education, health care, housing, and job creation for Palestinians in either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip is not, and should not be the responsibility of the UNRWA. There is no time like the present to tell Palestinians that the refugee gravy train for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is no more.  These people are not refugees and treating them as if there is any comparison with the ongoing tragic plight of the Syrians is Theatre of the Absurd. 

I am told regularly that Palestinians want and long for statehood, but as long as the UN and NGO's pick up the tab, the Palestinians have no vested interest in creating the infrastructure of governance which creates statehood.  Job creation, medical and education should be the sole responsibility of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. The destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip was the direct result of Hamas launching an offensive against Israel and consequently, it is up to the Hamas government to provide reconstruction to those citizens who have suffered their loss of their home and livelihood no the UNRWA.

It’s ironic that the Kurds, who have built all the necessary underpinnings and infrastructure for a state; including education, job creations, healthcare systems, and  are leading the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the very people the world seems determined to deny them statehood.  As long as the UNRWA provides, education, job creation, job training, housing, medical care for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority the Palestinians will continue their charade of being only a Facebook state.

Who knew this was what a Palestinian Victory looks like

A man who has a guaranteed free three meals a day, medical and dental care, a bed and a home for the next 40 or so years, claims Hamas won the war against Israel.

No one quite does 'peacekeeper' quite like the Palestinians

(picture h/tip EofZ) except maybe the Turks.

The long lie

One of the first truisms one encounters when studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that truth is fluid. What was true yesterday or even today is not what will be truth tomorrow. Of course, truth could depend entirely on what language is spoken.

There is no better example of this principle in action than Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' New York Times opinion piece. Why the NY Times gave this man their paper as his soap box to preach on is beyond me. I will not re-hash the points others have covered but instead I just want to point out Abbas' personal narrative is a little 'fluid' depending on time, place and language. Abbas' starts his op-ed piece with a personal walk down memory lane.

SIXTY-THREE years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family to Syria. He took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees. Though he and his family wished for decades to return to their home and homeland, they were denied that most basic of human rights. That child’s story, like that of so many other Palestinians, is mine. This month, however, as we commemorate another year of our expulsion — which we call the nakba, or catastrophe

In July 2009, Abbas speaking on Palestinian television stated quite plainly in Arabic that his family was not driven out by the Jewish militias but fled out of fear that the Jewish milita would potentially take revenge for the ill-treatment the Arabs had metered out historically to the Jews. Arutz Sheva:

Speaking with Al-Palestinia TV on Monday, Abbas admitted that his family was not expelled or driven out, but rather left for fear that the Jews might take revenge for the slaughter of 20 Jews in the city during the Arab pogroms of 19 years earlier.

“I am among those who were born in the city of Tzfat (Safed). We were a family of means. I studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel – ed.]. At night, we left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where we remained for a month. Then we went to Damascus, and then to our relatives in Jordan, and then we settled in Damascus.

“My father had money, and he spent his money systematically, and after a year, the money ran out and we began to work. “The people’s basic motives brought them to run away for their lives and with their property. These [motives] were very important, for they feared the violence of the Zionist terrorist organizations – and especially those of us from Tzfat felt that there was an old desire for revenge from the rebellion of 1929, and this was in the memory of our families and parents.”

Yadda, yadda. And so goes the long lie.

xposted to The Last Exile

Freedom is just another word for kill the Jews

What amazes me is how so often everything in the Arab world always comes back to killing Jews. It's like the entire body politic of the Arab world is literally a one-note charlie. And that one-note? Listen and learn.






h/tip: The Muqata

crossposted at the Last Exile

Better cry for Cairo

You may think you are watching the struggle for freedom and democracy in Egypt as ordinary Egyptians take to the street in the hopes of shedding the shackles of an oppressive dictator – and it might have even started that way - but now, it has come to a showdown between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hosni Mubarak. NY Times

CAIRO — Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition banded together Sunday around a prominent government critic to negotiate for forces seeking the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, as the army struggled to hold a capital seized by fears of chaos and buoyed by euphoria that three decades of Mr. Mubarak’s rule may be coming to an end.

The announcement that the critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, would represent a loosely unified opposition reconfigured the struggle between Mr. Mubarak’s government and a six-day-old uprising bent on driving him and his party from power.

Though lacking deep support on his own, Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and diplomat, could serve as a consensus figure for a movement that has struggled to articulate a program for a potential transition. It suggested, too, that the opposition was aware of the uprising’s image abroad, putting forth a candidate who might be more acceptable to the West than beloved in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood just bought themselves a public secular face as a beard. And for those of you with little short term memory – let point out that it was during Dr. El Baradei’s watch at the International Atomic Energy Agency that the Iranians got away with creating a second parallel but ‘unmonitored’ nuclear program.

crossposted at the Last Exile