 Seth Mandel THE JEWISH STATE June 25, 2010
Reading the reports on the state of newspapers today, and following the New Media revolution, you couldn't be blamed for thinking advertising and the riddle of the online paywall are the media's most pressing challenges.
Such is life, and worry, in a free country.
In reality, while newspapers are struggling in the West (from 2007-2009, the industry's revenue dropped by 30 percent in the U.S., according to the OECD), journalists elsewhere in the world -- especially in repressive states -- put their lives on the line. It is this combination -- falling revenue and the constant threat of death -- that has pushed Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury's newspaper to the brink.
Choudhury's paper, The Weekly Blitz , is published out of Bangladesh. When it was founded in 2003, advertising revenue wasn't an issue. But as soon as the Blitz started publishing pro-Israel editorials, local businesses in this Muslim country immediately started shunning the paper. Later that year, Choudhury was arrested at the airport heading to a writer's conference in Tel Aviv, tortured for 10 days, and kept in solitary confinement for 17 months at a Dhaka prison.
He is still on trial for sedition, blasphemy, and treason, for which he would be executed if found guilty.
Choudhury speaks eloquently about the fight against radical Islam and the moral imperative of supporting Israel. He is an unabashed Zionist, which many of our readers -- who filled a room in November 2009 to hear him speak -- know well.
In that speech, Choudhury mentioned that the police protection he was finally granted after the intervention of the U.S. Congress -- most notably Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) -- has been removed. As if on cue, six weeks after Choudhury gave that speech in New Brunswick, armed robbers broke into his home. The commotion woke the neighbors, and the men fled.
Such incidents have become routine, unfortunately, though Choudhury refuses to flee Bangladesh or convert out of Islam. "I remain important to the Muslims because I am a Muslim," Choudhury said back in November. "The moment I become an ex-Muslim, it makes no difference. If you want to reform a class, you need to be a member of the club. I am a member of Islam and I demand a reform in Islam... preaching hate is not the Islam that I follow; the Islam I follow is where I can embrace a Jew as a brother."
He has always been frank about his Zionism. "Today, Israel is suffering, tomorrow the world will suffer," he told me when we first met. Israel, he said, "is a land blessed by God. And God will protect his land."
And it goes without saying that bravery has never been a weakness for him. But now he is in the position of needing our help. It can't be easy for him to ask for it, but it should be easy for us to answer the call. A wealthy businessman in Bangladesh recently offered to buy Choudhury's paper for a generous sum, but Choudhury knows the man's intention: to silence one of the few pro-Israel, pro-Western voices in the East. Choudhury declined, choosing principles over money.
"But, now, our very sustainability has become almost impossible," Choudhury wrote in a message to readers. "Each month, we are losing [a] huge amount of money in continuing the print and online edition of this newspaper. For any newspaper, it is absolutely impossible to sustain without any advertisement revenue." He included the email address: ediblitz [at]yahoo.com at which he could be contacted by those willing to help.
Choudhury will get no help whatsoever from his fellow countrymen, who at best ignore him and at worst wish the government would end his troublemaking once and for all. So he needs the West to step up to the plate. Jewish organizations should do what Choudhury's close friend Richard Benkin did when he first heard Choudhury was in danger. Benkin references the one-word response Moses gave God when he was called from the burning bush: Hineni -- here I am.
Advertising revenue would be great, though a grant would be even better. We are blessed with philanthropists aplenty, and Israel has no more courageous defender than Choudhury. This is the first time he has ever made such an appeal. It has been two weeks since Choudhury published that request, and, he told me, "the situation is still unchanged. Weekly Blitz is in the very worst economic constraint."
"Today, I stand before you, the people of Bangladesh and in fact the entire Muslim world as a witness; a witness that Israelis want above all else peace and justice," Choudhury was to say in that speech prepared, but never delivered, to the writer's conference in Tel Aviv. "And those who spread false rumors to the contrary around the world, and especially in Muslim countries, are, frankly, either deluded or dishonest. I also stand before you perhaps as a living contradiction: a Zionist, a defender of Israel, and a devout, practicing Muslim, living in a Muslim country."
Israel needs such fire more than anything; yet this flame is in danger of being snuffed out. "Please pray for us," Choudhury told me this week. We should, and we will. But if all we can do is pray, we haven't done enough.
Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.
 Anne Frank's diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the terror group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism. The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of "The Diary of Anne Frank" were included in the textbook used by a private English-language school in western Beirut. Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews. "What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted," said the report aired last week and also published on the station's website. It questioned how long Lebanon would "remain an open arena for the Zionist invasion of education." A member of the school board, Jimmy Shoufani, told AFP the school dropped the textbook from its curriculum after the controversy erupted. He asked that the school not be identified. Hezbollah officials could not reached for comment. In the Al-Manar report, party MP Hussein Hajj Hassan had criticized the school for showing poor judgment in picking out its textbooks. "These respected, established schools are teaching the so-called tragedy this girl lived, and yet they are ashamed to teach the tragedy of the Lebanese people, the tragedy of the Palestinian people... the tragedy of the people of the south under the hands of Zionist occupation," he told Al-Manar. Paris-based organization Aladdin's Project, which fights Holocaust denial and first translated Anne Frank's diary into Arabic, issued a statement condemning Hezbollah's "intimidation campaign." Hezbollah fought a devastating war with the Jewish state in 2006. It has since refused to surrender its weapons arguing they are necessary to fight Israel, which withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. The militant party last month also took aim at another textbook used in a leading private school in Beirut in which Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas are referred to as "terrorist organizations". The chapter in question is usually blanked out by Lebanon's censorship bureau, but an uncensored copy purchased by a student abroad apparently sparked the uproar.
 Ali Waked Senior Islamist group legislator slams PM's speech before UN Security Council as 'attempt to impose twisted logic on entire world' Hamas legislator Mushir al-Masri told Ynet Thursday, following the Israeli prime minister's address before the UN General Assembly.
Benjamin Netanyahu , he added, "Was seeking the UN's support for his Zionist-terrorist agenda against the Palestinian people, in an attempt to cover up the massacre he has perpetrated." Al-Masri said that Israel and its prime minister "couldn't care less about international reports, including the one Israel failed to cooperate with… It was an Israeli attempt to evade the truth; of course Israel wants the world to follow it." The Hamas legislator was referring to the Goldstone Report probing January's Israeli offensive in Gaza. The report accused both Israel and Hamas of violating international law and possibly committing war crimes. Harshly criticized as biased by both Israel and the US, Hamas too rejected the report's findings, calling them "imbalanced." The Palestinians, al-Masri continued, do not expect the UN Security Council to censure Israel in wake of the report: "As long as there is an America there can be no condemnation of Israel, which only proves how two-faced the UN and the international community are.
"The US has vetoed over 50 resolutions meant to condemn Israel for harming the Palestinians… this only bolsters Israel, which mocks not only the Goldstone Committee but all UN resolutions. "This proves that Israel aspires to be above international law in order to cement its illegal presence on our land," he added. "Israel's conduct is a moral challenge the UN has to deal with." Netanyahu's claim that Operation Cast Lead was meant to counter Hamas' incessant rocket fire on its southern cities is nothing but a "pathetic excuse," said al-Masri. "You cannot compare the Israeli killing machine that was implemented in Gaza, killing 1,500 Palestinians within days, to the humble means used by the resistance in its self-defense efforts," he said.
"History is no stranger to incidents when the American and Europeans defended themselves against occupation. What aren’t the Palestinians allowed to do the same?"
 Zionist Organization president
Chaim Weizmann (left) with Prince Faisal.Every day politicians and pundits talk of another chance at Middle East peace missed, delayed or subverted. The focus is always on Palestinians and Israelis as the keystone to a global settlement with the West and across the region. But in the original peace arrangement between the Jews, Arabs and the Western powers, it was not settlements and Jerusalem that were at the heart of the problem. In fact, the Arabs originally agreed to a Jewish state complete with massive Jewish immigration. For Arabs, the prize was not Palestine, it was Syria. This is the story of how the original Middle East peace plan crafted among all sides in the aftermath of World War I was subverted - not by Jews or Zionists, but by the French. It begins at the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, in a flag-bedecked, battle-scarred but victorious Paris. There, the great top-hatted Allied men of vision and illusion gathered to remake the world and invent the post-Ottoman Middle East. At those fateful meetings, the Arabs and Jews formally agreed to mutually endorse both their national aspirations and live in peace. This was the deal: The Jews could have an unrestricted Zionist state in Palestine. The British could have Iraq and its fabulous, albeit still undrilled, oil. The Arabs only wanted Syria and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula. During the first days of the League of Nations' Paris Peace Conference, Prince Faisal, accompanied by T.E. Lawrence, widely dubbed "Lawrence of Arabia," met in Paris with Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann. Following up on meetings the two had held the previous June in Aqaba, Faisal signed an enlightened and tolerant nine-point agreement endorsing the Balfour Declaration and inviting the Zionists to coexist in Palestine. The text includes great specificity about mutual national aspirations.
But the chief goal of the Arabs for an Arab national state at that time was not Palestine, but Syria. Read more here... Source: Jpost
 Leon Symons | July 16 Parliament will be asked to consider whether the use of Nazi symbols and terms in reference to Jews, Israel and Zionism is breaking the law on incitement to racial hatred. A new report by the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA) has highlighted the increasing use of what it terms the “Nazi card” in antisemitic discourse and has called for a number of measures to try to combat its spread. “Playing the Nazi card” has been defined in the report as the use of Nazi-related terms or symbols — for example intertwining the swastika with the Star of David — while negatively referring to Jews, Israel, Zionism or other aspects of what it calls the Jewish experience. The report, which was jointly published by EISCA and the Department for Communities and Local Government, recommends that the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police officers (ACPO) and the Crown Prosecution Service should prepare new guidance for the police on whether this kind of terminology amounts to incitement. The report says that universities and adult education colleges should be surveyed to establish how they deal with antisemitic discourse. It also suggests that the University and College Union and the National Union of Journalists use the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s definition of antisemitism to improve their harassment policies. Cohesion Minister Shahid Malik, who launched the report on Tuesday alongside EISCA chairman Denis MacShane MP, said: “It is vital to reiterate the significance which my government places on tackling this scourge which has blighted our world for centuries. “Where antisemitic discourse flourishes unchecked, an atmosphere develops where Jews and other minorities — for it is certain that other minorities will also be targeted — feel isolated and vulnerable.
“Antisemitic discourse is not targeted at an identifiable victim but at Jews as a group. “The tone in which issues affecting Jewish people are raised or addressed by politicians, the media, educators or the business world, affects the way in which Jewish people are perceived by the wider public.” After the launch, Mr Malik said that the report’s proposals would be overseen by the cross-government working group set up as a result of the 2006 All-Party Parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism. Also on Tuesday, the Community Security Trust published its second report on antisemitic discourse. Author Mark Gardner, the CST’s communications director, said that while antisemitic discourse openly targeting Jews was “extremely rare” in mainstream British politics and media, “nevertheless, antisemitism is an important matter that must be better understood and challenged before it worsens any further”. Contemporary antisemitic discourse, he argued, “is most often revealed in language and imagery that evokes the central antisemitic allegation of a powerful and hidden Jewish conspiracy against all non-Jews”. As the British National Party’s first two MEPs took their seats in the European Parliament this week, the Centre for Social Cohesion published a report into the party’s online network, claiming that BNP members and self-professed BNP supporters continue to host, and link to online, material that is pro-Nazi, racist, antisemitic and homophobic. Source: JC
"It now seems certain these remaining concerns will not be addressed in the document to be adopted by the conference next week. Therefore, with regret, the United States will not join the review conference," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood. The United Nations organised the forum to help heal the wounds from its last such forum, in Durban, South Africa. The United States and Israel walked out of that 2001 conference when Arab states sought to define Zionism as racist. Source: The Australian
 THE Holocaust remains the sole issue blocking agreement on the final declaration of a UN conference on racism, diplomats said. Negotiators in Geneva are working against the clock to finalise a fresh declaration, with urgency added by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stated intention to attend the proceedings, which start on Monday. "There is just one lingering point, the question of the Holocaust. All the others are settled," a Western diplomat said yesterday after talks between ambassadors to prepare for the five-day Durban Review Conference. Iran wants a reference to past injustices to be linked to a paragraph calling for the Holocaust - in which Nazi Germany killed six million European Jews during World War II - never to be forgotten, said an Iranian diplomat involved in the negotiations. But European diplomats dismissed that suggestion as "unacceptable", as they succeeded in rejecting two other thorny issues - the notion of a direct link between foreign occupation and racism, and the stereotyping of religions. Both references - regarded by European UN member nations as "red lines" that would determine their presence at the conference - were deemed too explicit towards Israel and the defamation of religious faiths. In the revised draft, "foreign occupation" was shifted to another part of the declaration where it would no longer pose a problem, while the reference about stereotyping would be about individuals, not religions, a diplomat said. The Durban Review Conference will review progress and assess the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action, adopted in the South African city in 2001. That declaration aimed to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, but the US and Israel walked out over a push to link Zionism with racism. Source: The Australian
U.S. pulling out of ‘Durban II’ conference
February 27, 2009
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The Obama administration has decided to boycott the so-called Durban II conference over ant-Semitism concerns.
Multiple sources on a conference call with the White House on Feb. 27 told JTA that the Obama administration had opted not to attend any further preparatory meetings ahead of the planned U.N. conference against racism in Geneva in April.
The conference reprises the 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa, that devolved into an anti-Jewish free-for-all. Canada and Israel have opted not to attend the conference, and some U.S. Jewish groups had been pressing the United States to follow suit.
Preparations for a draft document thus far have seen Iran leading a coterie of nations blocking inclusion of anything that might guarantee Jewish protections -- including mention of the Holocaust -- while inserting draconian language guarding Islam against "insult."
The State Department sent a delegation, including a senior staffer from the American Jewish Committee, to this month's preparatory talks. The delegation's conclusions were that the anti-Israel and anti-Western tendencies were too deeply entrenched to excise.
Now that the United States is withdrawing from the conference, European nations are expected to follow.
Speaking for the White House on the conference call were Samantha Power and James Warlick, who handle international organizations for, respectively, the National Security Council and the State Department; and Jennifer Simon, an adviser to Susan Rice, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations. Source: http://jta.org/news/article/2009/02/27/1003341/us-pulling-out-of-durbanDurban II
Latest recipient of The Face of Evil Award
 Turkey witnesses some of the most passionate demonstrations in support of GazaAt a weekend meeting in Istanbul, 200 religious scholars and clerics met senior Hamas officials to plot a new jihad centred on Gaza. The BBC's Bill Law was the only Western journalist at the meeting. In a hall crowded with conservative Sunni Muslim sheikhs and scholars, in a hotel close to Istanbul's Ataturk Airport speaker after speaker called for jihad against Israel in support of Hamas. The choice of Turkey was significant. Arab hardliners were keen to put aside historic differences with the Turks. As one organiser put it: "During the past 100 years relations have been strained but Palestine has brought us together."  "Gaza gives us power, it solves our differences
... Palestine is a legitimate theatre
of operations for jihad"
Mohsen al-Awajy, Saudi religious scholarMany delegates spoke appreciatively of the protest by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who stormed out of a Davos debate on Gaza two weeks ago. The conference, dubbed the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, also gave impetus to Sunni clerics concerned about the growing power of Hezbollah, the Shia movement backed by Iran, which rose to international prominence in its own war with Israel in 2006. "Gaza is a gift," the Saudi religious scholar Mohsen al-Awajy told me. He and other delegates repeatedly referred to the Gaza war as "a victory". "Gaza," he continued, "gives us power, it solves our differences. We are all now in a unified front against Zionism." In closed meetings after sessions delegates focussed on the creation of a "third Jihadist front" - the first two being Afghanistan and Iraq. The intensity of the Israeli attack had "awakened all Muslims," Mr Awajy claimed. "Palestine is a legitimate theatre of operations for jihad (holy war)," he added. Read more ...Source: BBC
If you chose "No," please consider providing your solution to Gaza crisis in the comments.
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 David Burchell | January 12, 2009
UNTIL our own times, few civilisations showed much emotional interest in distant peoples.
Medieval Europeans were titillated by reports of dog-headed men and other far-off monstrosities, but chiefly because they provoked interesting thought experiments (what's human and what's not?). Medieval Muslims were so incurious about the Europeans, they called them all Franks, or Frenchmen, and distinguished them by body smell.
The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire made much out of the human toll of a catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon, because he believed it proved his arguments for the non-existence of God. There's no evidence he shed any tears.
It's we, the emotional sophisticates of the modern West, who invented the idea of global empathy. On our large-screen televisions we're joined up momentarily with the suffering faces of far-distant innocents, the better to make sense of the sorrows of the world. That's why, when the stories came in last week about the emaciated children discovered beside their dead mothers in a shelled house in Gaza, we immediately visualised the scene in our mind's eye. And our hearts felt a stab, as if these were our own children. Neither geographical distance nor paucity of factual detail is any longer a barrier to our capacity to feel.
Global empathy is one of those illegitimate children of the imperial experience whose origins we like to forget.
In the days of the British Empire, Australians greeted reports of distant massacres of British soldiery with a new urgency, as if we too were witness to the Indian Mutiny or overrun by African tribesmen at Mafeking. Even today, the same impulse appears to unite the sympathy of pious Muslims everywhere -- towards suffering peoples of their own kind. After the catastrophe of World War I, however, a new generation of critical intellectuals turned the tables on imperial sympathising, rerouting all that emotional energy towards the victims of European colonialism.
This was the generation that took Gandhi, that eminently Western non-Westerner, as its moral hero. But there were few enough Gandhis in the moral history of the 20th century. And so that generation's offspring switched their sympathies to new, more troubling heroes, from Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to Yasser Arafat. In the process, empathy became, in effect, the handmaiden of ideology. We learned to bestow empathy on those we approved of in our political fantasies, and to withhold empathy, with determined efficiency, from those we did not. We became gymnasts of the heart.
And so the '60s generation wept bitter tears for that young girl, half-alight with napalm, who ran naked down that Vietnamese road. But the curious economy of empathy required them to avert their eyes from the massacre of civilians by the Viet Cong or the barbaric behaviour of North Vietnamese prison guards. Just as, today, we weep bitter tears for those hapless prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay even as we withhold them from the wretched political inmates of Cuba's Guantanamo Provincial Prison, a few hundred metres away.
The same complicated moral logic was on evidence in The Netherlands last week when two high-profile Dutch political figures assumed leadership of a demonstration against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Harry van Bommel, a former schoolteacher, serves as Socialist Opposition spokesman on international affairs. Gretta Duisenberg, once a flamboyant socialite, is the socially conscious wife of the former Dutch central bank chief. Each has spoken at great length about the Palestinians' plight. (According to Duisenberg, Israeli rule in Gaza is worse than wartime Nazi rule in Holland.)
And each looked thoroughly comfortable in their skins as they led the crowd in chants of that old party tune, "Intifada, intifada, Palestinian state!" Even as, in the background, their fellow demonstrators could clearly be heard singing the more uninhibited political ditty: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" And so here they were together: the warm heart of the global conscience and the icy blood of Hamas, united within the same pulsing breast.
For the discriminating empathist, Israel presents special problems as an enemy. After all, it's hard for someone who trades in the currency of sympathy to deny any moral capital whatsoever to a state founded as a refuge for one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet.
The easiest solution to this dilemma is not to ignore the past, but rather to reconfigure it for your own purposes. Hence those familiar formulas, which hardly merit sober political analysis: Zionism equals fascism; Israel equals Nazi Germany; Gaza is a concentration camp; the Palestinians are the new Jews. Indeed, these aren't political slogans in the normal sense. They're a ritual language of degradation, employed to place your defiled opponents beyond the empathetic pale.
When empathy isn't serving as ideology's handmaiden, it puts in overtime as its usher. And while the present wave of sympathy towards the inhabitants of Gaza is no doubt sincerely felt, in some quarters it's also serving to usher in an altogether more pragmatic political calculation. For some time now many Western supporters of the Palestinian cause have been discreetly shifting their political allegiance away from Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority -- whom they mistrust as Western collaborators -- and towards that superlative foe of Western interests, Hamas.
So Britain's The Guardian last week editorialised in favour of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, to be engineered by withholding EU funds from the West Bank until Fatah submits. The alternative, the paper thundered, was a Fatah "satrap" (that old imperial imagery again!) under Israeli dominion.
And editorialists everywhere have been talking about Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, as if they were now the acknowledged spokespeople for Palestinian interests.
Yet, without lubrication from our discriminating tears, this change in political sympathies might be a little hard to swallow. After all, this is the same Hamas whose websites extol the divine achievements of its suicide bombers and whose children's TV exhorts a new generation of martyrs shaped in the same incandescent image. On Hamas's Friday-night TV sermons, the imam likes to recall the perfidy of the Jews towards Mohammed 1300 years ago: a broken pact that, as readers of Ibn Ishaq's biography will know, obliged the prophet to behead an entire Jewish tribe with his sword. Hamas, demonstrably, does not trouble itself much with the politics of empathy beyond the confines of its own kind.
And so, having elevated empathy to a universal faculty, it seems we've come full circle.
Now we're willing to authorise any kind of exotic political creed, with any kind of consequences, so long as it promises to rid us of the spectre of those distant children in distress. Source: The Australian
 By "X-Muslim" | 12 November 08
A great burden has been lifted from my heart.
Shalom. As an Arab Muslim I once asked myself: Why do I hate Israel? I really thought about this question. After only a little deliberation, the answer was clear: because I am a Muslim and Islam is extremely intolerant.
It's intolerance to everything non-Muslim that is the problem. But today I have rejected the teachings of Islam for this very reason. I have left Islam.
As an Arab "Palestinian", living in an Arab country, coming from a Muslim family, I was brought up with hatred of Jews, Christians and all non-Muslims. Now I'm older, I have matured enough to view the world from a different perspective. I reviewed real history and studied the sequence of events before and since the restoration of the State of Israel. I decided to step outside the mindset of a typical Muslim. It didn't take long to realize that I was on the wrong track and I moved quickly to the other side. In order to be at peace with myself, I have come to reject the hatred of Israel and now love my former enemy. I have not embraced another religion, but I am seeking a new spiritual path.
Why do the Arabs and Muslims have to reject the presence of a Jewish state in a tiny percentage of the land of the Middle East? Why does Islamic intolerance forbid other nations their right to exist in their own land? The whole world should realize that Islam is at war with all nations on the planet.
In our Muslim societies it is not "the extremists", but the whole society infected with this hatred. It is in the mosques, the schools, in the media and in the homes of nearly every Muslim family. It isn't just Israel they hate, but America and Christians as well. Islam hates all other religions.
In the case of Israel, its only fault is that it's a Jewish state that wants to live in peace within its borders. It's not a struggle of so-called "Palestinians" to establish a country and retain some land, which was never theirs - I know, because I studied the real history. The real problem is racism and the intolerance of Muslims, the blind hatred and jealousy when seeing a flourishing, strong and modern country where people from other faiths can live peacefully.
Why are the Jews forbidden to have a country? These people have contributed much to the world's culture and offered the best scientists, artists, doctors; and they have been victims of intolerance throughout history. Why are they forbidden to live in their national Zionist dream and return to their homeland, which was some desert which they cultivated and transformed into one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth? Why do the Arabs and the Muslim world have to take everything and claim every land they step on as theirs?
"Palestine" never existed and should never exist - and this is coming from me, an Arab classified as a "Palestinian." The creation of a Palestinian state would be the biggest threat to the existence of Israel and would not bring one day of peace to Israel. I know how my people think. Promoting such a state would be the equivalent of supporting the Nazis in their quest to destroy the Jews.
Israel has already made the mistake twice of giving land for peace, once in Southern Lebanon and secondly in Gaza. We all know the terrible results: the expansion of Hizbullah's power in Lebanon and the creation of a terrorist state in Gaza. Hamas and other terrorist organizations now have the space to launch more terrorist attacks and hostile activities on Israeli cities and villages.
Israel's right to exist shouldn't be open for discussion. Hamas, Hizbullah or Islamic Jihad, and the people behind them, must be destroyed. Nothing should hinder Israel's army to do whatever it takes to protect their people and ensure the safety of Israel, from Tel Aviv to the smallest settlement inside Israel, which should include Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).
I don't blame the Israeli army for any defensive measure it takes. It fought Islamic terrorism long before any other nation faced their atrocities. The Israeli soldiers have been on the front line on behalf of the whole free world. I am proud to support the Israeli Defense Forces, the most civilized and humane army in the world, no matter how the media might try to portray them.
One can't but respect the brave Israeli army, which puts its soldiers' lives at risk in order to protect civilian life in Gaza or Southern Lebanon, the same civilians who, in both places, voted terrorist organizations in to power. The same "innocent civilians" who deny Israel's right to exist, who never are held accountable for the democratic choices they have made. Yet still, the Israeli army, and in the most critical times of war, tries as much as possible to avoid harming them, even at the expense of losing lives on their side, as well as suffering tactical and strategic disadvantages because of their moral behavior. I salute the Israeli army; I can't but support these heroes, and bow in respect to the memory of their fallen ones. I can't but stand with Israel in its fight for its existence in this crazy part of the world.
I used to hate Israel with a passion, but today I am proud to say that I have shed my hatred for Israel and it has transformed to a deep love, passion and respect for Zionism and all the values it stands for.
I am proud that today I support the full restoration of Jerusalem. For the first time in my life I'm at peace with myself and in great harmony with what I believe in; standing with Israel and the Jewish people, who are the most forgiving and tolerant people on Earth. They must be praised for their deep dedication to their cause, and for their patience in their endurance of harm and hatred.
Jerusalem should never be divided and the Temple Mount should also be liberated. All other religious groups in the
It's the battle against Islam's imperial quest to conquer the whole world.
world have free access to their most sacred sites; yet, the Jews still watch their holiest place, Solomon's Temple, under occupation. I can't but feel compassion for their dream; and I know that their fight is now my fight.
Israel's existence and survival is really a test and responsibility for the whole civilized world. It's the battle against Islam's imperial quest to conquer the whole world. Israel is the fortress and stronghold for freedom and tolerance in the Middle East, the front line in the world's war against the tyranny of Islam.
I have held my tongue for too long, but today a great burden has been lifted from my heart. I don't care if I've been considered a traitor by my people for loving Israel. It's an honor for me. If supporting Israel's right to exist is a sin, then I'm a sinner. I'm proud to be an Arab who stands with a country that should be emulated by all its neighbors. For the sake of its people and for the sake of the world's stability and freedom, I'm proud to say I love Israel. Even if I don't have Jewish blood in my veins, I know I am Israeli at heart.
Long live Israel! Source: Israel National News
Source: IsrapunditBy Ted Belman, IsrapunditPost Annapolis, the Palestinian Authority made it crystal clear that it will never recognize Israel as a "Jewish state". Furthermore, it made it crystal clear that it will not compromise on Jerusalem making it a capital offense to do so. Yet negotiations continue. Either Olmert doesn't believe the PA or what is more likely, he will still cut a deal where Israel is denied that recognition and will divide Jerusalem according to Arab demands. Do not think for a moment that these entrenched Arab positions are negotiable. They aren't and never have been. Ever since Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896, the Arabs, with one exception, Faisal ibn Hussein, have opposed it.
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