Britain Increasing Economic Pressure on Judea and Samaria Jews

The government of Great Britain has begun advising its supermarkets on how to distinguish between Jewish and Arab manufactured foods from the Judea and Samaria regions of Israel.

The British Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), has recommended that food labels for products made in Judea and Samaria say either “Israeli settlement produce” or “Palestinian produce.”

The labels are intended to increase pressure on Israel to surrender these areas and to result in the exulsion of all Jewish residents.

DEFRA, in keeping with Britain’s longstanding opposition to a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, said that traders would be committing an offense if they declared produce from these areas as “produce of Israel.”

Israeli officials and leaders of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria criticized the British government Thursday evening for the recommendation. Foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor expressed fear that this was a slide towards a broader boycott of Israeli goods and called the move a matter of concern. “It looks like it [the British government] is catering to the demands of those whose ultimate goal is the boycott of Israeli products.”

Danny Dayan, who serves as chairman of the council for Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, said the decision was the “latest hostile step” from Britain against the Jewish towns and villages in the area. He added that “products from our communities in Judea and Samaria should be treated as any other Israeli product.”

Yehuda HaKohen of the Zionist Freedom Alliance told Israel National News that DEFRA’s recommendation is nothing new and that Britain has always been one of the leading obstacles to regional stability in the Middle East.

“It was the British who originally turned local Arabs and Jews against one another in order to further their own colonialist agenda for our region.

And since Jewish freedom fighters succeeded in driving the British administration from our soil, they have been working tirelessly to undermine Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

Britain is and has always been an imperialist power and an enemy of the Zionist revolution. Our leaders would do well to just accept this as fact.”

INN

Every Day is Groundhog Day in the Middle East

In the movie, “Groundhog Day”, the main character wakes up day after day, trapped in the same events, desperately looking for a way out of that living nightmare. It’s a very good metaphor for the Middle East.

Here are some quotes from a book whose title I will reveal in a moment:

“The only truly transcendent law in the Middle East is that of unintended consequences.”

“Nation-building and the redressing of historic wrongs were in the air…”

“His fighters secured control of key rivers, recaptured Kut, and on (date withheld) stormed victoriously into Baghdad. Still undecided was how this famous city—and, indeed, most of Mesopotamia—would now be governed.”

“I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern…and failed.”

And finally “Our armies have come into your cities and lands not as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

All this and more was said in the 1920s by British imperialists. If it sounds like things being said by Americans, then you must assume that America has been repeating all the mistakes of Great Britain in the exact same places.

The book being quoted is “Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East” by Karl E. Mayer and Shareen Blair Brysac ($18.95, W.W. Norton, softcover) and its five-hundred pages are devoted to the extraordinary personalities of the 1920s who, believing it was Great Britain’s duty was to bring civilization to India, Africa, and the Middle East, devoted themselves to “Pax Britannia”, the rule of distant colonies representing a fourth of the world’s population.

The book is a reminder that whatever passes for modernity in the Middle East has generally been imposed by the process of European colonization in quest of its oil and other riches to fatten the profits of various British, French, and American business enterprises such as the Suez Canal and the oil companies.

Left to themselves the polyglot of tribes would never have experienced anything resembling modernization.

Afghanistan today would look very much the same to the earliest invaders and explorers who passed through it. No roads. No hospitals. Few schools. No jobs except raising poppies for the heroin trade or serving in the army or police. Men raised from youth to fight anyone and everyone. Pushtuns, Tajiks, Hazarus, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Qizilbash.

The Middle East had been ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire for centuries—from Egypt to Persia. Going back even further in history, the region was no stranger to European invasions. The Crusades were a response against the Islamic invaders that at one point had laid siege to Vienna.

As the authors note, “In his history of Jerusalem, the Israeli writer Amos Elon calculates that over four millennia the Holy City has known ‘twenty ruinous sieges, two intervals of total destruction, eighteen recent reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religion to another.” In 1967 visitors could find the remnants of “Roman encampments, Crusader castles, Turkish parapets, and British pillboxes.”

To suggest, for example, that after more than sixty years of Israeli national sovereignty that Arab neighbor nations (and Iran) have the slightest intention of allowing it to exist is to ignore the history of centuries old intolerance directed against both Christian and Jew.

Following World War One, England and France divided the remains of the Ottoman Empire that had chosen to side with Germany. It would have died sooner or later of its own dead weight, but it was Sir Percy Zachariah Cox who would take out “a map and a pencil to draw the boundary between Iraq and the Nejd (now Saudi Arabia). The borders with Syria and Transjordan were defined similarly.”

There were Arab leaders, but they were generally the pawns of the great powers, frequently assassinated or deposed. With some exceptions, the nations of the Middle East continue to be ruled by monarchs and despots.

As the British Empire shrank in the wake of World War Two and American power grew only one thing is clear.

Neither of these imperial powers had any clue, nor way of dealing with the Middle East’s regressive Islamic fanaticism that remains a ceaseless threat to Western civilization. And, as in past times, the debates rage about staying in or getting out.

Every day in the Middle East is Groundhog Day.

Source: Alan Caruba

Peace is a Dead Road in the Middle East

by Sultan Knish

Right now Sunni and Shia are busy fighting with purist Sunni Islam represented by the Wahhabist Al Queda and purist Shia Islam represented by Iran's Mullah.

So too within Israel, Hamas and Fatah are fighting as well. But what they are fighting over is who will lead the Arab\Muslim world and their main form of competition is less about killing each other and more about competing to see who can kill the most Americans\Israelis.

The struggle for primacy in the Arab\Muslim world has been going on ever since Britain and France went home and turned over the Middle East to a handful of jumped up desert shieks who then proceeded to put their boot on the Jew, the Christian, the Sufi, the Bahai, the Kurd, the Copt, the Circassian and Armenian and the entire diverse range of Middle Eastern peoples chained together by the Arab slavemaster.

With the colonial powers gone, America and Russia stepped in, with the former trying to maintain the power of the Arab tyrants while the latter tried to push coups and revolutions and install new governments friendly to it.

The old colonial powers had hoped to treat the Arab states like client states, but instead coups overturned most of the old style rulers leaving some leftovers like the House of Saud and the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan (itself a Saudi leftover) in power. Military coups turned Egypt, Syria and Iraq socialist, while a religious coup turned Iran into a theocracy.

Throughout all this the one thing that had not changed was that the struggle for primacy in the Arab world was based on their capacity for Jihad. The ability to inflict damage on Israel or on Western powers was what made an Arab country respected under the Honor-Shame code. By contrast signing peace agreements was a deep form of humiliation.

Egypt and Jordan, once the region's primary powers, have never been able to recover from their peace treaties with Israel and their populations feeling the burning shame of the peace accords are fueled by an almost unimaginable bitterness and hate for Israel, not so much for the wars, as for the peace. By contrast the ascension of the Mullahs Iran and Saddam's Iraq was driven by their hostility and proxy wars against Israel.

That is of course why the "Peace Process" or any peace process in the Arab world cannot and will not work. In an Honor-Shame culture respect is gained from defeating one's enemies, but making peace with them is a sign of humiliating weakness. And that is the situation today.

Iran and Al Queda are jockeying for supremacy in making war on the infidel in order to compete for the leadership of the Arab world.

The stakes are high with Sunni and Shia religious affiliation on the table, which is why the Gulf Arab states have been increasingly nudging America and even Israel to do something about Iran.

Read more here,,,,

Source,,,,

H/T: Gramfan